To reduce all of History to a never ending tale of Oppression by simply ignoring the complexities of Human Nature, is to in effect promote a massive conspiracy theory. The Neo-Marxist narrative of the Left, inasmuch as it simply deletes all aspects of Reality which do not suit its purposes, is such a theory.
Central to the contempt for Western Civilization that informs today’s “woke” dementia, is the so-called anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi which eliminates from the historical dynamic the empirically demonstrable impact of human intelligence, imagination, integrity, effort and achievement. What we generally refer to as a people’s Culture, our “intellectuals” simplistically ascribe to the vagaries of weather and geography, thereby banishing conscious volition [i.e., merit and morality] from political discussion. It is a superficial vision unworthy of anyone with an IQ of more than 50! It is the delusion that led the aforementioned Taylor Noakes to make the ludicrous claim that the Culture of 16th Century European Man was no more “evolved” than that of the Indigenous of the Americas.
While any objective survey of history would prove the contemporary academic denunciation of Western Colonialism to be grossly simplistic, I shall reference an interesting 2002 article by Dinesh D’Souza who grew up in post-colonial India with a grandfather who absolutely loathed the British, inciting him to do so as well. And yet, while never exonerating them of their many crimes, he came to reject the now trendy notion that most of the poverty and dysfunction of the “Third World” is the result of the horrors of Western Colonialism, indeed heretically ascribes his personal success to the principles and values granted him by his British education. His is a vision that attempts to accommodate the complexities of the human dynamic, that refuses to deal in gross racial stereotypes, yet when I tracked down his article on Google, it was accompanied by a number of others declaring him to be a right-wing monster of the first order.
D’Souza says the contemporary narrative is given to three brazen lies. The first is that Colonialism is a peculiarly Western European vice. India, he wryly points out, prior to British occupation, had been invaded by the Mongols, the Turks, the Persians, the Afghans, etc., Empires, including those of the Aztecs and Incas in the Americas, being a persistent fact of human history.
The second lie rejected by D’Souza is that nations such as Britain acquired their wealth by exploiting their colonial possessions while bleeding them dry. But Britain, he insists, was already flourishing because of its commitment to Science, Democracy and Capitalism, the benefits of which endowed it with the wealth, technology and curiosity to explore the rest of the world, a world which in many demonstrable ways benefited from its presence. This leads him to debate what he sees as the third gross simplification of the contemporary narrative, the idea that those nations formerly occupied by Western Europeans are without exception far worse off today than they otherwise would have been.
His own homeland, D’Souza insists, has benefited from the principles and values as well as the physical infrastructure bequeathed it by its former occupiers. While in no way whitewashing their predilection to arrogance and self-enrichment, he points out, for example, that it was British Governor General Lord William Bentinck who, in 1829, banned the Hindu practice of “sati,” the practice of burning perfectly healthy widows on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands as testimony to their purity and fidelity. Pardon me, but 200 years later I cringe at the thought of an innocent woman being burned alive in deference to some barbaric “religious” tradition, a tradition thankfully eradicated by the British.
Noting that Ghandi and Nehru, two of the greatest figures in modern Indian history, were both educated in England, D’Souza insists that it was not exposure to Western values that led to the dysfunction of so many of today’s former British colonies but their failure to fully embrace those values. His article citing a 2012 discussion with George Obama, who clearly does not share his brother’s politics, seeks to validate that point. When Kenya achieved its independence from British Rule in 1963, it was, according to Obama, as politically and economically advanced as countries like Singapore and Malaysia. And yet, he told D’Souza, after 50 years of freedom it is a “basket case” in comparison to those two Asian nations, its decline having very little to do with the legacy of 80 years of British occupation.
Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, who ruled until 1978, was an autocrat whose government was rife with corruption. That very fact, to the rational “conservative” mind, suggests the abuse of political power to be a Universal Human inclination rather than one particular to the Western European Mind. All of history supports this conclusion, one based on a “moral” as opposed to Neo-Marxist vision of the past. But what appalls those such as D’Souza is not simply the contemporary Left’s refusal to acknowledge the incontestable facts of History, but its absurd insistence, as we have referenced repeatedly, that all cultural orientations are equally worthy of defense, that here in Canada, for example, MacDonald’s decision to educate the Indigenous was “cultural genocide” as opposed to a project of enlightenment. The “logic” behind such mindless Relativism, of course, suggests that the 1829 banning of the Hindu practice of “sati” was an act of racial arrogance, that their British overlords should have allowed Indian women to continue to be burned alive out of respect for their religious heritage. If it seems pathetic that I have gone back 200 years in an effort to expose the moral/intellectual bankruptcy of the Left, be advised that Ayaan Hirsi Ali continues to be savaged as an Islamophobe by many of that persuasion even as she seeks to rescue Muslim women from the horrors of forced marriages, honor killings and genital mutilations.
Nothing better illustrates the irrationality of “progressivism” than a recent posting by Turning Point U.S.A. which features a picture of a clearly “woke” young female ranting: “Judging people by their race and sex is wrong! Why can’t you privileged White Men understand that?” Denouncing the scourge of Identity Politics, she ironically resorts to the very same herself. Such is the absurdity of Ibram X. Kendi’s “anti-racism” which approaches every issue from a racial perspective! Such is the absurdity of the Left’s denunciation of Western Colonialism which mindlessly ignores the substance and relative merits of all Cultural regimes because intelligent, objective critical analysis does not serve its egalitarian agenda.