Year 501 (2 page)

Partial change of course. The embargo persists, in defiance of the world. Tourism is barred. And in other respects too the punishment of Cuba for refusing to bend to US will and violence will continue as President Obama made clear, repeating pretexts that are too ludicrous for comment.

Domestic opinion no doubt is also a factor in Obama's “historic move”—though the public has, irrelevantly, been in favor of normalization for a long time. A CNN poll in 2014 showed that only a quarter of Americans now regard Cuba as a serious threat to the United States, as compared with over two-thirds thirty years earlier, when President Reagan was warning about the grave threat to our lives posed by the nutmeg capital of the world (Grenada) and by the Nicaraguan army, only two days' march from Texas. With fears now having somewhat abated, perhaps we can slightly relax our vigilance.
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The relevant point here is the ease with which crimes can be denied. It is even possible to radically erase history with such words as “I'm being honest with you. We can never erase the history between us,” produced without shame in the confident expectation that they will pass with little comment in respectable intellectual circles, at home at least.

It would be wrong, however, to suppose that failure to acknowledge severe crimes passes entirely without comment. Immediately below the New York Times editorial praising “Mr. Obama's Historic Move on Cuba,” the “Editorial Notebook” did sharply condemn the fact that “There has been precious little investigation or contrition over the crimes” of state. The reference is to “crimes of the Soviet Union” that are “little remembered in Putin's Russia,” so different from us.
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None of this should occasion surprise. It is, after all, nothing new. Such crimes as harsh torture, large-scale terror, and economic strangulation still fall far short of what the Nuremberg Tribunal defined as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”: the crime of aggression, the most extreme recent example being the US-UK invasion of Iraq. President Obama is honored for having called it a “strategic blunder,” joining the Russian leaders who criticized the invasion of Afghanistan on the same pragmatic grounds—without, however, benefiting from Western praise for their high principle.

The same principles are amply illustrated in the 500 years of imperial crime and the way they enter history, a history sampled in the text below, persisting with little change to the present day.

Part I

Old Wine, New Bottles

Chapter 1

“The Great Work of Subjugation and Conquest”

The year 1992 poses a critical moral and cultural challenge for the more privileged sectors of the world-dominant societies. The challenge is heightened by the fact that within these societies, notably the first European colony liberated from imperial rule, popular struggle over many centuries has achieved a large measure of freedom, opening many opportunities for independent thought and committed action. How this challenge is addressed in the years to come will have fateful consequences.

October 11, 1992 brings to an end the 500th year of the Old World Order, sometimes called the Colombian era of world history, or the Vasco da Gama era, depending on which adventurers bent on plunder got there first. Or “the 500-year Reich,” to borrow the title of a commemorative volume that compares the methods and ideology of the Nazis with those of the European invaders who subjugated most of the world.
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The major theme of this Old World Order was a confrontation between the conquerors and the conquered on a global scale. It has taken various forms, and been given different names: imperialism, neocolonialism, the North-South conflict, core versus periphery, G-7 (the 7 leading state capitalist industrial societies) and their satellites versus the rest. Or, more simply, Europe's conquest of the world.

By the term “Europe,” we include the European-settled colonies, one of which now leads the crusade; in accord with South African conventions, the Japanese are admitted as “honorary whites,” rich enough to (almost) qualify. Japan was one of the few parts of the South to escape conquest and, perhaps not coincidentally, to join the core, with some of its former colonies in its wake. That there may be more than coincidence in the correlation of independence and development is suggested further by a look at Western Europe, where parts that were colonized followed something like the Third World path. One notable example is Ireland, violently conquered, then barred from development by the “free trade” doctrines selectively applied to ensure subordination of the South—today called “structural adjustment,” “neoliberalism,” or “our noble ideals,” from which we, to be sure, are exempt.
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“The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind,” Adam Smith wrote in 1776: “What benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events, no human wisdom can foresee.” But it was possible for an honest eye to see what had taken place. “The discovery of America...certainly made a most essential” contribution to the “state of Europe,” Smith wrote, “opening up a new and inexhaustible market” that led to vast expansion of “productive powers” and “real revenue and wealth.” In theory, the “new set of exchanges...should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent.” That was not to be, however.

“The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries,” Smith wrote, revealing himself to be an early practitioner of the crime of “political correctness,” to borrow some rhetoric of contemporary cultural management. “To the natives...both of the East and West Indies,” Smith continued, “all the commercial benefits, which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.” With “the superiority of force” the Europeans commanded, “they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.”

Smith does not mention the indigenous inhabitants of North America: “There were but two nations in America, in any respect superior to savages [Peru, Mexico], and these were destroyed almost as soon as discovered. The rest were mere savages”—a convenient idea for the British conquerors, hence one that was to persist, even in scholarship, until the cultural awakening of the 1960s finally opened many eyes.

Over half a century later, Hegel discoursed authoritatively on the same topics in his lectures on philosophy of history, brimming with confidence as we approach the final “phase of World-History,” when Spirit reaches “its full maturity and
strength
” in “the
German
world.” Speaking from that lofty peak, he relates that native America was “physically and psychically powerless,” its culture so limited that it “must expire as soon as Spirit approached it.” Hence “the aborigines...gradually vanished at the breath of European activity.” “A mild and passionless disposition, want of spirit, and a crouching submissiveness...are the chief characteristics of the native Americans,” so “slothful” that, under the kind “authority of the Friars,” “at midnight a bell had to remind them even of their matrimonial duties.” They were inferior even to the Negro, “the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state,” who is beyond any “thought of reverence and morality—all that we call feeling”; there is “nothing harmonious with humanity...in this type of character.” “Among the Negroes moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly speaking non-existent.” “Parents sell their children, and conversely children their parents, as either has the opportunity,” and “The polygamy of the Negroes has frequently for its object the having many children, to be sold, every one of them, into slavery.” Creatures at the level of “a mere Thing—an object of no value,” they treat “as enemies” those who seek to abolish slavery, which has “been the occasion of the increase of human feeling among the Negroes,” enabling them to become “participant in a higher morality and the culture connected with it.”

The conquest of the New World set off two vast demographic catastrophes, unparalleled in history: the virtual destruction of the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere, and the devastation of Africa as the slave trade rapidly expanded to serve the needs of the conquerors, and the continent itself was subjugated. Much of Asia too suffered “dreadful misfortunes.” While modalities have changed, the fundamental themes of the conquest retain their vitality and resilience, and will continue to do so until the reality and causes of the “savage injustice” are honestly addressed.
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1. “The Savage Injustice of the Europeans”

The Spanish-Portuguese conquests had their domestic counterpart. In 1492, the Jewish community of Spain was expelled or forced to convert. Millions of Moors suffered the same fate. The fall of Granada in 1492, ending eight centuries of Moorish sovereignty, allowed the Spanish Inquisition to extend its barbaric sway. The conquerors destroyed priceless books and manuscripts with their rich record of classical learning, and demolished the civilization that had flourished under the far more tolerant and cultured Moorish rule. The stage was set for the decline of Spain, and also for the racism and savagery of the world conquest—”the curse of Columbus,” in the words of Africa historian Basil Davidson.
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Spain and Portugal were soon displaced from their leading role. The first major competitor was Holland, with more capital than its rivals thanks in large part to the control of the Baltic trade that it had won in the 16th century and was able to maintain by force. The Dutch East India Company (VOC), formed in 1602, was granted virtually the powers of a state, including the right to make war and treaties. Technically, it was an in pendent enterprise, but that was an illusion. “The apparent autonomy from metropolitan political control that the VOC enjoyed,” M.N. Pearson writes, resulted from the fact that “the VOC was identical with the state,” itself controlled by Dutch merchants and financiers. In highly simplified form, we see already something of the structure of the modern political economy, dominated by a network of transnational financial and industrial institutions with internally managed investment and trade, their wealth and influence established and maintained by the state power that they mobilize and largely control.

“The VOC integrated the functions of a sovereign power with the functions of a business partnership,” a historian of Dutch capitalism writes: “Political decisions and business decisions were made within the same hierarchy of company managers and officials, and failure or success was always in the last instance measured in terms of profit.” The Dutch established positions of strength in Indonesia (to remain a Dutch colony until the 1940s), India, Brazil and the Caribbean, took Sri Lanka from Portugal, and reached to the fringes of Japan and China. The Netherlands, however, fell victim to what was later called “the Dutch disease”: inadequate central state power, which left the people “rich perhaps, as individuals; but weak, as a State,” as Britain's Lord Sheffield observed in the 18th century, warning the British against the same error.
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The Iberian empires suffered further blows as English pirates, marauders and slave traders swept the seas, perhaps the most notorious, Sir Francis Drake. The booty that Drake brought home “may fairly be considered the fountain and origin of British foreign investments,” John Maynard Keynes wrote: “Elizabeth paid out of the proceeds the whole of her foreign debt and invested a part of the balance...in the Levant Company; largely out of the profits of the Levant Company there formed the East India Company, the profits of which...were the main foundations of England's foreign connections.” In the Atlantic, the entire English operation prior to 1630 was a “predatory drive of armed traders and marauders to win by fair means or foul a share of the Atlantic wealth of the Iberian nations” (Kenneth Andrews). The adventurers who laid the basis for the merchant empires of the 17th-18th centuries “continued a long European tradition of the union of warfare and trade,” Thomas Brady adds, as “the European state's growth as a military enterprise” gave rise to “the quintessentially European figure of the warrior-merchant.” Later, the newly consolidated English state took over the task of “wars for markets” from “the plunder raids of Elizabethan sea-dogs” (Christopher Hill). The British East India Company was granted its charter in 1600, extended indefinitely in 1609, providing the Company with a monopoly over trade with the East on the authority of the British Crown. There followed brutal wars, frequently conducted with unspeakable barbarism, among the European rivals, drawing in native populations that were often caught up in their own internal struggles. In 1622, Britain drove the Portuguese from the straits of Hormuz, “the key of all India,” and ultimately won that great prize. Much of the rest of the world was ultimately parcelled out in a manner that is well known.

Rising state power had enabled England to subdue its own Celtic periphery, then to apply the newly honed techniques with even greater savagery to new victims across the Atlantic. Their contempt for “the dirty, cowkeeping Celts on [England's] fringes” also eased the way for “civilised and prosperous Englishmen” to take a commanding position in the slave trade as “the gradient of contempt...spread its shadow from nearby hearts of darkness to those far over the sea,” Thomas Brady writes.