Vijay Prashad how the West sees colonialism

They still have this huge feeling that the West only acts to bring good, never for some bad purpose.  And the reverse of that is the adversaries of the West are always savages.  You see, that's the colonial mindset that the West goes into the colonies to civilize people, but when the colonial rises up and fights back, they are being savages.  

This goes back to the way Western reporters wrote about Khartoum, the Battle of Khartoum in 1884.  They wrote about the Boxer Rebellion in this way.  Every time the Chinese resisted the opium wars and so on, the Chinese were treated as savages in the media, like, "how dare you fight, and if you fight, you fight brutally."  When the Indians rose up in 1857 in the great Indian uprising against British rule, every British newspaper said, "these are savages, they conduct attrocities."  After that war ended, Indians who were caught by the British were strapped to cannons and the cannons were fired as a warning to others not to fight.  I mean, it's a brutal, brutal repression of people.  And yet, that doesn't change the impression of the West as aggressive.  The West is always doing things for human rights and the savages are always wrong.

~ Vijay Prashad, "Critic Vijay Prashad slams the West's belligerent foreign policy," CGTN, 2:45 mark, September 26, 2021