Cognitive Dissonance

During one of the classes this week Cas mentioned the cognitive dissonance that the countries and people of Europe experienced in relation to the colonization and exploitation of other continents, particularly Africa, and nowhere is there a better example of this than the pro-Boer movement. This movement protested the British use of concentration camps for the Boers in South Africa, and pro-Boers "campaigned against these violations of white European's rights while saying very little about the fate of native Africans in the conflict" (Coffin, 819). This is one of the dumbest and most nonsensical things anyone could come up with, unless, of course, they shared that odd mixture of imperialist, racist, and enlightenment belief. While a pro-Boer's stance of "Don't do anything bad to African people (as long as they're white)" doesn't sit quite well with most of us in 2009, it sure made a lot of sense to 19th-century Europeans. Without cognitive dissonance, there wouldn't have been such an acceptance of imperialism, let alone the drive to civilize the rest of the world. It was this cognitive dissonance that justified imperialist foreign policies to the liberal democratic (and other) governments of Europe and their people.