Re: Still baffled

At 10:08 PM 4/28/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>I must chime in: Why is it "very small comfort"? (that is, some comfort) 
>Are you an anti-racist? Does it make a difference where these atrocities 
>occur? Your continued insistence that it has *some* significance that 
>certain mass slaughters did not occur for urbans in the U.S. sounds very 
>racist/nationalist to me. You must explain why it has *any* political 
>significance *where* people are killed.

It is of significance to those people, living in the metropolitan areas of
imperialist/colonial powers, who knows that they won't necessarily be
victimized by the imperialists. 

Consider French colonial expansion in North Africa from the 1870's up to the
1905 crisis, undertaken with the aim of ensuring that Tunisia would not
become Italian or that Morocco would become German, providing a profitable
space for French bourgeois to make a handsome living (according to Zeldin,
the average income of a North African colon around the time of the Second
World War was the same as of the average American), and bolstering the
prestige of France through colonial infantry, additional resources for
French industrialization, and generally enhancing French cultural
penetration of the Arab world. 

Many French did abhor the most notorious violations of the rights of
colonial subjects. But had you taken a French bourgeois or worker off of the
streets of Paris in 1900, or 1925, and asked him whether or not France
should set its colonies free, said Frenchman (or Frenchwoman) would probably
have disagreed with you. French colonialism was seen as a mean of enhancing
French power and prestige, thus allowing France to remain a Great Power. For
France to give up imperialism would be tantamount to accepting her
subordination to other, more aggressive European states, particularly 
Germany.

Perhaps a clearer example of this can be found in the Japanese case. Japan's
introduction to the world-system in the mid-19th century led it to fear the
possibility that Japan itself might become a colony of some aggressive
colonial power from the West. After Japan's victory over Russia, the
possibility of its formal colonization by a Western power had become
virtually nil. But despite this spectacular victory, the Japanese elite was
still concerned, afraid that Japan still might be reduced to a position of
informal dependence on the Anglo-American powers. So, Japan embarked on its
colonial expansion -- first Taiwan, then Korea, then China. The Second World
War in the Pacific was precipitated mainly because of Japanese fears that
without imperialism, Japanese interests would be threatened by a resurgent
China and/or by a hostile Soviet Union, and that Japan would be permanently
weakened. It is my impression that after Japan's defeat in the Second World
War, Japan consented to a permanent Amero-Japanese alliance only because it
feared Soviet and Chinese intentions.

It is not of any comfort to the people who've the "glory" of being colonial
appendages, nor should it be. But just as in France fo the better part of
the second French colonial empire, or in Japan in the eighty years after
Japanese "opening", it was a comfort to the people living in the imperial
power's metropolis. Particualrly in the Japanese case, most people saw no
choice between imperialism and totalitarianism, and positively preferred
imperialism -- at least _they_ wouldn't suffer directly.

>Paul

Randy McDonald
Charlottetown PE
Canada