Six Ideas That Set the West Apart from the Rest (And Why It’s All Over Now Baby Blue)

The actu­al ‘killer’ apps:

1. Com­pe­ti­tion through exploita­tion and war­fare
2. Sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge pre­served by Arabs
3. Prop­er­ty con­sist­ing of glob­al theft of native lands
4. Mod­ern Med­i­cine (also from the Arabs)
5. Con­sump­tion to the point of envi­ron­men­tal dev­as­ta­tion
6. Slave labor

As an Indi­an I’m deeply offend­ed by this speech, and not just dis­ap­point­ed, but shocked, that Open Cul­ture (which I oth­er­wise hold in the high­est regard)would stoop so low as to host such an offen­sive speech. The boun­ties reaped by West­ern impe­ri­al­ism are casu­al­ly brushed away by Niall Fer­gu­son and Impe­ri­al­ism is in fact jus­ti­fied by him, the intent being that the West col­o­nized the East because they were smarter. He even says, “So the Empire was­n’t all bad.” Atro­cious. The West did come up with some great insti­tu­tions, but their wealth and pow­er, for a very long time, came via col­o­niz­ing, exploit­ing and per­pe­trat­ing all kinds of atroc­i­ties on the col­o­nized, be they Indi­ans, Africans, Native Amer­i­cans, Aus­tralian abo­rig­ines, etc. The col­o­niz­ers also bru­tal­ly dec­i­mat­ed large swathes of these native pop­u­la­tions. To brush off the pos­si­bil­i­ty of this argu­ment with such cold arro­gance is prob­a­bly a typ­i­cal Niall Fer­gu­son trait. His mim­ic­ry of non- west­ern accents, like he does in the end, is anoth­er symp­tom of his racist way of think­ing. It’s also unfair on his part to lump the entire world, which is not the col­o­niz­er, as ‘the East’, whether it’s Africa or Latin Amer­i­ca. It’s an Us vs Them sce­nario and very much a case of Oth­er­ing, the very trait of colo­nial racism. I’m glad that Pankaj Mishra has raised his voice against this rather idi­ot­ic per­son­age.