Enough with the feelings of guilt: Western colonialism was not the only one, nor the worst
Among the various subsections that make up the woke pseudoculture, the so-called “decolonial thought” also occupies an important place. What is the meaning of this expression which is becoming more and more important in the Anglo-American academic world, and which now also penetrates us?
I begin by making it clear that I am perfectly aware of the many negative meanings that are rightly associated with the term "colonialism". However, I would like to clarify immediately that the European one is by no means the only one that has manifested itself in history.
When a certain civilization goes through an expansion phase, it is practically inevitable that it seeks to conquer, militarily, commercially, or in both ways, geographic areas perceived as weaker. The examples are many. European colonialism in Africa was preceded by the Arab one, the real initiator of the phenomenon of slavery. In Asia, China has practiced colonial policies at many stages of its millennial development, reducing the smaller and weaker states that it adjoined to the rank of vassals.
The latest Asian case is the Japanese one. The Japanese empire, based on the project called "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", embarked on a work of conquest that dramatically expanded its influence in the Pacific, and which failed only when the United States managed to prevail. thanks to the overwhelming superiority of their industrial and military apparatus.
In short, you have to be careful when talking about this topic. Europeans and Americans, who the aforementioned woke pseudoculture wants to convince to tear their clothes every other day for having invented colonialism, have not invented anything. There have been, in the course of human history, colonialism far worse than that of the West, and in those cases no one – but absolutely no one – tears his clothes.
It would be useful, then, to remember that the colonial policies of the West have not only had negative effects. They made it possible, for example, to build critical infrastructures in areas of the world that did not have one at all. And they have also made it possible to improve the health conditions of many populations.
We have been accustomed to thinking that the backwardness in which the African continent still finds itself is a fault attributable only to colonialism, but it is false. It is not the fault of the former colonizers that all or almost all of the new African states, after becoming independent, exhibited unimaginable rates of corruption and fell prey to local dictators far more violent than the colonialists.
This is the narrative that the UN and other international organizations want to impose on us, often animated by a preconceived anti-Western spirit. In reality, the aforementioned backwardness is due to the inability of those peoples to equip themselves with efficient political and economic institutions. A partial exception is South Africa, precisely because the colonial structures were not totally dismantled in that case.
However, there is also a more purely cultural aspect to take into account. The aforementioned "decolonial thought" would in fact want to convince us that even science – to give just one example – must be "decolonized". Western medicine has its limits, as we have seen on the occasion of the pandemic due to Covid-19 . However, it is unforgivable to say that shamanism and magical rites are equivalent to it.
The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend began to support similar theses in the middle of the last century, and a notable contribution in this direction was provided by the French theorists of "deconstruction" and "post-modernity" such as Derrida, Lyotard and others.
Everything, for them, was relative. Flat-earthers cannot attack too hard because they express their "point of view". Nor can it be argued that a Western doctor provides better care than a shaman. The latter, in fact, takes care of the soul more than the body, eventually obtaining more appreciable results. Even Newton's physics, according to this trend , should not be taken too seriously since it is, too, a typical colonial product.
What to say? Perhaps it would be appropriate to recover some pride in the results achieved by Western civilization not only in science, but in every sphere of human action and knowledge. And it would also be worth admitting that Western colonialism (which is not the only one in history, as I mentioned earlier) has produced damage but also advantages. Whatever the UN and other international organizations say, our culture still constitutes a paradigm of reference.
The post Enough with guilt: Western colonialism was not the only one, nor the worst appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/basta-con-i-sensi-di-colpa-il-colonialismo-occidentale-non-e-stato-lunico-ne-il-peggiore/ on Tue, 25 Jan 2022 03:43:00 +0000.