Arabian Sights.....
"I might point out here that colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that is just confined to England or France or the United States. The interests in this country are in cahoots with the interests in France and the interests in Britain. It's one huge complex or combine, and it creates what's known not as the American power structure or the French power structure, but an international power structure. This [racist western] international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources."Malcolm X
The Roots of [WESTERN] Capitalism...
Plunder, slavery, genocide, forced labor and piracy: these are the true origins of [WESTERN] capitalism...
In his landmark work "Capital," Karl Marx attacks the mythology-presented-as-fact concerning the origins of the [Western] capitalist system. We are led to believe that it was the hard work, diligence and frugality of the capitalists that enabled them to amass vast sums of wealth. Marx, however, exposes the lie of this narrative. He demonstrates that the capitalist mode of production only began to develop after centuries of enormous "accumulation," the brutal result of piracy, raids, pillage, rape and massacres of whole peoples.
Marx writes: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. … If money 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."
Dutch colonialism, according to the lieutenant governor of the island of Java, was "one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre and meanness.
"In acquiring slaves, Dutch colonizers rounded up entire populations and locked them in secret dungeons before sending them off in slave ships. In 1750, the Javan province of Banjuwangi had a population of 80,000. But by 1811 the murderous Dutch occupation had left only 18,000 inhabitants, a reduction of over 75 percent of the population.
As a result of such genocidal atrocities, Holland by the mid-17th century had fully developed the colonial system and was at the peak of its commercial supremacy. It dominated the trade between East India and Europe, and its fishing, marine and manufacturing industries were far ahead of any of its competitors. Yet the masses of the Dutch people were, according to Marx, "more over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together."
In the early 17th century, the English wrested control of the Spanish slave trade to the Americas. As a result, their share in the sordid industry grew enormously. In Liverpool in 1730, 15 slave ships were active, but by 1792 the city's slaving fleet had ballooned to include 132 vessels.
The English East India Company dominated Indian and Chinese commerce. Its monopoly of unparalleled sources of wealth, including salt, opium and countless other commodities were the result of wholesale theft and slaughter. In India between the years 1769 and 1770, the company bought up all supplies of rice to artificially create a shortage. The result was a devastating famine that caused massive suffering and death.
In the Americas, the British colonial settlers were no different. They participated in the annihilation of entire populations. In 1744, when Puritans in Massachusetts declared the indigenous population "rebels," they set prices for their scalps and capture: 100 pounds for the scalps of males 12 and over; 105 pounds for male captives; and 50 pounds for the capture or scalping of women and children. Marx writes: "The British Parliament proclaimed … scalping as 'means that God and Nature had given into its hand.'" ...
Plunder, slavery, genocide, forced labor and piracy: these are the true origins of capitalism...Who are the real 'pirates' in Africa?
Matt Murrayhttp://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=11855&news_iv_ctrl=1261
We don't grasp the correlation between European [stolen] wealth and Afrikan ['Third World'] subjugation
Once while I was giving a talk about Africa to a group of adolescent African-American males, a young brother asked, "If Africa is so rich in natural resources, why do the people look so poor and starving?"
Due to time constraints I didn't have enough minutes to explain why, aside from racist anti-Afrikan stereotyping, the mass media deliberately depict Afrikans as underdeveloped, destitute, backward, diseased and staving. I didn't have time to tell them about the Berlin Conference of 1884 in which 14 nations in Europe and the United States sat around a large table and carved up the continent, conspiring to shanghai its riches, its natural and human resources and plotting to appropriate them for their benefit......
We don't question how Europe went from being a backward, starving, disease ridden and destitute subcontinent without resources to commandeering most of the world's wealth, while Afrika went from being the cradle of civilization with most of the gold-rich lands and mineral resources to being a vast expanse of arrested social and technological development?. . .
We don't grasp the correlation between European military and political ascendancy, its wealth and Afrikan subjugation. We've been duped into believing Europeans have a higher standard of living because they are smarter and work harder, rather than realizing Europeans are where they are today because of their history of covetousness, imperialism, larceny and rapine.
The so-called age of exploration wasn't a time of scientific investigation, mutually beneficial ethnic, racial and cultural relations or exchange. The whites made out like the bandits they were and still are.
Even before the industrial and technological revolutions, European imperialism and colonialism created wealth-generating opportunities and improved the quality of life throughout Europe while simultaneously introducing disease, social disruption, death and ecological and trade unbalances everywhere they set foot on planet Earth. This was true no matter which European nation was involved.
Not to mention how the whites forced or attempted to force the indigenous inhabitants of the lands they invaded - or the millions they kidnapped or bartered for - around the globe to work for little or nothing to enrich the mother countries. . ."
Junious Ricardo Stanton
The theft of African wealth
http://www.sfbayview.com/110205/thetheft110205.shtml
Lies, Injustice And The [Western] Capitalist Way: We're On The Highway To Hell-Don't Stop Us!
Jason Miller
We "Free World" capitalistic Westerners are a loathsome lot-or to put it more crudely, we suck.
When one considers how degenerate we are from a collective standpoint, it is difficult to suppress intense feelings of disgust and contempt. There are many layers to our repugnant, depraved, and "beloved" capitalism, a socioeconomic system which ultimately furnishes the members of its upper echelon with de facto licenses to exploit, plunder, and murder with impunity. Problem is that as one peels back each successive layer hoping to find some purity, one finds a more profound rot...
Our collective selfishness, self-absorption, narcissism, greed, and mean-spiritedness are psychic malformations wrought by the wretched systemic exploitation we hold so dear to our withered, Grinch-like hearts. Smug and self-satisfied in our deeply rooted belief in the idiocy that despicable character traits like greed and selfishness can be harnessed in such a way that they provide virtuous means to benevolent ends, we revel in the delusion that the tremendous effort necessary to nurture the human spirit is a waste of time. The uglier and coarser we become on the inside, the greater our likelihood of achieving "success" by the standards of our soul-murdering society. Our worship of a man like Donald Trump as a cultural icon demonstrates how spiritually perverse we have become...
How have the cynical and ruthless ruling elite of the United States and the "Axis of Good" accomplished this seemingly impossible feat?In breathtakingly simple fashion. Battering their "inferiors" with a dizzying array of cleverly crafted psychological assaults from cradle to grave, the plutocracy maintains the mass delusion that a system that exploits and impoverishes a majority of the population, rapes the Earth, and necessitates endless resource wars represents the pinnacle of our socioeconomic development...Consider that in the upside-down world the "keepers of the capitalist faith" have contrived, many vices and despicable human traits have been elevated to the status of virtue. Selfishness, avarice, ego, self-absorption, narcissism, careerism, winning at all costs, crushing the competition, the ruthless pursuit of profit, and gluttonous consumption are "all in a day's work" for the good little capitalists of America.Even those who have broken free of their indoctrination and recognize the depravity of enshrining infantile, mean-spirited, and cruel behavior have little choice but to practice it in some instances simply to survive in our reprehensible "dog eat dog" environment...As we busy ourselves compulsively pursuing the acquisition of material possessions, looking out for number one, vying for promotions, building and preserving our egos, and gorging on the latest brain candy the mainstream media is peddling, who wants to "endure the agony" of engaging in introspection, thinking critically, educating oneself, acting on one's conscience, empathizing, or pursuing a principled existence? Giving a damn isn't worth the trouble when we can simply swallow the lies, take the bribes, and let the rest of the human and non-human animals of the world pay our outrageous bills (using their pain and blood as currency)...But we do need to realize that our path to hell isn't paved with good intentions; we are racing along a road to perdition comprised of suffering, subjugation, oppression, theft, destruction, and wholesale murder.We are riding alongside Angus and Malcolm Young on the "Highway to Hell."...Continued...http://www.countercurrents.org/miller301207.htm
"The beast that digs and forges and consumes, blind to everything but its immediate needs, is then no longer the individual man...
In the past two hundred years the European has destroyed or corrupted a great number of ancient cultures which, if we have the courage and the honesty to look into the mirror they show us all what we need to know of ourselves...
the most illuminating examples lie in the very heartland of the modern [western] world- in the encounter between the invading palefaced people and the Indians of North America...
What happened was not merely tragic, it was diabolical...
The conscious, calculated, methodical, official, and by no means anonymous destruction of the "red" race, its traditions and cultures, in North America and partly also in South America, far from being an unavoidable process....certainly remains one of the greatest crimes and most notable vandalisms of all human history. Since the presence in their midst of people who find meaning in the world is intolerable to those who think themselves the victims of a meaningless universe, the basic structure of the Indian's spiritual life had to be destroyed...
These invaders [the Europeans] differed from all others...they alone had achieved the capacity to look upon everything in creation as material for exploitation, seeing a tree only as timber, a lamb only as meat, and a mountain only as the site for a quarry. This single-minded rapacity now taken for granted as 'natural' to man was so strange to the Indians...that the invaders might as well have come from another planet...
the combination of greed and fraud and perfidy which they encountered in their dealings with the white man Nothing in their previous experience had forewarned them that men could be like that...the invaders though to Indian eyes they appeared ignorant, physically dirty, mostly drunken and, in general, both Godless and lawless, carried dreadful weapons in their hands and enjoyed all the advantages which the unprincipled enjoy in their dealings with those for whom honour is paramount. The hordes spread out over a land of almost magical richness...and congratulated themselves upon pursuing so worthily their 'civilizing mission'.
For the victims of this 'mission' there could only be...sadness deeper than imagination can hold- sadness of men completely conscious, watching the universe being destroyed by a numberless and scorning foe..."
Charles Gai Eaton
King of the Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World, P.131, 133-134
Arabian Sights
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