.
Those who identify colonialism and empire only with the West either have no sense of history or have forgotten about the Persian empire, the Macedonian empire, the Islamic empire, the Mongol empire, the Chinese empire, and the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas. Shouldn’t the Arabs be paying reparations for their destruction of the Byzantine and Persian empires? Come to think of it, shouldn’t the Byzantine and Persian people also pay reparations to the descendants of the people they subjugated? And while we’re at it, shouldn’t the Muslims reimburse the Spaniards for their seven-hundred-year rule? As the example of Islamic Spain suggests, the people of the West have participated in the game of conquest not only as the perpetrator, but also as the victims. Ancient Greece, for example, was conquered by Rome, and the Roman Empire itself was destroyed by the invasions of Huns, Vandals, Lombards, and Visigoths from northern Europe. America, as we all know, was itself a colony of England before its war of independence; England, before that, was subjugated and ruled by the Norman kings from France. Those of us living today are taking on a large project if we are going to settle upon a rule of social justice based upon figuring out whose ancestors did what to whom.
Perhaps it is not colonialism but slavery that is distinctively Western. Actually, no. Slavery has existed in all known civilizations… The Sumerians and Babylonians practiced slavery, as did the ancient Egyptians. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Arabs all had slaves. Slavery was widespread in Greece and Rome, and also in sub-Saharan Africa. American Indians practiced slavery long before Columbus set one foot on this continent.
If slavery is not distinctively Western, what is? The movement to end slavery! Abolition is an exclusively Western institution…
Never in the history of the world, outside of the West, has a group of people eligible to be slave owners mobilized against the institution of slavery. This distinctive Western attitude is reflected by Abraham Lincoln: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master” [16]. Lincoln doesn’t want to be a slave — that’s not surprising — but he doesn’t want to be a master either. He and many other people were willing to expend considerable treasure, and ultimately blood, to get rid of slavery not for themselves, but for other people. The uniqueness of this Western approach is confirmed by the little-known fact that African chiefs, who profited from the slave trade, sent delegations to the West to protest the abolition of slavery [17]. And it is important to realize that the slaves were not in a position to secure freedom for themselves. The descendants of African slaves owe their freedom to the exertions of white strangers, not to the people of Africa who betrayed them and sold them.
[16] R. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), Vol. II, 532.
[17] D. D’Souza. The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995), 105-6 and endnotes.
Dinesh D’Souza
Chapter Two, “Two Cheers for Colonialism: How the West Prevailed”
What’s So Great About America
