PLANK JULY 4, 2012
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Now that Conrad Black is no longer in jail, he is free to spread his ideas to the hungry masses. National Review, which is always pining for the glory days of imperialism, has taken Black under its wing, and apparently decided that July 4th was an opportune time for him to pen a piece about the glories of empire. He begins:
It is an ever-growing matter of suspense how long it will take before there is general recognition of the fact that, although the spread of democracy is — next to its irreplaceable contribution to victory in World War II and the Cold War — America’s greatest bequest to the world, most of the world worked better in colonial times. No one could seriously dispute that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans. The Philippines and Cuba and, during the piping days of the U.S. Marines’ occupations (even if they were deployed at times by the United Fruit Company), Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic were all better off under the Americans.
The problem with Black's analysis, or at least the biggest problem, is that he never pauses to ask himself whether perhaps colonial rule had something to do with the horrors that often followed independence. Robert Mugabe was a lot more likely to emerge from a country run by Ian Smith. The bloodshed that has accompanied Congolese independence (gleefully noted by Black), would probably have been significantly less gruesome had the Belgians (and the rest of the Western world) not treated the place so disgracefully. This general point holds true for a nearly all postcolonial hotspots.
Black also shows some difficulty when it comes to the subcontinent:
In all that time, there was one mutiny, but there were not the terrible violence and corruption of Pakistan, the wars, the tyranny of the Burmese generals, or the Tamil-led civil war in Sri Lanka. The British left a justice system and the English language, and some spirit of market economics, and departed with scarcely any violence, apart from the regrettable episode at Amritsar in 1919, and the sectarian relocations when they left.
In other words, except for the millions of people who died thanks to an arbitrary partition, there was "scarcely any violence" in the territory that made up British India.
Black eventually turns to America, about which he concludes:
If the Americans had maintained their British status, they would control Britain and Canada and Australia and New Zealand now (another 120 million people and over $5 trillion of GDP), have all their energy needs met, and enjoy better government than they have actually endured for the past 20 years. It would have been much easier to abolish slavery and, if there had been a Civil War, it would not have lasted long, nor cost a fraction of the 750,000 American lives that it did. There would have been no World Wars or Cold War, or at least no conflict remotely as perilous as those were.
If America had stayed a colony, one day it would have colonized the motherland! And it would control New Zealand and Australia, and be exploiting them for energy. It sounds like paradise. (It's amusing that Black says more colonialism would have prevented the First World War--and thus its sequel--given that WWI was an imperialist war). For now we can just enjoy the fact that we live in a country free enough to allow Black his grumblings about the lost days of a white-ruled world.
10 comments
Well. Never too late I say; let's go take over England! We can put President Obama (aka The Kenyan) in charge; perhaps he can borrow some beads from The Queen (but I draw the line at the hats and purses!)
- Sophia
July 4, 2012 at 2:53pm
But if America had remained under the Crown, there would have been no historical basis for the smug assertion of unique American values that the rest of the world loves to hear about.
- ironyroad
July 4, 2012 at 3:02pm
It's funny how Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, etc. made such a big deal about one little mutiny and a regrettable incident in Amritsar ... The same one where General Dyer blocked all exits from a public park, ringed it with his men and in cold blood ordered hundreds of people shot, all because they had gathered there in defiance of his curfew. We Indians (ex-Indian in my case) like to call that regrettable incident the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre. While there is no doubt the Brits did some good in India, there is even less doubt about the bad they did. Black also seems to ignore the fact that the largest country in the sub-continent is a flourishing, if not quite perfect democracy, with an economy that has been growing for a while. Btw, I used to be NR409654 ... When it came time to renew my subscription, it was cheaper by more than half to sign up as a new member. Editors, please take note.
- austinous
July 4, 2012 at 4:45pm
Subscribers, take note too! Thanks austinous.
- ironyroad
July 4, 2012 at 6:59pm
This reminds me of how another National Review contributor, Dinesh D’Souza, criticized Obama for having “an anti-colonialist worldview”. I never understood why the editors at National Review never told Dinesh: “So did George Washington and Thomas Jefferson”. For quite some time, I haven’t been able to understand how people on the Right can reconcile their reverence for the Founding Fathers with their approval of colonialism. But now I think I’ve got it: Colonialism is an affront to liberty when the colonies are populated by relatively rich White people; colonialism is good governance when the colonies are populated by poor Black and Brown people.
- NateG
July 4, 2012 at 8:35pm
Which says something quite interesting about D'Souza that only he may not notice.
- ironyroad
July 5, 2012 at 12:41am
Conservatives are ultimately result-oriented. Their lip service to "liberty" is pure bs. They'd enslave 90% of the world in exchange for, say, a concealed carry law, a personhood amendment, and a third round draft pick. That's how jerks like Conrad Black (and John Derbyshire, and Ann Coulter, and Robert Weissberg, and . . . ) get to write on that site until, like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, they can no longer keep their right arms down.
- Mikelawyr22
July 5, 2012 at 7:57am
Sorry to be completely off-topic, but in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, one of the blog posts here had a link to an article that detailed all the different ways in which Obamacare was supposed to bring down costs. Can anyone point me to that post?
- NR409654
July 5, 2012 at 8:43am
Regarding Black's assertion that colonial rule made for a better world, remind me again why the French and British protested so much when the Germans showed up on their doorsteps (by air over Britain) in 1940? As for the post, I think probably a little time should have been spent discussing just why colonization ended, if indeed it was so pleasant as Black describes. And then pointing out what happened as a result. I mean, if colonial rule never ends, we're not having this discussion.
- jet
July 5, 2012 at 5:20pm
I should be specific here, yes, you can't fight a war to free majority white countries to allow for self governance and then tell everyone else you don't get a shot at it. Despite Black's claim that there was little violence, as Issac points out, look what happened afterward. I was looking for more details on the failures of colonization to prevent what happened afterward. It wasn't as quiet as Black would like to imply.
- jet
July 7, 2012 at 3:58pm