Hong Kong: Britain's 22-year shame

[Montmorency]

Ancient distaste at internecine rapine was something confined to certain of your cited elites, whom you say we should not only study. It was either accepted as a fact of life by the commonfolk, or was damn popular as a way of enrichening themselves. It may not be within reasonable living memory in the west which is all the world you know, but in some parts of the world, that attitude was within living memory. I've spoken to Hong Kongers whose previous generation had fought tribal wars over territory and influence, until the British shut down all the fun post-WWII. Ancient distaste at internecine rapine? Internecine rapine was a current thing in Hong Kong well into the 20th century. You probably didn't know that though, as mainstream history as taught in 21st century school is all you know of history.

So you're on to anthropology? I can't say I'm impressed by your alleged (undocumented) knowledge of the mindset of the average Athenian on the street or the bulk of the population of Hong Kong. Civil strife and elite competition is not something invented in post-war Hong Kong, by the way; lol @ "tribal wars." We had those in American cities throughout the same time period, waged by swarthy migrant tribes from Europa called "Mafia." Something outside the bounds of a history class might be that millions of Westerners to this day are thirsty for the blood of foreigners (and impure countrymen). As it turns out societies, like individuals, are permeated with multiple attitudes and belief systems.

Sorry, "nothing to do with" looks like a grammatical mistake here.

??

This is the sort of thing people say without any actual empirical evidence

Defenders of colonialism don't seem too bothered about advancing empirical evidence of benefits. There's quite a lot of evidence for negative

Late Victorian Holocausts
Resource drain
Colonial economy
Long-term consequences

You know how the history of the WWII Holocaust is sufficiently documented that we can denounce "denialism" and the fabrication of history excusing atrocity?

I disagree, you first have to understand the past (or try to) and only then can you ask questions such as whether the past was better or worse.

First of all, why? Second of all, how does this impinge on what I said? Assigning moral valence to a historical practice or event is different than comparing how good life was in the past versus the present, which I am utterly uninterested in doing here (I'm pretty sure we're better off nowadays FWIW, reactionary mileage may vary).

But why is Colonialism bad?

See above. Murdering and exploiting people to steal their resources and labor is also bad in itself regardless of its guise. Like when the French maintained slavery by proxy in Mali well into the Belle Epoque. It is disconcerting that I should need to explain this. It's like having me respond to "Why is it wrong for me to eat you alive?" Like, OK Mr. Lecter, but the cops are on the way.

Let's leave Hitler aside, he's a bit too recent.

Why? The history of living memory is not subject to any qualitatively different conditions than the study of history beyond it, just the availability of materials. Ultimately the methods of archaeology, osteology, and gathering of documentary evidence are as relevant for 2000 BC as for 2000 CE.

Let's consider the Protestant Reformation when both sides fiercely suppressed each other up to and including burning at the stake. Today we consider this wrong because we consider the free flow of ideas to be pretty much paramount - except when we don't. In fact, today we lock people up, fine them, sack them from their jobs and exclude them from public life if they don't toe a particular line, we just don't torture or kill them.

Holy shit, we consider this wrong because they murdered each other in an orgy of political violence.

If you want someone extolling the value of free press - though not on exactly the same terms as speech absolutists today - we have John Milton. Obviously the Puritans disagreed. Others did agree. Similarly today we have a variety of views among individuals, groups, and within different national legal regimes. The question is, what is the question?

During the Reformation ideas, heretical ideas, were considered more dangerous than anything else because those people valued their souls more than their bodies or their property. In that context, absolute suppression of heresy by all methods becomes a moral imperative.

As I said, that was a specific viewpoint held by a subset of certain sociopolitical groups. Other groups and subsets may held overlapping views for different (e.g. secular) reasons. They may have held them to differing intensities. Some might have opposed them but gone along out of expedience or cowardice. Various commoners may or may not have held sophisticated viewpoints on the matter, or to differing extents been swayed by elite signalling. It is possible to study all of this.

The point is precisely that their morals, their concept of Right and Wrong, was different from ours.

You're engaging in convenient anachronism, not truly study of the past. To study intellectual history you should not assign sweeping ideologies this way.

I take the second view, which means that British Imperialism was misguided, but I will not apply words like "brutal" or "evil" unless the actual acts at the time were evil or brutal.

Why would you view it as misguided? Your logic says that if you don't believe British colonizers viewed colonialism as misguided - which some did indeed, but keeping to your understanding - then you can't either. What allows you to evaluate in terms of "misguided" but not good or bad? Don't you see how thoroughgoing the absurdity is? The same limitation you impose on me would, for example, prevent you from judging the political or military efficacy of the reported decisions of statesmen and generals. All those nerds scrutinizing Waterloo must be full of shit.

Even on your own terms as regards the intellectual or cultural sphere you would have to demonstrate that no one viewed given acts as evil or brutal. In fact you couldn't. If even a single person at any point in time thought 'We should somewhat improve things' or 'Violence is bad' or 'I wish my community had more control over its affairs', the doctrine collapses on its own terms.

As I said, to apply this fairly would produce an absurd and incoherent vision of history, assigning uniform viewpoints to both past and present people and engaging in the moral relativism of refusing to evaluate concrete actions within a cultural context not intimate to one's own. But it is typically applied only selectively, in a self-serving way. I'm not sure which is worse.


There is a sense in which a historical interpreter's personal beliefs get in the way of accurately analyzing or understanding history, but this isn't what you stand opposed to. Here are some examples and how to avert them:

1. Many African, Asian, and Latin American people after WW2 embraced Marxist ideologies in the form of their national and transnational struggles of the time. A naive contemporary interpretation might be that they were all true utopians or dialectical materialists somehow. Learning the colonial histories of those continents and the process of post-war decolonization reveals that the Marxist revolutionaries were not so much persuaded by ideological exegesis as attached to a political consciousness and intellectual network that seemingly linked them to a relatable and cohesive transnational struggle to strike back at European or American influence and control, an ideology that afforded them equal status to white men. Also, the hope for Soviet sponsorship.
2. Abortion has been pretty common throughout recorded history. But if one looks through printed materials from the 19th or 18th centuries, or through diaries, letters, or medical literature of the time for the words "abortion" or "birth control", one might get the impression that these concepts did not exist at the time. But with some thought, one can figure out they used different, often euphemistic, terminology than what we recognize today.
3. A lot of neo-Medieval films portray premodern combat in strange ways. For example, the most recent Robin Hood adaptation opened with a small unit of crusaders stalking the city streets of [city] with a tactical posture like they were fighting insurgents in modern Fallujah, complete with flanking maneuvers against a machine-gun repeating crossbow nest. The neo-Medieval aesthetics of stone masonry, sword and bow, etc. were all there, but the modernization was reckless. There's modernization of an old story, and then there's grafting on modern tropes and iconography.
4. The idea of Afghanistan as a graveyard of empires and locus of irregular resistance unfamiliar to civilized Europeans is often assumed to be accurate and timeless, one stretching back to the invasion of Alexander the Great. However, in ancient times the people in what is modern Afghanistan practiced fairly conventional warfare, such as would have been recognizable to Alexander the Great from his campaigns against Thracians. This elaborate interpretation entered British academic and popular consciousness following the Victorian-era defeat of the British in the First Anglo-Afghan war, sort of constructed to rationalize the imperial setback. We can discover this first by studying the available primary histories of Alexander's campaigns, and second by comparing how pre-Victorian and later classical histories narrated the same events. The meme endured for generations and lately was reactivated/repurposed by the Americans after 9/11 to slot into their counter-insurgency doctrine, a similar sort of rationalization.
[I actually learned the last specifically from one excellent essay.]

It is absolutely correct to caution that events distant or current cannot be completely understood solely through the parochial lens of personal context or semiotics, and that ideas and modes of living have differed across time and place. If your caution were such, we would have no disagreement...