Are imperialism and colonialism funny now?


africa

When last I commented on one of the UK’s battier climage change denialists, James Delingpole, it was to ridicule his “joke” about executing environmental scientists. He’s back with a new “joke” — I really think he ought to give up on the humor thing. He’s not very good at it.

His new idea is to erect a giant golden statue in Africa to honor…Cecil Rhodes.

The idea is to build in the middle of Africa a gigantic golden statue of the mighty British imperial hero Cecil Rhodes – a really big one, about four miles high, so that Kilimanjaro doesn’t get in the way – to remind all the locals for miles around what a complete and utter toilet their malarial, tsetse flyblown continent would have been if it hadn’t been for all the 19th century explorers, miners and pioneers and nation builders and District Commissioners in their white pith helmets who brought them civilisation, the rule of law and economic progress.

Yeah, racist asshole thinks the entire continent of Africa is a a complete and utter toilet and that the appropriate way for Britain to signal their attitude towards Africans is to build a giant “fuck you” in the continent. Charming. Hilarious. Not.

How would he propose to pay for this monstrous gratuitous insult?

all we need to do is get the Africans to give us back the $1 trillion in aid money we in the West have given them over the last 50 years.

Oh. He’s a cut-rate Donald Trump. Africans, that homogenous and malleable mass, will pay to be insulted. Delingpole and Trump seem to share the same abysmally low degree of intelligence and empathy.

Is it racist enough for you yet?

This debt repayment scheme – I call it #AidJustice4Whitey – will serve at least two very important purposes.

1. We’ll be able to buy enough gold to build the Cecil Rhodes statue. (Probably. I haven’t done the maths)

2. It will teach an invaluable lesson to chippy, ungrateful, hoity-toity Africans like the students at Oxford University currently leading the #rhodesmustfall campaign for the removal from Oriel College of a statue of one of its benefactors Cecil Rhodes.

If this is satire, I have to ask what it is satirizing — because it seems to be simply blatant racism trying to be amusing (to Delingpole) with exaggeration and hyperbole. It doesn’t work. We should remember what Cecil Rhodes was like.

He was admired by Hitler. He thought white people were superior to everyone else.

I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives.

For the American patriots out there, I’ll just mention that part of his imperial dream was the reconquist of the United States.

Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire.

Practically the entire world was invaded and dominated by Europeans. They looted and exploited people everywhere, leaving behind wreckage and disruption. This was not a good thing for the residents of those nations.

If you want to know the effect of Cecil Rhodes’ depradations, you don’t ask the people who profited from all the looting. Talk to Africans.

“Every object tells a story” indeed. So what stories do the hundreds of colonial statues in public places in African cities tell?

Generally they tell the stories of conquest, the subjugation of the African people and their lands by foreigners who came from across the seas. In that context, the statues rub salt into the wounds of the once- conquered people of Africa and their descendants.

As a result, according to the black students of the University of Cape Town (UCT), the contentious statue of Cecil Rhodes that used to sit, head in hand, looking out over the UCT’s rugby grounds was a “symbol of white supremacy” that offended their sensibilities, and therefore they wanted it removed. And it was removed.

Chumani Maxwele, the student who started it all by throwing a bucket of human excrement at Rhodes’ statue, advanced a powerful argument: “As black students,” he said, “we are disgusted by the fact that this statue still stands here today as it is a symbol of white supremacy.”

That feeling is universal across Africa, and it was not a surprise that thousands of other black South Africans agreed with Maxwele. “It should have long been removed,” Xolela Mangcu, a UCT academic and biographer of Steve Biko, said of Rhodes’ statue.

“Rhodes was probably one of the worst colonisers both in word and deed,” Mangcu, who also writes for New African, added. “His legacy speaks for itself. He laid the template through the native reserves, the pass laws, and saying extremely racist things. For his statue to have pride of place is anachronistic.”

It is telling that even today a British lunatic can think it admirable to march roughshod into Africa to celebrate racism and exploitation, and humorous to slap Africans in the face.

Comments

  1. says

    The comments on that piece are far, far worse than the actual article itself.

    These are the ruins of the right lying before us– paranoid, conspiracy-mined, racist, and oh, so deeply deluded of past that was truly horrendous for the bulk of its victims. This nothing more than the British variant of our Neo-Confederate numbskullery.

  2. jrkrideau says

    If you can, have a look at the interview (disemboweling?) of Delingpole by Sir Paul Nurse. A joy to behold but unfortunately my link is block by BBC copyright.

    Delingpole is a bit like a four-year old who has learned some naughty words and cannot help saying them.

  3. k_machine says

    “Foreign aid” is mostly bullshit anyway. It’s long been known that “aid” in the form of food and clothes knock out local farmers and cloth makers, making former colonies more dependent on foreign “aid”.

    The European exploitation of the Third World continues to this day. I remember a hydroelectric plant in a former Portuguese colony was recently “given” to the former colony. Only the profits where still to be paid to Portugal. Haiti is still paying France damages for overthrowing their slavery regime. Etc. Africa is supposedly filled with “failed states”, yet not even the most vicious of wars disrupt the export of rare minerals on the cheap.

    Add to that the fact that there are war criminals from the colonial era that are living in the former colonial powers today. E.g. the people who set up camps were prisoners were forced to rape each other in Kenya are still walking the streets of England today, chest full of medals and drawing their pensions. Elizabeth II is a war criminal. Puts the international courts single-minded focus on prosecuting African leaders in another light.

  4. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    doesn’t Rhodes get enough adulation recruiting college students from all over the world to attend Oxford?
    pfft
    I see this “comedy” as a racist attempt to go all Monty Python, by amplifying its racism to the absurdity level. His reference to Katmandu made me wait to hear reference to the two peaks of Katmandu and to have the bridge between them named “Rhodes”.

  5. pacal says

    About that 1 trillion in aid money “given” to Africa. I suppose Delingpole is utterly unaware of the several trillion dollars paid by African states in debt service to loans from western banks and institutions like the World bank?

  6. Larry says

    @swestfall

    The comments on that piece are far, far worse than the actual article itself.

    Rule #1: Never, but never, read the comments unless you wish to totally obliterate your faith in mankind.

    Rule #2: Do not violate rule #1.

    Are we clear?

  7. robro says

    “Imperial hero” sounds like an oxymoron to me.

    I’m willing to wager that most of that governmental “foreign aid” is in the form of military and police training, guns and bullets, that sort of thing rather than food and clothes.

    Anyway, this guy is a complete idiot with an abysmal knowledge of human history. It’s safe to say that one of the homes of civilization was Africa…and if, as Ali Mazuri argues, you include the Middle East in Africa, then its role is indeed large. And that’s North Africa. There was plenty of civilization south of the Sahel when white people arrived. Like the civilizations in America, Europeans simply chose to ignore it because it didn’t fit their presumptions of superiority and it was inconvenient for their imperialist aspirations.

  8. Gregory Greenwood says

    On behalf of decent Brits everywhere, I would like to rescind James Delingpole’s Brit membership card and banish him forthwith. No slightly peculiar food and terrible weather for him, and I must insist on immediate cosmetic dental surgery so that he no longer possesses the quintessential, rather unfortunate dentition associated with the occupants of this green and pleasant land. He shall be stripped of all British real ale privileges, and shall no longer be allowed to bore himself into a catatonic state by listening to our insipid politicians.

    I am sure he will find a billet on Donald Trump’s campaign team without too much difficulty; the two of them do seem to be cut pretty much from the same cloth after all. Maybe – if he lies conscientiously, hates marginalised groups with sufficient fervour (he definitely has a head start on that one) and prays really, really hard to Jebus – Delingpole will get a dead rodent hair piece of his very own one day. I mean, America has room enough for one more ranting bigot with delusions that he is humorous, right? We promise we will give up our super secret plans to reconquer the United States if you take him. Scouts honour…

    Pretty please?

  9. microraptor says

    Gregory Greenwood @8

    Sorry, but I’m afraid we’re full up on our batshit-insane jackass quota right now.

    But you could send him halfway here…

  10. methos says

    @ k_machine
    Haiti has finished the payments years ago. It was the first time and only time in world history there the winning country Haiti had to pay a war debt of the losing country France. But that is for another day.

    Foreign aid is a whole other beast. For argument’s sake, imagine that there was a natural disaster in Minnesota. For some reason there is no food in Minneapolis. There is food in Saint Paul and Duluth, but the people of Minneapolis could not afford to buy that food, so the people of Minneapolis are starving. The governor of say…Texas sees a news item about the starving people and decides to help. What does he do? He buys food from Texan farmers and using Texan transportation companies moves it over to Minneapolis. This might sound good, you are feeding starving people. However, the adverse effect is destroying the livelihoods of the farmers of Saint Paul and Duluth. The obvious answer is to buy the food from those two places and distribute it to Minneapolis. But imagine trying to sell that plan to the residents of Texas, that as governor you are going to take their tax dollars, and buy food from Minnesotan farmers to feed other starving Minnesotans.

    With my apologies to the residents of Minnesota, and Texas, the above example is the mechanics of international aid.

  11. Anton Mates says

    all we need to do is get the Africans to give us back the $1 trillion in aid money we in the West have given them over the last 50 years.

    Great! I assume we’ll simultaneously reimburse them for all the resources plundered from their land, all the forced labor, all the murders and rapes and other atrocities committed during colonial rule? Fairness is a time-honored Western value, after all!

  12. Sili says

    I suppose Delingpole is utterly unaware of the several trillion dollars paid by African states in debt service to loans from western banks and institutions like the World bank?

    Not to mention the resources stolen from the continent by those oh-so-selfless benefactors. (And that’s not even trying to put a price on the lives lost.)

    I’m surprised he fixated on Rhodes, but I guess he’s to ignorant to even know of Leopold II.

  13. militantagnostic says

    Mark Twain had this to say about Rhodes

    He raids and robs and slays and enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of Charter-Christian applause for it. He has beguiled England into buying Charter waste paper for Bank of England notes, ton for ton, and the ravished still burn incense to him as the Eventual God of Plenty. He has done everything he could think of to pull himself down to the ground; he has done more than enough to pull sixteen common-run great men down; yet there he stands, to this day, upon his dizzy summit under the dome of the sky, an apparent permanency, the marvel of the time, the mystery of the age, an Archangel with wings to half the world, Satan with a tail to the other half.

    And

    I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.

  14. says

    all we need to do is get the Africans to give us back the $1 trillion in aid money we in the West have given them over the last 50 years.

    Yes, colonialism is kind of hilarious, in a sad fkd up way. Sorry dude, that’s pocket change compared to what you took out of there, with interest, which you used to build empire and enrich the imperial capital. And never mind all the other “exteralized costs”, like people’s lives and stuff.

  15. says

    Tony Abbott the former and unlamented Prime Monster of Australia was a Rhodes Scholar. He is defending Cecil’s statue at Oxford from students who want this symbol pf racism removed. Tony is a hardcore, misogynist conservative who restored the British Imperial honours system in Australia so he could knight Prince Philip. He also oversaw the worst human rights abuses on the part of an Australian government. If Cecil was only half as bad as Tony I would still demolish his statue.

  16. says

    He also oversaw the worst human rights abuses on the part of an Australian government

    I think you mean to add a “in recent years” to that sentence. The history of Australia is unfortunately full of horrendous human rights abuses.

  17. says

    I’m also pretty sure that a great number of the black students protesting in Oxford are actually not “Africans” but Brits.

    Also, I’m in favour of stopping foreign aid. If we also stop actively ruining African economies with our subsidized exports, fishing fleets and “investments”. If European milk powder* is cheaper than fresh local milk there’s something seriously wrong.

    *Currently I’m paying for the milk 4 times
    1) I pay at the supermarket checkout
    2) I pay subsidies that make it very cheap at the check out
    3) I pay subsidies to export the surplus of milk
    4) I pay taxes to pay for “foreign aid” to help the farmers whose livelyhood was ruined by step 3

  18. mnb0 says

    Since when are Anglo-Saxons a race?
    If he’s talking about the white race – take the last 10 genocides in human histories and 7 of them were organized by whities. Yeah, the finest race.

  19. colinday says

    According to Wikipedia, there is only 9,513 m^3 of gold above ground. As four miles is about 6,400 m, that leaves an average cross-sectional area of 1.5 m^2. Also, that is 9,500,000,000 cm^3 of gold, which has a mass of roughly 183,000,000,000 grams, which is about 6,000,000,000 troy ounces. At the current price of $1,000 per troy ounce, that’s 6 trillion dollars. Of course, buying that much gold would increase the price.

    And why is a defender of Rhodes using dollars instead of pounds?

  20. dorkness says

    @mnb0, 23
    Race being an artificial and made-up category, you can have as many as you like and logic is not an issue. Cf. ‘Aryan’ race.

  21. dianne says

    I have some issues with that map. While Korea and Japan were not invaded by Europe, they both were invaded and controlled by the US during the 1940s-1950s. The US, at that point, was a sort of nouveau European power, having had its native societies almost completely wiped out and replaced by a sort of pseudo-British society. Same issue with Liberia: It was colonized by US-Americans, albeit mostly ex-slaves, who acted more or less like any other colonial power. I don’t know much about Thailand’s history. It might have escaped European domination of any sort, though I doubt it. Japan, Korea, and Liberia I would say all experienced second order European invasion and domination: it was done through one of their more “successful” colonies, but it was European people, both genetically and culturally, who were doing the invading.

  22. blf says

    I don’t know much about Thailand’s history. It might have escaped European domination of any sort, though I doubt it.

    Turns out I don’t know much about it either… I had thought Thailand was, at least in part, colonized by the French, but according to Ye Pfffft! Of All Knowledge: “Thailand is the only Southeast Asian nation to never have been colonised.” It did loose territory to the colonial powers.

  23. dianne says

    In terms of how much places are “toilets”, I’d like to point out that Britain is #34 in terms of press freedom, worse than Ghana and Namibia, but beating out the US at #49. In terms of economic justice, Britain’s Gini coefficient is 0.36, worse than Egypt, Burundi, and Ethiopia, among other places in Africa, but again beating out the US with a Gini of nearly 0.47. Hmm…perhaps a 4 mile tall statue of King George III in DC would be more to the point than a statue of Rhodes in Africa. Actually, given that the US lacks mountains as high as Kilamanjaro, surely a 3 mile high statue would do. Much more economical!

  24. colinday says

    @dianne
    #28

    Actually, Denali is taller than Kilamanjaro, at 20,310 ft. (6,190 m). It’s in Alsaka, though, so it wouldn’t block much of the view.

  25. Nova Conceptum says

    “Practically the entire world was invaded and dominated by Europeans. They looted and exploited people everywhere, leaving behind wreckage and disruption. ”

    I guess I just don’t have enough self hating white liberal guilt to get all sad about this statement, rather lacking in depth or nuance.

    First, invasion and conquest was a global practice long before the Europeans got so good at it. City states of Mezzo-America, Native North Americans, Mongols, Persians…Oh yes, and then the Japanese got into the genocidal conquest and exploitation field.

    Second, what was “left behind” was a mixture of humankind’s greatest advancements and greatest sufferings.

    Yes, the 4 mile statue and accompanying statements make for an entirely unfunny joke, but I hope you were not thinking your audience would join you in self flagellation in response.

  26. consciousness razor says

    “Practically the entire world was invaded and dominated by Europeans. They looted and exploited people everywhere, leaving behind wreckage and disruption. ”

    I guess I just don’t have enough self hating white liberal guilt to get all sad about this statement, rather lacking in depth or nuance.

    I guess not. Depth or nuance about what? In fact, I probably don’t give a shit what you’re blathering about, although you presumably do.

    It’s not that you’re disputing the facts, yes? But if it were more deep or nuanced somehow, maybe you would find it in yourself to have some self-hating white liberal guilt, eh? Or at a minimum, to be a little bit sad about something which is clearly wrong?

    Why would your emotional state, if you were at all reliable about reporting it, concerning a vast subject like this, require convoluted and seemingly irrelevant criteria about the level of depth or nuance present in a sentence or two? You’re an awfully delicate one, aren’t you? How is it even relevant, considering how patently and uncontroversially awful it is in reality, no matter how fucking nuanced a statement about it may be? If you were genuinely facing reality, not merely picking nits in a person’s statements, how should you feel then?

    First, invasion and conquest was a global practice long before the Europeans got so good at it.

    For certain values of “good.”

    City states of Mezzo-America, Native North Americans, Mongols, Persians…Oh yes, and then the Japanese got into the genocidal conquest and exploitation field.

    So of course that means it’s okay, no big deal, nothing to be sad about, etc.

    Because nuance: some inscrutable thing you won’t even bother to mention needs to be nuanced to fuck, or else I guess the threat is that you’ll keep repeating incoherent anti-liberal slogans at us.

    Hmm… no, that makes no fucking sense. What the fuck was your point? In other words, so the fuck what, if it was a global practice, or if anyone else anywhere ever got into the “field” of genocidal conquest and exploitation?

    Second, what was “left behind” was a mixture of humankind’s greatest advancements and greatest sufferings.

    Perhaps you could attempt specificity. Perhaps not. Or nuance even — what the fuck is it supposed to consist of?

    Yes, the 4 mile statue and accompanying statements make for an entirely unfunny joke, but I hope you were not thinking your audience would join you in self flagellation in response.

    If you’re only listening to your own bullshitting, I wouldn’t include you in anybody’s “audience.”

  27. Saad says

    Nova, #30

    First, invasion and conquest was a global practice long before the Europeans got so good at it. City states of Mezzo-America, Native North Americans, Mongols, Persians…Oh yes, and then the Japanese got into the genocidal conquest and exploitation field.

    And if a Mongolian person was making horrible jingoistic jokes about building gigantic Hulagu statues in Baghdad “to remind all the locals for miles around what a complete and utter toilet their [city] would have been if it hadn’t been for all the [13th century explorers]”, I’m sure you’d hear that being condemned too.

    You’re not really good at this thinking stuff, are you? The context and details matter. A lot.

  28. says

    Nova conceptum:

    I guess I just don’t have enough self hating white liberal guilt to get all sad about this statement, rather lacking in depth or nuance.

    Well, that’s certainly not a new concept, is it? So very convenient for you to handwave, “hey, white person here, and I don’t want to feel guilty or responsible in any way, so eh, it wasn’t so bad, was it? C’mon, just an unfunny joke.

    Why do white people think they are being so adorably reasonable with this contemptible shit?

  29. microraptor says

    Caine @33:

    Because it’s such an easy and convenient way to avoid dealing with the issue.

  30. chigau (違う) says

    as a whiteliberalreasonableadorableguiltysad person, I am quite upset
    about
    something
    probably, that I am never recognised for the *very*special*snowflake* that R me.
    possibly, that Nova Conceptum could have been welcomed in but, instead, chose the porcupine.

  31. smrnda says

    @Nova C

    You seem to think that we’re any less bothered by other people’s conquests and colonialism? I guess I never took an entire course in college on Japanese atrocities during WWII. At least many nations are not proud of this aspect of their past. If someone in Japan decided that there should be a solid gold statue of their former emperor in Manchuria because ‘it was a toilet before we got there’ I think they should be roundly denounced.

    it’s not self-flagellating white guilt for white people to *not* be proud of imperialism.

  32. says

    Giliell @ 37:

    Just for the information of those that have not read the other thread: Nova C has been kicked.
    Now we can feel sad about this horrible human rights abuse…

    Well, the half of me that is white doesn’t want to suffer self hating white liberal guilt, don’t want to be sad about this, and I’m not in the mood for self flagellation. Too bad, eh?

  33. Ichthyic says

    I guess I just don’t have enough self hating white liberal guilt to get all sad about this statement, rather lacking in depth or nuance.

    speaking of lack of nuance, your entire argument was a logical fallacy of the form:

    “Well, they did it too!”

    I’d call that worse than pathetic, if I could think of an appropriate term.

    I’m sure you think of yourself as an intellectual though… which amuses me greatly.

  34. Ichthyic says

    @swestfal:

    The comments on that piece are far, far worse than the actual article itself.

    It’s Breitbart.

    of course they are. It’s no different that reading Whirled Nut Daily,