usmbguest5318
Gold Member
While there's no way I'm ever going to argue that race is a determining factor for the nature and extent of a people's bellicosity and belligerence, as a point of circumstance, there's no way to credibly refute/deny that at least since the Crusades, the bulk of death and destruction wreaked throughout the planet was founded on a host of notions Europeans had that enabled them, under specious/sophistic auspices of audaciously arrogant altruism (see Kipling), to justify myriad wars and incursions against and/or the diminution and devaluation, killing and enslavement of myriad societies of pretty much anyone having a different world-view than did Western Europeans and that Europeans determined they could dominate by force if those societies were unwilling to "capitulate" voluntarily. Indeed, the entirety of post-Fall Western Civilization, most especially from the Renaissance forward, is little other than one event after another whereby Europeans' unyielding "my way or the highway" has been the principal attitude and course of actions Europeans (and later Americans) took toward nearly all other societies.
To wit, no non-European civilization marched or sailed after 1400 to plunder, conscript and bend to their will the natural and human resources of entire societies/civilizations in Europe, or anywhere else, for that matter. Indeed, one cannot even very generously look back to 800-1100 A.D. and construe the Moorish invasion and occupation and occupation of Spain, to which the Crusades were a response, as an incursion of non-white folks on Europeans because given their Middle Eastern origins, the Moors, though some of them were dark skinned and of African ancestry, they were yet members of Western Civilization, white folks' civilization, not of Sub-Saharan or Far East Asian ancestry.
As I said, however, that Europeans did such things is more coincidental to their race, coincidental to their whiteness, if you will, than because of it. For example, consider the nature and extent of colonization and enslavement in which Russia engaged as contrasted with that of England, France, and Spain. For example, though from the Renaissance to the middle of the 19th century Russia had no compunction about slavery, its aristocrats enslaved the white folks who occupied territories Russia invaded or anyone who sold themselves into slavery. One's eligibility to obtain the status of a slave had no skin color constraints.
To gain an even better understanding, one might seek the answer to the question: Why did far Western European monarchs, with Papal approbation, in contrast to Russian monarchs and/or with Far East Asian and African monarchs, condone race-based slavery and cleave to the notion that it was okay to take what they wanted from people who already occupied other parts of the world? The answer will be found the comprehensive examination of several factors:
- The nature of intra-European politics and global politics/diplomacy
- Europe's monarchs were all related to one another. While one may have very heated contests with one's siblings and first cousins, one's not about to steal and formally enslave their subjects because doing so opens the door to one doing so to one's own people. [1] Doing that will create utter havoc in one's own country. One need only compare the size of the nobility to the size of common population to know that no matter how much one was of a mind to do so, even coming close to such a state of being was, flat-out, a "non starter."
- European monarchs were concerned with the balance of power (BoP) [2]: A consequence of the BoP as pre-modern-era European potentates saw/managed it is that they couldn't conquer one another's lands, yet, for a host of reasons, neither were they willing to combine their lands to form a single political unit.
- Economics and size--> Quite simply, to "keep up" with their relatives, most notably Russia, smaller countries had to secure resources from elsewhere. For most European powers, that meant Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, India and Australia.
Map of Europe and Asia, 1840-1900
It takes little prescience to see that monarchs west of Russia hadn't the same easy southward and westward conquering options, options that resulted in the enslavement of conquered white folks, Russia's tsars did.- Because they could. The continual warring amongst the European powers all but forced them to employ gunpowder (something they learned of from the Chinese) not to decorative ends, but to militaristic ones.
Note:
- Make no mistake, slavery was politically contentious in Europe long before it come to a head in the American Civil War. With the decline of Roman slavery in the 5th century, the institution waned in western Europe and by the 11th century had virtually disappeared. Portuguese exploration of the west coast of Africa beginning in 1420, however, created an interest in slavery in the recently formed colonies of North America, South America, and the West Indies, where the need for plantation labour generated an immense market for slaves. That said, insofar as it wasn't a sovereign's own people being enslaved, and slavery generated revenue streams, it wasn't hard to be insouciant about it, thus it took a very long time to terminate legal forbearance of it.
- Europe and China Compared
The Balance of Power: a Cause of War, a Condition of Peace, or Both?
The Balance of Power
Additional references:
- Were Shaka's incursions those of imperial conquest of territory and resources held by indigenous peoples of races other than his own or of his own? The context of the discussion is race, not polity, right?
- What has anything Shaka Zulu did (or didn't do) to do with the thesis of my post? That thesis is the very first sentence I wrote in the post to which you've replied.
- In what way is the accuracy of my thesis diminished by anything Shaka Zulu did? (Note: Keep in mind that arguments based on tu quoque and/or relative privation will fail in trying to show that my thesis is contextually or factually inaccurate.)
