"We bring civilization." "We bring technology." "Be grateful."
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2042627593745371373
"Nothing wrong with the Empire. France brought civilization."
France arrived in Vietnam in the 1850s. By the time they were expelled in 1954, they had run the country for a hundred years. Here is what that century looked like:
They dissolved the existing Vietnamese administrative and legal structures and replaced them with a colonial apparatus designed to extract maximum value for Paris.
They imposed taxes, the head tax, the salt tax, the alcohol monopoly, calibrated specifically to impoverish the peasantry and force them into plantation labor.
They ran an industrialized opium trade as official colonial policy. A third of their revenue in Indochina came from selling opium to Vietnamese people.
Their rubber plantations had mortality rates so catastrophic they were compared at the time to the Belgian Congo.
When Vietnamese people organized, protested, or resisted, they were imprisoned, tortured, or executed. The prison at Poulo Condore became synonymous with systematic brutality.
By 1945, after a century of French civilization, approximately two million Vietnamese people died in a famine, partly caused by Japanese wartime policies, but significantly exacerbated by French colonial infrastructure that had been designed to export food rather than feed the people who grew it.
Then America arrived with a different accent and the same logic.
"We bring civilization."
"We bring technology."
"Be grateful."
And three million people died saying: we did not ask you to come. We do not want you here. This is our country and we will run it ourselves.
We were right.
We proved it in the most definitive way a people can prove anything.
The civilization argument is not an argument. It is a costume the powerful wear so they don't have to look at what they're actually doing.
We saw what was underneath it.
We always did.
posted by Satish Sharma at
01:59
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