Re: Still baffled

And this is the second of two messages that I'm forwarding from Jeffrey
Sommers in Latvia -- he's having problems posting to the list.

Randy McDonald
Charlotetown PE
Canada

>X-POP3-Rcpt: mcdonald@kiln
>Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 08:30:19 +0300
>From: jeffrey sommers <jsommers@latnet.lv>
>Reply-To: jsommers@latnet.lv
>Organization: World History Center <www.whc.neu.edu>
>X-Accept-Language: en
>To: mcdonald@isn.net, wsn@csf.colorado.edu
>Subject: Re: Still baffled
>References: <1.5.4.32.20000429025201.006792a8@mailer.isn.net>
>
>Dear Randy,
>
>The distinction (20th cc) is somewhat arbitrary.  If anything, US
>removal policies
>of American Indians (ethnic groups) were more brutal than those
>exercised by
>authoritarian states only a few decades later--and here I mean removal
>rather than genocide policies.
>The US pretty much finished the job
>with Wounded Knee at the close of the 19th cc.  Job completed, it then 
>began
>expansion into the Philippines, 25,000 killed and another 200,000 dead
>from effects
>of pacification effort, and to enforce its hegemony over the Wester 
>hemisphere,
>which included numerous invastion with some considerable deaths, such as
>in the 19
>year long occupation of Haiti.
>
>It took a long time to make the US anything resembling democratic. 
>Long, hard fought struggles from below, and it still has a long way to go.
>
>Best,
>
>Jeff
>
>The McDonald Family wrote:
>
>> At 08:47 PM 4/28/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>> >Randy and others,
>> >
>> >I still continue to be baffled by a comment like this:
>> >
>> >"The crimes of the United States and the leading democratic western 
>European
>> >colonial powers, in their colonies and quasi-colonies and 
>protectorates, are
>> >beyond dispute by myself. I'll only say that unlike the Soviet Union, 
>and
>> >most unlike Nazi Germany, their crimes occurred outside the boundaries 
>of
>> >the metropole. In thats sense and that sense only, they were limited."
>> >
>> >===========================================
>> >
>> <<Why in the world should that make ANY difference?  National boundaries,
>> borders, are just LINES created by different ruling classes depending on
>> what they can get away with.  Even discounting the genocide of Native
>> American Indians and the slavery/murder of African American slaves, which
>> could be said to have mainly happened before imperialism was 
>consolidated,
>> two million in prison in the U.S. today is a very profound development. 
>As
>> Andy and other pointed out, there's been quite a bit of terror at within 
>the
>> industrialized countries also.>>
>>
>> So far as I know, at no time since the beginning of the 20th century did 
>the
>> United States government operate any gulags to liquidate American 
>citizens
>> living within American territorial boundaries. It did not send death 
>squads
>> to the South to drive black sharecroppers off the land in the 1930's to
>> create larger agricultural fields; it did not deport the Navajo to 
>Alaska,
>> killing a third of them in the process, and let them come back only a 
>couple
>> of decades later to find their most productive lands occupied by Anglo
>> _colons_. The United States was all-too-frequently racist, anti-Catholic,
>> anti-Semitic, xenophobic, anglochauvinistic, anti-feministic, but at 
>least
>> it deigned to spare the lives of its citizens.
>>
>> I agree with you totally that that is very small comfort, certainly no
>> comfort to the colonized peoples and not much comfort to the colonizers. 
>It
>> reveals how very thin the line beetween peace and justice, and noise and
>> injustice, is, and the meagre grounds on which imperialists claim the 
>right
>> to dominate colonized peoples. We need to remember that thin line, and to
>> remember that when you take that line, _everyone_ suffers -- colonizers 
>and
>> the colonized -- and you have achieved a totalitarian state on the order 
>of
>> Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union in most of its lifetime. Imperialism is
>> only superior to Naziism or Stalinism in that it pretends, most of the 
>time,
>> when you're looking, to keep itself to an implicit promise to keep the
>> terror out of the metropolitan society. And when you're not looking, it 
>can
>> turn on you, but colonizers can pretend that of course it would never do
_that_.
>>
>> <<But more directly,  if you believe that there is yet the distinct
>> possiblity of another major war involving "core"  (Western Imperialist)
>> ruling classes, then it may be the case that the assumed geographic 
>limits
>> of imperialism's horrors may expand quite rapidly. Bombs over New York or
>> chemical/biological warfare in Chicago may sound highly improbable, but
>> social scientists learn to "Never Say 'Never' ".>>
>>
>> Well, we did live with that during the Cold War.
>>
>> The Second World War gave us a taste of it, with the nuking of Hiroshima 
>and
>> Nagasaki, with the firestorms in Dresden and Hamburg, with the death 
>camps
>> at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, with the V-2 rockets falling 
>like
>> rain on western Europe and the mobile front decimating entire provinces 
>in
>> Russia and Ukraine and Poland.
>> A Third World War -- between the Triad and a Russo-Chinese alliance? 
>between
>> an Amero-Japanese alliance and a greater European Union? between power 
>blocs
>> the likes of which we have no idea? -- would take the horrible 
>destruction
>> to which Europe suffered, expand it ten-fold or a hundred-fold, and 
>disperse
>> it liberally across the entire Northern Hemisphere.
>>
>> I wouldn't be surprised if a new imperialism forged in the Kondratieff
>> up-cycle will turn out to be the ruin of the world when the down-cycle
>> begins. I'd wager that this new imperialism would have the best chance of
>> coming about if the up-cycle doesn't see any dispersion of wealth beyond 
>the
>> Triad economies and selected lucky Second World states. Imperialism may
>> perhaps come into vogue in the Triad because it promises to draw a
>> comforting line around the imperial/colonial states, protecting the 
>fearful
>> inhabitants from the chaos of the world outside, presenting itself as 
>better
>> -- for the citizens of imperial states, anyway -- than other systems, 
>like
>> fascism, naziism, or communism, that would entail a heavy cost for the
>> imperial powers (i.e. secret police, death camps, deportations, et 
>cetera).
>>
>> Just like the colonial powers of the Long Nineteenth Century, the 
>imperial
>> powers of the 2030's and 2040's would probably convince themselves that 
>they
>> are only doing their duty by protecting their citizens from the wrath of 
>the
>> Other, and that they are actually doing the colonized a favour by 
>imposing
>> totalitarian order on them. And just like the colonial powers of the Long
>> Nineteenth Century -- particularly the more aggressive and oppressive 
>ones,
>> like Russia and Germany -- they wouldn't realize that imperialism was 
>only a
>> short-to-medium-term solution, and that it would soon turn on _them._
>>
>> It bears notice how this bears a great resemblance to the situation that,
>> according to Dr. Wagar, would result in a global socialist revolution. In
>> fact, from what I know of his book, it bears a very strong resemblance to
>> his scenario for the future.
>>
>> >Alan Spector
>>
>> I hope that I've made myself clear, here.
>>
>> Randy McDonald
>> Charlottetown PE
>> Canada
>
>--
>Jeffrey Sommers
>World History Center
>Boston/Riga
><www.whc.neu.edu>
>
>"Adam Smith started with a view of the forest but his followers lost
>themselves in
>the woods."
>       --John R. Commons, 1934--
>
>
>
>