Internal colonization.

• Author: Ayres, Ed

Years ago, progressive educators began complaining students in the "developed" world were getting a heavily distorted picture of history - that what children were being taught in school was almost entirely based on European and American perspectives. Such large pieces of the human puzzle as the civilizations of India, sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, and Indonesia remained utter blanks. In the United States, this bias was encapsulated by a phrase we learned as kids, that the Italian explorer Columbus "discovered" America - as though, until then, the "New World" had been just an empty space. We should have asked our teachers: if Columbus discovered America, didn't Attila the Hun discover Europe?

The Euro-centric bias was, of course, a kind of academic residue of the great European expansion of the 16th through 19th centuries, in which relatively small but densely populated and militarily powerful countries such as Portugal, Spain, England, and The Netherlands conquered vast pieces of the world and planted colonies on every habitable continent.

Now that European nations no longer run colonial empires, that imperial era is presumed to have ended. The most celebrated achievements of the 20th century have included the independence of former colonies, the rise of the United Nations as a benign overseer of universal human rights and needs, and the recognition that humanity has some common assets that need cooperative protection.

But many observers have argued that that Euro-centered bias, rather than being abolished, has only transmogrified into new forms. In one incarnation, the exploitation has gone from military dominance to economic dominance - enabling the industrialized nations to continue their disproportionate use of resources. In another incarnation, colonialism has gone domestic; instead of a country's resources and labor being exploited by foreign powers, they are exploited by their own governments and elites. And sometimes those two forms are combined, with the government/elite exploiters working closely with foreign investors to develop profitable export arrangements.

So the Euro-American dominance has continued, though it has expanded in the past half-century to include the Japanese. The resource-suppliers are still largely the former colonies, and the biggest per-capita consumers are still the former imperial powers whose history defines our mental picture of the world. The double standard imposed by our history teachers still...