On May 7, 9:26 pm, nada <dwalters...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On May 7, 10:46 am, Daniele Futtorovic
>
>
>
> <da.futt.newsLOVELYS...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > On 2008-05-07 00:31 +0100, Vngelis allegedly wrote:
>
> > > The racialist Walters who originally argued there were no settlers
> > > then argued there were using as a point of reference what I stated
> > > about the PAC in S Africa (in other words backpeddling like a slimy
> > > politician) seems to assume that what characterises a settler is
what
> > > others believe they are. In other words when I stated that despite
> > > the whites being in S Africa for 3 centuries makes them no more
> > > African than an Albanian becomes Greek because he is in Greece for
> > > one and a half decades. The whites in Bolivia consider the
indigenous
> > > to be Indian and seek to distance themselves from them in a
racialist
> > > manner. Why shouldn't they be expelled by the indigenous Indian
> > > nationalists?
>
> > Because it would be their (the indigenous nationalists') undoing.
>
> > A racist with a gun is dangerous. A racist without a gun is just a
> > pathetic loonie.
>
> > Racism is an ideology. You should know as well as I do that ideologies
> > don't drive the world. Economics (and their more sophisticated form,
> > class struggle) do. A racist ideology can at best ever be a tool to
> > provide moral justification for an existing social inequality. Remove
> > the inequality (expropriation), the ideology will fart itself out.
>
> > --
> > DF.
>
> DF, you are trying to give a rational(ist) argument with a
> fundementally irrational person, someone who isn't even political. For
> example, he *projects* onto the PAC a "throw the settlers out"
> position they never had. The irrationality of his view...that
> "settlers" (as only defined by himself) have to leave every country
> they reside in even if the m***** don't call for this shows how such
> irrationality (and a bizzare form of racialism) he's sunk to.
>
> Further he delibertly falsifies my position by a false reductionist
> argument "The racialist Walters who originally argued there were no
> settlers..." rather a pathedic lie. He further lies when he writes
> "...what characterises a settler is what
> others believe they are." He refuses to look at the totality of a
> discussion to draw conclusions. That the PAC defines what a settlers
> is is good enough for me. For V, who now casts himself as the
> consiousness (I know, a joke if there ever was one) of the PAC (and
> other BC groups I suppose) by seeking to be the arbritor of
> "settlerism". Irrational.
>
> I accept the PLO Charter version as well: Jews who accept Palestinian
> rule and stop seeking Jewish exclusiveness can stay, those that
> percist in Zionist practices are to leave.
>
> So...DF, "settlerism" is not what they say, but the way they ACT.
> (something I've stated about a dozen times now).
>
> An Albanian who lives in Greece for 15 years (or a Greek who lives in
> Albania for the same period) is still Albanian, but he's part of the
> Greek working class, whether British and Greek Citizen Vngelis
> believes it or not. Same is true for the Polish worker in London.
> Niether are "Settlers" because they are not trying to colonize the
> country to the exclusion of the "native" populations. That ****tends a
> "settler state" mentality.
Lets start from back to front once more.
If a working class is overrun by a majority of 50% by overseas workers
whose aims are foreign to the nation they are living in then they
become setters de facto. You seem to freeze the process to a point in
time not what it leads to as always. A worker is a worker but a worker
may also be a scab. Workers aren't workers solely because they are
workers but they are judged to be so on the basis of what they are
engaged in when the time comes.
I aint PAC or PLO both bourgeois/stalinist outfits. They dont
represent my line. I would expel the white Bolivians and then allow
them to return if they renounced their past and worked for a better
Bolivia against Wall Street and the Multinationals. Above you said no
one has raised the issue of the white settlers of Bolivia...
Even bourgeois liberals writing in the Guardian no the difference...
PS
I may have changed it after all that is Holmes latest 'big' issue...
Latin America is preparing to settle accounts with its white settler
elite
The political movements and protests sweeping the continent - from
Bolivia to Venezuela - are as much about race as class
* Richard Gott
* The Guardian,
* Wednesday November 15 2006
* Article history
About this article
Close
This article appeared in the Guardian on Wednesday November 15 2006 on
p33 of the Debate & comment section. It was last updated at 00:13 on
January 12 2008.
The recent explosion of indigenous protest in Latin America,
culminating in the election this year of Evo Morales, an Aymara
indian, as president of Bolivia, has highlighted the precarious
position of the white-settler elite that has dominated the continent
for so many centuries. Although the term "white settler" is familiar
in the history of most European colonies, and comes with a pejorative
ring, the whites in Latin America (as in the US) are not usually
described in this way, and never use the expression themselves. No
Spanish or ****tuguese word exists that can adequately translate the
English term.
Latin America is traditionally seen as a continent set apart from
colonial projects elsewhere, the outcome of its long experience of
settlement since the 16th century. Yet it truly belongs in the history
of the global expansion of white-settler populations from Europe in
the more recent period. Today's elites are largely the product of the
immigrant European culture that has developed during the two centuries
since independence.
The characteristics of the European empires' white-settler states in
the 19th and 20th centuries are well known. The settlers expropriated
the land and evicted or exterminated the existing population; they
exploited the surviving indigenous labour force on the land; they
secured for themselves a European standard of living; and they treated
the surviving indigenous peoples with extreme prejudice, drafting laws
to ensure they remained largely without rights, as second- or third-
class citizens.
Latin America shares these characteristics of "settler colonialism",
an evocative term used in discussions about the British empire.
Together with the Caribbean and the US, it has a further
characteristic not shared by Europe's colonies elsewhere: the legacy
of a non-indigenous slave class. Although slavery had been abolished
in much of the world by the 1830s, the practice continued in Latin
America (and the US) for several decades. The white settlers were
unique in oppressing two different groups, seizing the land of the
indigenous peoples and appropriating the labour of their im****ted
slaves.
A feature of all "settler colonialist" societies has been the
ingrained racist fear and hatred of the settlers, who are permanently
alarmed by the presence of an expropriated underclass. Yet the race
hatred of Latin America's settlers has only had a minor part in our
customary understanding of the continent's history and society. Even
politicians and historians on the left have preferred to discuss class
rather than race.
In Venezuela, elections in December will produce another win for Hugo
Ch=E1vez, a man of black and Indian origin. Much of the virulent dislike
shown towards him by the opposition has been clearly motivated by race
hatred, and similar hatred was aroused the 1970s towards Salvador
Allende in Chile and Juan Per=F3n in Argentina. Allende's unforgivable
crime, in the eyes of the white-settler elite, was to mobilise the
rotos, the "broken ones" - the patronising and derisory name given to
the vast Chilean underclass. The indigenous origins of the rotos were
obvious at Allende's political demonstrations. Dressed in Indian
clothes, their affinity with their indigenous neighbours would have
been apparent. The same could be said of the cabezas negras - "black
heads" - who came out to sup****t Per=F3n.
This unexplored parallel has become more apparent as indigenous
organisations have come to the fore, arousing the whites' ancient
fears. A settler spokesman, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian-now-
Spanish novelist, has accused the indigenous movements of generating
"social and political disorder", echoing the cry of 19th-century
racist intellectuals such as Colonel Domingo Sarmiento of Argentina,
who warned of a choice between "civilisation and barbarism".
Latin America's settler elites after independence were obsessed with
all things European. They travelled to Europe in search of political
models, ignoring their own countries beyond the capital cities, and
excluding the majority from their nation-building project. Along with
their im****ted liberal ideology came the racialist ideas common among
settlers elsewhere in Europe's colonial world. This racist outlook led
to the downgrading and non-recognition of the black population, and,
in many countries, to the physical extermination of indigenous
peoples. In their place came millions of fresh settlers from Europe.
Yet for a brief moment during the anti-colonial revolts of the 19th
century, radical voices took up the Indian cause. A revolutionary
junta in Buenos Aires in 1810 declared that Indians and Spaniards were
equal. The Indian past was celebrated as the common heritage of all
Americans, and children dressed as Indians sang at popular festivals.
Guns cast in the city were christened in honour of Tupac Amaru and
Mangor=E9, famous leaders of Indian resistance. In Cuba, early
independence movements recalled the name of Hatuey, the 16th-century
cacique, and devised a flag with an Indian woman entwined with a
tobacco leaf. Independence sup****ters in Chile evoked the Araucanian
rebels of earlier centuries and used Arauco symbols on their flags.
Independence in Brazil in 1822 brought similar displays, with the
white elite rejoicing in its Indian ancestry and suggesting that Tupi,
spoken by many Indians, might replace ****tuguese as the official
language.
The radicals' inclusive agenda sought to incor****ate the Indian
majority into settler society. Yet almost immediately this strain of
progressive thought disappears from the record. Political leaders who
sought to be friendly with the indigenous peoples were replaced by
those anxious to participate in the global campaign to exterminate
indigenous peoples. The British had already embarked on that task in
Australia and South Africa, and the French took part after 1830 when
they invaded Algeria.
Latin America soon joined in. The purposeful extermination of
indigenous peoples in the 19th century may well have been on a larger
scale than anything attempted by the Spanish and the ****tuguese in the
earlier colonial period. Millions of Indians died because of a lack of
immunity to European diseases, yet the early colonists needed the
Indians to grow food and to provide labourers. They did not have the
same economic necessity to make the land free from Indians that would
provoke the extermination campaigns on other continents in the same
era. The true Latin American holocaust occurred in the 19th century.
The slaughter of Indians made more land available for settlement, and
between 1870 and 1914 five million Europeans migrated to Brazil and
Argentina. In many countries the immigration campaigns continued well
into the 20th century, sustaining the hegemonic white-settler culture
that has lasted to this day.
Yet change is at last on the agenda. Recent election results have been
described, with some truth, as a move to the left, since several new
governments have revived progressive themes from the 1960s. Yet from a
longer perspective these developments look more like a repudiation of
Latin America's white-settler culture, and a revival of that radical
tradition of inclusion attempted two centuries ago. The outline of a
fresh struggle, with a final settling of accounts, can now be
discerned.
=B7 This article is based on the third annual SLAS lecture, given to the
Society for Latin American Studies in October. Richard Gott is the
author of Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press)
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