French ships full of white people arrive in the New World to pester natives with aqueducts, roads, medicine, etc.
When the computer game Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization was about to be released, one reviewer of pinkish hue got agitated about its subject matter. “Whether it was British rule of India or slavery in Africa or Aboriginal children kidnapped and taken to Christian schools in Australia or the dislocation of Native Americans in the U.S., there were no positive colonization experiences.” Now, before the instinct kicks in to retort, “O RLY?” or repeat some of the anonymous responses to him that essentially advised him to ask Santa for a Y-chromosome for Christmas, it might help to take look under this game’s hood.
Colonization belongs to a game genre known among gamers as 4x: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate and already the genre itself has three of four words that would send progressives into apoplexy. Usually 4x games allow the player to set the victory conditions. Most obvious is military victory, but there is also economic, diplomatic, and cultural victory. In Colonization there is only one, count ‘em, ONE victory condition: be the first colony to declare independence.
Get that? You must rebel. You must revolt if you want to win. It ain’t a toggle. You can’t change the victory conditions in the options. I don’t even think it can be “modded” to change it. In other words, if you want to play a Loyalist, you are out. Thus, this is game is at heart every bit as progressive as white game-reviewers feeling aggrieved on behalf of others. To be fair, after you have rebelled, you can set up what kind of government you want and “monarchy” is a choice, as is “theocracy”, but c’mon. This isn’t the first time the Civilization series touted lots of customization but locked you in to others. Every Civ game when you reached the modern era, gave you anthropogenic global warming. You couldn’t turn it off, you couldn’t vary its effects or rate, you just had to slug along by their rules.
Anyway, this is just an excuse to quote more Moldbug asking the question in An open letter to open-minded progressives (part 1) :
What’s up with the Third World?
Here, for example, is a Times story on the fight against malaria. Often, as with politicians, journalists speak the truth in a fit of absent-mindedness, when their real concern is something else. If you read the story, you might notice the same astounding graf that I did:
And the world changed. Before the 1960s, colonial governments and companies fought malaria because their officials often lived in remote outposts like Nigeria’s hill stations and Vietnam’s Marble Mountains. Independence movements led to freedom, but also often to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care.
Let’s focus on that last sentence. Independence movements led to freedom, but also often to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care.
I often find it useful to imagine that I’m an alien from the planet Jupiter. If I read this sentence, I would ask: what is this word freedom? What, exactly, does this writer mean by freedom? Especially in the context of civil war, poverty, and corrupt government?
What we see here is that independence movements – which the writer clearly believes are a good thing – led to some very concrete and very, very awful results, in addition to this curious abstraction – freedom. Clearly, whatever freedom means in this particular context, it’s such a great positive that even when you add it to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care, the result still exceeds zero.
Isn’t that strange? Might we not be tempted to revisit this particular piece of arithmetic? But we can’t – because if we postulate that colonial governments and companies (whatever these were), with their absence of freedom, were somehow preferable to independence movements, which created this same freedom (the words freedom and independence appear to be synonyms in this context), we are off the progressive reservation.
In fact, not only are we off the progressive reservation, we’re off the conservative reservation. No one believes this. You will not find anyone on Fox News or townhall.com or any but the fringiest of fringe publications claiming that colonialism, with its intrinsic absence of freedom and its strangely effective malaria control (note how the writer implies, without actually saying, that this was only delivered for the selfish purposes of the evil colonial overlords), was in any way superior to postcolonialism, with its freedom, its malaria, its civil war, etc.
