period got off to a variety of starts. In some places, the withdrawal was smooth; in others, it opened up vacuums that consumed everything in the vicinity. But wherever the case, as the West retreated, anti-Westernism advanced. A correction was due. But in no time, that correction became an overcorrection. People in the former colonies who praised or emulated aspects of the colonial era were suddenly pariahs. And in the West itself, the pendulum also swung. Where once many people had thought that the West could do nothing wrong, the West entered an era where it became dangerous to concede that
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