re: Winston Churchill is no better than Adolf Hitler says Indian politician Dr Shashi Tharoor

Africa was and is a shithole because of a number of factors. The european empires are not one of them. European empires drew arbitrary lines in the americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Yet Africa alone stands as a total shithole.

Why?

Because the harbors are few and shallow, rivers are not navigable, railroad grades are steep, and disease from the tse tse fly kills your nice little shite. The continent never even developed permanent organization above chiefdoms, because the nice domesticable animals and plants grown in Mesopotamia couldn't hack the climate and natural fauna.

Africa being a shithole in current year has nothing to do with Europe. Europe didn't make it impossible without modern tech to connect regions economically. They didn't invent malaria or sleeping sickness. They didn't prevent the spread of domesticated animals past Ethiopia. They didnt prevent Africa's 7,000 languages from coagulating into regional lingua francas. Hell they fricking gave large sections of Africa the railroad, the harbor dredge, the lingua francas and the basic infrastructure.

The Middle East goes double. The arabs were pastoral nomads before the ottomans. They hated and revolted against the ottomans all the time, and did the same to the British. But it's the British's fault they're fighting now? Really?