It Could Be Said #12 Colonialism Is Bad, Mkay
Once again Will sticks his neck out and says that Westerners should stay in their lane
It is common to chart the renewed anti-racism activism to the murder of George Floyd, and before him, the murder of Michael Brown Jr in Ferguson. But in Britain, years before Black Lives Matter became a staple of anti-racism messaging this side of the Atlantic, young people were campaigning to Decolonise the Curriculum and demanding that Rhodes Must Fall1.
This different emphasis made sense given both the lower level of police violence against Black people in the UK2, and our country’s failure to grapple with its colonial past. Not for nothing did the multi-racial coalition of activists pivot to decolonialist activities such as throwing a statute of slaver Edward Colston into the Bristol Harbour3.
So it was something of a surprise to see that barely a year later people openly advocate nakedly colonialist arguments for a continued Western presence in Afghanistan, even after the hollowness of the Ghani regime had been exposed. But colonialism isn’t a euphemism for “bad things Britain did in the past”, it’s an evil and flawed system of government that we should oppose.
It’s worth, belt and braces style, just explaining why that is.
But before that, we should underline that what has just ended in Afghanistan was colonial rule.
Something Something’s Burden
At its heart, colonialism is one country ruling another. Contrary to the common belief that this has to be done by agents of the state, there are many forms this rule can take, with many colonialists ruling lands through quasi-autonomous agents (such as the East India Company4) or local puppets (such as the pliant princes who technically had sovereignty over a third of British India). In many ways Afghanistan met both categories; the Americans employed contractors to perform key state functions whilst also maintaining what we now know was a puppet regime with no reason for existing beyond its patron’s largesse.
That lack of an independent powerbase is crucial. We previously looked at how the Anglican Ascendency’s dependence on Britain fundamentally weakened it when negotiating the Act of Union, and that weakness carried on afterwards. Time after time, Southern Irish Unionists were overruled by London because both sides knew that the former couldn’t survive without the latter. It’s no coincidence that their Northern cousins had more success in calling the shots, because Presbyterian Ulster was a real nation rather than a fragile elite subjugating a foreign people5.
The same is true of American allies. There have been ludicrous comparisons made between Afghanistan and America’s longstanding commitments in Europe and East Asia. But those countries, even the most precarious in Taiwan, are unquestioned masters of their own house. They may rely on their alliance with the Americans to repel mutual external threats, but they do not need the Americans to fight domestic rivals. The knowledge that they are not underwriting the ruling regime against its own people, frees the Americans from the responsibility of second guessing every decision made by the local administration. Indeed, if the Americans tried to interfere in the domestic politics of their frontline allies, it would almost certainly rupture the alliance.
Afghanistan was not like that. The Americans went beyond writing the constitution as they had in Germany and Japan, they kept interfering in the form and substance of Afghan governance long after a decade after they invaded. But what alternative did they have? Deep down they knew the ruling regime was in power on their sufferance, and if you built it, you have to fix it. The Americans would obsess about the smallest detail about local governance, whilst their allies would try to reform the country in their image. As an example, Britain….no really….BRITAIN volunteered to rid Asia of opium and nobody laughed!
….
No this is not a bit. I swear6
Fund the Colonisers
You may think that Western influence declined as troop numbers fell, but this would be badly wrong. Afghanistan has a sizeable trade deficit, and a public sector bloated by years on American largesse. They were reliant on the Americans flying over planes full of dollars every fortnight. Indeed if you’re looking for a reason why the Ghani regime fell surprisingly fast, the postponement of one of those flights is as good a place to start as any.
Now America may have gone into Afghanistan for revenge, but the people it employed had less pure motives. You may have heard much in recent days about how much money has been spent on building the Afghan Army, but you’ve heard less that Afghan soldiers regularly went without pay. Yes much of the money was embezzled by corrupt local politicians, but plenty went back to Americans, as if this was Saul Goodman’s nail salon on bizarro world; washing taxpayer money so it could be safely paid to criminals.
This is a watered down version of what happened with the British Empire, and colonial empires beforehand, where men would become rich off the resources of native land. The reason it’s watered down, is to be blunt, Westerners weren’t allowed to profit off Afghanistan’s one cash crop7, and instead had to recycle their own hegemon’s money. Other countries weren’t so lucky. In British India, instant fortunes were to be found if you were lucky, devious and cruel enough.
It was the leveraged takeover of its day, with many going into debt to get to the taken land, and then paying those debts back off the backs of other people’s labour and other peoples’ assets8. To put it more crudely, take how annoyed Manchester United fans are at the Glazrers and extrapolate that for the entirety of the Sub-Continent. And rather than a team performing badly whilst their stadium crumbles, it was a populace going hungry and being routinely dehumanised.
This is not a case of a few bad apples. Many industries believed they benefited from colonial rule. In his disgraceful attempt to deny India the same self-rule and dignity that South Africa, a less-loyal and less-longstanding but more-White member of the British Empire enjoyed, Winston Churchill let the cat out of the back. He worried that if British India had the ability to set tariffs against Britain, then it would develop its own ability to process its raw materials, and so doom the Cotton Mills of Northern England.
Churchill is likewise blamed for the famines that occurred during the Second World War. Indeed, it’s often misconstrued to suggest that he was genocidal. Any robust analysis of British India during World War Two, shows that the British Prime Minister barely noticed that Indians were starving. That’s not humane, but it’s also not deliberate extermination.
A Local Hero
To claim Churchill’s famine was an accident is coded as being an Imperial apologist, but the opposite is true. Famines were a constant problem in British India, as a foreign elite prioritised what their home needed, and was slower to rouse when confronted with the local population suffering. For all the faults of the various states and governments that have replaced the Raj, none of them have presided over a full-blown famine, despite going to war with each other. Not for nothing has the proportion of Afghans below the poverty line significantly increased, even as Western aid gooses the income of the richest residents.
But it’s not just food where you see that colonialism is lacking. The areas of India that were governed by an Indian officer of the Indian Army rather than one born in Britain, had a higher survival rate during the Spanish Flu Crisis. This and many other factoids convey a key truth; colonialism is not just wrong, it’s a mistake.
Weirdly, Benjamin Disraeli, the person who formalised Britain as an imperium, was the one who best explained the fundamental weakness of colonialism, whilst bemoaning the weakness of Irish governance:
“Well, what then would gentlemen say if they were reading of a country in that position? They would say at once, ‘The remedy is a revolution.’ But the Irish could not have a revolution and why? Because Ireland is connected with another a more powerful country.
No matter how bad things got in Southern Ireland, there was no recourse for its people to correct the fact, because the governing regime was backed by a significantly more powerful country. They were trapped as long as Britain was committed to the imperial project. Likewise, the Afghans had no way to challenge the American-backed regime short of siding with the Taliban. And whilst those who proactively sided with the Taliban are a cause for concern, those who sullenly endured a crap government because it was backstopped by a superpower, are the reason the Ghani regime imploded so quickly.
So colonialism is not just a moral evil because the overlords are focused on their own countries interests, but it’s a practical failure because even the domestic agents are focused on their own country’s interests. Or alternatively, the hegemonic armed forces will indulge bad behaviour from local allies beause they believe those allies are useful to them. How bad could that behaviour behaviour be? Oh just a little KEEPING BOYS AS SEX SLAVES.
We Stan Laura Bush
There’s been much talk about the impact the fall of the Ghani regime will have on women’s rights. Leaving to one side that the progress made since 2001 has been badly exaggerated, with Afghanistan still only educating a small minority of its women, there is no doubt that the future sadly seems bleak for women there. I’m sure they can claim aslyum in Saudi Arabia…oh wait a minute…the literal fulcrum of Western engagement in the Muslim world treats women barely better than the Taliban. It’s as if this whole female empowerment angle is putting lipstick on the military-industrial pig.
One may suggest it is a bitterly ironic example of cultural appopriation that as these concepts spread through British education, little effort is made to reach out to the South African activists who came up with the original concepts
Primarily due to our general lack of guns rather than any greater virtue on behalf of our police. Our police are racist but impotent.
Admittedly, survey data suggested that Black and Asian Britons were slightly confused why Middle Class activists were allowed to take attention away from the everyday racism they actually wanted tackled.
Or the the pro-British Argetine Governments that dominated the country until the 1920s, which is the unacknowledged aspect of their rivalry with us over the Falklands.
And of course when their demographic domination disappeared, their baragaining power disappeared overnight, hence London sending troops in
Look, I’m 95% on board with being ashamed of Empire. But getting the Chinese hooked on Smack because we were gagging for Tea is just fucking funny. We need Scorsese to make an Opimum Wars movie.
Smack
An unacknowledged fact is that in Britain people got annoyed at people who returned from India having made their fortune, exercising influence on domestic affairs. And they got even more annoyed when half-Indian Britons returned to act as wealthy interlopers. It’s not suprise, that as British rule in India became more established and integrated into the wider Imperial system, Britons became less likely to freely mix with locals. Not for nothing were the few MPs of Indian heritage elected several decades before the end of British rule in the Sub-Continent.