this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Youβre still reaping the benefits from colonialism before your lifetime. Your prosperity is founded on wealth stolen from countries still suffering from the theft. Itβs okay to want to repair this.
If colonialism has made those countries poor, then they should have gotten rich once they were no longer part of a colonial empire. At the same time countries which had large colonial empires should have gotten poor, when loosing their empire.
What we mostly see is that this is not the case. Portugal got rich after its empire collapsed. Spain was about as rich as its former colonies for a long time. France and the UK did not collapse after loosing their colonies. There are rich countries, which never did have many colonies or only small ones for a limited time, like Germany, Scandinavia or Switzerland. You also have Oman, which did not get rich despite having had colonies. We also have Africa, which only has Botswana as a country genuinly benefiting from no longer being a colony. However that was after diamonds were found inside Botswana shortly after independence. Funnily enough Botswana also asked to be a colony. Everybody else more or less failed to get rich.
That is not to say that colonial empires should not pay for crimes they comitted or return stolen artifacts. The benefits of colonialism were mostly going to a small elite in the colonial countries and cost the states a lot of resources, which in many cases would have been better spend on other projects.
Of you look closer you will see that these countries often still exert significant control, in particular economically over their "former" colonies.
This reasoning sounds very eurocentric. You talk about monetary values - rich, poor, diamonds - without taking into consideration that other civilizations, have other values, and these should be respected. At least as a proof of actual decolonisation.
The issue with colonialism and coloniality is that it destroyed (and still does actually), the way of being of thriving communities around the world to the point they are not able to be self-sustained as they used to be, before the colonisers arrived there.
I argued against Europe having benefited from having colonies in the Europe community, which by its nature is eurocentric.
As I said Europe should pay for its crimes and I fail to see, that crimes need to benefit the criminal to be considered crimes. However that obviously makes reparations a lot more complex.
The statement in your first paragraph (that you later try to prove as true) is flawed because it is eurocentric.
Eurocentric does not mean talking about Europe. It's about having a biased perspective that favors or exonerates western civilisations for crimes they committed. Among other things, of course.
In other words you are saying that I am a racist.
Does this hold true even if these countries (often times the population at large, not just the leadership) are avid supporters of imperialism and brutal occupations?
Are those countries this way as a result of the historical theft of their resources? Would uplifting the common person in that country lead to progressive change there?
Difficult to say. One possible area to look into is formerly colonized nations that have experienced very strong economic growth in the last 30 years. What do you think?
Would Brazil be a good example? I believe colonialism ended over 200 years ago and they've seen pretty strong growth in the last ~25 years. How would you rate their attitude towards modern colonialilsm?
What about South Africa? Or is that a bad example. Their consistency on the topic of imperialism is interesting to say the least.