Re: racism and world system theory

In a message dated 12/29/2001 9:02:14 PM Central Standard Time, snedeker@concentric.net writes:


> I would like to thank Louis Proyect for pointing out the racist nature of
> Gordon Hales posts. I was unable to put my finger on this key. after all,
> how else can one defend empire by the logic of the strong against the weak.
> "nation" or is it tribe? what is all this talk about hatred for the Other?
> of course, it is racism that unlocks the door of empire. Hale talks about
> ancestors and all they have built. is this some kind of code for racial
> domination and conquest? I think it is. this is perhaps why Hale has been so
> vague about details. his little story about the Sudan gives it all away.


       If you people are college students, let alone graduates, I wonder how you manage to survive when you seem to be unable to read messages as they are written.  You have read into my messages data that is not there.  

       The little story of the Sudan, as you put it, was meant to show that a person who had no European education could see through all of the smoke and rhetoric of the educated, and arrive at the brutal truth of the way the world is actually run.

       I grew up with Mexican Americans and African Americans.  I played ball with them.  I worked with them.  Yes, in my youth they were both considered a lower class of people.  I have not said, then or since, that I agreed with that assessment.

       You folks like to throw the name Marx around.  In my youth I too thought that Communism was the most equitable form of government.  This was when I was young and foolish.  I have not said any of you are young and foolish, I said that I was.  Holy cow, it is difficult to write anything so that you people don't twist it around because I disagree with your high and mighty ideas.

       I saw what Communism could do and how it, too, was just another operation which favored a select elite.  Capitalism and our system in the United States is the same but a little less crude.  Let's see now, I insinuated that the system of the United States is not the same as capitalism didn't I.  I must make that idea clear.  The system of government in the United States is a capitalistic system heavily overlaid with socialism.  

       I am not trying to defend what all of the European governments did in Africa or other parts of the world.  None of the European governments were angelic in their treatment of the native peoples of areas that were under their power.  This cannot be defended except by stating that the world was run in that manner in that time.  We cannot go back and change it.  Why keep harping on it.  Why not try to let those areas which have become independent run their own nations.  It is not necessary for any European, or other, assistance.  Indeed, that is probably the worse action that could be taken.  The people in these nations must make their own way in the world as it is, not as some Eurocentric do-gooders want to make it.


Gordon Hale