Nigel Biggar is a British conservative who has written a book entitled “Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.” On March 1 of this year, Canada’s National Post published a massive article by him in which he exposes the superficiality of the contemporary Left’s denunciation of Western European Colonialism, and more specifically British Colonialism, as the greatest cancers of human history. The facts simply do not support this hypothesis which is a result of the absurd Neo-Marxist compulsion to automatically relegate all those who succeed to the status of “oppressors.”
While I shall spare you the details, Biggar’s article cites the multitude of non-European ethnic groups [i.e., the Carthaginians, Babylonians, Chinese, etc.] throughout history which engaged in imperial occupations of other people’s lands. This of course includes the Indigenous of North America where, for example, the Iroquois and Comanche were particularly aggressive. And yet, Biggar asserts, the ruling Left focuses exclusively on the “Anglo-American liberal world order” as the sole target of its “moral” outrage! The incredible stupidity of this conviction is that it utterly ignores the fact that the “world-order” in question ultimately proved to be beneficial to even those who were in some ways its victims.
Biggar in no way denies that British Colonialists were often guilty of racially motivated injustices. What he does contend is that the contemporary Left’s narrative is ridiculously simplistic. Those of British extraction established their Raj in India and their domination of most of North America not because of their heinous power lust but because of the radically superior culture they brought along with them. While to the Left this is an ugly expression of “White Supremacy,” it is an inarguable historical fact. As I have stated in previous blogs, the British banished the practice of slavery from their domain early in the 19th Century, while many in Asia and Africa continued to exploit it. And while traces of racism continue to infect the American landscape, the Civil War, 150 years ago, clearly entailed an effort by the country’s enlightened leaders to bring justice to its people of colour. As we are an imperfect species, one may find examples of deplorable behaviour in every domain, yet the Ideas, Values and Technology introduced by Western European colonialists to the rest of the world almost inevitably proved beneficial to the peoples living there.
In another Post article of June 21, Biggar cites the positive relationship that evolved between The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Indigenous of Canada’s West Coast, a relationship embraced by the latter because it brought them access to better food, better health care and ultimately profitable jobs which significantly improved their quality of life. This is a dynamic that no doubt informed most every British Colonialist venture, yet the Left persists in reviling all such ventures as no more than exhibitions of greed, racism and oppression. That this narrative simply ignores the relative intellectual status of the Cultures involved is hardly surprising inasmuch as the Left’s devotion to “inclusiveness” compels it to do so. Suggesting that a Civilization which had produced Socrates, Shakespeare and the Enlightenment as well as the technological ability to explore the darkness beyond its horizons, was in any way more Civilized than those it discovered there, is an egregious violation of Inclusive Orthodoxy. Yet it is absolutely True!
As I have mentioned in earlier blogs, two wonderful professors of Asian-Indian extraction contributed significantly to my studies in English Literature at Hamilton’s McMaster University in the 1970s. Clearly cherishing the many works of genius bequeathed them through their exposure to British Culture, they never for a moment suggested them to be weapons of a Cultural Genocide. India, of course, is today the most populous Democracy on the planet! Might it be just another authoritarian dystopia had it not been occupied by the British? Is the contemporary Left’s insistence that White Western Europeans stole North America from its innocent Indigenous natives an inarguable fact, or a product of the inane superficiality of its vision?