But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors.Ĥ. Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But you will not be able to pull them out they’ll have to stay there till the end. And if you chose to be victims and to risk being put in prison for a day or two, you are simply choosing to pull your irons out of the fire. Very well then if you’re not victims when the government which you’ve voted for, when the army in which your younger brothers are serving without hesitation or remorse have undertaken race murder, you are, without a shadow of doubt, executioners. A fine sight they are too, the believers in non-violence, saying that they are neither executioners nor victims. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions. There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism. Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see what is becoming of us. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.ģ. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls.Ģ. The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. To put this in a contemporary context, the ratio of native survivorship in the Americas following European contact was less than half of what the human survivorship ratio would be in the United States today if every single white person and every single black person died. What this means is that, on average, for every twenty natives alive at the moment of European contact-when the lands of the Americas teemed with numerous tens of millions of people-only one stood in their place when the bloodbath was over. The pace and magnitude of their obliteration varied from place to place and from time to time, but for years now historical demographers have been uncovering, in region upon region, post-Columbian depopulation rates of between 90 and 98 percent with such regularity that an overall decline of 95 percent has become a working rule of thumb. Within no more than a handful of generations following their first en counters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere’s native peoples had been exterminated. this is the pile of corpses capitalism is built on: not explicitly marxist, but it’s probably done more to radicalize me than any other piece of writing. StannardĪbout the colonization of america. Some suggestions below (all books should be available either on or as pdf/epub files on libgen) The most important value for me as an ML is anti-imperialism, so i guess i’ll always recommend that people start with works centred on that
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