Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (47262)	6/1/2004 9:02:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 794009

When your tiny minority includes Prince Albert, it's not so tiny. The ideas of the liberals were extremely important to the British imperialists, just as they are to American fp today. How important do you think they were, say, to the administrators of the British East India Company, and the similar organizations that actually managed colonial enterprises? Rhetoric about the white man’s burden was both popular and convenient in London’s political circles. If that’s all there was too it, England would never have had a colony. The point was to make money. That end of it wasn’t discussed much – liberal ideals make much better copy – but in practice, it had a lot more to do with the mechanics of colonialism than liberal ideals ever did. Do you know why the spinning wheel became a symbol of Ghandi’s resistance to British rule? if you had to choose a colonizer, wouldn't you have chosen the British over the French or the Belgians? The French and Belgians brought ineptness and brutality to new heights (while still speaking grandly of liberal ideals - remember the mission civilatrice). I’m not sure a Maori, and Iroquois, or an Australian aborigine of the time would have had many good things to say about British colonialism. The greatest virtue of the British, as colonizers, was that while they did fight to retain their colonies, they were able to see when the fight was no longer winnable, and didn’t force it to the point that some others did. It would be interesting to compare the careers of former colonies where colonized peoples had to fight a war to gain independence with those where they received independence without a war. I think you’d find that the latter group had a much better time of it. For one thing, countries that had to fight wars of independence almost always ended up ruled by whoever had led the war, an arrangement not conducive to good government. Our great mistake during the French years in Vietnam was imposing a right/left paradigm on what was essentially a war of liberation from foreign rule. To us, the French were the good guys, because they were fighting communists. To most Vietnamese, it didn’t matter if Ho was red, yellow, brown, or pink with polkadots. He had raised a Vietnamese army, the first in human memory, and was fighting a hated and contemptible occupier. We took the wrong side, and paid for it bitterly. The most dangerous effects of colonialism had nothing to do with rules and laws, infrastructure and schools. The natural course of national differentiation and political maturation in many of these areas was simply frozen, often for several hundred years. When they took their freedom, they picked up where they left off. The stupendously irrational national borders bequeathed by departing colonists have cost an absolutely staggering number of lives in post-colonial civil wars.