TRIGGERnometry - Cancelled for Defending Colonialism - Bruce Gilley

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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kishan and this is a show

00:00:40.600 for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our brilliant guest today

00:00:46.440 is a professor of political science at portland state university bruce gilley welcome to trigonometry

00:00:52.140 thank you thank you for having me it is great to have you here uh we obviously have met before but

00:00:57.020 other people may not know who you are tell everybody who are you how are you where you are

00:01:02.260 what has been your journey through life that brings you here uh well i'm a uh political

00:01:07.800 scientist as you said and uh i just was a journalist before i uh left journalism and uh

00:01:13.100 went into the academy um and uh ended up here in beautiful portland since i'm from uh western

00:01:19.420 canada my wife's from california so this was more or less the midpoint um and i work in comparative

00:01:25.500 politics, international relations, international development issues. And I'm best known because

00:01:31.160 I wrote an article in 2017 called The Case for Colonialism, which apparently I was not supposed

00:01:36.680 to write because apparently that's offensive and there is no case for colonialism. So I was

00:01:42.260 cancelled in the sense that the journal that published that article in 2017 was facing death

00:01:47.360 threats to the editorial staff. So I agreed to have it withdrawn. And now I've been cancelled

00:01:52.420 again because a biography of a British colonial official, Sir Alan Burns, that was actually

00:01:58.000 shipping to stores already was cancelled last week because a Maoist, Leninist, Mao Zedong

00:02:05.380 theorist in Toronto also decided that that was inappropriate, that that should be read.

00:02:10.160 And so here I am.

00:02:12.760 Well, it's good to have you here.

00:02:14.940 It seems our list of guests increasingly includes people who've been cancelled as that

00:02:19.100 phenomenon spreads. And obviously, we've had Nigel Biggar, one of your colleagues on the show,

00:02:24.080 who was himself canceled for defending your article in a Times piece as well. So we've

00:02:29.920 talked to him about that. But before we get into the stuff about cancel culture and free speech

00:02:37.080 and the ability for academics to debate ideas, what is the case for colonialism exactly? Because

00:02:43.920 colonialism now seems to be a sort of it's like it's like writing an article saying the case for

00:02:49.160 Nazism to many people. Yeah, the case for colonialism is that colonialism not only made

00:02:57.540 people better off, more free, it allowed them to live, survive, boosted survival rates, access to

00:03:08.200 food, water, protected minorities from human rights violations, especially women.

00:03:15.760 That's what I would call the objective side of it.

00:03:18.160 But I think the real dirty laundry in the closet of most colonial writing is it was

00:03:24.620 legitimate to the people supported it by and large, which is why colonial governments had

00:03:30.440 practically no colonial officials on the ground.

00:03:34.120 Colonialism was mainly carried out by the people living in the places.

00:03:38.460 And that's what I call the legitimacy argument.

00:03:41.040 So those are the two key pieces.

00:03:44.260 We could go on ad nauseum.

00:03:46.340 I have a 40-page bibliography of research that supports that conclusion.

00:03:49.440 And I understand that many people disagree, and they should. 0.99

00:03:52.300 And we should be engaged in constant debates on this.

00:03:55.500 And I don't expect it will end anytime soon.

00:03:57.920 And the question is, what does it say about a school of thought when it's afraid to hear counter arguments?

00:04:05.820 Well, speaking of the counter arguments, a lot of people who've studied history, perhaps not very much, but have studied it would say, well, what about the treatment of starting with, let's say, take Christopher Columbus arrival in North America and Central America?

00:04:21.240 The treatment of the locals there, the treatment of the Native Americans from there on in,

00:04:26.780 the British Empire's conquests and oppression of people around the world,

00:04:31.980 obviously slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, the conquistadors in South America.

00:04:37.800 Surely all of that was bad, Bruce. You wouldn't challenge that, would you?

00:04:41.140 I would, actually.

00:04:42.620 So first of all, most of what has been built up as kind of a constant oppression,

00:04:50.000 starting with columbus um was anything but uh columbus was actually very sensitive to to the

00:04:56.740 locals um there's a new article you may have seen in the spectator showing um you know that this

00:05:02.320 this was a this was a settlement that was highly restrained for the time yes did did he have kind

00:05:08.900 of consultative committees and recycling uh programs no but for the time and certainly

00:05:14.200 compared to the cultures that were otherwise likely to show up in these places it was by far

00:05:20.780 the most enlightened and human rights sensitive form of encounter between civilizations the world

00:05:26.800 has known and i would say that's generally like as a general statement true about not just the

00:05:31.660 british empire because the british empire is easy it's easy to defend the british empire i would

00:05:35.260 say this applies to the portuguese empire this applies to the germans i have a book coming out

00:05:39.520 on german colonialism in about a month we'll probably be back here because there'll be another

00:05:43.540 canceled war over that. But, you know, my argument is colonial scholarship is basically a train wreck

00:05:49.800 and 50 years of ignorance have been produced by the academy. And it's going to take a lot of work

00:05:55.060 to recover an authentic, objective, evidence-based account of colonialism. Was there a lot of bad

00:06:01.240 stuff that happened during which half of the globe was ruled by five countries, billions of people

00:06:08.840 over hundreds of years and billions of interactions of course there was but this is called selection

00:06:14.360 bias when we find out those little incidents and then decide that they invalidate the entire

00:06:19.880 experience i don't know of a single case and i again i would say not a single case where we would

00:06:26.500 say that people would have been better off had the colonialists not arrived and taking into account

00:06:33.620 also, you know, the horrific things that happened in these places, both before colonialism arrived,

00:06:40.840 what would have happened had a different set of colonizers shown up, which almost certainly would 0.95

00:06:45.280 also have been gun-toting Westerners, but without the accountability to governments that actual

00:06:51.600 imperialism had, and the great historical amnesia, what happened after the colonialists were suddenly

00:06:57.920 forced out, not a pretty picture over the last 50 years. Do you think part of the problem is,

00:07:03.180 bruce is that you you make a case for colonialism and in a lot of people's heads what they think is

00:07:08.860 that you're making a case for slavery yeah or genocide or you know what about so i call this

00:07:15.140 the what about arguments right well what about the what about the mau mau what about the herero

00:07:20.000 what about the maji maji rebellion what about tasmania right and so this is this is kind of

00:07:25.220 what i called whataboutism so there's two answers to whataboutism yes a lot of bad stuff happened

00:07:30.400 And there's no excuse for it. And it was a failure of accountability mechanisms. Sure. Great.

00:07:37.020 The second question is, though, I often look into these whatabouts more carefully and I discover there's not much what about to be found there.

00:07:44.680 So, as I said, I have a book coming out on German colonialism. I spent a lot of time talking about the Herero Nama wars in German Southwest Africa, as well as the Maji Maji rebellion in German East Africa.

00:07:55.300 These two things are supposedly irrefutable evidence for why German colonialism was a terrible thing. And I find both claims empty. Now, people will disagree with me. I have no problem with that. I draw upon the scholarship of many people who do agree with me. That's part of what we do in academia.

00:08:13.100 academia. So, you know, the bigger issue is, why are we so scared to have these debates? Why is the

00:08:19.140 mere mention of an opposing viewpoint, you know, reason to rush to the cancel culture office and

00:08:25.540 instigate an investigation? Bruce, I'm Ingus, you don't have to persuade me that the Germans were 0.99

00:08:30.340 dreadful. Well, yes, well, to that point, you know, much of the twisted and unfair historiography

00:08:41.260 about German colonialism began with the British at the Treaty of Versailles, which is a real

00:08:47.080 violation of the British empirical tradition and the British blue book tradition. The blue books

00:08:51.680 were, of course, their annual reports on colonies. Well, they drew up a blue book on German colonialism

00:08:55.880 in order to justify the seizure of German colonies at Versailles. It was a real violation of that

00:09:03.280 British empirical objective tradition and a sad chapter in British imperial rule and foreign

00:09:10.060 policy because much of what was produced by the british essentially for propaganda purposes at

00:09:15.280 versailles became entrenched in the historiography about german colonialism eagerly lapped up by the

00:09:21.680 far left and east german scholars who of course we know were absolutely in a position to engage

00:09:26.800 in objective research and has become kind of uh locked in uh in a way that is going to take just

00:09:32.760 a massive effort to undo so there you go man it's all your fault and you're far left very good and

00:09:38.020 That's what I keep telling him anyway, Bruce.

00:09:40.340 But let me ask you this, because I'm just curious, actually.

00:09:45.920 Why is it important to have this different view of colonialism to the one that's being pushed at the moment?

00:09:55.380 Why is that significant?

00:09:57.280 So that's a great question, Constantine.

00:09:59.660 And, you know, frankly, everyone from my wife on up around me will tell me, why are you doing this?

00:10:06.940 you're causing you're causing yourself trouble you're causing your family trouble you're hated

00:10:13.680 by your colleagues in your department who spent a lot of time trying to find ways to drive me out 0.91

00:10:19.480 you're called a white supremacist you know is this worth it like you know why why are you so

00:10:26.340 engaged in this so part of my answer is well I'm an academic my job is to seek the truth

00:10:32.820 as best I see it and pursue those research topics that I find interesting.

00:10:37.740 So that's not very convincing to my wife.

00:10:40.700 So I think the bigger issue is, and I think this is where it really is coming back to,

00:10:46.980 is you think it's just about the Herero or you think it's just about the Mau Mau

00:10:54.260 or the question of, you know, the Anglo-Egyptian condominium over the Sudan and some obscure

00:11:04.140 historical issue. It's not because the whole rhetoric about the evils of colonialism

00:11:11.080 has now become the rhetoric about decolonize. Now, the decolonize is probably coming soon to

00:11:18.960 a theater near you it may be already in your workplace uh and what is decolonize in in a

00:11:25.420 nutshell decolonize is an attack on the enlightenment and on science and reason it argues

00:11:31.600 that the basis on which liberal civilization has arisen is a fraud and we need to dismantle it

00:11:38.540 so we will no longer for instance be promoting our colleagues in the academy based on their

00:11:43.240 research records, but will be adopting alternative approaches to promotion, such as whether their

00:11:50.020 friends think they're great people, or whether they've made a big contribution to the latest

00:11:56.300 social justice movement tearing down the downtown, right? So this is, to me, there's a lot more at

00:12:03.000 stake here than just obscure debates about history. And I got into this with the Germans,

00:12:09.220 Because one of the big issues in contemporary German foreign policy is, should Germany be engaged in paying massive reparations to the people of contemporary Namibia, maybe Tanzania, maybe Cameroons and Togo, where they were former colonial rulers?

00:12:28.000 And the arguments in favor of that say, well, look at how terrible it was for the Germans to be colonizers here.

00:12:35.020 So there's something at stake here, not just in terms of contemporary culture and workplace and scientific enlightenment values, but in terms of real policy implications is, you know, there's demand for reparations and reparations assume a harm was committed.

00:12:51.080 If no harm was committed, then policymakers need to know that.

00:12:55.420 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:13:01.220 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

00:13:06.460 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:13:10.480 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:13:17.340 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:13:21.800 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

00:13:24.560 And what do you say, Bruce, to those people who say, look, that these empires were fundamentally racist?

00:13:30.880 It was basically white people going over to countries where there are brown people, enslaving them, taking their natural resources, transporting them, making them more impoverished and enriching the white countries. 0.90

00:13:45.280 Well, yes, they were racist. Of course, they were racist because everyone was a racist back then. 0.94

00:13:49.980 So that's a totally anachronistic argument, for one.

00:13:53.100 Um, what's the interesting question is, um, in terms of the degree of racism, let's say,

00:13:59.100 if we could measure it, um, how racist were they?

00:14:02.000 And I would say they were the most unracist examples of governance the world has ever

00:14:06.880 seen, especially compared to the racism that most subject peoples had experienced from

00:14:13.300 the dominant tribes in their, in their territories.

00:14:16.120 Of course, this is how colonialism spread.

00:14:18.060 It spread because groups which were facing annihilation or enslavement or extinction by major rival groups, whether it was the Buganda in East Africa, whether it was the major black tribes moving into South Africa and displacing and enslaving the Koysians, the so-called Hottentots, right, that, yeah, maybe they wouldn't let you into their clubs to have G&Ts at the end of the day.

00:14:46.000 But the other threat to you was the people who wanted to actually make you their slaves and ship you off maybe to places where slavery remains.

00:14:54.740 So so racism is relative and it's historically embedded.

00:14:58.360 So to to go through some colonial officials memoirs from 1832 and find some unkind comments on the locals and then say, aha, you see, these things were a complete disaster for peoples is I mean, it's bad history and it's bad logic and it's bad philosophy.

00:15:17.420 And we know that the reason why these empires found such a ready welcome, by and large, from most places they were, otherwise they couldn't have stayed there, is because people experienced them as less racist than the rivals.

00:15:32.400 There's a great book called Baba of Cairo done by a British anthropologist, Felice Smith.

00:15:39.760 1945, it was issued.

00:15:41.960 And Baba of Cairo talks very explicitly about, you know, did I want to be subject to the Fulanis, the slave empire that enslaved us and stole our daughters? 0.98

00:15:51.220 Or did I want to be under the rule of the British who really just wanted us to stop killing each other and were willing to pay us if we worked for them? 0.88

00:15:58.840 Hey, I'll take the racist British, if that's what you want to call them, over the racist Volani. 1.00

00:16:03.400 And I think in all circumstances, you know, this this was the concrete choice. 0.62

00:16:07.680 And it just seems to me stunningly arrogant and anachronistic for some academic in a Western university sitting there with as much food and security and running water and safety from enslavement and major human rights violations to tut tut those people facing concrete choices of life and death.

00:16:28.840 for having accepted or acceded to Western colonial rule.

00:16:33.220 I was going to say, Bruce, neither of us is qualified to assess the merits of the historical argument there.

00:16:39.520 But one of the things that, as a layman, I would say is, you know, Francis and I were just on holiday in Sicily,

00:16:45.520 in the island off the southern tip of Italy.

00:16:49.140 And that is a part of the Mediterranean that was conquered repeatedly by different groups and tribes over the centuries.

00:16:57.080 And every monument that we went to see over the course of two weeks, the guide would explicitly

00:17:01.940 say, you know, the Carthaginians defeated the Greeks.

00:17:05.380 They used the Greek slaves to build this temple. 0.96

00:17:07.720 And then 100 years later, the Greeks came back and they used the Carthaginian slaves 1.00

00:17:12.100 to build this temple.

00:17:13.280 And then the Romans came and they enslaved both the Carthaginians and the Greeks and 0.99

00:17:17.380 they built this thing here.

00:17:19.500 And it's a sort of universal constant through history.

00:17:23.080 Why do you think we now seem to be just obsessed with this idea of slavery as this unique sin of modern Western civilization when, in fact, it was a constant through history?

00:17:35.700 I mean, that is one thing that if anyone who has any superficial understanding of history would tell you.

00:17:41.780 Because white people love it when it's all about them.

00:17:46.440 And that is the essence of Eurocentrism.

00:17:50.160 I mean, it is comical to see these radical scholars declaring, you know, arguing against Eurocentric knowledge and Eurocentric systems when their whole intellectual apparatus is to put the white man at the center and to keep him there.

00:18:05.180 Right. And so, you know, you read like in this people who talk a lot about the Shelby Steele, his book, White Guilt, talks about this with respect to the United States.

00:18:13.320 The need for white people to feel guilty, which is a very Christian response to the world, through guilt to seek some form of benediction, some form of absolution, and through that process of guilty feeling and absolution seeking to therefore be redeemed. 0.71

00:18:36.980 And then in Christian escatology, of course, not only people are Christians, but they're operating with a fully Christian template to therefore have attained moral superiority over others.

00:18:47.420 So what is this? This is about trying to reestablish white moral superiority over other people. 0.74

00:18:54.100 It is, to summarize, racist, right? To declaim that the lives and histories of other people have not been through their own choices, their own agency, their own cultural repertoire, through the things that have happened to them and through which they have been active agents, but to say, no, no, no, no, it's about me. It's about us, right, is the embodiment of white supremacy.

00:19:19.780 So, you know, this is why we know these arguments now about how wokeness and white supremacy, you know, in terms of that that circle, you know, really share a lot of fundamental premises.

00:19:30.300 And I think you see it in this argument.

00:19:32.740 There's a there's a funny argument that's Thomas Sowell, the great Stanford economist, says, you know, we look at Eastern Europe and Western Europe, you know, what was the difference?

00:19:42.980 Why did Western Europe take off? Well, because the Western Europeans were conquered by the Romans and the and the Eastern Europeans weren't. 0.70

00:19:49.780 And thereby, the Western Europeans got the Latin alphabet and, you know, the rest is history, so to speak.

00:19:55.780 So do the Western Europeans feel resentment against the Romans?

00:20:02.160 Is there a kind of historical animosity about the Roman Empire in Western Europe?

00:20:07.780 No. And it's not just because they realized that the Roman Empire had very clear developmental benefits,

00:20:16.840 But also, it's because why would you give up your historical agency to a narrative about victimization?

00:20:24.940 Because we don't want it to be about the Romans.

00:20:28.240 And it's not about the Romans as a historical matter.

00:20:30.940 You know, history takes place through the active agency of those through which history affects them.

00:20:36.460 And there's a bigger apparatus here at work through which the attempt to pull slavery and colonialism that were practiced by Western colonies out of its historical context and make it anachronistically evidence of white guilt is part of an attempt to resurrect the centrality of the white man in world history.

00:20:58.240 And, you know, I think Terthankar Roy, who is one of the people who blurbed my cancelled book, wrote a letter to the publisher who cancelled it.

00:21:07.860 And his letter has been widely circulated because he says to the publisher, you know, we people in South Asia and Africa are tired of white people telling us what we can and cannot read.

00:21:19.760 That is the essence of white supremacy. 0.90

00:21:23.180 Stop trying to control our history with your white guilt syndrome. 0.83

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00:22:34.140 So, Bruce, answer me this. How should we deal with, you know, I've put it in the context of Sicily and other countries as well, of course, that civilizations have done terrible things forever.

00:22:47.160 That is human nature. It's inescapable. The moment you open a history book, you're immediately confronted with all sorts of, you know, human behavior that is abhorrent. And it's inevitable. And there's no doubt that the colonial powers and the people whose land they came to rule, all of them were involved in this.

00:23:06.340 how should we look should we not ever feel guilt for anything that was done in the past should we

00:23:11.240 just go oh no that was part and parcel of the time there's nothing wrong with genocide there's nothing

00:23:15.820 wrong with to taking millions of people from africa putting them on on slave ships in which 0.75

00:23:21.000 they suffer and drown and die of hunger and malnutrition uh there's nothing wrong with that

00:23:25.740 that was par for the course is that how we should look at things surely we should have a bit more

00:23:29.500 uh more sort of contrition about things shouldn't we okay two issues constantine first of all

00:23:35.240 Constantine, how many black people have you enslaved in your life?

00:23:38.520 Well, I don't want to say on camera.

00:23:41.340 Zero.

00:23:42.160 And Francis, how many brown people's land have you stolen and then sold them into abject poverty?

00:23:48.540 I'm a millennial.

00:23:49.280 I can't even afford property, Bruce.

00:23:51.000 Right, right.

00:23:51.500 So, I mean, honestly, just as a starting point, that's a horrible, horrible, even pre-modern form of thought that one would ascribe wrongs done by A to B merely because B shares a similar genitalia or skin tone or heritage.

00:24:13.580 I mean, that's a very dangerous form of philosophy. If you think about it, Chinese people in the United States are sometimes scapegoated now because of COVID. That's a horrible thing. They did nothing to do with COVID. In fact, most people in China had nothing to do with COVID.

00:24:30.100 So that that is like I don't want to call it Old Testament because it's not fair to the Old Testament.

00:24:34.260 But, you know, what people think of this is this is the blood debt that you inherit by virtue of some vague association to people who may or may not have done bad things in the past.

00:24:45.700 So let's let's stop that right away. That is dangerous and evil.

00:24:49.640 the second question is yes we by all means in history engage in examination of good things

00:24:59.040 and bad things that happened as a result of people's actions at different times in the past

00:25:03.600 great that's that's our that's that's what we do right we look at history we try and objectively

00:25:08.360 assess the good and the bad what i would say is again we have to always keep in mind two things

00:25:16.360 And this is, you know, this is just social science. And I think a lot of historians, because history has moved towards the humanities in the last decades, historians don't actually know what it means to conduct scientific research.

00:25:26.900 So I always say three things. First of all, counterfactuals. Right. You cannot say this was terrible, you know, as a meaningful statement, unless you are pretty sure that in the absence of the forces that led that to happen, the people's well-being, whatever happened would not have been less terrible.

00:25:46.440 OK, now that's hardly difficult to do, but actually we can do counterfactual thought experiments, especially when we have side by side places, for instance, one of which was colonized, one of which was not.

00:25:58.220 Would you rather be a resident of contemporary Haiti or would you rather be a resident of contemporary Bahamas?

00:26:03.680 OK, Bahamas is a counterfactual to Haiti.

00:26:07.080 OK, so we can do that kind of thing.

00:26:09.080 Counterfactual.

00:26:09.580 Secondly, controls. People who study colonialism recently, and I think Frederick Cooper is probably the best known for saying this, is, you know, colonialism wasn't really a thing in the sense that pretty much everything that happened to non-Western areas during the area of Western imperialism would have happened anyway.

00:26:31.220 Why? Because so much of those forces, economic, social, technological, geographic, the spread of disease burdens, this would have all happened with or without Columbus or Lord Lugard, right?

00:26:45.840 I mean, Western Europe was expanding and mainly through privateers and colonialism was an attempt to govern that encounter in a way that would be better for both parties.

00:26:59.560 So controls, super important. You know, that's the controls, meaning the other things that were also happening at the same time.

00:27:07.100 counterfactuals controls and finally case selection don't cherry pick your evidence

00:27:14.800 right whenever you measure something which is for instance how long did that rule last

00:27:20.720 how many rebellions were there right you need to have a proper understanding of how we

00:27:26.840 conceptualize and then measure something like rebellion it turns out when you scratch a little

00:27:32.360 below the surface of most of this history, what is today called a resistance against the West or

00:27:37.940 anti-colonial rebellion or self-emancipatory struggle. It turns out none of these struggles

00:27:44.840 had anything to do with that. It was usually, you know, we don't like this tax or could you please

00:27:49.380 help me to expand and, you know, take over my neighbor's land. I mean, these were, these have

00:27:55.440 been back these have been back casted at a as kind of as struggles against things that we later

00:28:02.320 invented and decided were wrong so that's just that's just bad history right and so many of

00:28:07.240 these issues that we talk about there's no attention paid to controls counterfactuals

00:28:13.800 and case selection and yes i'm sorry i'm boring you because this is what social scientists do

00:28:18.020 but but so many of the historical critiques i get come from people who i don't think could even

00:28:23.900 vaguely understand those concepts because history has become kind of about humanities. It's about

00:28:28.920 progressive visions and finding kind of stimulating and extolling the virtues of

00:28:37.020 voices that haven't been heard. That's great. That doesn't give us good answers to those big

00:28:42.880 questions. And Bruce, you know, we're talking about bad history and so on and so forth.

00:28:48.800 A few months ago, there was a statue of Edward Colston, who was a British slaver.

00:28:55.700 That was pulled down in Bristol.

00:28:57.380 I don't know if you were following this at the time.

00:29:00.440 Where do you stand on that, that we are reappraising these historical figures, looking at them?

00:29:05.300 And for instance, in the case of Edward Colston, he was involved in the slave trade, made a lot of money from it.

00:29:11.020 Should he have his statue in a prominent place?

00:29:13.720 And if we're doing that, aren't we celebrating his crimes?

00:29:16.180 Well, I think, let me give you a very pedantic answer, but he should be there if the process of decision making in Bristol, through which it is decided what should be where in public space, says he should be there.

00:29:37.740 And if the process of decision making results in the decision he shouldn't be there, then he shouldn't be there.

00:29:43.660 I mean, I don't think I don't think we can have a big deductive philosophical claim that he must be there.

00:29:51.880 If the people of Bristol don't want him there, then he shouldn't be there.

00:29:54.740 And if the protesters led to a change of heart by the city councilors, that's that statue shouldn't be there.

00:30:05.500 I have no problem with that. I mean, public spaces change all the time and things that people like and don't like get removed and added.

00:30:13.140 And that's fine. That's what the public space is for. Of course, if that had been someone's private property displaying an Edward Colston statue and they had invaded the private property and defaced and destroyed that, well, that's a legal issue because that has to do with property rights.

00:30:29.940 And that would be wrong, unless the property owner also had a change of heart and decided to take it down. But that's fine. That's within their right. So I don't I don't like putting a lot of analytical weight on these statuary issues, because to me, it doesn't really matter whether his statue is there in terms of the big debate and right and wrong.

00:30:50.800 Indeed, I would argue that I would much prefer these great statues to be in a safe place where people can learn about them than in the public with a bunch of 20-something thugs defacing them with spray paint every day.

00:31:06.600 I have no problem with democratic processes which lead to changes in public spaces consistent with the mores and preferences of the population affected.

00:31:17.360 And what do you think about this wider trend, though, of reappraising historical figures and judging them with the values of our time?

00:31:23.860 For instance, you know, Gandhi is now a racist and so on and so forth.

00:31:29.020 We always knew Gandhi was a racist.

00:31:30.980 The only people who didn't know Gandhi was a racist were the people who have Gandhi bumper stickers on their cars and keep making up things like, you know, always recycle your plastic bags, Gandhi.

00:31:41.340 You know, you know, he just he became a totem and he was so ripe for destruction.

00:31:48.440 Gandhi, of course, was a very loyal member of the British Empire and served in British forces in South Africa in World War One until he discovered he could make a name for himself by being anti-colonial.

00:32:00.720 But yes, I have, again, no problem with Gandhi's statue being reappraised and those responsible for a space in which his statue is displayed, having decision making power to remove it and following the processes of democratic decision making through which these decisions are made, coming to the conclusion that it's being taken down and sent somewhere else.

00:32:24.220 I have no problem with that. I mean, no one has a no statue has a right to the public square.

00:32:30.060 That's different from the history itself. Right. Which is we need to and must continue to have open minded debates that include the possibility of saying Churchill, Lord Lugard, a slave trader.

00:32:44.940 right uh have a aspect of their biographies we should we should value we should honor um and be

00:32:53.020 historically understanding about the context in which they operated that's the history debate

00:32:58.780 got nothing to do with the statuary and bruce let's move on to the other aspect of all of this

00:33:05.480 because let's say i'm listening to you and i fundamentally disagree with every single thing

00:33:11.580 that you said, right? Even if that were the case, I would still think that it's perfectly legitimate

00:33:18.720 for your work to be published, to be peer reviewed, to be criticized by your peers who are qualified

00:33:25.900 to talk about history, to say that Bruce Gilley doesn't know what he's talking about. Here's some

00:33:31.040 counter evidence. Here's the counter argument. Here are the facts of the matter. And for that

00:33:35.520 to be a process of academic debate, discussion, etc. But that doesn't seem to be what's happened

00:33:42.320 in your case. Why do you think the people who disagree with you, which I'm sure are many people,

00:33:47.760 why can't they just do that? Well, as you say, there's two types of critics. There's the critics

00:33:53.800 who say, Bruce, I think you really got it wrong. You know, I think the evidence is not in your

00:33:59.460 favor, but I will support your right to say it because I realize that you refer to evidence,

00:34:07.840 that you use logic, and that there's a lot of scholars who have produced things saying exactly

00:34:14.740 the same that you've said. And as one Harvard scholar said to me after the Case for Colonialism

00:34:19.500 article, he said, Bruce, you know, if you hadn't written that article, someone else would have,

00:34:24.420 because it's been brewing for a long time. Brewing for a long time was that phrase he

00:34:29.340 used, meaning there's been a counter, a revisionist literature growing, and someone was going to

00:34:34.420 summarize it and say, hey, this kind of treatment of colonialism as a unique, you know, Western

00:34:42.360 Columbia, unique historical evil is just really so one-sided. We need to have that other counter

00:34:48.240 argument. Okay. Then there's the other critics who say this argument is so noxious, so offensive

00:34:55.260 as Sahar Khan at the Cato Institute claimed in one of the most widely read critiques,

00:35:01.720 that it can't be heard. And I'm not a censor. It's because we need to uphold academic standards.

00:35:07.620 And some things are so offensive and so beyond the pale and so inconsistent with the research

00:35:15.620 is even to entertain them, even to give them a platform is to engage in a kind of academic

00:35:21.700 misconduct right we are the guardians of truth and the guardians of truth have a gatekeeping role

00:35:28.100 and sometimes we just need to keep barbarians outside of the gates so uh two types of critics

00:35:34.680 right and the former i am completely comfortable with indeed uh as i tell them you know much of my

00:35:40.640 research on this topic draws upon people who disagree with me but i respect their scholarship

00:35:45.560 because they provide evidence and facts that are transparent enough to allow me to draw different

00:35:50.940 conclusions from. No problem with them. Most of those people are signing the petition in my favor

00:35:55.240 right now. It's the cancel culture mob, right, who is found in very prominent positions and you can

00:36:04.460 find their names. They're the ones who seems to me feel insecure about their premises because they

00:36:12.720 have responded with such virile attacks on me and my scholarship is it makes you wonder

00:36:21.140 why do you feel so insecure? And Bruce, do you think that the attacks would have been

00:36:26.720 any less vitriolic if you weren't a white man? Well, of course, I don't think there would have

00:36:33.240 been attacks if I hadn't been a white man, because I can give you a half a dozen scholars

00:36:39.080 who are not white, who have said what I've said, and it just kind of passes under the radar. I think

00:36:45.120 my new book on German colonialism, I'm going to show you how much pushback there has been among

00:36:50.080 Africanist scholars, scholars in Africa, right? Black African scholars pushing back against the 0.88

00:36:56.300 anti-German colonial historiography of mostly white Germans in Germany. So yes, that's, you 0.95

00:37:09.080 To be frank, I do have privilege.

00:37:13.280 And what one of my sense of privilege is, is nobody can attack me for violating the norms of my tribe.

00:37:23.560 Right. And a lot of these scholars in places like Pakistan, right, we actually the book series that got canceled.

00:37:30.120 We had a very interesting proposal from a Pakistani scholar rewriting Macaulay, you know, the story of Macaulay and arguing that Macaulay has been misunderstood by anti-colonial scholars.

00:37:41.680 Well, he's now scared to death because he was submitting a proposal.

00:37:46.020 I've told him you're safe. I've told anyone about this.

00:37:48.400 But, you know, they have this problem that this can be a life and death choice for them to step outside of the anti-colonial safe space.

00:38:00.420 And so one of the privileges of not being in one of those tribes is I have the role of speaking out.

00:38:09.740 And yes, the vitriol that attends that.

00:38:12.640 We've spoken to many people, not just Nigel, but other academics who've been cancelled, you know, had their careers curtailed, and they all seem to make a similar point that it's not just about what's happened to them, it's fundamentally damaging to their subject, because it means that certain lines of questioning can't be explored, which means that the subject can't be progressed. Do you think the same thing has happened to history?

00:38:37.260 Yeah, and I think this is fundamental.

00:38:39.540 And I think what you have seen this summer, since a drug-addled felon who had just robbed a store and was then resisting arrest, died because of his drug overdose in Minneapolis, tells you what's at stake here.

00:38:55.980 And, you know, I'm sorry to make it so plain, but this is what's at stake.

00:38:59.440 You don't think he was killed by the police officer, Bruce?

00:39:02.760 So he died of a heart attack?

00:39:05.040 Well.

00:39:05.260 And he did not die of asphyxiation. Yes, the police officer was restraining him in a way that is not a good form of policing. And it was a violation of Minneapolis police protocols and should be subject to discipline for the manner in which he died. I have no problem with that.

00:39:25.040 But but the reason for his death, according to the coroner, was he had a heart attack and he was having a heart attack long before he was put on the ground and his neck placed under that officer's knee.

00:39:36.800 He was having the heart attack when they were trying to get him into the car and he was resisting arrest. Right.

00:39:41.340 I mean, so I go back to people like, well, there's George Floyd. I said, let's look at George Floyd. Let's look at this.

00:39:47.440 this is the hero of your movement, right? This is problematic. And I think there's a lot more

00:39:54.660 at stake here. You know, when I talk about what's at stake, why am I spending time arguing about

00:39:59.300 Lord Lugard? Because this is where it's coming out in the wash, right? And what is at stake here

00:40:05.960 is, and this happened in Britain, this is happening in Canada, this is happening in Australia.

00:40:10.020 Once you allow a distortionary account of your national past to seize the high ground in the national discussion, there becomes a level of hatred and a level of dissonance in your society that will very quickly spill out into social chaos.

00:40:30.300 And I don't mean social chaos is bad if people are protesting against things, but what's happened is a loss of faith in the structures of democratic government and liberal society itself.

00:40:40.940 And where does that come from? That comes from this kind of historiography that says, oh, all your highfalutin language about democracy and good governance, that was just a cover for exploitation and oppression and racism.

00:40:53.060 And so when you tell us. We were we were called to this store to deal with a robbery and we found ourselves in a difficult situation.

00:41:02.660 And yes, this is not ideal policing. And yes, he died. And yes, this is the subject investigation.

00:41:09.760 Oh, this is a whitewash. We're tearing the place down.

00:41:12.740 So so black neighborhoods, black businesses, black lives have been lost at an alarming rate in the last four months, not just in the United States, but elsewhere.

00:41:23.060 because of a movement that grew out of what is this fundamentally distortionary account 0.73

00:41:29.200 of liberal society. And I think a lot is at stake here. This is not just about

00:41:33.340 obscure historical arguments. This is about the foundations of a liberal society and whether we

00:41:39.420 should understand them as basically good or basically bad. In other words, what you're

00:41:44.520 saying, and I'm not sure in terms of George Floyd, I just, from my perspective, what I understand was

00:41:50.140 That was the initial coroner's report. There was since an autopsy done by someone else, which suggested it was asphyxiation. But it doesn't really matter too much in terms of what you're saying, because if my understanding of what you're saying is if we tell ourselves stories, false stories about how bad we are and how bad our history is, then it almost makes sense to tear that down.

00:42:13.680 Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, the world media and the BBC love and Australian media, too.

00:42:20.040 They love these kind of TV nightly news reports, America at war with itself.

00:42:26.700 Right. I mean, there's just a kind of ghoulish fascination for watching American violence on the streets.

00:42:34.300 But look in your own backyard. You know, I'm Canadian and the CBC loves, you know, stories about.

00:42:43.680 protests in the US. But meanwhile, you know, Alberta and Saskatchewan want to secede.

00:42:50.000 Quebec is going to probably have another referendum.

00:42:54.880 This is a country falling apart because it has been victimized by the same sort of narratives

00:43:01.120 about its evil colonial settler colonial past as inspired protests and violence in the United 0.61

00:43:08.480 States. So this is a global phenomenon, and it's rooted in a global set of claims that have

00:43:17.460 dominated the academy and therefore spread into society at large, and in particular into elite

00:43:22.980 and media culture for the last 50 years. And the chickens are coming home to roost.

00:43:27.540 And so what do you think is the endgame of this particular movement, Bruce?

00:43:31.520 Well, at a certain point, reality clicks in, right? You do get mugged by reality. So to take a very close example, to me, there was a girl raped in our neighborhood this summer in Portland.

00:43:52.060 And the family

00:43:55.500 There's a big BLM supporter 0.98

00:43:58.320 With signs and everything

00:43:59.660 The police said

00:44:01.360 Sorry, we don't have time to investigate this

00:44:03.780 Because every night we're downtown

00:44:05.300 Protesting

00:44:07.620 You know, dealing with protesters

00:44:08.960 And we're backed up 0.87

00:44:10.300 We can't investigate your daughter's rape

00:44:12.260 Okay, so at a certain point

00:44:14.400 Those who seek to tear down

00:44:17.060 Liberal civilization

00:44:18.180 And the police

00:44:19.340 And democratic procedures

00:44:21.260 and the economies that support our flourishing realize they're shooting themselves in the foot.

00:44:27.540 They start to suffer the consequences themselves. Right. And I, you know, I hate to say this,

00:44:33.000 but I think the only way for this movement to arrest itself is to discover the consequences

00:44:38.240 of what it's doing. Right. And black businesses are the first to feel this. Right. Now, 0.96

00:44:44.080 black communities in the U.S. where murder rates are skyrocketing, thanks to the BLM movement, 1.00

00:44:48.460 are starting to discover this too so i mean this is basically the revolutionary process right we

00:44:55.200 can trace this in every revolution um at a certain point you get to the point of thermidor and the

00:45:01.440 backlash and the reaction but in this case the reaction is really just maybe we do need police

00:45:08.160 maybe we do need to fund our police maybe our police should be investigating rapes instead of 0.91

00:45:13.820 trying to keep a bunch of delinquents from destroying our federal courthouse do you think

00:45:18.000 that's the only way out of it, Bruce. There's no positive way. The only way is essentially is to

00:45:22.920 let people create sort of chazzes all over the United States, go there for a few days. 0.98

00:45:28.700 If they make it out alive, they come back a little bit with a little bit more perspective,

00:45:34.760 let's say, on this whole issue. Is that the only way? Is there no way we can talk about this?

00:45:38.980 Well, you know, again, I'm a big supporter of

00:45:42.740 liberal fixes, such as let's reinvigorate debate. Let's make sure we all adhere to

00:45:50.180 democratic procedures. Let's make sure our protest is peaceful. Let's ensure that

00:45:56.180 diversity of political viewpoints are present in the places where people are learning about the

00:46:02.560 facts. So I love that. And that's obviously a program I'm fully on board with. I think what

00:46:10.720 I've written about my own book being cancelled in the Wall Street Journal this week is, I'm

00:46:18.200 starting to, and maybe just because I'm getting old, but and like Thomas Sowell, the great black

00:46:24.100 economist at Stanford, starting to wonder if we're not reaching a point of no return. And at that

00:46:30.460 point, with the ship sinking, I'm not sure the bucket brigade is enough anymore, right? We need 1.00

00:46:38.020 some more radical attempts to keep this thing afloat. And the sort of liberal fixes to a

00:46:45.040 totalitarian problem don't always work. Just ask the people who had to flee the Russian revolution.

00:46:51.260 Bruce, this is a question that I seem to be asking almost every episode,

00:46:55.280 but how much responsibility do the universities need to take for this?

00:47:01.500 Well, I'm not sure we can ask the response to the universities, if by that you mean the faculty

00:47:07.160 and the administrators to fix this problem, because they are the problem. I do think that

00:47:12.360 the chancellors and the boards of trustees or boards of governors and the departments of

00:47:21.180 education that oversee the standards and the funding and the rules that govern these institutions

00:47:32.880 do have to take responsibility um it won't come from within the university the university is the

00:47:39.480 problem um sorry to interrupt uh francis is a lefty so when he said who should take responsibility

00:47:45.780 what he meant is who should be punished oh i see who should take responsibility well you know i i

00:47:52.720 i don't blame anyone i don't think anyone did wrong i mean if i'm a if i'm a young scholar

00:47:59.180 And I want to get a job in the English faculty. I will most assuredly write a dissertation on a hitherto undiscovered black transgender woman who had her land stolen and how we need to elevate that voice.

00:48:14.700 And I'll get a job. Well, good on you. You know, I mean, you you had a system put before you that was institutionalized and you acted in response to those incentives and you got to where you want.

00:48:25.880 That's that's great. I you know, why would we say that's unfair?

00:48:29.960 That's the whole the whole idea of property rights is that people have reasonable expectations that are created by a system and you can't blame them when they hit the jackpot.

00:48:39.740 However, over time, we need to change those incentives.

00:48:43.000 And the people who are responsible are the people who are essentially asleep at the wheel, boards of trustees, chancellors of universities, departments of education or education secretaries, especially when they are representing a government that is, let's say, center or center right, where we know that their constituents want the university system to be changed.

00:49:05.780 they should take responsibility because they failed to enact their jobs to make sure that

00:49:13.100 universities, like all other parts of federally funded or state funded or government funded

00:49:19.020 institutions, follow the expectations of democratic majorities.

00:49:23.560 Well, Bruce, thank you so much for your time. We're wrapping up. So we've just got one more

00:49:28.280 question for you, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society,

00:49:32.400 but we really should be. I think we need to talk about what is the end game for this,

00:49:39.000 because it seems the more information we have, the more debate, the more podcasts, the more

00:49:44.400 blogs, the more difficult it is going to be for us to understand why people have different

00:49:50.940 perspectives on issues. And surely we don't want to tear ourselves apart each time we discover a

00:49:57.080 disagreement. We're not talking about the, in some ways, evolutionary flaw in our brains.

00:50:03.720 That was really brains which were designed to deal with groups of 60 or 70 people and are now

00:50:10.200 interacting with several billion people simultaneously. We have to find a better

00:50:14.880 way of responding to things we disagree with or that we find offensive, because I do think

00:50:20.060 humanity is at stake. That's a really good point. Bruce, thank you so much for joining us. If people

00:50:25.360 want to follow your case or support you in any way what do they do uh my twitter handle is bruce

00:50:30.800 gilly three and that probably gets you all you need to know all right fantastic thank you so much

00:50:35.940 and thank you for watching we will see you very shortly with another episode or live stream all

00:50:41.840 of them go out at 7 p.m uk time absolutely they do wednesday and sunday for our episodes

00:50:47.460 and tuesday thursday friday and saturday for our live streams we'll see you soon guys

00:50:55.360 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - October 18, 2020

Cancelled for Defending Colonialism - Bruce Gilley

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