One of the worst progressive tropes is the narrative that European colonialism destroyed paradise. The mischief in the idea lies not in the idea that it was destructive to local cultures — which it was — but in the assertion of its special nature; that in the long history of conquest that dates back to millennia BC, this was the unique innocence-destroying event.
In this story line, the Sea Peoples, Chinggis Khan, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the intrepid Chinese admirals who established the Nine-Dash Line all fade into the background.
It assigns to European civilization the role formerly assigned to the devil, corrupting an idyll inhabited by a progressive version of Adam and Eve with the equivalent of the Tree of Life and/or the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. There was and remains by the way, some controversy over whether these two Trees were distinct or one and the same. It reflects the ambivalence of the progressive narrative, itself a product of the West, over the creative and destructive aspects of the Fall of Paradise. They are torn between the desire to take up the Woke version of the White Man’s Burden or burying its legacy fathoms deep.
If they were honest the progressives would admit that paradise ended long before Europeans set sail upon the seas; that there were empires before them, evil before them, hunger and disease before them. The Fall occurred long ago; so far back that perhaps we cannot even remember it. Until then the progressive narrative will be riven by contradiction and fraught with irony.
- Give us your putrid imperialist vaccines as a human right!
- Stop the Taliban abuses in Afghanistan!
- Put GPS and the Internet, both products of the evil military industrial complex, under UN control because they are vital to the world!
Do progressives hate the White Devil or admire him? You see it’s still undecided whether the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil were one and the same.
Books: What Really Happened In Wuhan, Sharri Markson. Part-thriller, part-expose, What Really Happened in Wuhan is a ground-breaking investigation from leading journalist Sharri Markson into the origins of Covid-19, the cover-ups, the conspiracies and the classified research. It features never-before-seen primary documents exposing China’s concealment of the virus, fresh interviews with whistleblower doctors in Wuhan and crucial eyewitness accounts that dismantle what we thought we knew about when the outbreak hit.