You’re a star-belly sneech, you suck like a leech … Well, you’ll work harder with a gun in your back for a bowl of rice a day
The Dead Kennedys, “Holiday in Cambodia”
As Orwell wrote, “All left-wing parties in the highly industrialised countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.”
The same goes double for the rabble of left-wing “Indigenous” and “First Nations” parties who endlessly whine and rant against the very thing which made it possible for them to live in very nice houses, drive very nice cars, and get paid a lot of very nice taxpayers’ money to shake their little fists and stamp their little feet. That thing is, of course, colonialism.
If the British – or any other Europeans – had never come to Australia, as some of the more militant Aboriginal activists clearly wish, their lives would be very different. A whole lot poorer, and certainly much more violent. The same goes for Maori activists, who act as though “Aotearoa” was a pacifist paradise before Captain Cook. (Although it is, in a way, true that it was a utopia. Literally, “no place”: no place called “Aotearoa” ever existed until a white missionary made it up in the mid-19th century. “Aotearoa” is itself literally a colonial invention.)
Of course, no one is fool enough to pretend that colonialism was all smiling white bwanas indulgently handing clothes and rations to wide-eyed, grateful, dusky innocents. We’re all very well aware of the violence (on both sides, it must be also be pointed out) that inevitably accompanied colonialism. But only the left are fool enough to act as though colonialism were an unalloyed evil.
Nor will they be persuaded otherwise by harsh facts.
When a Cambridge don and professor emeritus of history has the temerity to remind the idiots that, like pretty much everything, colonialism engendered both good and bad, leftist heads duly explode. We live in a time of universal deceit, after all. So when David Abulafia utters the truth, it is not just a revolutionary, but a shocking act – at least to the ignorant ninnies of the left.
Abulafia […] lament[ed] “the woke view is that anything that can be labelled as ‘colonialism’ is inherently bad”, before going on to suggest that things weren’t all terrible under the British empire, that there was plenty of imperialism outside Western countries as well, that critics of colonialism didn’t define it well (when in doubt, throw in a definitional query to look like you’ve fundamentally undermined your opponent) and even that the British empire was a kind of accident.
Empires were not all created as the result of a grand masterplan organised by white male Europeans. The historian Sir John Seeley opined that the British empire was acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. Cromwell never intended to capture Spanish Jamaica. The East India Company, not the British government, laid the higgledy-piggledy foundations of British India.
All of this is broadly true. No wonder the left are outraged.
There was – and still is – plenty of much worse imperialism outside Western countries. The Islamic empires, for instance, were imposed on a tide of blood that makes even the Spanish look like lily-clean innocents by comparison. The Maori brutally exterminated and enslaved the Moriori people in the 19th century. China is rapidly establishing itself as a modern imperial power, not only blatantly invading and annexing long-independent peoples from Tibet to Taiwan, but, via the Belt and Road Initiative, taking economic control of much of what used to be called “the Third World”.
Let he who is without colonies cast the first stone.
Crikey
That’s what has really got the left riled – as Orwell pointed out. Whinge and whine about “stolen land” all they like, the left, especially the “Indigenous” left (I would call them the “brown left”, were not so many of them even paler of hue than I), are happily living a “standard of living […which] demands that the robbery shall continue”.
Or as an Aboriginal chap of my acquaintance once said, of his grandmother supposedly being “stolen”: “We’d still be scratching our arses in the dirt, if she wasn’t”.
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