more on colonialism

It strikes me that the US and Canada were unusual colonies because they were white people.  They were also different in that a lot of the colonists left because they were hostile to the British government.  Wait a minute, did I call us colonists?  I suppose we (Americans) were colonizing the Indians, not really, the Spanish and Portuguese colonized their Indians putting them in settlements and teaching them about Jesus, why so many Indians are still in South, as opposed to North America, where we basically just took there land and threw them out. 

It's been the subject of many books why in the last half of the nineteenth century Europe, a former backwoods, came to colonize a good part of the rest of the world.  Myself I think we just happened to be at the right place at the right time, if the yellow, red, brown, or black people had been there they would have done the same.  This is not what the white people at the time thought.  They thought that the fact that they were currently at the top of the heap meant that they were clearly superior to any nonwhites.  This gave them a license to treat the nonwhites badly, but the bleeding hearts of the time thought it was our responsibility, the white man's burden, to raise them up to our level of civilization.

Bleeding hearts have never been a powerful constituency, and their aims became window dressing for steamrolling the natives.  The Conquistadors encountering Indians would yell at them in Spanish to lay down their arms and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior and when the Indians ignored that it was clobbering time.  Technically they were converting rather than conquering the Indians though they did manage to ship a lot of gold (to kill Protestants in Italy and the Netherlands) back to Spain. 

But in more benevolent colonies an attempt was made to transport the European forms of government to the colony, but there was a reluctance to give them much schooling lest they become restive, and to allow native people to assume any kind of high office in their own countries because, you know, they weren't white.  When the Europeans found the colonies unprofitable and shed them in those outlandish ceremonies the countries fell on their face.

Some of these countries were still getting their freedom back in the sixties and anti-colonialism was a part of the new left's lexicon,  It fit right in, you could blast the powers that be while excusing the excesses of the downtrodden by calling them victims.

You don't hear it so much anymore, because after all that was like seventy to a hundred years ago, and stronger countries have always bullied weaker countries, so like, you know, get over it.


I was going to get into speculating on why South America, so big and rich in resources has never been much of a player on the world stage, but that will have to wait for the next posting.  Adios.