Yeah, I agree. But “colonialism” is not just pervasive in one field—it’s everywhere and it (like so many “activist” terms) have expanded so broadly that in many cases it doesn’t seem to mean anything apart from “really bad, but in some really vague indiscernible way”. It’s valid jargon more often than not.
I'm arguing that colonialism has lasting negative pragmatic effects in the world. Further, I'm arguing that we should not practice colonialism, and that we should actively work to decolonize; this makes me one of the anti-colonialists whose narrative is being questioned by the original article's author.
What are you arguing? I recognize the tactic as one of the most ancient: You're scooping up handfuls of sand and throwing it in the air to try to make everything harder to see. From my perspective, it's almost as if you're anti-anti-colonialist, but that's a rude accusation to make without hard evidence. Either way, I can't tell where you're headed and it feels like you just wanted to make sure that the thread was derailed.
Colonialism is just an extension of what was always occurring throughout History. It was no more necessary than all those conquests that shaped the world, which is another way of saying, it's no more necessary than civilization itself, the foundations for which were laid to build armies to wage war and reap the benefits.
You could no more divorce the History of technology from barbarism and inhumanity than you could Civilization. You could project a better way over human history looking through present-day lens, but that way did not happen, and more than likely it would never have occurred the way we'd idealize. Revisionism is hardly necessary.
Moralizing the past is senseless, whether you argue it was good or bad. It matters not that the colonial era is less old than others. All we can do with our newly calibrated compasses is decide what good means going forward.
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