By Nathan J. Robinson
Ignoring
or downplaying colonial atrocities is the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial…
Perhaps
the easiest way to understand why colonialism was so horrific is to imagine it
happening in your own country now. It is invaded, conquered, and occupied by a
foreign power. Existing governing institutions are dismantled and replaced by
absolute rule of the colonizers. A strict hierarchy separates the colonized and
the colonizer; you are treated as an inconvenient subhuman who can be abused at
will. The colonists commit crimes with impunity against your people. Efforts at
resistance are met with brutal reprisal, sometimes massacre. The more vividly
and accurately you manage to conjure what this scenario would actually look
like, the more horrified you will be by the very idea of colonialism.
One
would think this revulsion was now universally shared. But that is far from
being the case. The majority of British people are
still proud of colonialism and the British Empire. Americans continue to show
an almost total indifference to the lasting poverty and devastation inflicted
on the country’s indigenous population. Being pro-colonial is no bar to success
in academia; Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has long defended the British
Empire as a force for good in the world. And now, Princeton PhD and Portland
State University professor Bruce Gilley has published an unapologetic “Case for Colonialism”
in Third World Quarterly, a respected academic journal.
Gilley’s
article takes a very clear stance: not only was colonialism a force for good in
the world, but anti-colonial sentiment is “preposterous.” What’s more, Gilley
says, we need a new program of colonization, with Western powers
taking over the governing functions of less developed countries. Gilley says he
intends to overturn or revise three lines of criticism directed against
colonialism: “that it was objectively harmful (rather than beneficial),” “that
it was subjectively illegitimate (rather than legitimate),” and “that it
offends the sensibilities of contemporary society.” Thus he is not just
concerned to prove that colonialism was good and should be revived. He also
wants to prove that it was “legitimate,” i.e. that there is nothing inherently
unjust about invading and dominating a people.
Gilley’s
article is a truly extraordinary piece of work. It’s hard to believe, at first,
that it isn’t a Sokal-esque
satire intended to prove how normalized abhorrent opinions are. But it appears
to be sincere. And because it appeared in a mainstream journal, and the
sentiments it expresses are somewhat common, it’s worth responding to the case
Gilley makes.
Gilley’s
argument is, roughly: opposition to colonialism is reflexive rather than
reasoned. This has caused terrible consequences, because postcolonial
governments have hurt their people by attempting to destroy beneficial colonial
institutions. The “civilizing mission” of colonialism was valuable and had a
positive effect. Colonialism was legitimate because it helped people and many
populations were willing to tolerate it. Anti-colonial arguments are often
incoherent, blaming colonial governments for all ills rather than examining
what would have occurred in the absence of those governments. And colonialism
should cease to be a dirty word; in fact, it should be re-instituted, because
many developing countries are incapable of self-government. Gilley’s article is
brief, so he does not elaborate much on each of these points. But the thrust of
the article is that a commitment to factual rigor requires an unbiased
assessment of colonialism, and that such an assessment will reveal colonialism
to be a good thing for the colonized. Anti-colonialism is a destructive and
irrational “ideology” that should be abandoned.
I
suppose to those unfamiliar with the history, Gilley’s argument could appear
superficially persuasive. But a moment’s examination of the record reveals why
the case he makes is abhorrent. Gilley says he is simply asking for an unbiased
assessment of the facts, that he just wants us to take off our ideological
blinders and examine colonialism from an empirical perspective. But this is not
what he has done. Instead, in his presentation of colonialism’s record, Gilley
has deliberately excluded mention of every single atrocity committed by a
colonial power. Instead of evaluating the colonial record empirically, he has
distorted that record, concealing evidence of gross crimes against humanity.
The result is not only unscholarly, but is morally tantamount to Holocaust
denial.
First,
Gilley says he is making a “case for colonialism,” to rescue Western colonial
history’s “bad name.” But he restricts his examination to “the early nineteenth
to mid-twentieth centuries.” He does so because if he were to include the first
300 years of Western colonialism (i.e. the majority), it would be almost
impossible to mount any kind of case that the endeavor benefited indigenous
populations. The civilizations of the Americas were exterminated by
colonialism, through disease, displacement, resource depletion, one-sided
warfare, and outright massacre, and their populations suffered a “catastrophic
collapse.” Since it is impossible to spin this as benefiting the
inhabitants, Gilley avoids mentioning that it even happened. This, in itself,
in an article defending “colonialism,” should sufficiently prove that Gilley is
unwilling to consider evidence that contradicts his case, by discussing
“colonialism” generally while selecting only the cases in which native
populations were not extinguished.
Next,
Gilley’s method of defending colonialism is through “cost-benefit analysis,” in
which the harms of colonialism are weighed against the “improvements in living
conditions” and better governance. (Gilley even proposes “greater business
confidence” as a potential benefit of a neo-colonial project.) He quotes his
standard of measurement:
[I]n
times and places where colonial rule had, on balance, a positive effect on
training for self-government, material well-being, labor allocation choices,
individual upward mobility, cross-cultural communication, and human dignity,
compared to the situation that would likely have obtained absent European rule,
then the case for colonialism is strong. Conversely, in times and places where
the effects of foreign rule in these respects were, on balance, negative
compared to a territory’s likely alternative past, then colonialism is morally
indefensible
We
should observe here that this is a terrible way of evaluating colonialism. It
is favored by colonialism’s apologists because it means that truly unspeakable
harms can simply be “outweighed” and thereby trivialized. We can see quickly
how ludicrous this is: “Yes, we may have indiscriminately massacred 500
children, but we also opened a clinic that vaccinated enough children to save
501 lives, therefore ‘the case for colonialism is strong.’” We don’t allow
murderers to produce defenses like this, for good reason: you can’t get away
with saying “Yes, I killed my wife, but I’m also a fireman.” We must also be
careful about using hypothetical counterfactuals: examining whether colonialism
is “better than what would have happened in its absence.” I’m reading Great
Expectations at the moment, and so I’ll call this the “Pip’s sister
defense”: Pip’s sister justifies her cruelty and physical abuse by constantly
reminding Pip that if it were not for her, he would be in an even worse
situation. It’s an argument frequently deployed by abusive and exploitative
individuals in order to justify their acts. And the point is that whether or
not it’s true is immaterial to the evaluation of the person’s crimes.
Gilley and other colonial apologists, like the husband telling his wife that
while she may not like being hit, she should remember who provides for her, try
to exonerate colonial powers by suggesting that enough economic growth could
somehow make a “strong case for colonialism” even if there had been constant
mass rape and torture. (By the way, I think even committed opponents of
colonialism may sometimes fall into this trap. They may feel as if it is
necessary to deny that colonialism ever brought any benefits—which, as Gilley
points out, even Chinua Achebe doesn’t think. Instead, it’s important to point
out that building power lines and opening a school doesn’t provide one with a
license to rob and murder people. Furthermore, nobody should be surprised if
performance on certain economic and political metrics did end up declining in
the postcolonial era, since reconstructing a functioning country after decades
or centuries of subjugation is… not easily done.)
But
even if we assume that “cost-benefit” analysis is the correct way to examine
colonialism, Gilley has to distort the evidence in order to prove his case. For
example, Gilley cites the fact that “since gaining independence, Congo has
never had at its disposal an army comparable in efficiency and discipline” to
that it had under the Belgians, commenting that “Maybe the Belgians should come
back.” If one knows anything about the history of the Belgian Congo, one knows
that this statement is equivalent to saying “Maybe the Confederacy should come
back” to the American South. Belgian King Leopold created possibly
the most infamous colonial regime in history. Contemporaries called it
“legalized robbery enforced by violence,” and Leopold “turned his ‘Congo
Free State’ into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the
harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of
perhaps 10 million innocent people.” Belgian rule in the Congo was a
reign of terror that scandalized the world:
Much
of the death toll was the result of killing, pure and simple. Villages were
dragooned into tapping rubber, and if they refused to comply, or complied but
failed to meet European quotas, they were punished. The hands of dead Congolese
were severed and kept by militias to account to their quartermasters for spent
ammunition. And, as Morel said, the practice of mutilation was extended to the
living. By far the greatest number of deaths, however, were caused by sickness
and starvation. The effect of the terror was to drive communities from their
sources of food.
Below
is one of the most disturbing pictures I have ever seen (WARNING), taken by
English missionary and journalist Alice Seeley Harris,
who exposed the
Belgian abuses. It depicts a man
looking at the severed hand and foot of his
murdered daughter, who had been killed after the man failed to meet his daily
rubber harvesting quotient:
It
is shocking that Gilley could discuss Belgian colonialism without so much as
mentioning any of this in his “cost-benefit” analysis. But then, despite
promising to weigh negatives against positives, he doesn’t really discuss any
negatives. He says British suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya was
better than the alternative, but doesn’t discuss what it involved, namely mass
detention and human rights abuse. Kenyans were “put
in camps where they were subject to severe torture, malnutrition, beatings. The
women were sexually assaulted. Two of the men were castrated. The most severe
gruesome torture you could imagine.” Gilley doesn’t deal with or refute this,
he simply writes all allegations off as “scolding.” (Even Niall Ferguson admitsthat
“When imperial authority was challenged… the British response was brutal.)
Likewise unmentioned is what happened in India under British rule: the
horrific Amritsar massacre,
the mass famines that killed
millions, and the horrors of the
partition. French crimes in
Algeria: unmentioned. German genocide in
Namibia: unmentioned. Heck, Gilley doesn’t even mention racism, or
the various psychological wounds inflicted on colonized people by a
dehumanizing ideology (as explained by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon,
and Albert Memmi,
all of whom… also go unmentioned.) One of the cruelest aspects of colonialism
is the way it forces the colonized into servility and obedience, yet this
doesn’t even count as a “cost.”
In “Shooting an Elephant,”
while conceding the prejudices he had developed against the Burmese, George
Orwell expressed the revulsion that he felt about participating in the colonial
project:
I
hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you
see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling
in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term
convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos —
all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.
British police stand
guard over Kenyans as their homes are searched during the Mau Mau uprising.
Source: The Independent
I
say, then, that Gilley’s article is “morally tantamount to Holocaust denial”
because if you say you are performing a cost-benefit analysis of colonialism,
and you ignore colonial atrocities, you are fabricating history. Gilley says
that anti-colonialism is just leftist ideology, that it doesn’t take account of
the facts, but it’s his article that depicts a factually false version of
colonial history, one in which colonists acted out of benevolent and civilizing
motives, and primarily devoted themselves to opening schools and hospitals, and
imposing efficient government. The worst he will say about colonialism is that
it was “not an unalloyed good.”
The
portions of Gilley’s article alleging that colonialism was “legitimate” adopt
reasoning that cannot possibly be taken seriously. Gilley says that “alien rule
has often been legitimate in world history because it has provided better
governance than the indigenous alternative.” If this logic were accepted,
anyone could establish totalitarian rule over anyone else if they could “govern
them better than they can govern themselves”; Gilley doesn’t provide any reason
why we should accept that theory, he just says it. Gilley also
says colonized populations engaged in “relatively voluntary acts” like
“send[ing] their children to colonial schools and hospitals” and
“fight[ing] for colonial armies” that legitimized the enterprise, and that “the
rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative
to the populations and areas concerned is prima facie evidence of its
acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives.”
Somehow, obtaining compliance from an indigenous population means obtaining
legitimacy, which is like saying that a man with a gun to his head has
voluntarily decided to give you his wallet. As evidence that colonizers were
not attempting to pillage the colonized, he says “Despite cries of
‘exploitation’, colonialism was probably a money loser for imperial powers,” reasoning
that would lead us to believe that if a company loses money it must not be
seeking profit.
I go
into this level of detail because I think it’s crucial to show that Gilley’s
article is not a serious work of scholarship. I think the gut reaction of many
people will be that Gilley’s arguments are “self-evidently” absurd. But
apparently this is not the case, because the Third World Quarterly chose
to publish them. I don’t know why they made that decision; frankly, it’s very
strange. The board of TWQ is stocked with anticolonial lefties like
Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky, and while Prashad has said that they didn’t see
the article before publication (and threatened to resign if it’s not
retracted), it’s odd that the editors themselves thought an essay suggesting
that the Belgians should recolonize the Congo was a useful contribution to
scholarly discourse.
But
while TWQ’s motives remain inscrutable, I suspect I understand Gilley’s.
This article does not read as if it is attempting to be taken seriously. Its
tone toward critics of colonialism is polemical and mocking (these scholars
have a “metropolitan flaneur culture of attitude and performance”). Gilley must
intend to provoke people to rage: postcolonial countries should be like
Britain, which “embraced and celebrated its colonisers”; anticolonial thought
was about “advocacy” rather than “accuracy”; colonialism was not just
legitimate but “highly legitimate”; and we should “build new Western colonies
from scratch” and “colonial states should be paid for their services” by the
colonized.
I
expect Gilley wants the following to happen: people will be outraged. They will
call for the article to be retracted. Then, Gilley will complain of censorship,
and argue that lefties don’t care about the facts, and that his points has been
proved by the fact that they’d rather try to have his article purged than have
to refute its claims. This is a dynamic that has occurred many, many times.
It’s what Milo Yiannopoulos
did: he would say things that were truly upsetting and outrageous
(including bullying and mocking individual students), then when people got
upset and outraged and tried to shut him down, he would complain that “SJWs”
were trying to censor him because they can’t deal with facts and arguments. The
same thing happened when conservative law professors recently published an op-ed blaming
the “rap culture of inner-city blacks” for cultural decline, with one of them
lauding the “superiority” of white European culture. People got upset, for
obvious reasons, and students objected to having to be taught by a white
supremacist. But when one of the professors went on FOX News, he declared that
“there were no
allegations that anything we said was incorrect.”
(There were plenty of such allegations.)
It’s
a predictable pattern: A conservative publishes something that is both
factually duplicitous and morally heinous. The liberal reaction focuses on the
moral heinousness. The conservative says that the liberal doesn’t care about
facts. I have a sneaking fear that Bruce Gilley is going to end up on Tucker
Carlson’s show, whining that the left wants his article retracted because they
refuse to confront the true facts of colonialism and because they are biased
against white Europeans.
And so
I’m worried about how the response to this article may play out. I am not
signing the petition to
have it retracted, because I believe that the journal shouldn’t retract it
simply because there was public pressure. I am also very concerned that this
could be a PR coup for the right, as so many of these things are. It’s tough,
of course, because for the reasons I’ve outlined above, the article shouldn’t have
been published. Gilley did not meet the standards that should be expected of an
academic. He falsified history. When evaluated by a fair standard, he has not
upheld the honesty and rigor that should be expected of someone in his
position, and the article is a factual disgrace as well as a moral one. But it
would be very easy to fall into a certain predictable trap, where the left
calls Bruce Gilley a racist, and Gilley declares that they simply can’t handle
the truth. And while I’m sympathetic to the argument that we should avoid that
by Not Even Addressing Such Rubbish, bad arguments fester when they go
unaddressed. (This is why I put myself through
the ordeal of reading The Bell Curve.)
I
think, then, that all responses to this article should be rigorous and careful.
I think everyone should try to read the full thing, to know what Gilley argues
and what he doesn’t argue. And we must repeatedly emphasize that the reason
Gilley’s piece is so wretched is not just because it advocates something that
contradicts our sense of justice, but because he has deliberately produced a
false version of history. I am sick and tired of people on the right saying
those of us on the left simply Can’t Respond To Their Arguments. I’ve read
their arguments, and they’re bad.