Green Energy
From Victor Davis Hanson:
- Obama And The Term Islamic Terrorism
Recently I stumbled across the New York Post article entitled "Obama was as clueless about 9/11 as he is about ISIS" (February 28, 2015). The essay points out that, in 2004, Obama added a new preface to his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father. Excerpt...
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Obama and Terrorists – or is it Obama and the Sunni Muslims? In a great article in the Independent, Robert Frisk points out that if Obama attacks Syrian leader Assad’s army, the US and Al Qaeda would be on the same side. However, Frisk...
- Who Said This?
In the face of these challenges (in the Middle Eastern countries), too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people's grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half-century after the end of colonialism. Antagonism...
- The First Hundred Years
In just over one hundred years following the death of Mohammed in 632, the Arab followers of the Prophet had subjugated a territory with an east-west expanse greater than the Roman Empire, and they accomplished it in about half the time. By the mid-eighth...
- End The Occupation!
The occupation of indigenous peoples by invaders from outside, whether physical or cultural, is the root cause of all political hatred and violence in our world today. In order to secure just and lasting peace for the peoples of the world, it is necessary...
Green Energy
Imperialism: The Truth About Western Colonialism
One word that has been central to our foreign policy for over a century is “colonialism.” Rather than describing a historical phenomenon––with all the complexity, mixture of good and evil, and conflicting motives found on every page of history––“colonialism” is now an ideological artifact that functions as a crude epithet.
As a result, our foreign policy decisions are deformed by self-loathing and guilt eagerly exploited by our adversaries.
The great scholar of Soviet terror, Robert Conquest, noted this linguistic corruption decades ago. Historical terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism,” Conquest wrote, now refer to “a malign force with no program but the subjugation and exploitation of innocent people.”
As such, these terms are verbal “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers,” which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.”
Particularly in the Middle East, “colonialism” has been used to obscure the factual history that accounts for that region’s chronic dysfunctions, and has legitimized policies doomed to fail because they are founded on distortions of that history.
The simplistic discrediting of colonialism and its evil twin imperialism became prominent in the early twentieth century. In 1902 J.A. Hobson’s influential Imperialism: A Study reduced colonialism to a malign economic phenomenon, the instrument of capitalism’s “economic parasites,” as Hobson called them, who sought resources, markets, and profits abroad. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin, faced with the failure of classical Marxism’s historical predictions of the proletarian revolution, in 1917 built on Hobson’s ideas in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Now the indigenous colonized peoples would perform the historical role of destroying capitalism that the European proletariat had failed to fulfill.
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Whether it was the Romans in Gaul, the Arabs throughout the Mediterranean and Southern Asia, the Huns in Eastern Europe, the Mongols in China, the Turks in the Middle East and the Balkans, the Bantu in southern Africa, the Khmer in East Asia, the Aztecs in Mexico, the Iroquois in the Northeast, or the Sioux throughout the Great Plains, human history has been stained by man’s continual use of brutal violence to acquire land and resources and destroy or replace those possessing them.
Scholars may find subtle nuances of evil in the European version of this ubiquitous aggression, but for the victims such fine discriminations are irrelevant. Yet this ideologically loaded and historically challenged use of words like “colonial” and “colonialist” remains rife in analyses of the century-long disorder in the Middle East. Both Islamists and Arab nationalists, with sympathy from the Western left, have blamed the European “colonialists” for the lack of development, political thuggery, and endemic violence whose roots lie mainly in tribal culture, illiberal shari’a law, and sectarian conflicts.
Moreover, it is blatant hypocrisy for Arab Muslims to complain about imperialism and colonialism. As Middle East historian Efraim Karsh documents in Islamic Imperialism, “The Arab conquerors acted in a typically imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.”
Indeed, if one wants to find a culture defined by imperialist ambitions, Islam fits the bill much better than do Europeans and Americans, latecomers to the great game of imperial domination that Muslims successfully played for a thousand years. “From the first Arab-Islamic empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire,” Karsh writes, “the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams.”GO READ THE WHOLE THING.
- Obama And The Term Islamic Terrorism
Recently I stumbled across the New York Post article entitled "Obama was as clueless about 9/11 as he is about ISIS" (February 28, 2015). The essay points out that, in 2004, Obama added a new preface to his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father. Excerpt...
-
Obama and Terrorists – or is it Obama and the Sunni Muslims? In a great article in the Independent, Robert Frisk points out that if Obama attacks Syrian leader Assad’s army, the US and Al Qaeda would be on the same side. However, Frisk...
- Who Said This?
In the face of these challenges (in the Middle Eastern countries), too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people's grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half-century after the end of colonialism. Antagonism...
- The First Hundred Years
In just over one hundred years following the death of Mohammed in 632, the Arab followers of the Prophet had subjugated a territory with an east-west expanse greater than the Roman Empire, and they accomplished it in about half the time. By the mid-eighth...
- End The Occupation!
The occupation of indigenous peoples by invaders from outside, whether physical or cultural, is the root cause of all political hatred and violence in our world today. In order to secure just and lasting peace for the peoples of the world, it is necessary...