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According to a recently published editorial, the thing about Western-world feminism that you probably don’t know is that it does not owe its origin to the 19th-century first-wave suffragists, abolitionists and socialists of song and story, but rather to men — specifically European imperialists and colonialists. From “time immemorial,” the invaders of Muslim lands have always put ideas about women’s equality to crude use in a “colonialist saviour complex” that has persisted in justifying imperial conquests around the world, most recently and notoriously in the case of Afghanistan. “It is typical colonialist nonsense,” the editorial says.
You could mistake the above proposition for an overwrought passage from the lecture notes of some painfully white gender studies professor who is determined to attract public notoriety sufficient to have her (or his) colleagues take him (or her) seriously. You could throw up your hands and utter some hoarse jibe about the absurdity of wokeness, or about “political correctness gone mad.” You’d be dead wrong about the passage coming from a gender studies professor, but it isn’t going too far to suggest you could be making an honest mistake.