The Case for Colonialism By James Reed
Back in 2017, Bruce Gilley’s article, “The Case for Colonialism,” was published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. As expected with any articles challenging the woke status quo of academia, there were the usual protests and demands for the editors to be dismissed. Yes, even though there is no limit to the attacks upon the West in academia, and calls for the West’s destruction by academics. The breaking point was with threats of violence against the editor, who then caved in, for these are academics, not hardened warriors. As we have seen in Europe, there were also death threats against the author. Fortunately, the paper is now published:
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/the_case_for_colonialism/pdf
The argument is simply that colonialism had enormous benefits to a people who were undeveloped and probably would have remained so. That does not go down well with the equality cult. Likewise, for Australia, as a recent paper by Mark Powell details.
https://caldronpool.com/the-colonisation-of-australia-was-a-blessing/
Powell rereads Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (1986), and gives us an idea of what the land mass of Australia would have been like without British colonisation, or China, we may add. No academic would be writing like this today in the modern university, as the Gilley controversy shows.
“1. Government
‘The Australians divided themselves into tribes…The tribe did not have a king, or charismatic leaders, or even a formal council. It was linked together by a common religion, by language and by an intricate web of family relationships…’(9)
- Treatment of Women
‘…the unalterable fact of their tribal life was that women had no rights at all and could choose nothing. A girl was usually given away as soon as she was born. She was the absolute property of her kin until marriage, whereupon she became the equally helpless possession of her husband. Before and after [marriage], she was merely a root-grubbing, shell-gathering chattel, whose social assets were wiry arms, prehensile toes and a vagina…
As a mark of hospitality, wives were lent to visitors whom the Iora tribesmen wanted to honour…. If a woman showed the least reluctance to be used for any of these purposes, if she seemed lazy or gave her lord and master any other cause for dissatisfaction, she would be furiously beaten or even speared.’ (16)
- Written Language
‘…it had no writing, but instead a complex structure of spoken and sung myth whose arcana were gradually passed on by elders to the younger men.’ (9)
- Architecture
‘They were far more backward than any Bedouin or Plains Indian. They used what they could find: the sandstone caves of the harbour shores, with sheets of bark propped up to for crude “humpies.” (13)
- Agriculture
‘…that the Iora had no conception of agriculture. They neither sowed nor reaped; they appear to have wrought no changes on the face of the country. They were seen as culturally stative primitives lightly wandering in an ecologically static landscape, which seemed to eliminate any claims they might have had to prior ownership.’ (12)
- Technology
‘Compared to an American Indian birch canoe, they were unstable craft and wretchedly crude, “by far the worst canoes I ever saw or heard of…They had neither outriggers nor sails (the Iora were ignorant of weaving); low in the water, they flexed with every ripple and leaked like sieves.’ (11)
- Literature & Religion
‘…they had few of the external signs of religious belief: no temples or altars or priests, no venerated images set up in public places, no evidence of sacrifice or (apart from the corroborees) of communal prayer.’ (17)
- Education & Art
‘…they scratched crude patterns on the walls that may be the first works of art ever made in the southern hemisphere – the merest graffiti, compared to the later achievements of aboriginal rock-painting, but clear evidence of some primal artistic intent.’ (9)
- Health Care
‘Since the Iora never washed, they spent their lives coated with a mixture of rancid fish oil, animal grease, ochre, beach sand, dust and sweat. They were filthy and funky in the extreme.’ (14)
- Military
‘Skirmishing with other clans, or with foreign tribes along the frontier between tribal territories, was an inevitable fact of nomadic life…They had no “specialist” army. They recognized no distinction between fighters and civilians, or between hunter and warrior.’ (15)
- Currency
No property, no money or any other visible medium of exchange; no surplus or means of storing it, hence not even the barest rudiment of the idea of capital; no outside trade, no farming, no domestic animals except half-wild camp dingoes; no houses, clothes, pottery or metal; no division between leisure and labour, only a ceaseless grubbing and chasing for subsistence foods.’ (14)
- Acts of ‘Compassion’
‘To get rid of surplus children, the Iora, like all other Australian tribes, routinely induced abortions by giving the pregnant women herbal medicines or, when these failed, by thumping their bellies. If these measures failed, they killed the unwanted child at birth. Deformed children were smothered or strangled. If a mother died in childbirth, or while nursing a child in arms, the infant would be burned with her after the father crushed its head with a large stone.’ (17)”
Clearly, the romantic Left would see all of Hughes’ points as virtues, but we, lovers of civilisation would disagree.
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