Leftism
18. Anticolonialism
Anticolonialism has been one of the worst traps into which American foreign policy fell during this century. Naturally its stalwarts were and are the leftists. Yet the anticolonial sentiment is. quite generally represented in the American people and, in the United States, one has to be something of an esprit fort, an emancipated spirit, to be able to resist its temptation. The fact that anticolonialism has two distinct roots, and not just one, contributes powerfully to its strength. To make matters even worse, it has become a tactical weapon in the Cold War where Washington uses it with the greatest sincerity. Now, since anti-imperialism seems to sound better than anticolonialism it has partly but not entirely replaced the latter term in Soviet harangues. When I was asked in Irkutsk a few years ago what I thought about Eastern Siberia, I replied that it is a wonderful example of the dynamics of Russian colonialism. With this remark I horrified most of my interlocutors (by no means all convinced Communists) and one of them told me that the term colonialism was out of place here: I should have called it osvoyeniye, which means “incorporation” (or the German Landnahme), whereupon I opened my notebook and took down this valuable piece of information and education with the straightest of faces—whereupon a few in my audience started to laugh. I am sure, however, that some of the young among those present became aware for the first time in their lives that their country truly was a colonial power.
I witnessed something similar in America, when I once started a lecture with the remark that I, belonging to a nation which never had colonies, was addressing myself to the citizens of a colonial power. It was immediately pointed out to me that the United States never possessed colonies in the past and none at the present. When I mentioned the Philippine Islands, Guam, and Western Samoa, I created a minor sensation. The fact had been known all along, but its realization had been blocked. When I defined a colony in the modern sense as a distant area administrated by a motherland granting either only limited or even no autonomous power, we had to include some other areas as well.
There is, of course, nothing evil and nothing extraordinary about colonialism. It is the inevitable result of a historical law according to which not only nature, but also political geography, does not tolerate a vacuum. Where no effective resistance can be expected, other powers, other nations, other tribes will occupy, dominate, and administer an area. Our history could not be imagined without the forces of colonialism constantly at work. Without Greek colonialism Magna Graecia would not have existed, Stagira would not have existed (in a way Aristotle would not have existed), Paestum or Pergamum, Ephesus, or Agrigent would not delight us with their ruins. Without Phoenician colonialism, there would have been no Carthage—and eventually no St. Augustine. Roman colonialism (or “imperialism”) is responsible for the French language, for Racine and Molière—and also for Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón. Without Bavarian colonialism there would be no Austrian people. And so forth. As we should all realize, there is good colonialism and bad colonialism, just as we have good rule, which is government conscious of the common good and the welfare of the citizen or subjects, and bad rule which is selfish and exercised solely for the profit of the rulers.
The twin roots of American anticolonialism are (a) insistence on self-rule (democracy), and (b) a misinterpretation and an illegitimate application of the reasons for American independence. We have dealt elsewhere with the mirage of self-rule, which admits at best to a collective, but never to a personal-existential interpretation. The only individuals who enjoy self-rule are citizens in a direct democracy, deciding all issues with unanimity (a purely theoretical case) and absolute monarchs, dictators, or tyrants. The dream of everybody becoming his own monarch could especially be fulfilled by the anarchists (provided such fulfillment is possible and desirable), but the democrats can explain their system as a pantocracy only with the help of amazing abstractions, psychological arguments, and axiomatic suppositions which hardly fool the independent thinker.
Yet more often than not it is the memory of history classes and the uncritical listening to Fourth of July speeches rather than the democratic argument which emotionally dominates American anticolonialism. As a result a genuine fusion of leftist and “patriotic” arguments against colonialism is possible, and this is usually fostered assiduously by the more clever leaders of the American left. Here we have an ideal opportunity to quote again Dr. Johnson’s “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
What is usually forgotten in the “patriotic” (i.e., historic) appeal to anticolonialism is, first of all, the fact that here we are not facing any “ism” whatever. The term “colonialism” will hardly be found in authoritative dictionaries before 1914 or even 1924. Colonizing is not the result of a systematic ideology, of a Weltanschauung, of a philosophy, political or other. A second fact has to do with the great variety of situations actually covered by the term “colony.” There have been and there still exist a few colonies which before the arrival of the white man were totally void of the human element. This is true, for instance, of a number of islands in the Indian Ocean. Is it an iniquitous situation if such settlements are governed by the motherland? When does their God-given right of secession and independence begin? Certainly not with the landing of the first settler. When are they “ripe” for autonomy? All answers of necessity will be arbitrary.
We have to place into the same category areas which were practically deserted and where the indigenous population at best had tribal but not political organizations. It would not be too easy to prove that the Britishers were infringing on the natural law (or on God-given rights) when they started to colonize Australia. Whatever may be the case, the colony in the classic sense of the term was a city or a whole area settled by people from a “motherland” (metropolis) speaking the same language, adhering to the same laws, praying to the same gods as the people in the motherland. In the remote past their independence usually resulted from the impossibility of long-distance administration. Political decisions had to be made on the spot without much delay. In antiquity independence always evolved in an organic process. The moral and emotional ties between motherland and colony were rarely broken. As a result, military alliance was the rule rather than the exception.
In spite of the American War of Independence, (often referred to as the “American Revolution” starting the “American Experiment”), the relationship between America and Britain falls entirely into the category of classic colony where people of the same culture, language, and civilization, with equal intellectual and moral levels, are separated by a considerable geographic distance. Any equation of the secession of the Thirteen Colonies with, let us say, the “War of Liberation of the Peoples of Angola” is based on complete ignorance of the facts.
A second type of colony is the one found in isolated spots. Here the purpose of colonization is merely one of civil or military communications.
The third type of colony very frequent until recently, had a relatively numerous local population of a manifestly lower culture and civilization than the motherland. The former Belgian Congo would be a case in point.
Now, there exists a school of thought which hesitates to talk about higher and lower cultures. We, of course, use the term culture in the German sense, now generally adopted by the English-speaking nations: the intellectual, moral, and artistic status of nations as opposed to their civilization, which includes the civic (political) institutions and the servile arts. Obviously there are domains which do not fit neatly into one category or the other: Sanitation and industry obviously belong to civilization; religion, painting, and poetry to culture; jurisprudence and table manners to both. High levels of culture and civilization are related, but do not operate in synchromesh. Often history shows us great discrepancies between both, among persons as well as entire nations.
In talking about levels we need measuring rods. We need standards. The assumption that Western culture, in its present stage, is inherently superior to others is not easily proved. I am convinced of it, but I have to omit a lengthy argument here. Still, I want to go on record as affirming that the overwhelming part of mankind wants to adopt Western culture and, even more so, Western civilization—if not in all, at least in many or most of its aspects. (I will return to that theme). In occupying and administering areas inhabited by primitives and semiprimitives (central Africa, to quote an instance), the Western powers were driven to their colonization by psychological motives (“national pride”, expansive patriotism, etc.) as well as by practical considerations, i.e., advantages of a military or economic nature. Nor were altruistic motives entirely absent. Missionary zeal as well as a desire to help these populations from a medical, educational, and civic point of view—they all played their part.
Fourth and finally, we had colonies whose populations had a culture and civilization as old as ours, if not older. These nations either had stagnant cultures or civilizations, or both. The technological side of their civilizations ceased to develop and this particular inferiority resulted in the conquest of their ancient states by Europeans.
There exists, however, a curious interconnection between culture and civilization. There can be hostility and conflict between them (as is evident if we put the masses of our big cities under the magnifying glass), but they cannot exist too far apart either. Jointly they form (to use an expression of Arthur Koestler) a “package deal” which precludes the possibility of taking individual items arbitrarily and successfully out of their compounds. The European masters of these old and proud nations (our fourth type of colony) usually tried to provide them with the blessings of Western civilization rather than culture, but soon the desire for cultural assimilation (within arbitrary limits) followed. There is a real inner conflict between the study of mechanical engineering and the natural sciences and Buddhism or Hinduism, whereas in the case of Christianity, such an antithesis does not exist, except, perhaps, in the minds of leftist semi-intellectuals who have never taken the trouble to study systematic theology.
The American anticolonialist is usually unaware of the fact that his protest against the survival of colonies practically never can be based on arguments valid for the independence of his own country. The United States in 1776 were as cultured and civilized as Britain at the same time. Americans then were honestly convinced that they were “just as good as the British” and the same argument, on the other side of the Atlantic, was used by and large by the agent of the Province of New York, Edmund Burke. One has only to visit New England towns which have not materially grown since 1800 in order to evaluate the levels attained by Americans more than a century-and-a-half ago. The controls by London (humiliating rather than vexatious) were resented as insulting and superfluous. To compare Holden Roberto with George Washington or Patrice Lumumba, the embezzler of the Stanleyville post office, with Nathan Hale is ludicrous: to liken the évenements regrettables of January 6, 1959, which grew out of a senseless riot of football fans in Leopoldville, to the Boston Tea Party or to Bunker Hill is an insult to the American people. American Independence, after a few difficulties, led to the progress of the United States in almost all domains, whereas the precipitated decolonializations of the mid-twentieth century have resulted in an endless series of calamities.
The negative results of “decolonization” could have been foreseen easily. However, two legitimate views are possible on the subject of decolonization: (1) It was inevitable but should not have taken place at so early a period; and (2) it was not at all inevitable but happened in a historical impasse—just as did the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Indeed very few historical events should be called inevitable. We should be content to speak of greater or lesser probabilities, in extreme cases of “virtual impossibilities” and “greatest likelihoods.” True, it belongs to the leftist mentality to visualize a fixed point of historic evolution, a utopia behind which there is no genuine historical development but, at best, improvement. All roads lead to utopia which will be reached automatically, but intelligent people help to increase the speed of this evolution. “Progressive people” thus promote the coming of paradise on earth; reactionaries in vain try to delay the arrival of the millennium. (They are merely “turning the clock back.”) Actually the machinations of the left are often in the nature of a real fraud because they try to create the impression that the events favoring their cause were bound to come. But if they are so truly convinced of “historic automation” along their lines, why are they not waiting patiently and passively for the inevitable fulfillment of their Great Dream? This is a question legitimately addressed to the left progressivist no less than to the orthodox Marxist. Certainly, if you stand on the right, then rightly you have no reason to adopt such complacency.
I lean toward the view that decolonization was neither inevitable nor even desirable. I am convinced, however, that eventually, in the long, very long run, the globe might be federated politically and that such a process could have positive aspects as I shall explain in the last chapter.
The continued existence of the colonial empires would have greatly facilitated the federation of the globe because it would have aided the Westernization of the colonized tribes and nations, a process not completely terminated today but greatly handicapped and considerably slowed down. We must bear in mind that we saw in the European colonies by 1945 not only a steady advance of Western culture and civilization, but also the growth of education and an increase in local self-government. As a matter of fact, in the years immediately following World War II Europeans emigrated in increasing numbers to the colonies, and when we ask where the most dynamic Europeans could then be found, where the great modern and thriving European cities were located, we would have had to point to Léopoldville and Dakar, Singapore and Hongkong, Casablanca and Lourenço Marques, Luanda and Algiers, Elizabethville and Nairobi, Hanoi and Bombay. Here the energies and the adventurous spirit of the Old World found their concrete expression; here we had the counterpart to the American drive toward the West and the Russian drive toward the East.
A great many other features of decolonization were also antiprogressive and recessive. Before we deal with the desirability of the Westernization inaugurated by the European powers, we have to ask the preliminary question whether the Afro-Asians wanted to be Westernized: a legitimate question because nations should decide whether they really like to be subjected to a specific evolutionary process. Talking in Africa to évolués, highly critical of “colonialism,” I very often asked pointblank whether they would have considered it preferable if, 200 years ago, we Europeans had put a cordon sanitaire around Africa, leaving it to its own evolution unaided by the immense knowledge and experience we had acquired and accumulated—at great cost, at great pains, in the last three thousand years. A few extreme nationalists explained to me with profound conviction that, left to their own devices, they would have achieved the same inventions, the same improvements, the same advances, but the vast majority, less possessed by brazen optimism, were usually put on the spot. A few even admitted that in all likelihood they would not even exist, since the substantial decrease in mortality and the phenomenal increase in population were gifts of the medical services introduced by the Europeans. The unqualified “yes” to European civilization was, to be true, not always followed by the same enthusiastic assent for European culture. In most of the “emerging nations” the belief exists that one might opt for one and not the other, but this is true only to a very limited extent. One can, for instance, ride a bicycle half or three-quarters naked, one can read Plato (though not in Linguala!) and eat couscous, one can use the most modern automatic rifle and, at the same time, practice cannibalism which might be defined as “nutritional democracy.” There are, however, certain limits to these arbitrary selections from what, as Arthur Koestler pointed out, in reality are package deals.
All this does not mean that Afro-Asians have always and everywhere accepted most forms of Westernization with open arms and immediate joy. This happened only after a longer acquaintance with these values, inventions, and institutions: They came to desire them. As a matter of fact, the remark is very often heard in Africa and Asia that the colonizing powers did too little in imparting these values: Their educational effort was too haphazard, their medical services not sufficiently comprehensive, their road-building program too sketchy, their slum clearance not effective enough, their granting of self-government (autonomy) too slow. The American left has always been extremely vocal in denouncing the colonial powers for their egotism, their selfishness, their neglect, their “exploitation,” their “undemocratic” ways of dealing with “natives.” And, unfortunately, since these leftists control so much of the press and the other mass media, they were frequently seconded by well-meaning good Americans who otherwise are not leftists by conviction.
This colossal misunderstanding (sometimes amounting to a truly wilful falsification of facts) was evident in the case of the independence of the Belgian Congo and the subsequent catastrophic developments. First of all, it must be borne in mind that the Belgian Congo is located in “darkest Africa”—in other words, in an area which was among the last to be explored. It contains the least civilized and the most primitive tribes if we exclude the Bakongos, who had a political organization in the late Middle Ages around the mouth of the Congo and northernmost Angola.
The earliest efforts at colonialization of the Belgian Congo go back to the last years of the 1880s and the subsequent establishment of the Congo Free State under Leopold II, when the Congo was exploited (and, we must admit, quite brutally exploited) by private companies. It became a colony only in 1908 and the reports of Mr. (later Sir) Roger Casement decided the Belgians to make of their only possession a model colony. (European nations at that time had a free press and parliaments in which the opposition was only too happy to expose mismanagement or an inhumane administration. Whether they realized it or not, the “victims of colonialism” were morally represented in the European parliaments. The countries without parliaments were those with no colonies.)
Official Belgium had a real plan—a wise and constructive plan about the Congo. Unfortunately “time” (which largely means Washington and Moscow) did not permit it to mature. The basic idea was to avoid the French pattern, i.e., the hasty establishment of a few elementary and secondary schools from which the best scholars were shipped to French universities where more often than not they became uprooted. The Belgians wanted rather to cover the entire country with a net of primary schools to provide the vast majority of the Congolese with a basic education. After having developed the elementary schools, the Belgians started secondary schools and seminaries. Unlike the French colonial system, university education (which to Continentals is a graduate and not a “college” education), was also to be given in the Congo itself. The idea of the Belgians was to avoid tearing the young men and women away from their own land, for a life of isolation and miserable cold in Belgium (which lacks the warm sites of southern France). Their plan was to build universities around the Equator. We have mentioned two of these; a third was scheduled to be set up in Usumbura for the Ruanda-Urundi area which did not form an integral part of the Congo but was actually a United Nations mandate.
The Belgians, indeed, thought that the main burden of the administration should be transferred to the Congolese, but at first no specific date was set for a more systematic takeover. The Lovanium was opened in 1957 and the University of Elizabethville a year later. When the fatal riots started on January 6, 1959, the Belgians were no less startled than the Africans themselves. It all came like lightning out of a blue sky. The “ignition” came from a brawl between two factions at a football game. This developed into an attack against the Portuguese traders in the former native section of Léopoldville. (All racial discriminations and the zonings were abolished in 1954 and the new laws were applied from one day to another without any protest.) The traders defended themselves with the usual Portuguese stubbornness, courage, and skill, but the army failed to receive orders to shoot from the Governor General who completely lost his head. General Janssen of the Force Publique thereupon delivered an ultimatum to him: “I will wait for three hours to get your orders to shoot, sir. If I don’t get them by that time I will act on my own.” The Governor General consented and Janssen restored order with the Force Publique which, together with the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, was considered one of the two great success stories of the Congo.
While the American State Department pressured the Belgians to give up their wicked colonialism, the Pentagon had rather different sentiments. The military men thought about the big base of Kamina and they had no squeamish anticolonialist complexes. They knew, moreover, a bit more about the realities of the big wide world than the leftist theorists. Yet, even in spite of the Republican administration at that time still holding office in Washington, the bureaucracy in the State Department prevailed and the Belgians, who had finally made plans to give full autonomy to the Congo in 1975, changed their timetable and promised freedom by July 1, 1960. They relied on the Force Publique which was to be officered by the Belgians as in the past. The vast majority of Belgian civilians were also expected to stay in the country. The leader of the Bakongo party, Joseph Kasavubu, was to be the President, Monsieur Patrice Lumumba, leader of the Lumumbist wing of the Mouvement National Congolais (strongly centered in Stanleyville), became Prime Minister. This man had been indicted as an embezzler while employed by the post office. He had received another conviction for revolutionary activities but benefited from an amnesty. At the ceremony in Léopoldville, when King Baudouin solemnly handed over the power to the new local government, this petty thief insulted the Bwana Kitoko (The Young Master). Yet a few days later the red carpet was literally rolled out for him in Washington. (Maybe his theft was just a piece of “economic democracy”!)
Soon the mutiny of Thysville broke out. All order collapsed in the Congo; the Katanga region seceded. The Golgotha in the heart of Africa had begun thanks to the follies of Western leftist anticolonialists and the shrewd calculations of their brothers under the skin in the East.
The reaction of the free Western press to the atrocities was worse than could be expected. Let us bear in mind that in order to be a “good journalist” it is apparently not sufficient to be a good reporter or to have access to a certain amount of “inside information” (which, more often than not, cannot be checked easily). Above all, it takes a thorough study of history, geography, economics, sociology, political science, religion, anthropology, languages, etc. In Europe at least, a very large sector of the newspaper correspondents and responsible editors have been to graduate schools.
In the case of the Congo horrors a large part of the press (and not only the notoriously leftist press) turned against the Belgians. They were accused of not having sufficiently civilized and educated the inhabitants of the Congo Basin “for independence.” First of all, it has not been considered a primary task in the past to educate any conquered or incorporated area “for independence.” No doubt the United States is doing its level best to foster and promote welfare in Puerto Rico: It can even be said that it is aiding education in Puerto Rico in every imaginable way. But it simply is not true that the United States is training the Puerto Ricans for “independence”—nor is the United States doing anything along these lines in Guam, in Samoa, or on the Indian reservations.
Thus, neither the American left nor the various demagogues in the Congo were upset about the fact that a still largely illiterate nation should go to the polls. Switzerland does not have female suffrage though educational levels for Swiss women are very high; yet the Congolese women were naturally permitted to vote. Actually, there should be no reason for a real democrat to get upset about it. Literacy alone does not guarantee knowledge. The mere fact that somebody can read and write does not mean that he has any grasp of the political problems his vote (however infinitesimally small in relation to the grand total) might contribute to decide. As we have said before, the twenty-one-year-old prostitute and the sixty-five-year-old professor of political science have one vote each. Equality and not knowledge, quantity and not quality are the keynotes of democracy; the Hitlers defeat the Brünnings.
In this respect I received a wonderful object lesson when I discussed with a group of Congolese their forthcoming independence and the demo-republican constitution. This happened in Bukavu (Kivu Province) in February 1960. We sat in a restaurant and my newly acquired friends were MNC, men of the Lumumbist faction. “Your womenfolk, too, will vote,” I declared. “But tell me now, honestly, what do they know about the Congo and the world? Have they here in Bukavu any idea what the Katanga is like or what the economic problems of the Katanga are, or what reasons the Luluas have to hate the Balubas? Do they understand the arguments for and against federalism in the Congo? What do they know about the Cold War, the United Nations, free trade, nationalization, educational problems, the issue of highways versus railroads, the world market in copper, uranium, and diamonds? Can they judge any of the issues with which the free Congo will be confronted—judge them seriously, not merely following hunches, whims, and emotions?”
One of the men looked straight at me and asked, “What about your country, Austria? Do women vote in Austria?” “They do.” “And are the Austrian women capable of judging domestic politics seriously? And world affairs? What do they know about free trade, the United Nations, railroads, nationalized industries, the Cold War?” “I’ll be frank—they know nothing at all. They repeat what they read in the newspapers, if they remember at all what they read. And so do the men.”
“All right, then,” my interlocutor replied grimly, “So why should you have all the fun of voting—and not us!”
This reaction was not at all stupid. He almost had me. Yet the answer is that it is not popular representation that makes a country tick, but the executive and the administration. Without its administration France would have gone the way of all flesh a long time ago. The intellectual level of the voters and the politicians with the general franchise and a political Gresham’s Law affecting the quality of modern political life has shifted many of the responsibilities to the civil service which still insists on qualifications, whereas elections and parliamentary life require neither knowledge, nor practical experience, nor wisdom, nor higher moral standards. A lieutenant in an army, a locomotive engineer, a bank cashier behind a grill—nay, a plumber, an electrician, or a traveling salesman needs infinitely more knowledge, more experience than politicians (especially in countries where party slates and not individual candidates compete).
But it is clearly the civil service which in the underdeveloped countries cannot be established overnight. A good civil service needs not only an intellectual infrastructure of relatively high quality, but also a sound moral fiber. A civil service which is competent but corrupt is as valueless as one which is honest but untrained. And inevitably when we speak of moral qualities we mean those emanating from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and these standards are not universally accepted or at least not uniformly evaluated. The taking of bribes (to quote just one example) was not equally condemned in eighteenth- and in late nineteenth-century England: it was treated differently in early twentieth-century Germany and Rumania. It is not viewed in the same way in contemporary Burma and in Switzerland.
We have talked about the Congo at length because in dealing with such an area and its problems, the American leftist (independent of the degree of his anticolonialist fervor) is uniquely unqualified to pass judgment, to design a policy, to make forecasts. His handicaps in this matter are so manifold that it is difficult to enumerate them all. Let us, therefore, merely recall his basic alienation from the existing world, from human nature. About human nature he makes two mistakes: One is dictated by his Roussellian heritage and by his blind reaction to Calvinism: He overrates the character of the average man (i.e., his moral qualities). The other mistake stems from his utopian visions which have a global and symmetric character: He underrates human variety. Anthropology, egalitarianism, and identitarianism mar his outlook even more so than those of the European leftist.
His utopianism has other drawbacks. Utopia comes through progress and progress for him has an automatic character: It is one of the hidden laws of this world. Progress in his view and in the long run will always reassert itself even if, here and there, minor setbacks occur, engineered by evil reactionaries. Man is good, but reactionaries do not deserve to be treated as human beings. Thus the evils of decolonization are of short duration (as in the United States). After a slight detour the emerging nations will be safely back on the swift uphill road of progress.
Haiti was decolonized before Christianity had struck deep roots and the same process has taken place in most of Africa and in parts of Asia. Hence we have to expect among the “emerging nations” nightmares similar to those perpetrated by National Socialists, by international Socialists and by the minions of Duvalier, who are Voodooists and spiritual grandchildren of the Jacobins. When the “long-suffering” East Indians were “liberated from the British yoke” in 1948, few people in the Western world knew history sufficiently well to have real apprehensions about a negative development. The horrors of the Indian Mutiny—the Black Hole of Cawnpore 91 years earlier, were forgotten a long time ago. Here again it must be borne in mind that not only had the unification of India been the work of the British, but that India had also been liberated from the rule of a Muslim minority. India did not pass from freedom to “colonialism,” but from Moghul to European sovereignty. There can be no doubt that the rule by London brought greater individual and national freedom to India than the rule from Delhi by the descendants of Mongol-Tartar invaders who were racially less akin to the Hindu than the British who, after all, are Indo-Europeans. When the British Labour Party decided to give up British rule in India the Moslems, who formed about one-fourth of the Indian population, demanded a state of their own. Since India was scheduled to become a democracy where the majority rules over the minority, the pre-British masters of India did not want to fall under Hindu sway and the Hindus did not want to revert to their old rulers. The tragic answer was partition.
There was never complete agreement as to where the new border should be drawn (especially not in Kashmir). There existed, however, a considerable reluctance to leave large minorities on either side of the new demarcation line. The Pax Britannica had gone. Mass expulsions took place and they degenerated into the worst, the most fiendish, the most nauseating spontaneous massacres the world had ever seen. Diabolical tortures, the most nightmarish sex crimes, the most delirious blood orgies resulted in the death of four-and-a-half million people, perpetrated by pious Moslems and the believers in Ahimsa, “nonviolence.” Even Gandhi’s Satyagraha (fasting) could not stop the butchery. This incident alone—unthinkable under the British Raj—annuls the morality of such a form of independence. And actually, if one talks with the plain people in India, one finds very little enthusiasm for the present order. On the contrary, the old times appear to many as a Golden Age. Only a very small and very thin upper layer of politicians profits from this new situation, and this is true not only in India but elsewhere in the decolonized world. Again and again one meets people who inquire whether there is really no chance that the British sahib might come back. (A friend of mine was asked by a native in the Cameroons: “When is this terrible indépendance going to end?”)
There exists a myth—and not only among American leftists—according to which the wicked Europeans with their missionaries brutally invaded overseas areas (which they often did) in order to destroy the idyllic life of the innocent natives, a life without a sense of guilt, without disease, without fear and unhappiness—all blatant nonsense. They defeated and enslaved vastly superior civilizations which merely lacked the machine gun, civilizations of a much greater spirituality, intellectuality, profundity, with a greater artistic sense and a more balanced life than ours. That is nonsense too. Anybody who knows the world and has not been seduced into building up elegiac dreams about faraway tribes and nations realizes only too well that the Dayaks, nay even the Japanese or the Aztecs, if they had been technologically able to colonize Europe, would have established an iron rule resulting in lasting tyranny.
Now, one might object that this is a “low” religion, a mere superstition of savages, and that nothing like it can be found in the higher religions of the East. Yet I remember a talk I had with a highly educated Hindu in Agra, outside the Imperial Hotel. He was a civil engineer and he had received part of his training in England. We discussed the British Raj and he admitted that it had benefited India in many ways. He added, however, that the provincialism and the narrowness of the British had been silly and harmful in many other ways. The prohibition of suttee, the burning of widows, is only one example. “If a woman really loves her husband she obviously wants to immolate herself. If she throws herself on the funeral pyre, she will be knocked unconscious in five to ten minutes, suffocated by the fumes if not actually killed. And then she has a chance of being reunited with her husband in another incarnation.”
“You mean to say that you approve of this? Personally? Now and for every woman?” I inquired.
“Naturally. Take the case of my married sister. Her husband had a quarrel with his father and committed suicide by taking poison, cutting his wrists and hanging himself. Two days later my sister did the same. After all, what is the alternative? There is nothing worse than to live as a widow, especially in the higher castes.”
“Were there any children?”
“There were three, but what are families for? They were taken care of.”
Here, however, we have to put in a word of warning. These horrors are not “racially conditioned.” Ideas, primarily specific religious ideas, were or are working against them. Ideas Have Consequences, to use the title of the late Richard Weaver’s book. We have to ask ourselves whether we too would not still be indulging in such practices without Christianity intervening (whether, without the British Raj, suttee would be as rare as it is now).
The “destruction” of widows is probably an ancient Aryan rite; witness the account of Ibn Fadlan, an Arab diplomat who was in a Viking town in Russia around 920, only a thousand years ago. He watched the funeral of a Nordic chieftain whose corpse was put on a riverboat. The Chief’s friend raped his bride in a tent on land and then had sexual intercourse with her on the boat. After this she was held in an iron grip so that an old woman called the Angel of Death could strangle her. Finally the boat was set on fire and the two bodies were burned together—a performance surely not much more humane than suttee or our own legal procedures in the Middle Ages.
The fact remains that we continue to move ahead along the road of Christian development—both as a faith and as a civilization—while the newly Christianized or un-Christianized nations are trailing. This is true morally, it is true intellectually, and it is also true economically. We already mentioned the fact that, from an economic viewpoint, the colonizing powers have rarely seen their plans mature and their expectations fulfilled. The reasons why the European powers clung to their colonies, as we said before, were psychological and military rather than economic—even when nations nourished great hopes for economic gain. Their loss of colonies, needless to say, was for most colonial powers a blessing only thinly disguised, since the colonies were more often than not a constant drain on their finances. It is significant that Europe’s present prosperity coincides with the loss of her colonies. Now, at long last, the former colonial powers have a chance to reach the material standards of the noncolonial powers—Scandinavia and Switzerland.
Looking at decolonization in the last twenty years, we ought to liken the colonies to adopted children of European powers, children going through the process of puberty. Adolescence is always a difficult time for children as well as parents. It is usually a period when children start to become critical of the persons exercising authority over them. Not rarely their dissatisfaction is so great that they think it would be better for them to run away—from school, from the paternal home. They are convinced that they are quite as bright, experienced, and educated as their parents. Usually, of course, they do not carry out their plans because they dimly realize that their formal training is not finished, that a start on their own would be difficult, that it would be wiser to swallow one’s silly pride and stay on.
But what would happen if just outside their parental home were two powerful men with fat wallets encouraging a promising child to make the break? “The way you are being treated by your parents is a disgrace. We would never have put up with that at your age.” Matters would be worse, of course, if the children were merely adopted.
This is a good analogy if we think of the elites, the évolués, of the colonies as adopted children, while Uncle Sam and Uncle Ivan represent the powerful men who can fleece their taxpayers at leisure. Uncle Ivan’s subjects have no say in the matter and Uncle Sam’s citizens have been indoctrinated by the left. If, to make the situation more troublesome, Uncle Sam and Uncle Ivan were to engage in a real competition for affection, shouting at each other, “I can be more anticolonialist than you!” while assuring the child that it would be taken care of materially, the rebellious brat could hardly be held back. He would leave home, repair to a hotel, and write blackmailing letters, playing off one big man against the other.
The aid now given can be viewed from several angles. If it were true that these hapless quondam colonialized peoples and tribes had been brutally exploited in the past and had also been artificially stunted in their development (as, for instance, the Poles were under the Nazi occupation), the argument might be raised that aid given to them is a compensation for the mistreatment they had suffered. This, however, is not the case. The usual outcry of the ex-colonials is that they had been insufficiently Westernized. They do complain about exploitation (as many Latin Americans do in relation to their post-liberation period), but here the dual question must be posed: What was the exploitation of natural resources and manpower before the arrival of the Europeans, and what were the living standards before and at the end of the colonial period?
The Europeans and Americans have achieved their high standards after an immensely bitter uphill fight lasting 2,500 years. They have gone through agonies to arrive at their present levels. The Industrial Revolution is only one of the many periods of large-scale sacrifice. All this knowledge, all this thinking and planning and endless experimenting, all the fruits of savings, of studies, of scheming, of wars (Polemos pater chrematon!) have been put at the disposal of overseas peoples and nations, and in a sense, this has been done without charge. To learn, as we all know, is not always pleasant. Remember the Greek proverb: Ho me dereis anthropos ou paideuetai. There is no education without tears.
Here we must bear in mind that humanity has existed probably for one-third to one-half million years and that living standards which we now call “compatible with human dignity” could be found in a few isolated areas of this globe only during the last 1,000 years and in a more general way in Europe and North America only in the last 200 years. The living standard of a skilled Swiss worker today is infinitely higher than that of professional people a century ago.
But this is not the only reason. The uncommitted left in America (far more so than in Europe) is promoting this yielding to blackmail on “moral grounds” and as a move designed to foster egalitarianism. Why should economic egalitarianism be fostered merely within the nation? Let us carry it to the international scene! There is very little fear or realization that all this penalizing of the hardworking element (on the individual or national level) will finally act as a brake to progress, as a positive discouragement to all extraordinary effort which alone assures progress.
(Why are the Soviets and the Chinese more successful with smaller handouts than the United States? America is more envied than the two Communist powers. China, moreover, is “colored” and the Soviet emissaries, as Russians, are less “insular.” The heroes of Dostoyevski are more “universally human” than the moralizing do-gooder types who so often represent America abroad.)
“Tragically typical” is the history of American intervention in Vietnam. The French can point out with bitterness that, as long as they were engaged in the struggle to hold North Vietnam against Communist aggression, the United States did not lift a finger to help. The French, like the Dutch in Indonesia, were convinced that Southeast Asia was not ready to resist the assault of the forces of decomposition and tyranny. They were obviously not afraid of local decadent ideas but rather of ideologies which either had failed in Europe or had established unspeakable tyrannies: communism, socialism, Jacobinism, nationalism, National Socialism, one-party tyranny of an authoritarian character, or nationalistic communism. And after the “Colonialists” had left there never was a question in Southeast Asia or anywhere else overseas of restoring forms of government or social systems which had prevailed prior to the arrival of the European powers. As a matter of fact, if such local, such “native” forms continued to exist (or coexist) under colonial rule or protection, they now were crushed, persecuted, snuffed out. So great is the hatred of the new “nationalistic” masters for their own native traditions, so abject their admiration for the worst ideologies, for the fecal matter of the West.
The elimination of Dutch power in Indonesia under the threats of Washington, just as the fall of French power in Indochina, was applauded by the American left as an evolution in the direction of “progress.” Yet in whatever direction we look, we see that decolonization has never meant material or practical progress, nor even political advance. If we eliminate entirely the religious (missionary) viewpoint from our speculations, we have put at least these two aspects under the magnifying glass. The material decay is obvious and intimately connected with the lessened internal security through brigandage and revolutionary movement. Yet it might be argued that, had the Portuguese handed Java over to the native princes instead of to the Dutch, this return to local (“native”) government then and there (in the seventeenth century) would have been quite sensible. In the meantime, however, the globe entered a period of Westernization, and political independence in the twentieth century means joining a more or less Westernized society of nations. For this task the new ruling groups, classes, and cliques are not really prepared, the masses, obviously, even far less so. Whatever our view about the United Nations—and it is indeed a rather dim one we have to take—it is based on a Western concept: International trade, stock exchanges, currency regulations, the world of diplomacy, international traffic, cooperation between police forces, disease control and sanitary laws, international scientific bureaus and educational systems—all these are Western, Western, Western. The Sultan of Jokjakarta on Java in the seventeenth century could easily have taken over after a Portuguese evacuation of his domain, reassuming local rule with few outside contacts. Today the birth of a new nation means facing the entire gradually Westernized globe with its institutions and currents and cooperating with it. And for this dangerous existence in a strange world the new nations were and are totally unprepared.
