FOR those of you unfamiliar with so-called Postcolonial Theory, it relates to the enormous impact that colonialist regimes have had on the countries they once governed. It is true, for example, that great swathes of Africa and Asia have been ‘civilised’ to the extent that they have either retained or institutionalised various aspects of European culture and politics.
The leftist approach to such matters is that postcolonial nations exhibit signs of social, psychological and cultural inferiority, something I tend to agree with, but rather than seek to infuse or perhaps reacquaint the indigenous populations of such countries with their own respective identities, they are encouraged to deconstruct the prevailing trappings of colonialism within a decidedly Western framework. After having been invaded and populated by Europeans, therefore, these non-European victims of imperialism still face interference from political and academic outsiders who believe they know best when it comes to rooting out the final vestiges of colonialism itself.
Furthermore, in their haste to patronise the underdog, the proponents of Postcolonial Theory fail to notice the debilitating effects that Americanisation has on European culture, something that has clearly not had to rely upon physical American settlement. In other words, whilst colonialism has been facilitated in a far more brutal and direct manner, Americanisation has been deposited around the world by way of the mass media.
One final point that demolishes Postcolonial Theory altogether, concerns the fact that the vast majority of those countries which, in previous centuries, were brought under the heel of the British, Dutch, Germans, Belgiums, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese and various others, did not go on to achieve real independence or sovereignty at all and their contemporary puppet-governments continue to export their own people’s resources on behalf of the West at the point of a gun. Despite the fact that European colonialists have departed, therefore, the process still continues by stealth. There can be no true ‘postcolonialism’ until the exploitative Western core has itself been dismantled.
