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In my darker moments, I wonder if "decolonization" in practice is somewhat genocidal. For all the lofty "self governance" rhetoric, there are uncomfortably many examples, of which I'd consider the Subcontinent one (also Palestine, Rwanda, and many others), in which some of the first actions with newfound independence were to start killing and forcibly relocating each other.
Even some places that set out with lofty rhetoric (South Africa) haven't really been able to realize those stated values. I recognize that the colonial powers weren't exactly saints either, so I don't have a better suggestion. Just the sad state of the world. On the other hand, there are success stories: Singapore, for example.
When Uganda decolonized it immediately engaged in ethnic expulsion of 90% of it's businesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Uganda
Zimbabwe promptly used literally North Korea trained death squads to commit genocide against the Ndebele as soon as it could.
Algeria promptly ethnically cleansed 10% of it's population upon de-colonization. About 1 million Pied Noir were expelled. No one calls it ethnic cleansing or genocide though, because they were told they had a choice. the choice given to them:
Kenyan independence immediately led the the complete destruction of the Arabs of Zanzibar.
Even Singapore itself was effectively born from ethnic race riots. See the 1964 Race Riots. Plural.
I blame our collective forgetting about it all on Franz Fanon. Who made it clear that ethnic hate wasn't a coincidence, it was the point. He would regard modern Singapore as a failure and modern Zimbabwe as success.
Could you elaborate more on this point?
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I think this just depends on the specific circumstances and usage of the term really. Many of the colonies controlled by Imperial Japan were so awful that their descendents in China and Korea continue to hold a powerful cultural grudge to this day. And it's easy to understand when they committed atrocities like the hundred man killing contest (the specifics of this event is historically questionable but even Japanese courts generally rule something most likely happened) Their forces were so opposed to the Japanese invaders that China put their civil war aside and worked together to fight back. Decolonizing the areas they had conquered was a liberation.
But in the same way "decolonization" is used by some wacky leftist types who seem to think that the US continuing to exist at all is equivalent to doing the trail of tears over and over again. The native Americans of the 18th and 19th century might not have fared well under American rule back then, but the native Americans of today certainly benefit from our country's wealth and power.
I don't have a time machine or a parallel dimension viewer to see the counterfactual where a native American tribe won and ruled over the land of the US to see what happened. Maybe that tribal America is even wealthier and more powerful, maybe it's worse off. But it doesn't matter, we don't live in that time or alternate reality and the native Americans of today benefit from the country existing. "Decolonizing" makes no sense even from a pro-native perspective, we would be hurting them.
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Inherently, yes. The entire colonization rhetoric is incoherent in honest historical context, unless e.g. viewed as moral justification for immediate power shifts and ethnic cleansing.
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Decolonisation is a weird term. People who use it here remind of the Hindi term dehati, its closest translation would be hick I guess. There is a growing online population of people who want to "decolonise" which means becoming more afghanistan like but still staying liberal lol.
"True decolonisation" here would be like Kashmiris seeing the Hindu rule that civilised the place as evil, hence justifying current acts of violence. South Africa and Zimbabwe have become actively worse economically.
I hate the word because it is used mostly by bioleninists. India cannot "decolonise" unless you have revolutions against the upper castes, as they were here far longer than the Brits, at least that's the bioleninist narrative here.
Muslims obviously can run a civilized-if-not-to-western-preferences society(Iran and the Gulf States clearly qualify), while it is not at all clear that India and Nepal qualify as 'civilized'- and there's no hindu counterfactual.
Hinduism represents the last active strain of Aryan religious beliefs of the Indo Europeans. The place, the people have declined substantially, but you can take a look at Bangladesh and Pakistan or even Afghanistan and see how much worse they are by comparison.
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