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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Another interesting piece of information that people don't particularly like to acknowledge is that colonisation might actually have benefited the colonised countries' economies and resulted in improved health and general wellbeing when compared with the counterfactual situation.

For example, countries like Kenya benefited from the establishment of a cash economy, the modernisation of infrastructure, and the spread of Western medicine. There’s a study which used height data as a proxy for nutrition and health to investigate how well Kenyans did under colonial rule. It notes that “however bad colonial policies and devastating short-term crises were, the net outcome of colonial times was a significant progress in nutrition and health.” Other numbers quoted in that article show improvements in the health infrastructure as well as a steep decline in infant mortality during the colonial period.

This article, in trying to explain the end of colonialism, speaks of a population explosion that occurred pretty much everywhere in the colonised world, and notes that while sometimes this was a result of immigration, in most colonies it was a result of population growth. "[P]opulation increase during the colonial period presumably was not an exogenous event, but rather a result of changes produced by colonialism itself —specifically, increased employment opportunities and decreased mortality due to the introduction of European technologies." The author suggests the increased population resulted in more subversive activity and extralegal appropriation of profits which might explain decolonisation.

Interestingly, it was not during colonialism, but during independence that the situations of many of the colonised countries became how it is today. This World Bank report notes "Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess. Many countries have lost professionals with valuable skills to more prosperous neighbors or to the developed world because of poor motivational practices, poor governance, internal conflicts, and civil wars. Guinea presents the most classic example of this decline. At independence, Guinea had a highly motivated public service, with clear rules on recruitment, promotion, and appointments to senior positions. Public sector infrastructure - roads, telephones, and so on-were adequate and well functioning. All these have broken down today."

And once the "colonisers" left, African politics became quite the corrupted hellhole. "[O]nce the political imperative of independence was achieved, the tools of nation building became a double-edged sword, increasingly coming to serve the ends of patronage in the struggle to retain and consolidate power. In this struggle, economic logic was the loser, resulting in factories located miles from critical inputs, paved roads extending into useless bush, while areas of high agricultural output were left unexploited for lack of transport. The heavy and often corrupted and corrupting hand of the centralized autocratic political system reached into all branches of the public service, controlling public administration, the judiciary, the private sector, and civil society."

Even the worst example of colonial exploitation, the Congo, had a better deal under colonisation then it does now. The Congo Free State under Leopold II was pretty bad, yes. On the other hand, the Belgian Congo was... okay, relatively speaking. Infrastructure was built, and living standards improved to a degree that would not be seen there at any point after. I think Moldbug makes a convincing case for it here, and it's notable that some Congolese after independence expressed a wistfulness for the days of colonialism. This Time article details such a perspective from a Congolese man.

"We should just give it all back to the whites," the riverboat captain says. "Even if you go 1,000 kilometers down this river, you won't see a single sign of development. When the whites left, we didn't just stay where we were. We went backwards."

“The river is the artery of Congo’s economy,” he says. “When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations — cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 3,000 people, 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned.” Using a French expression literally translated as “on the ground,” he adds: “Everything is par terre.”

This is not necessarily a case in favour of colonialism and colonial policy, but if someone wants to claim that whites should feel some sort of endless historical guilt for the plight of third-world countries today and subject themselves to a system of racial reparations, they’ve got another thing coming.

This anti-colonial argument often underpinned by a willful ignorance of how basic economics works.

Even where the Europeans (I am talking about 18-20th century Asian and African colonialism) engaged in basic resource extraction like mining (and the economies of colonies were generally far more sophisticated in reality than one might think) it still results in substainal economic development for the locals. Europeans had to build massive amounts of infrastructive to support these economic activities, to say nothing of the associated colonial administration like hospitals, schools and law enforcement. But the most important part is that the local workers were paid for their work and there was wealth flowing to the natives of the colony. The anti-colonial (typically Marxist) persective sees economy activity has necessarily zero-sum. If someone is making money, someone else must be losing money (or having their labour 'stolen'). This is obviously wrong.

Now, were these colonial economic arrangements as fair as they could have been? Maybe not, though once you factor in the expenditures on colonial administration and that colonialism generally speaking a money-losing venture for the Europeans it becomes a lot less clear.

But the counter-factual of no colonialism is that there would have been no economic development at all, and most economic activity that did exist would have continued to be conducted under local slavery (or similar economic structures) which is far less fair than the colonial arrangements.

South Africa is going particularly badly. I read a book review here: https://thepsmiths.substack.com/p/review-south-africas-brave-new-world

The most interesting sections:

…in the Khayelitsha squatter settlement, outside Cape Town… the DA [Democratic Alliance, an opposition political party] had made inroads thanks to the tireless activism of township workers fed up with the warlord-rule of local ANC councillors… One ANC councillor, De Putch Elise, held a meeting where his DA opponents attempted to speak about Elise’s alleged abuse of his housing allocation powers to punish DA supporters. Elise drew a gun and in full view of the crowd shot six of the DA activists, wounding five and killing one… the police declined to lay charges against Elise.

He (Mandela) declared that the solution to continuing violence in KwaZulu-Natal was for everyone to join the ANC… In 1995 he told a May Day rally that if the IFP continued to resist the ANC he would cut off all funding to KwaZulu-Natal, the most populous province. This was a completely unconstitutional threat which had to be quickly retracted. Similarly, when he dismissed Winnie from government he failed to read the constitution and thus had to reappoint her and later dismiss her again. Visiting Tanzania, he announced that: “We are going to sideline and even crush all dissident forces in our country.”

That's one hell of a villainous statement, even if something is lost in translation.

Mandela also made a lot of genuinely very big-hearted speeches pitching a “rainbow nation” vision of South Africa and begging whites not to flee the country, but every time the interests of justice conflicted with those of the ANC, he showed himself to be a party man first and foremost. The most revolting examples of this are two incidents in which independent prosecutors were investigating ANC atrocities (in one case a massacre of dozens of protestors, the other case an incident where some Zulus were kept in a cage inside a local ANC party HQ and tortured for months), and Mandela staked the full power of his moral authority on blocking the inquiries. In the case of the massacre, Mandela went so far as to declare that he had ordered the gunmen to shoot, which everybody knew to be a lie, but which meant that any attempt to pursue the coverup would mean taking down Mandela too. Nobody had the stomach to face that prospect, so the prosecutors dropped the case.

Who could've guessed that former terrorist leader Mandela was not a very nice fellow? It then mentions South Africa's staunch support for Zimbabwe during its problem-period of economic collapse, ethnic cleansing and so on. This was under Mbeki's de facto leadership of South Africa.

The second, even more catastrophic event that caused the South African government to lose the sheen of respectability was the AIDS epidemic and their response to it. The story of how Mbeki buried his head in the sand, embraced quack theories on the causes of AIDS, and condemned hundreds of thousands of people to avoidable deaths is well known at this point, but Johnson’s book is full of grimly hysterical details that turn the whole story into the darkest comedy you’ve ever seen.

For example: I had no idea that Mbeki was so ahead of his time in outsourcing his opinions to schizopoasters on the internet. According to his confidantes, at the height of the crisis the president was frequently staying up all night interacting pseudonymously with other cranks on conspiracy-minded forums (an important cautionary tale for all those… umm… friends of mine who enjoy dabbling in a conspiracy forum or two).3 These views were then laundered through a succession of bumbling and imbecilic health ministers such as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma4 or Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang who gave surreal press conferences extolling the healing powers of “Africanist” remedies such as potions made from garlic, beetroot, and potato.

I wonder if there are any dictators posting on /pol/ or whatever the modern conspiracy forum is. And of course there's the tacit encouragement of victims of child rape getting HIV:

The horror of it all is that by this point there were very good drugs that could massively cut the risk of mother-child HIV transmission and somewhat reduced the odds of contracting the virus after a traumatic sexual encounter. There were a lot of traumatic sexual encounters. A contemporaneous survey found that around 60 percent of South Africans believed that forcing sex on somebody was not necessarily violence, and a common “Africanist” belief was that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS, all of which led to extreme levels of child rape. The government then did everything in its power to prevent the victims of these rapes from accessing drugs that could stave off a deadly disease. At first the excuse was that they were too expensive, then when the drug companies called that bluff and offered the drugs for free, it became that they caused “mutations.”

After Mbeki disappears, we get Zuma as a new interesting personality. He's basically the South African Trump, except more based.

The last chance to stop Zuma was a credible-seeming rape accusation from a family friend. The ANC pounced on this, and initiated a high-profile criminal trial. This incensed Zuma’s supporters, who insisted that the prosecution was politically motivated (given that over the past decade the ANC had all but stopped prosecuting rape cases in society more broadly, they may have had a point). The trial was a total debacle. Countless thousands of young activists showed up outside the courtroom wearing t-shirts with slogans like “One hundred percent Zuluboy,” “Burn the bitch,” and “Zuma was raped.” When summoned to the witness stand, the president-to-be performed war dances and led the crowds in song. The prosecution collapsed after the accuser's story was found to be inconsistent on numerous points, and a triumphant Zuma rode the backlash all the way to the presidency.

Another interesting piece of information that people don't particularly like to admit to is that colonisation might actually have benefited the colonised countries' economies and resulted in improved health and general wellbeing when compared with the counterfactual situation.

It's irrelevant even if it's true. Colonization is being argued as inherently immoral.

Yes. It is relevant, however, in the context of demanding reparations and other forms of coercive political action as remedy. Without proving that colonisation is the reason for the poor state of any given population of people it's about as pertinent to anyone's present plight as the Norman Conquest.

One can easily make the case that reparations are owed one way or another for the original act of victimization and that whatever happened to the victim afterward is irrelevant to the matter. If someone kidnapped you and turned you into a slave for 10 years but while enslaved you spent more time than before reading books and so after you escaped you became richer than you had been before I kidnapped you, it would not invalidate the argument that the person who kidnapped you owes you something.

Given that both colonists and colonised are all dead now, who would be paying the reparations to who?

the person who kidnapped you owes you something

So ... that's a "yes chad" to the question of Norman Conquest reparations? If so, there's going to be a long line behind the Anglo-Saxons.

Perhaps a statute of limitations of mere decades isn't the best idea, but isn't punishment at least a little tricky if you and the person who kidnapped you have both been dead for a century or two? We tend to laugh at the idea of posthumous execution in modern times, but that at least seems more just than "take it out on the great grandkids".

If someone kidnapped you and turned you into a slave for 10 years but while enslaved you spent more time than before reading books and so after you escaped you became richer than you had been before I kidnapped you, it would not invalidate the argument that the person who kidnapped you owes you something.

Firstly, your hypothetical isn't exactly analogous to the situation under discussion, since in your hypothetical it is not the act of victimisation that directly caused the richness of the slave, whereas when it comes to colonialism it was what the colonisers did which ended up improving health and living standards (and it did so while the colonisation was happening, which is yet another dissimilarity to your hypothetical).

Secondly, in line with your stated moral principles, I hope you are in favour of Arabs compensating the Assyrians and approx 50 other ethnic groups for the 7th century Muslim conquest of the Levant. Or hey, as mentioned, the Norman Conquest of 1066. According to this article people with Norman surnames today are overrepresented at Oxbridge and elite occupations like medicine, law and politics. Reparations sure seem to be in order.

Alternatively, we could let bygones be bygones, instead of demarcating a special class of victims and making grievance inheritable. But that's just what my preference regarding public policy is, as a person who grew up in a post-colonial country themselves.

I believe that @Goodguy is arguing not that reparations should be paid, but rather that, if an act is immoral, the fact that victims ultimately benefited from that act does not imply that the perpetrator is immune from responsibility for that act. To change their hypothetical very slightly: " If someone kidnapped you and turned you into a slave for 10 years but while enslaved [taught you to read] and so after you escaped you became richer than you had been before [they] kidnapped you, it would not invalidate the argument that the person who kidnapped you owes you something."

My comment was specifically created to address the arguments of people demanding reparations. I appropriately scoped my point for making the claims I did in my original comment: "This is not necessarily a case in favour of colonialism and colonial policy, but if someone wants to claim that whites should feel some sort of endless historical guilt for the plight of third-world countries today and subject themselves to a system of racial reparations, they’ve got another thing coming." As a result, any supposed "counter" to my original point which is not related to the discussion of reparations is attacking a point which I did not make. I would also add that I do not necessarily believe colonisation was moral, but I also do not believe responsibility for colonisation is inherited, and thus the hypothetical still fails. The way people argue for intergenerational guilt is to claim that the effects of colonisation still persist, but if negative effects attributable to colonisation aren't demonstrated, that argument isn't an effective counter.

Furthermore, I would also dispute your characterisation of the reply to me. The argument that was being forwarded by my interlocutor was that reparations should, in fact, be paid. To quote: "One can easily make the case that reparations are owed one way or another for the original act of victimization." The user's other comment in this thread is also pretty clearly forwarding a case for it.

EDIT: added more

I see the key part of that quote as "one way or the other."

Regardless, it does seem to be that the argument that reparations are unjustified because "the colonized benefited from colonization" does not really address the argument that colonization was an inherent wrong (an argument, BTW, which which I completely disagree: As far as I am concerned, it is an argument manufactured (or adopted, since it is really a Western idea) by local elites and foisted upon the hoi polloi; it is essentially, "Your oppression by outsiders is immoral! It is we who should be oppressing you!"). Arguments re inheritance of responsibility are much stronger, in my view.

I see the key part of that quote as "one way or the other."

If reparations are owed "one way or the other", that's still arguing in favour of reparations in some form regardless of whether the colonised benefited or not.

Regardless, it does seem to be that the argument that reparations are unjustified because "the colonized benefited from colonization" does not really address the argument that colonization was an inherent wrong

Sure, but as already noted my original comment wasn't really meant to address that argument, since even if it is true, arguing that colonisation was an inherent wrong doesn't in and of itself justify guilt let alone reparations because often the people responsible are dead. To adapt the hypothetical a little bit, if my grandfather kidnapped your grandfather and enslaved him but taught him to read, and so after he escaped he became richer than he would've been had he not been kidnapped, this could be argued to be a moral wrong. Nevertheless, I think it would be unfair for you in the present day to claim grievance and demand that I take responsibility for the actions of my grandfather because he committed a moral wrong. In the case of colonisation, it's even worse because a whole nation of people is implicated regardless of whether they even have any ties to those at fault. It's the worst form of guilt by (involuntary) association.

As a pedantic note - this hypothetical ignores that it's also the case that colonisation improved health and living standards while the colonisation was happening and in some cases had legitimacy via the support of locals, whereas in this hypothetical the slavery probably resulted in a loss in life quality and improvements came only after it ended, but it demonstrates the point that even if you make that concession it doesn't change much.

(an argument, BTW, which which I completely disagree: As far as I am concerned, it is an argument manufactured (or adopted, since it is really a Western idea) by local elites and foisted upon the hoi polloi; it is essentially, "Your oppression by outsiders is immoral! It is we who should be oppressing you!")

Yes, I agree completely. Local elites do also tend to like blaming the West for the state of things, instead of placing the blame where it belongs (since said elites and officials are often in fact responsible for the myriad issues in their communities and countries). I think this is an aspect of the public discourse that actually hurts people in these countries, instead of helping them, and the culture of guilt in the West really only helps foster and intensify it.

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