Not all the facts fit the anti-colonialist narrative
&gt;&gt; I cried reading that book, and experienced intense feelings of animus
towards white people, even though my own mother, being Polish, was white.<p>I find this a little unfair, given that many white people do not have a
colonial past and some have themselves been subject to colonisation and
imperalism. This includes most of the peoples of Eastern and Southern Europe,
i.e. the Slavs and also my people, Greeks. While Russia had an Empire and
colonies in Asia, it never really colonised Africa [1]. Other Slavic countries
never had colonies [2] and neither did us Greeks who were ourselves enslaved
by the Ottomans for much of our pre-modern history and were a protectorate of
the Great Powers saddled by them with a foreign kingly dynasty [3] during the
time that the Western Europeans where having their little moment in Africa, in
the 1880&#x27;s.<p>So it&#x27;s no point feeling &quot;animus&quot; towards all white people- certainly not
towards one&#x27;s Polish mother. It&#x27;s no use lumping all &quot;Europeans&quot; together,
either. I would go as far as to say that even the majority of people in
countries that were colonial powers, like Britain or France, did not really
partake in the riches pillaged from Africa and its people, because it all
stayed in the hands of monarchs and aristocrats who often didn&#x27;t treat their
domestic population any better than the people of faraway lands and certainly
didn&#x27;t hold them in much greater esteem. If you hail from a long line of pig
farmers and washerwomen that lived in poverty and squalor while their &quot;betters&quot;
partied in India - how can you be held responsible for the latters&#x27; behaviour?<p>And then there were the white people colonised by other white people, as in
the colonisation of Ireland by the English during the 1550&#x27;s, by settling it
with Protestants and establishing...  plantations [4]. Has anyone asked the
Irish how they feel about the great British Empire? [5]<p>If we&#x27;re going to have a historically nuanced debate about colonialism (and
not just race and racism, which are somewhat independent, in my view) then we
should have a <i>nuanced</i> debate and discuss the fact that colonialism didn&#x27;t
really care about the colour of your skin, only about the degree to which you
were inhabiting land with useful resources that could be taken from you and
exploited for the glory of Empire (and the enrichment of its elites).<p>________________<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_colonialism#Imperial_Russia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_colonialism#Imperia...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_colonialism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_colonialism</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_modern_Greece" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_modern_Greece</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plantations_of_Ireland" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plantations_of_Ireland</a><p>[5] Oh, but it&#x27;s complicated, I know... probably because of the settlement by
Protestants as above.