The Others - Native Americans, Arabs, Blacks, etc.

A related excerpt from Eqbal Ahmad's column, "Culture of Imperialism":

"Boundaries were drawn to deny our common humanity. An ideology of difference possessed the empires' intellectuals and administrators. They had a mania for classifying people and viewed each as a distinct, necessarily divisible entity. Easy intermingling of peoples was regarded as somehow unnatural. Edward Said points to how the English were astonished to find Muslims, Christians and Jews socializing as though they were not different species. So in the novel Tanered, one of Disraeli’s characters quips that 'Arabs are simply Jews on horseback, and all are orientals at heart.' The policy of divide and rule flowed easily from this sectarian outlook.

While the menace of miscegenation haunted imperial cultures and barriers of policy and social sanctions were erected to prevent it, complex mechanisms emerged to break the barriers to conquest and domination. There was the notion of mystery, as in the mysterious East, an invitation to exploration. Mysteries, after all, demand solution by enlightened, knowledgeable men. Or the idea of darkness, as in the dark continent to which one should bring light. Or the notion of empty lands which of course needed filling up. Or the veritable literature on identifiable, collective mind the Arab mind, Hindu mind, etc. that is still prevalent. All led to a set of common conclusions: they are not like us. They are different. Hence they can be treated differently, according to standards other than those that apply in civilized places. The outlook was so embedded in civilization that it traversed centuries. One finds strange bedfellows, separated in time and space. 'We must save Chile from the irresponsibility of its people', Henry Kissinger was reported to have said while proceeding to destabilize the elected government of Salvadore Allende. A century earlier Karl Marx had written: "They cannot represent themselves. They have to be represented." Third World dictators give precisely this argument to justify their tyranny. This culture is pervasive, it cuts across continents and penetrates our outlook by a variety of mediums. As I outline this talk in the flight from Islamabad to New York, Pakistan International Airlines shows Star Trek: First Contact. I snip at what looks like a high-tech, outer-space replay of an earlier voyage into an 'undiscovered' world. Commander Jean-Luc Picard plays a modern-day Cortes, leading the crew of the newly commissioned Enterprise E to war against the Borg "an insidious race", informs the PIA flier.

Those "half organic aliens" appear like Indians in the early Westerns mysteriously, ubiquitously and sometimes seductively. Violence flows freely as 'contact' is made. Fallen aliens are shot even as they beg for mercy. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew commit quite a holocaust with an insouciance we are expected to appreciate only because they have vanquished an alien race mysterious, dangerous, seductive and, ultimately, vulnerable. The Borgs have no individual identity, only a collective one. Their defeat is deemed final only when their roots are destroyed, when their head which assures life's motion to the entire race is cut off. An idea redeems this "mission"; once contact has been made the world will change. Promises Captain Picard: "Poverty, disease, and war will end."

Star Trek is but a crude, popular expression of the culture of imperialism. This culture is not Western any more. Rather, it enjoys hegemony, it has become global. Note an irony: Pakistan International Airlines, which will not serve wine to passengers, happily serves up Captain Picard on its flights."

http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/9803/eqbal_ahmad/imperial.html

A critical point to note here is that Colonialism was not separate from the European project of the (so-called) Enlightenment. Colonialism was not contradictory to the liberal ideals of political rights and self-determination. The very ideals of European Enlightenment, anchored in the notions of uni-linear progress of history and civilizations, the emphasis on particular modes of thought and reason, the importance on individual rights and private property as the means of self-actualization, and the difference between the "modern" and "backward", implied that Europeans see themselves as "different," "superior," and "civilized" in comparison to other unfamiliar cultures and peoples. Both John Locke and John Stuart Mill, the champions of Liberalism, supported and rationalized the practice of colonialism through these ideals. To them it was a "progressive force" that would civilize the indigenous people (sounds very familiar, huh?!). That is the "White Man's Burden". These ideals were also incorporated into particular versions of Christianity that were brought to the Americas by the European settlers.