Bring Back the White Man!

The modern American college has so degraded words that they are practically meaningless. “Racism” is overused and abused. “Sexist” is making a run for second place, thanks to harridans who teach such important subjects as 17th century lesbian poetry and inclusionary hip-hop.

However, one word that still holds real negative power is “colonialism.” It is synonymous with blue-eyed devils raping and pillaging their way to financial gain. Many patriotic Americans are proud that the Revolutionary War was against a colonial power, and many lefties continue to criticize American “neo-colonial” wars in the Middle East.

Colonialism has as much popular appeal as fascism.

This is why a recent article by Portland State professor Bruce Gilley is causing such a furor. Prof. Gilley, who teaches political science, wrote an article entitled “The Case For Colonialism.” As if that weren’t bad enough, the paper appeared in the Third World Quarterly, a scholarly journal that grants the yearly Edward Said Award to the best work in the field of post-colonial studies. Edward Said was a Palestinian activist who posed as a professor. His most famous work, Orientalism, essentially blames the West for every bad thing that ever happened.

For some reason, the Third World Quarterly decided to publish “The Case for Colonialism,” which explains why colonialism has been a net good for the world, especially Africa. The response to Gilley’s article has been swift and vicious.

One South African law professor called Prof. Gilley’s piece “offensive” and a form of “validation” for the “Euro-American Cathedral.” Several committee members of the journal have pushed for the removal of Gilley’s piece (a move that Gilley supports because he regrets “the pain and anger that [the article] has caused for many people”), and others even demand that Gilley be stripped of his doctorate or that he be blacklisted.

“The Case for Colonialism” is dangerous only if you have completely swallowed post-colonial dogma. Prof. Gilley’s article is nuanced, fact-filled, and brimming with common sense. The same cannot be said for the pabulum that the Third World Quarterly usually publishes.

This is how Prof. Gilley begins: “For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name.” From here, he points out that colonialism and the Euro-American concept of “good governance” has helped millions of people who would otherwise be living in wretched poverty. “The case for Western colonialism is about rethinking the past as well as improving the future,” he writes. “It involves reaffirming the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities.”

Prof. Gilley argues for more than just historical reevaluation. He proposes that Western nations reestablish colonies:

Suppose that the government of Guiena-Bissau were to lease back to Portugal the small uninhabited island of Galinhas that lies 10 miles off the mainland and where the former colonial governor’s mansion lies in ruins. The annual lease would be US$1 so that the Portuguese spend their money on the island and the Guinea-Bissau government is not dependent on a lease fee. Suppose, then, that the US$10 million to US$20 million in foreign aid wasted annually on the country were redirected to this new offshore colony to create basic infrastructure.

The island of Galinhas would become not only more livable than the rest of Guinea-Bissau; it would become an economic hub — perhaps the most successful in all of Africa. Direct recolonization would also end the foreign aid racket that lines the pockets of Africa’s many kleptocracies. Recolonization would also require many African governments to admit that their experiments with freedom have failed.

Prof. Gilley continues on the subject of Guinea-Bissau. Amilcar Cabral, a hero of the “decolonization” era, began his guerrilla campaign against the Portuguese in 1963. Prof. Gilley quotes Cabral as saying that it was “necessary to totally destroy, to break, to reduce to ash all aspects of the colonial state . . . .” Cabral’s long campaign, which some have called “Portugal’s Vietnam,” did reduce the Portuguese colony to ashes. In its place, with weapons and economic support from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, and Sweden, Cabral established a murderous regime that killed as many as 25,000 people and displaced 150,000. In 1980, Guinea-Bissau produced only 80,000 tons of rice, a full 50 percent drop from the highpoint under Portuguese rule. These days, the average resident of Guinea-Bissau has a life expectancy of only 55 years. Western aid and the permanent presence of UN peacekeeping troops have done very little to help.

There are other horror stories. Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe has become a laughably corrupt state where an average of $1 billion is lost every year. Old videos of Zimbabwe when it was called Rhodesia and run by the white minority are like fantasy films — one cannot believe that such a prosperous country could become a hellhole.

The South African case is well known, but it bears repeating that more black South Africans are killed every year by their fellow blacks than ever died at the hands of the Apartheid state. There is also Equatorial Guinea, which was a Spanish colony up until 1968. The first leader of an independent Equatorial Guinea was Macias Nguema, a deranged and illiterate mass murderer who killed as many as 80,000 people out of a population of just 300,000.

The Congo has been at war with itself since Brussels abandoned it in the 1960s. The Second Congo War alone killed 5.4 million people, with 45,000 dying each month in 2007. Even anti-colonial hero Patrice Lumumba admitted in his autobiography that the Belgian imperialists had given the Congolese “human dignity” and helped to turn its people “into free, happy, vigorous, and civilized men.”

Prof. Gilley quotes Africans — from Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe offering thanks to the British imperialists for leaving behind a prosperous and unified Nigeria, to a resident of Kinshasa who asked a foreign journalist: “How long is this independence of ours going to last anyway? When are the Belgians coming back?” It is not hard to imagine why such sentiments are common in Africa.

Prof. Gilley’s article is a clear indictment of the post-colonial racket and of those gullible Western nations that continue to fall victim to the libel about white responsibility for Africa’s plight. Guilt helps to keep racist professors employed in Europe and America, and black Africans routinely invoke the sins of colonialism in order to squeeze money out of the West and drum up support among voters. Even if many Africans think it privately, few admit publicly that life was better under white rule. Prof. Gilley has told the truth in an age corrupted by dogma and cowardice.

As Prof. Gilley notes at the end of his article, while many may find the idea of resurrecting colonialism evil or “preposterous,” it is not as “preposterous as the anti-colonial ideology that for the past 100 years has been haunting the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the Third World.”