TRIGGERnometry - Cancelled for Defending Colonialism - Bruce Gilley

Episode Date: October 18, 2020

Bruce Gilley is professor of political science at Portland State University. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a professor of political science at Portland State University. Bruce Gilly, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It is great to have you here. We obviously have met before, but other people may not know who you are. Tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what has been your journey through life. That brings you here.

Well, I'm a political scientist, as you said, and I was a journalist before I left journalism and went into the academy and ended up here in beautiful Portland since I'm from Western Canada, my wife's from California, so this was more or less the midpoint. And I work in comparative politics, international relations, international development issues, And I'm best known because I wrote an article in 2017 called The Case for Colonialism, which apparently I was not supposed to write because apparently that's offensive. And there is no case for colonialism. So I was canceled in the sense that the journal that published that article in 2017 was facing death threats to the editorial staff.

So I agreed to have it withdrawn. And now I've been canceled again because a biography of a British colonial official, Sir Alan Burns, that was actually shipping the stores already was canceled last week because a Maoist, Leninist, Mark Zedong theorist in Toronto also decided that that was inappropriate, that that should be read. And so here I am. Well, it's good to have you here. It seems our list of guests increasingly includes people who have been canceled as that phenomenon spreads. And obviously, we've had Nigel Bigger, one of your colleagues on the show, who was himself canceled for defending

your article in a Times piece as well. So we've talked to him about that. But before we get into the stuff about cancel culture and free speech and the ability for academics to debate ideas, what is the case for colonialism exactly? Because colonialism now seems to be sort of, it's like writing an article saying the case for Nazism to many people. Yeah, the case for colonialism is that colonialism, not only made people better off, more free. It allowed them to live, survive, boosted survival rates, access to food, water, protected minorities from human rights violations, especially women. That's what I would call the objective side of it. But I think the real dirty laundry in the

closet of most colonial writing is it was legitimate, too. The people, it by and large, which is why colonial governments had practically no colonial officials on the ground. Colonialism was mainly carried out by the people living in the places. And that's what I call the legitimacy argument. So those are the two key pieces. We could go on ad nauseum. I have a 40-page bibliography of research that supports that conclusion. And I understand that many people disagree, and they should. And we should be engaged in constant debates on this. And I don't expect it will end anytime soon. The question is, what does it say about a school of thought when it's afraid to hear counter

arguments? 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, the treatment of the locals there, the treatment of the Native Americans from there on in? the British Empire's conquests and oppression of people around the world, obviously slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, the conquist of does in South America. Surely all of that was bad, Bruce.

You wouldn't challenge that, would you? I would, actually. So first of all, most of what has been built up as kind of constant depression, starting with Columbus, was anything but Columbus was actually very sensitive, too, to, to the locals. There's a new article you may have seen in The Spectator showing, you know, that this was a settlement that was highly restrained for the time. Yes, did he have kind of consultative committees and recycling programs? No, but for the time, and certainly compared to the cultures that were otherwise likely to show up in these places, it was by far the most

enlightened and human rights sensitive form of encounter between civilizations the world has known. And I would say that's generally like as a general statement true about not just the British Empire because the British Empire is easy. It's easy to defend the British Empire. I would say this applies to the Portuguese Empire. This applies to the Germans. I have a book coming out on German colonialism in a bit a month. We'll probably be back here because there'll be another cancel war over that. But you know, my argument is colonial scholarship is basically a train wreck. and 50 years of ignorance have been produced by the Academy, and it's going to take a lot of work to recover an authentic, objective, evidence-based account of colonialism. Was there a lot of bad

stuff that happened during which half of the globe was ruled by five countries, billions of people over hundreds of years, and billions of interactions? Of course there was, but this is called selection bias when we find out those little incidents and then decide that they invalidate the experience. I don't know of a single case, and I again, I would say not a single case where we would say that people would have been better off had the colonialists not arrived. And taking into account also, you know, the horrific things that happened in these places, both before colonialism arrived, what would have happened had a different set of colonizers shown up, which almost certainly would also have been gun-toting Westerners, but without the accountability,

to governments that actual imperialism had. And the great historical amnesia, what happened after the colonialists were suddenly forced out? Not a pretty picture over the last 50 years. Do you think part of the problem is, Bruce, is that you make a case for colonialism? And in a lot of people's heads, what they think is that you're making a case for slavery? Yeah, or genocide or, you know, what about, so I call this the what about the what about the Mao? What about the Mao? What about the Herrero, what about the Magi Maggi Rebellion? What about Tasmania? Right? And so this is, this is kind of what I called what aboutism. So there's two answers to what aboutism. Yes, a lot of bad stuff happened and there's no excuse for it. And it was a failure of

accountability mechanisms. Sure. Great. 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. So as I said, I have a book coming out in German colonialism. I spent a lot of time talking about the Herrero Wars in German Southwest Africa, as well as the Majimaji Rebellion in German East Africa. 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. So, you know, the bigger issue is, why are we so scared to have these debates? Why is the

mere mention of an opposing viewpoint, you know, reason to rush to the cancel culture office and instigated an investigation. Bruce, I'm Ingus. You don't have to persuade me that the Germans were dreadful. Well, yes. Well, to that point, you know, much of the twisted and unfair historiography about German colonialism began with the British at the Treaty of Versailles, which was a, which is a real violation of the British empirical tradition and the British blue book tradition. The blue books were, of course, their annual reports on colonies. Well, they drew up a blue book on German colonialism in order to justify the seizure of German colonies at Versailles.

It was a real violation of that British empirical objective tradition and a sad chapter in British imperial rule and foreign policy because much of what was produced by the British, essentially for propaganda purposes at Versailles, became entrenched in the historiography about German colonialism, eagerly lapped up by the far left and East German scholars who, of course, we know, were absolutely in a position to engage in objective research and has become kind of locked in a way that is going to take just a massive effort to undo. So there you go, man.

It's all your fault and your far left. Very good. And that's what I keep telling him anyway, Bruce. But it's, let me ask you this, because I'm just curious, actually. actually, why is it important to have this different view of colonialism to the one that's being pushed at the moment? Why is that significant? So that's a great question, Constantine. And, you know, frankly, everyone from my wife on up around me will tell me, why are you doing this? You're causing yourself trouble. You're causing your family trouble. You're hated by your

colleagues in your department who spent a lot of time trying to find ways to drive me out. You're called a white supremacist. You know, is this worth it? Like, you know, why are you so engaged in this? So part of my answer is, well, I'm an academic. My job is to seek the truth as best I see it and pursue those research topics that I find interesting. So that's not very convincing to my wife.

So I think the bigger issue is, and I think this is what where it really is coming back to is you think it's just about the Herrero or you think it's just about the Mao, or the question of, you know, the Anglo-Egyptian condominium over the Sudan and some obscure historical issue. It's not because the whole rhetoric about the evil. of colonialism has now become the rhetoric about decolonize. Now, the decolonize is probably coming soon to a theater near you. It may be already in your workplace. And what is decolonize in a nutshell? Decolonize is an attack on the enlightenment and on science and reason. It argues that the basis on which liberal civilization has arisen is a fraud and we need to dismantle it. So we will no longer for instance, be promoting our colleagues in the academy based on their research records, but we'll be adopting alternative approaches to promotion, such as whether their friends think

they're great people, or whether they've made a big contribution to the latest social justice movement tearing down the downtown, right? So this is, to me, there's a lot more at stake here than just obscure debates about history. And I got into this with the Germans 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? And the arguments in favor of that say, well, look at how terrible it was for the Germans to be colonizers here. 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. If no harm was committed, then policymakers need to know that. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being,

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And what do you say, Bruce, to those people who say, look, these empires were fundamentally racist. It was basically white people going over to countries where they're brown people, enslaving them, taking their natural resources, transporting them, making them more impoverished and enriching the white countries. Well, yes, they were racist. Of course they were racist because everyone was a racist back then. So that's a totally anachronistic argument for one. What's the interesting question is in terms of the degree of racism, let's say, if we could measure it, how racist were they? And I would say they were the most unracist examples of governance the world has ever seen, especially compared to the racism that most subject peoples had experienced from the dominant tribes in their in their territories. Of course, this is how colonialism spread. It's spread because groups which were

facing annihilation or enslavement or extinction by major rival groups, whether it was the Bouganda in East Africa, whether it was the major black tribes moving into South Africa and displacing and enslaving the Coisians, the so-called Hottentotts, right? That, yeah, maybe they wouldn't let you into their clubs to have G&Ts at the end of the day. 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. So racism is relative and it's historically embedded. So 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. 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. There's a great book called Baba of Caro done by a British anthropologist Felice Smith. 1945, it was issued. And Bobo of Caro talks very explicitly about, you know, did I want to be subject to the Falanis, the slave empire that enslaved us and stole our daughters, or did I want to be under the rule of the British, who really just wanted us to stop killing each other and we're

willing to pay us if we worked for them. Hey, I'll take the racist British, if that's what you want to call them over the racist Volani. And I think in all circumstances, you know, this was the concrete choice. 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 for having accepted or acceded to Western colonial rule.

I was going to say, Bruce, neither of us is qualified to assess the merit. of the historical argument there. But one of the things that as a layman, I would say, Francis and I were just on holiday in Sicily, in the island of the southern tip of Italy. And that is a part of the Mediterranean that was conquered repeatedly by different groups and tribes over the centuries.

And every monument that we went to see over the course of two weeks, the guide would explicitly say, you know, the Carthaginians defeated the Greeks. They used the Greek slaves to build this temple. And then 100 years later, the Greeks came back and they used the Carthaginian slaves to build this temple. And then the Romans came and they enslaved both the Carthaginians and the Greeks, and they built this thing here. And it's a sort of universal constant through history.

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? I mean, that is one thing that if anyone who has any superficial understanding of history would tell you. Because white people love it when it's all about them. And that is the essence of Eurocentrism. I mean, it is comical to see these radical scholars, you know, arguing against Eurocentric knowledge and Eurocentric systems when their whole intellectual apparatus is to put the white men at the center and to keep him there, 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, you know, 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.

And then in Christian eschatology, of course, none of these people are Christians, but they're operating with a fully Christian template to therefore have attained moral superiority over others. So what is this? This is about trying to reestablish white moral superiority over other people. It is, to summarize racist, right? to to to to claim 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 it's about me.

It's about us, right? Is the embodiment of white supremacy. So, you know, this is why we know these arguments now about how whokeness and white supremacy, you know, in terms of that, that circle, you know, really. share a lot of fundamental premises. And I think you see it in this argument. There's a, there's a funny argument that Thomas Sowell, the great Stanford economist, says, you know, we look at Eastern Europe and Western Europe, you know, what was the difference? Why did Western Europe take off? Well, because the Western Europeans were conquered by the Romans and the

Eastern Europeans weren't. And thereby, the Western Europeans got the Latin alphabet and, you know, the rest is history, so to speak. So do the, do the, the, you know, the Western Europeans feel resentments against the Romans? Is their kind of historical animosity about the Roman Empire in Western Europe? No. And it's not just because they realized that the Roman Empire had very clear developmental benefits, but also it's because why would you give up your historical agency to a narrative about victimization? Because we don't want it to be about the Romans. And it's not about the Romans as a historical matter. History takes place through the active agency of those through which history affects them. 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 resurrects the centrality of the white man in world history. And, you know, I think Tertankar Roy, who is one of the people who blurbed my canceled book, wrote a letter to the publisher who canceled it. 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. That is the essence of white supremacy. Stop trying to control our history. with your white gilson.

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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 colloquial. colonial powers and the people that they, whose land they came to, to rule, all of them were involved in this. How should we, look, should we not ever feel guilt for anything that was done in the past? Should we just go, oh, no, that was part and parcel of the time. There's nothing wrong with genocide. There's nothing wrong with taking millions of people from Africa,

putting them on slave ships in which they suffer and drown and die of hunger and malnutrition. There's nothing wrong with that. That was par for the course. Is that how we should look at things. Surely we should have a bit more, more sort of contrition about things, shouldn't we? Okay, two issues, Constantine. First of all, Constantine, how many black people have you enslaved in your life? Well, I don't want to say on camera. Zero. And Francis, how many brown people's land have you stolen and then sold them into abject poverty? I'm a millennial. I can't even afford property, Bruce. Right, right. So, I mean, honestly, just as a starting point, that's a horrible, horrible,

even pre-modern form of thought that one would describe wrongs done by A to B, merely because B shares a similar genitalia or skin tone or heritage. 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. So that is like, I don't want to call that Old Testament because it's not fair to the Old Testament. But 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. So let's stop that right away. That is dangerous and evil.

The second question is, yes, we by all means, in history, engage in examination of good things and bad things that happened as a result of people's actions at different times of the past. Great. That's our, that's, that's what we do, right? We look at history, we try and objectively assess the good and the bad. What I would say is, again, we have to always keep in mind two things. 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. 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. Okay. 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.

Would you rather be a resident of contemporary Haiti, or would you rather be a resident of contemporary Bahamas? Bahamas is a counterfactual to Haiti, okay? So we can do that kind of thing. Counterfactual. Secondly, controls. People who have studied colonialism recently, and then, you know, 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. Why? Because so much of those forces, economic, social, technological, geographic, the spread of disease burdens, this would have all happened with or were not with or without Columbus or Lord Lugard, right? I mean, Western Europe was expanding and mainly through privateers. And colonialism, Mazewanime, is an attempt to govern that encounter in a way that would be better for both parties. So controls, super important. You know, that controls meaning the other things that were also happening at the same time.

Counterfactuals, controls, and finally, case selection. Don't cherry pick your evidence, right? Whenever you measure something, which is, for instance, How long did that rule last? How many rebellions were there? You need to have a proper understanding of how we conceptualize and then measure something like rebellion. It turns out when you scratch a little below the surface of most of this history, what is today called a resistance against the West or anti-colonial rebellion or self-immancipatory struggle, it turns out none of these struggles had anything to do with that. It was usually, you know, we don't like this tax or could you please

help me to expand and, you know, take over my neighbor's land. I mean, these were, these have been back, these have been backcasted as kind of as struggles against things that we later invented and decided we're wrong. So that's just, that's just bad history, right? And so many of these issues that we talk about, there's no attention paid to controls, counterfactuals, and case election. And yes, I'm sorry, I'm boring you because this is what social scientists do. But so many of the historical critiques I get come from people who I don't think could even vaguely understand those concepts because history has become kind of about humanities. It's about progressive visions and finding kind of stimulating and extolling the virtues of voices that haven't been heard. That's great.

That doesn't give us good answers to those big questions. You know, we're talking about bad history and so on and so forth. A few months ago, there was a statue of Edward Colston, who was a British slaver that was pulled down in Bristol. I don't know if you were following this at the time. Where do you stand on that, that we are reappraising these historical figures, looking at them? And for instance, in the case of Edward Colston, it was involved in the slave trade, made a lot of money from it. Should he have his statue in a prominent place? And if we're doing that, aren't we celebrating his crimes? 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. And if the process of decision making results in the decision he shouldn't be there, then he shouldn't be there. I mean, I don't think we can have a big deductive philosophical claim that he must be there. If the people of Bristol don't want him there, then he shouldn't be there. And if the protesters led to a change of heart by the city councilors, that that statute shouldn't be there. 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. 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. 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 rights. So 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. 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. I have no problem with democratic processes which lead to changes in public spaces consistent with the mores and preferences of the population affected. And what do you think about this wider trend, though, of reappraising historical figures and judging them with the values of our time? For instance, you know, Gandhi is now a racist and so on and so forth. We always knew Gandhi was a racist. 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, you know. He just, he became a totem and he was so ripe for destruction. Gandhi, of course, was a very loyal member of the British Empire and served in British forces in South Africa in World War I until he discovered he could make a name for himself by being anti-colonial. 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. I have no problem with that. I mean, no one has a, no statute has a right to the public square. 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, right, have an aspect of their biographies we should value, we should honor, and be historically understanding about the context in which they operated. That's the history debate. Got nothing to do with the statuary. And Bruce, let's move on to the other aspect of all of this, because let's say, say I'm listening to you and I fundamentally disagree with every single thing that you said,

right? Even if that were the case, I would still think that it's perfectly legitimate for your work to be published, to be peer reviewed, to be criticized by your peers who are qualified to talk about history, to say that Bruce Gilli doesn't know what he's talking about, here is some counter-evidence, here's the counter-argument, here are the facts of the matter. And for that to be a process of academic debate, discussion, et cetera. But that doesn't seem to be what's happened in your case. Why do you think the people who disagree with you, which I'm sure are many people, why can't they just do that? Well, as you say, there's two types of critics. There's the critics who say, Bruce, I think you really got it wrong. You know, I think the evidence is not in your favor.

But I will support your right to say it because I realize that you, refer to evidence that you use logic and that there's a lot of scholars who have produced things saying exactly the same that you've said. And as one Harvard scholar said to me after the case for colonialism article, he said, Bruce, you know, if you hadn't written that article, someone else would have because it's been brewing for a long time. Brewing for a long time was that the phrase he used. Meaning there's been a counterer revisionist literature growing and someone was going to summarize it and say, hey, this kind of treatment of colonialism as a unique, you know, Western Columbia, unique historical evil is just really so one-sided. We need to have that other counter argument.

Okay. Then there's the other critics who say, this argument is so noxious, so offensive as Sahar Khan at the Kato Institute claimed in one of the most widely read critiques, that it can't be heard. and I'm not a censor. It's because we need to uphold academic standards. And some things are so offensive and so beyond the pale and so inconsistent with the research is even to entertain them, even to give them a platform is to engage in a kind of academic misconduct. We are the guardians of truth. And the guardians of truth have a gatekeeping role. And sometimes we just need to keep barbarians outside of the gates.

So two types of critics, right? And the former I am completely comfortable with. Indeed, as I tell them, you know, much of my research on this topic draws upon people who disagree with me, but I respect their scholarship because they provide evidence and facts that are transparent enough to allow me to draw different conclusions from. No problem with them. Most of those people are signing the petition in my favor right now. It's the cancel culture mob, right, who is found, in very prominent positions, and you can find their names, they're the ones who seems to me feel insecure about their premises because they have responded with such virile attacks on me and my scholarship, is it makes you wonder, why do you feel so insecure? And Bruce, do you think that the attacks would have been any less vitriolic if you weren't a white men? Well, of course, I don't think there would have been attacks if I hadn't been a white man because I can give you a half a dozen scholars who are not white who have said what I've said and it just kind of passes under the radar. I think my new book on German colonialism,

I'm going to show you how much pushback there has been among Africanist scholars, scholars in Africa, right, black African scholars pushing back against the anti-German colonial historiography of mostly white Germans in Germany. So yes, that's absolutely a part of the dynamic here. It's also, I think that, you know, to be frank, I do have privilege. And what one of my sense of privilege is, is nobody can attack me for violating the norms of my tribe, right?

And a lot of these scholars in places like Pakistan, right, we actually, the book series that got canceled, we had a very interesting proposal from a Pakistani scholar, rewriting McCauley, you know, the story of McCauley in a very arguing that McCauley's been misunderstood by anti-colonial scholars. Well, he's now scared to death because he was submitting a proposal. I've told him, you're safe. I've told anyone about this, 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. And so one of the privileges of not being in one of those tribes is I have the role of speaking out. And yes, the vitriol that attends that.

We've spoken to many people, not just Nigel, but other academics who've been cancelled, 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? Yeah, and I think this is fundamental. 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. And, you know,

I'm sorry to make it so plain, but this is what's at stake. You don't think he was killed by the police officer, Bruce? So he died of a heart attack? Well. And he did not die of exfixiation. 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 it should be subject to discipline for the manner in which he died.

I have no problem with that. but the reason for his death, according to the corner, 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. He was having the heart attack when they were trying to get him into the car and he was resisting arrest. Right. 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.

This is the hero of your movement, right? This is problematic. And I think there's a lot more. at stake here. You know, when I talk about what's at stake, why am I spending time arguing about Lord Lugard? Because this is where it's coming out in the wash, right? And what is at stake here is? And this is happening in Britain. This is happening in Canada. This is happening in Australia. 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. 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. 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. And so when you tell us, we were called to this store to deal with a robbery and we found ourselves in a difficult situation. And yes, this is not ideal policing. And yes, he died. And yes, this is the subject investigation. Oh, this is a whitewash. We're tearing the place down. So black neighborhoods,

black businesses, black lives have been lost at an alarming rate in the last four months, not just the United States, but elsewhere, because of a movement that grew out of what is this fundamentally distortionary account of liberal society. And I think a lot is at stake here. This is not just about obscure historical arguments. This is about the foundations of a liberal society and whether we should understand them as basically good or basically bad. In other words, what you're saying, and I'm not. not sure in terms of George Floyd. I just, from my perspective, what I

understand was 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. Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, the world media and the BBC love, and the Australian media, too, they love these kind of TV, nightly news reports America at war with itself, right? I mean, there's just a kind of ghoulish fascination for watching American violence on the streets. But look in your own backyard.

You know, I'm Canadian. And the CBC loves, you know, stories about protests in the U.S. But meanwhile, you know, Alberta and Saskatchewan want to secede, Quebec is going to probably have another referendum. This is a country falling apart because it has been victimized by the same sort of narratives about its evil colonial, settler, colonial past as inspired protests and violence in the United States. So this is a global phenomenon, and it's rooted in a global set of claims that have dominated the academy and therefore spread into society at large, and in particular into elite and media culture for the last 50 years. And the chickens are coming home to roost. And so what do you think is going to is the end game of this particular movement, Bruce? 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. And the family, there's a big BLM supporter with signs and everything. The police said, sorry, we don't have time to investigate this because every night we're downtown protesting, you know, dealing with protesters. And we're backed up. We can't investigate your daughter's rape. Okay. So at a certain point, those who seek to tear down liberal civilization and the police and

democratic procedures and the economies that support our flourishing realize they're shooting themselves in the foot, they start to suffer the consequences themselves. Right. And I, you know, I hate to say this, but I think the only way for this. movement to arrest itself is to discover the consequences of what it's doing, right? And black businesses are the first to feel this, right? Now, black communities in the U.S., where murder rates are skyrocketing, thanks to the BLM movement, are starting to discover this, too. So, I mean, this is basically the revolutionary process, right? We can trace this in every revolution.

At a certain point, you get to the point of Thermidor and the backlash and the reaction. But in this case, the reaction is really just, maybe we do need police. Maybe we do need to fund our police. Maybe our police should be investigating rapes instead of trying to keep a bunch of delinquents from destroying our federal courthouse. Do you think that's the only way out of it, Bruce, there's no positive way. The only way is essentially is to let people create sort of chazas all over the United States, go there for a few days. If they make it out alive, they come back a little bit with a little bit more perspective, let's say, on this whole issue. Is that the only way? Is there no way we can talk about this?

Well, you know, again, I'm a big supporter of liberal fixes, such as let's reinvigorate debate, let's make sure we all adhere to democratic procedures, let's make sure our protest is peaceful, let's ensure that diversity of political viewpoints are present in the places where people are learning about the facts. So I love that. And that's obviously a program I'm fully on board with. I think what I've written about my own book being canceled in the Wall Street Journal this week is I'm starting to, maybe just because I'm getting old.

but and like Thomas Soll, the great black economists at Stanford, starting to wonder if we're not reaching a point of no return. And at that point, with the ship sinking, I'm not sure the bucket brigade is enough anymore, right? We need some more radical attempts to keep this thing afloat. And the sort of liberal fixes to a totalitarian problem don't always work. Just ask the people who had to flee the Russian Revolution. Bruce, this is a question that I seem to be asking almost every episode, but how much responsibility do the universities need to take for this? Well, I'm not sure we can ask the response to the universities if by that you mean the faculty and the administrators to fix this problem because they are the problem. I do think that the chancellors and the boards of trustees or boards of governors and the departments of education that,

oversee the standards and the funding and the rules that govern these institutions do have to take responsibility. It won't come from within the university. The university is the problem. Bruce, sorry to interrupt. Francis is a lefty. So when he said who should take responsibility, what he meant is who should be punished. Oh, I see, who should take responsibility? Well, you know, I don't blame anyone. I don't think anyone did wrong. I mean, if I'm a young scholar and I want to get a job in the English faculty, I will most assuredly write dissertation on a hitherto undiscovered black,

transgender woman who had her land stolen and how we need to elevate that voice. And I'll get a job. Well, good on you, you know. I mean, 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. That's great. You know, why would we say that's unfair? 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. However, over time, we need to change those incentives. 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, they should take responsibility because they failed to enact their jobs to make sure that universities, like all other parts, of federally funded or state-funded or government-funded institutions follow the expectations of democratic majorities.

Well, Bruce, thank you so much for your time. We're wrapping up. So we've just got one more question for you. Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society, but we really should be? I think we need to talk about what is the endgame for this, because it seems the more information we have, the more debate, the more podcasts, the more blogs, the more difficult it is going to be for us to understand why people have different perspectives on issues. And surely, we don't want to tear ourselves apart each time we discover a disagreement. We're not talking about the, in some ways, evolutionary flaw in our brains. That was really brains which were designed to deal with groups of 60 or 70 people and are

now interacting with several billion people simultaneously. We have to find a lot of people. We have to a better way of responding to things we disagree with or that we find offensive because I do think humanity is at stake. That's a really good point. Bruce, thank you so much for joining us. If people want to follow your case or support you in any way, what do they do? My Twitter handle is Bruce Gilly 3 and that probably gets you all you need to know. All right, fantastic. Thank you so much and thank you for watching. We will see you very shortly with another episode or a live stream. All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time. Absolutely, they do. Wednesday and Sunday for our episodes and Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday for our live streams. We'll see you soon, guys.