| Yes, there are several. I mentioned two in my post above, so it's unfair of you to say that all I did was make accusations of isms. Here they are, repeated: 1. The fact that the (very large) number of Indian soldiers in WW2 was slipped in without comment into a statement about how NZ, Australia and other Anglosphere countries were joined in some kind of glorious kinship. India was not, and is not, a part of this cosy club and should not have been in that list. 2. Attributing the participation of Indian soldiers in WW2 to some kind of personal decision, and not the fact the British ruled India at the time as an imperialist foreign power. Here are a couple more statements that are false: 1. "What do we mean by Western civilization?...Third, representative government. Laws should not be passed, nor taxes levied, except by elected legislators who are answerable to the rest of us." This was patently false in the large parts of the world where Britain ruled illegally for two centuries. Taxes were routinely levied on citizens of the colonies without representative government. (I seem to remember this having something to do with the American Revolution, as a matter of fact.) 2. "Yet Peru—indeed, Latin America in general—never achieved the law-based civil society that North America takes for granted. Settled at around the same time, the two great landmasses of the New World serve almost as a controlled experiment. The north was settled by English-speakers, who took with them a belief in property rights, personal liberty, and representative government. The south was settled by Iberians who replicated vast estates and quasi-feudal society of their home provinces." There were several other differences between North and South America, including the climate, the relative times at which they achieved independence, and (perhaps most importantly) the attitudes of the imperialists towards their subjects. In colonies where the ruled were racially different than the rulers (South America, Africa and Asia), their treatment and eventual outcomes were far worse than in places where the colonial power and the colonies were both racially the same (North America). The author is ignorant at best, and probably deliberately dishonest, in not mentioning this as part of his argument. ============== The tone of the article is clear enough that point by point rebuttals like this are a waste of time, but since you asked... |