SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Here is what "civilizing mission" meant in practice. It meant that your laws did not apply to us, but our laws applied to you.

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Here is what "civilizing mission" meant in practice.

It meant that your laws did not apply to us, but our laws applied to you.

It meant that your land could be taken because you did not hold title in a European legal sense, but we could not use your land's resources without your labor, which we would compel.

It meant that your religion was superstition, but ours was the reason we were here.

It meant that your resistance was savagery, but our violence was order.

It meant that your complexity, your political structures, your trade networks, your architecture, your medicine, your astronomy, was invisible to us, because seeing it would have complicated the story we needed to tell ourselves about why we were here.

The "civilizing mission" was not a lie in the sense of something the people promoting it didn't believe.

Many of them believed it completely.

That is the most important thing to understand.

The capacity of human beings to commit profound violence against other human beings while experiencing themselves as their benefactors:

That capacity is not a historical artifact.

It is a permanent feature of what power does to the moral imagination of the people who hold it.

Understanding that is the beginning of understanding what we are still dealing with.