Posted on 06/19/2006 6:11:46 AM PDT by mcvey
Oh, yes, it was legitimate to remove the Indians for they didn’t use money, Locke’s benchmark for a commonweal united by a social contract. Nor did American Indians maximize production, which sinfully wasted what God had provided human kind. The point is not Locke’s quaint coin trick and Calvinist apologia for Indian-removal—that would have happened without his imprimatur—but rather the more historically interesting point that he ballasted parliamentary liberalism by assuming imperial control of exploitable resources of conquered overseas societies. Since Locke, Western societies have promised their discontented non-owning classes more and have looked covetously at their imperial holdings and spheres of influence in search of fulfillment of the promise. That the strategy didn’t, doesn’t, always work—history can be chancy —is evidenced by the rising price of gasoline in the US as a result of our Iraq debacle. The temptation of empire is the permanently structured economic danger to democracy.
--snip--
I want to highlight a final deep colonial obstruction to democratic thought, this time in its most global dimension: bad thinking about “the Other.” Edward Said’s work on “Orientalism,” on the invidious view cultivated in the West of non-Western cultures, has taken us part of the way. But what about the uses in our imaginative literature, art, theater, opera, films, popular culture of “natives” that we all have seen always languishing lazily under palm trees, or loved and left, or doing savage dances and rituals, or shot, or trying to kill us, or—and this is perhaps the great crime of aesthetic modernism—put in a work to represent a world empty of content and meaning. As in Baudelaire’s Black Venus, in the paintings, poems, and novels of modernism, salvage blacks, or their equivalents have been markers of modern formalist invention. Their humanness dissolves into art.
(Excerpt) Read more at hnn.us ...
For the art ping list (I guess?)
The interesting part is how the idea that those sitting on a piece of ground must be left in perpetual control of its resources directly contradicts the aithor's probable socialist/Marxist ideology.
If resources are to be used to produce equality among all humans on the planet, why should Indians and other "indigenous peoples" have some pre-emptive right to the land and its resouces they sit on, purely as a result of historical chance?
I tried to read it but my mind began to turn into green cheese so I stopped.
It is interesting that I have never seen any comment on the invidious view of the West that is cultivated in non-Western cultures, or for that matter (as in this piece), within (anti-)Western culture itself. That is taken for granted as being utterly logical and appropriate.
It is interesting that I have never seen any comment on the invidious view of the West that is cultivated in non-Western cultures, or for that matter (as in this piece), within (anti-)Western culture itself. That is taken for granted as being utterly logical and appropriate.
Lebovics is a French cultural historian whose books are so sought by followers that you can buy his most recent tome in English, listed at $75, for $15. The guy would have us believe that France has handled it cultural milieu with dexterity and aplomb (and there I gave yous some of Lebovics purple prose). He seems unwilling, however, to take on the problem of Islam and France, and would much prefer to lecture Americans on our early history while forgetting himself the cultural Darwinism (even before survival of the fittest was a common explanation used to explain or justify man's actions) that dominated the 19th century.
It is a great thing that this country exists; we have done the world so much good, and continue to do so.
Which is a heck of a good point. I have never seen one of this ilk complain because the Romans displaced the Etruscans or the Anglo-Saxons displaced the Britons.
Yea, it has that effect. The leaps of logic are so great that it turn the solid into the "holey."
As a post above said, it is on one hand the Marxist theory of colonies and on the other hand the idea that some groups do not engage in historical processes unless forced to do so.
I wonder if this wise and sage writer has any idea what happened between the Iroquois and the Susquehannocks? Before the Europeans came?
I think it's an article about Robert Mugabe.
"The guy would have us believe that France has handled it cultural milieu with dexterity and aplomb"
Is that so? Then why is France so hated in West Africa?
It boggles the mind...
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