Free What's So Great About America by Dinesh D'Souza

that was inflicted by the rulers over their long period of occupation. Understandably the Indians chafed under this yoke. Toward the end of the British reign in India Mahatma Gandhi was asked, “What do you think of Western civilization?” He replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

    Despite their suspect motives and bad behavior, however, the British needed a certain amount of infrastructure in order to govern India effectively. So they built roads, and shipping docks, and railway tracks, and irrigation systems, and government buildings. Then the British realized that they needed courts of law to adjudicate disputes that went beyond local systems of dispensing justice. And so the English legal system was introduced, with all its procedural novelties, such as “innocent until proven guilty.” The English also had to educate the Indians in order to communicate with them and to train them to be civil servants in the empire. Thus Indian children were exposed to Shakespeare, and Dickens, and Hobbes, and Locke. In this way the Indians began to encounter new words and new ideas that were unmentioned in their ancestral culture: “liberty,” “sovereignty,” “rights,” and so on.
    This brings me to the greatest benefit that the British provided to the Indians: they taught them the language of freedom. Once again, it was not the objective of the English to encourage rebellion. But by exposing Indians to the ideas of the West, they did. The Indian leaders were the product of Western civilization. Gandhi studied in England and South Africa, Nehru was a product of Harrow and Cambridge. This exposure was not entirely to the good. Nehru, for example, who became India’s first prime minister after independence, was highly influenced by Fabian socialism through the teachings of Harold Laski. The result was that India had a mismanaged socialist economy for a generation. But my broader point is that the champions of Indian independence acquired the principles and the language and even the strategies of liberation from the civilization of their oppressors. This was true not just of India but
also of other Asian and African countries that broke free of the European yoke.
    My conclusion is that against their intentions the colonialists brought things to India that have immeasurably enriched the lives of the descendants of colonialism. Colonialism was the transmission belt that brought to India the blessings of Western civilization. It was a harsh regime for those who lived under it, to be sure. My grandfather would have a hard time giving even one cheer for colonialism. As for me, I cannot manage three, but I am quite willing to grant two. So here it is: two cheers for colonialism! Maybe you will now see why I am not going to be sending an invoice for reparations to Tony Blair.
    Back to Muhammad Ali: I understand him to be making the same point. Slavery was a grave moral crime that inflicted incalculable harm to the slaves. But the slaves are dead, and the truth is that their descendants are better off as a result of slavery. Jesse Jackson is vastly better off because his ancestors were enslaved than he would have been if that had never happened. If not for slavery, Jackson and others like him would be living in Somalia or Ethiopia or Nigeria. The enormous improvement in their condition can be verified by simply asking them whether they would consider moving to one of those places. As the African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston bluntly put it, “Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and that is worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.” 18
    I realize that in saying these things I am opening the door for my critics, and the incorrigible enemies of the West, to say that I am justifying colonialism and slavery. This is the purest nonsense. What I am doing is pointing out a historical fact: despite
the corrupt and self-serving motives of their practitioners,