The Tools of Colonial Development

While wandering lonely as a cloud through the Conservapedia, I stumbled on this informative entry:

Neocolonialism is a myth perpetuated by leftist institutions, like Marxism. The basic idea is that colonial powers still have control over their colonial assets like Africa. Proponents of neocolonialism claim that wealthy western countries are responsible for the economic misfortune of their previous colonial assets. These claims are inherently flawed because they forget to take into account that institutions like slavery were not one sided.

It's amazing how many of the Left's intellectual failings stem from the inability to grasp that slavery was "not one sided."

The next section is helpfully entitled "How the Myth Got Started." Have your smelling salts at hand before proceeding, for this is exceedingly stern stuff:

The myth was originally a ploy by Marxists to tarnish capitalist governments, claiming that free trade agreements were simply ploys by the West used to exploit other nations. The myth was used by Marxists to mobilize indigenous nationalists to the the Marxist cause by providing a common enemy; in fact, it was just another way the Communists used people during the Cold War in their calculative chess battle of Proxy wars. Neocolonialism later became a fad by post-modern philosophers such as Escobar, Obadina, Agamben, Spanos, Mignolo, Soja, Massey, Foucault, Said, Lafava to criticize the West. And the list of taint goes on. All speaking the same thing with a twist thinking they are so clever with their big words, when in truth it is all just a myth peddled by post modern academics who wish to deny the agency of African peoples. Post modern academics are, (to use their own critisim against them) bourgeois swine who deny the agency of African people in a selfish attempt to advance their academic careers.

As far as I can tell, "deny[ing] the agency of African peoples" means denying their status as people who traditionally "had limited understanding or control of their physical environment," and accordingly find it hard to reap the rewards of their "inheritance from colonial rule."

The African economy is crumbling but that is not the West's fault; if anything the West is continuing Africa's existence.

And what an existence it is!

Slavery continues to remain prominent in Africa in the form of child soldiers, sex workers, coerced or debt workers.

Coerced or debt workers, eh? Must have something to do with the famously low IQ of Africans, or their "barbaric practices such as pagan worship"; to believe otherwise, after all, would be to "deny their agency."

In summation, you must not be taken in by the Marxist myth that "colonial powers still have control over their colonial assets like Africa," and you must also comprehend that "the tools of colonial development will allow for countries like Africa to develop and become equal trading partners in the future."

Unless, of course, the African susceptibility to debt, coerced labor, and the "calculative chess battle of Proxy wars" makes further progress impossible, and the West is at last obliged to stop "continuing Africa's existence."

(Illustration: "The Filipino's First Bath," 1899.)