Colonial arguments that defeat themselves: A primer

From an early age, even during primary education, Americans are told that their country is exceptional. It's not clear what is meant when we are told this, since no explanation is given as to how we are exceptional.

In fact, most of American propaganda makes endless excuses for itself. "American slavery and genocide isn't all that bad, especially considering everyone else does it too. All land is stolen. You have to keep 'historical context' in mind when criticizing the United States. It's not fair to judge our actions by modern standards."

Without even deconstructing this argument, how it is filled with deception and misdirection, we can see a glaring hypocrisy. I thought we were supposed to be exceptional. Now you're saying we aren't?

This kind of self-destructive argumentation always emerges in regards to America's colonial underclass. When people discuss the annexation of Indian land or the enslavement of Africans, we are always told that the conquered and enslaved peoples were underdeveloped economically and had little in the way of sociopolitical organization, infrastructure, or wealth before we so charitably brought them under our heel and gave them everything worth having.

Of course, we know this isn't true. Indigenous peoples had quite a bit to steal. Otherwise, we wouldn't have stolen their land, their human labor, their natural resources, or have dissolved their existing polities to facilitate our theft. People with no riches have nothing to plunder.

Even concerning our annexation of Hawaii and the enslavement of indigenous Hawaiians, people have argued that Hawaii would have been "a poor fishing nation in the middle of nowhere" without our gracious intervention, that we built Hawaii's wealth and worth. Another obvious lie. If Hawaii was truly what they claim it was, which is in itself a lie, there would be no point in annexing it, dissolving its government, and plundering its resources. If Hawaii is poor, how did it come to be that American capitalists profited from it? Similarly, people argue that if we hadn't annexed Hawaii, some other country would have. Why, if it's so unimportant, would any country bother to do so?

On the one hand, colonizers and settlers love to say that they are doing nothing wrong because the people they exploit are so infantile and helpless that our aggression and theft is counterintuitively an overall benefit for the people we brutalize. On the other hand, they sure seem to want what indigenous people have, which is why they steal it.

This is the white savior complex brought into clear focus. The belief that the colonized must be colonized to save them from themselves isn't merely a delusion borne of believing the wrong facts. It is a rationalization. They must believe they are superior to justify their theft, but if they truly were superior to the people they exploit, as they claim they are, the exploitation itself would not only be unnecessary, but a total waste of time.

Do not let liberals get away with arguing like this. Who knows, if someone spells it out for them, they might realize the errors of their ways.