Many readers might consider
the retreat of imperialism—at least of overt
imperialism; see below—a good thing, but it has had cataclysmic consequences.
The rise to power of indigenous leaders, in what we used to call the Third
World, produced more tyrants (which term, by the way, I do not limit to
malevolent "dictators," but in which I include all politicians,
elected or not, who behave tyrannically) than did probably any other process in
history. Pol Pot, Saddam "Hussein," Ne Win, Mao Zedong, Masie Nguema
Biyogo, Mobutu Sese Seko, Ho Chi Minh, Idi Amin, Kwame Nkrumah, Ferdinand
Marcos, Plutarco Elias Calles, Gamel Abdel Nasser, François Tombalbaye, Habib
Bourguiba, Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar, Rafael Trujillo, Manuel Noriega, Hafez
Assad, Juan Peron, the Duvaliers, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Fidel Castro, Manuel
Cedras, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Gaddafi, Allende, Sukarno, Samoza, Romero,
Toure, Zelaya, and a host of others all held power in lands formerly within
either the empires or the spheres of influence of European powers; other
noteworthy criminals occupy office right now, in such places as Cuba,
Nicaragua, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, India, Sudan, and Iran. Christ gave
his followers the responsibility and the privilege of preaching the Gospel to
the ends of the Earth, and our ongoing fulfillment of this Great Commission was
greatly facilitated by the age of European supremacy, since, for the first
time, missionaries and their converts could have confidence that their efforts
and their lives would be protected by the home government; even atheists ought
to consider this proselytizing worthwhile, for the missions have provided not
only spiritual but also tangible benefits, such as education and medical care.
(The spread of Christianity would alone outweigh all other considerations, but
European administration benefitted its foreign subjects in other ways, as can
be seen below.) Conversely, systemic persecution of Christians, which the
tin-horn strongmen and other objectionable elements of native populations could
not have gotten away with in the days when Christians controlled their
countries, largely owes its alarming spread and intensification to the
"achievement" of political independence by true colonies (i.e.,
places for settlement), trust territories, and protectorates.
Few, if any, would deny that
the rise of developing-country despots is a lamentable situation, but most
would see it as a result—maybe an unavoidable one—of something that was
necessary: the advancement of "freedom." I, on the other hand, challenge
the hubristic assumption that people have a "right" to govern
themselves. Nor, though, do I believe that people have a right to govern
others; imperialism, self-rule, and so on, in my opinion, have nothing to do
with the question of "rights," but should rather be viewed in terms
of good versus bad governance. To put it another way, imperialism is neither
innately bad nor innately good; what matters is whether the imperial power
governs justly. Akbar the Great, the Mogul emperor of India deemed by many the
model of an enlightened ruler, was of a Mongol (whence the name
"Mogul") dynasty based outside the subcontinent; one of the
highest-respected Kings of England, Canute the Great, was a Dane; Persian Shahs
Darius and Cyrus, each also given the sobriquet "the Great," were
much esteemed by the authors of the Old Testament for their compassionate
policies toward the Jews within their dominions; Alexander (the Great) had a
similar reputation, resulting in the tradition of giving this Macedonian
conqueror's name to the third male child in a Jewish family. There are many
other such illustrations.
The United Nations has
proclaimed that every ethnic group has the prerogative of self-determination,
but the UN is wrong. Its position is: 1) hypocritical, since nearly all its
members, including all those that have permanent seats on the Security Council,
have minority nationalities (for instance, American Indians and native speakers
of Spanish in the USA, and Bretons and Occitans in France); and 2) totally
impractical, since the ethnicities or nationalities in the world number in the
thousands, and most of them are so tiny that sovereignty would be economically
(as well as, of course, defensively) untenable; many don't even inhabit
contiguous territories, but dwell in populations isolated from one another
sometimes by hundreds of miles. Most former overseas possessions are themselves
de-facto empires, as exemplified by the fact that Africa is home to only a few
dozen sovereignties but to over 800 ethno-linguistic groups.
Unsurprisingly, there
were few significant states in Africa prior to European domination of that
continent; that might still be the situation, had said domination never
occurred.
Anyone who takes the Bible
seriously, as I do, has further reason to disagree with the UN on this issue.
Jeremiah 27-29 gives an instance of God's instructing the King of Judah,
through the prophet from whom that book takes its name, not to rebel
against the Babylonian overlord of the Holy Land; in the New Testament, the
chief reason for the rejection of Christ by his own people is that they had
expected the Messiah to be a political deliverer, who would free them from the
Roman yoke. It must be borne in mind also that Moses' initial call to Pharaoh
was merely to permit the Hebrews to serve Yahweh on the Sabbath (Exodus 5:1);
only after the denial of this request did Moses' mission become one of ending
the Egyptian bondage.
Among the nationalities that
hoped to build sovereignty from the junkyard of defeated belligerents (in this
case, the Turkish and the Russian), at the end of World War I, was the
Armenians. At Armenia's own request, the League of Nations offered this reborn
state as a mandate to the USA, meaning that it would be governed by the USA
until that country deemed it fit for independence. US rejection of this offer
doomed Armenia to seven decades of Soviet misrule.
Similarly, the transformation
of a part of the globe into a protectorate of an European country was usually
carried out in response to the proposal, or the repeated entreaty, of a local
ruler or rulers. The creation and maintenance of such protected states, which
commonly burdened the imperial power financially as well as militarily, played
the decisive part in ending slavery and the slave trade in Africa (which, along
with piracy, another of the many evils that succumbed to the imperial forces,
is making a comeback in our more "enlightened" times.)
The worst irony and inanity
of the notion of "independence" for formerly-European-controlled
territories is the fact that most of these new states don't even survive sans
economic and military (as well as humanitarian) aid, which often come from the
very country that bestowed official independence.
The Hispanic countries of the
New World take their "freedom" and "independence" just as
seriously as does the USA, to judge from the number of their places with such
names as "Liberdad." One might wonder why, minding their pathetic post-colonial
record of multiple coups d'état, some of which had a felicitous effect, but
most of which simply replaced one unjust caudillo
with another. After all, the USA has mythologized its own history, but at least
its government has had stability during that history (albeit perhaps too much stability for it to have
been really effective; more on that, some other time). Are any of the polities
of what's called "Latin" America really any better off than they
would be had they never separated themselves from their former masters?
There are other things that I could mention, such as
the fact that nearly every city, railroad,
and university in Sub-Saharan Africa originated with Europeans, that those
Christian overlords prohibited savage practices like infanticide, and that the political unity bestowed bythe creation of empires prevented inter-tribal
warfare, but, to conclude: Today,
people typically deplore the Westernizing influence that is changing
traditional indigenous cultures, but this attitude is largely romanticism. It's
not as if we Caucasoids live the same way that we did during, e.g., feudal
times; we can recapture anything of that lost world only by visiting a castle
or by attending an historical recreation such as a mock jousting-tournament.
Also: I don't suggest, with a few exceptions, that former overseas possessions
actually be put back under foreign control. It would be nice if this were
currently a feasible option, but right now the old imperial powers (including
the USA) can't even govern themselves eptly, and so how can they govern anyone
else?
