The Case for Colonialism

De: Bruce Gilley

Narrado por: Warren du Plooy

“For the last hundred years, Western colonialism has had a bad name.” So began Professor Bruce Gilley’s watershed academic article, “The Case for Colonialism,” of 2017. The article sparked a global furor. Critics and defenders of Gilley’s argument battled it out in the court of public opinion. The Times of London described Gilley as “probably the academic most likely to be no-platformed in Britain.” The New York Times called him one of the “panicky white bros” who “proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best” and are “busy recyclers of Western supremacism.” In this book, Gilley responds to the critics and elaborates on the case for colonialism. The critics have no evidence for their claims, he asserts. The case for colonialism is robust no matter which colonizer or colonized area one examines. Patient, empirical, humorous, and not a little exasperated by anti-colonial ideologues, Gilley here sets a challenge for the next generation of scholars of colonialism. “It is time to make the case for colonialism again,” he writes.

©2023 Bruce Gilley (P)2024 New English Review Press

The honesty was favorite part.

nothing to dislike about this book. I very much appreciated it. A good insight you will struggle to find elsewhere.

Hell is the Impossibility of Reason

This is an excruciating book due to the wedding between the academic world rooted in reasoned debate and a fashionable morality of pity that tolerates no debate whatsoever, and views even an attempt at debate as an offense so grievous that it responds with violent emotion.

Bruce Gilley has clearly been wounded in this battle. The first third of this book is an expression of those wounds. But the final two thirds are product of intensive scholarly work. When someone like Noam Chomsky opposed the removal of Gilley’s original article with the same title as this book, you know something is horribly askew. But Chomsky, in his mid-90s now, comes from an academic tradition we’re all familiar with. It was one of reasoned debate. Chomsky, a genuine genius in the field of linguistics, relished it. His appearance on Firing Line opposite William F. Buckley, Jr., was legendary.

Western Civilization is the product of thousands of years of such debates. What Gilley’s book reveals, more than just facts and supporting statistics, is the end of reasoned debate itself. This is what makes reading the book so painful. There’s a tyranny here, what Timothy Snyder calls, obedience in advance. People agree to obey before even being asked out of fear of doing otherwise. In this case, colonialism is just bad, as rape is bad. It’s often viewed as rape.

The entire language used to describe Gilley by his critics is violent and packed with hyperbole and evidence-free assertions of bigotry and genocides. Filled with emotion and absence of any facts, clearly many of his critics have no interest in improving the lives of anyone. Rather, they make their reputation and their living by perpetuating the very ills they relish in highlighting. Such is the morality of pity; the pitied must stay pitiable. This is what makes that form of dubious morality so decadent. It exploits the alleged victims of colonialism more than colonialism itself ever did.

The entire discussion is tainted by the persistence of the long-disproven belief that there are multiple races of human beings. It’s a false idea. Yet the word, racism, persists. Race, as a concept, is toxic. And it’s not one of those toxins like, say, Digitalis, where a tiny amount can save a life. Can snap a heart out of a-fib. Race, in any quantity, is poison. Thus, when I hear the word, I wonder if the person using it isn’t, in fact, the true bigot.

As depressed as I felt after reading this book, I was nonetheless glad I did. It took courage to write it, more courage than I have certainly.