At the risk of becoming the metaphorical drunken bore at an otherwise lively and interesting party I will say this: Only Western Europe, particularly the Atlantic nations of Portugal, Spain and England (and to a lessor extent the Dutch) undertook extensive sea exploration, colonization and exploitation of other nations. (I will concede the French had colonized parts of North Africa, also.)
I was informed by a student of mine, originally from Somalia, about what he described as two African princes,one from the east (Indian Ocean) and one from the west (Atlantic) who each built a fleet of ships to undertake world exploration. (My Somali friend said the Olmec heads of the Yucatan region of Mexico were clear evidence of Sub-Saharan African visitation. Apparently most scholars of pre-Columbian-Meso-American civilizations disagree. Let you the reader look at some of those Olmec monumental head sculptures and decide yourself). He also informed me that about 100 years before Columbus a Chinese emperor had commissioned a great fleet of ships for world exploration. All three of these expeditions traveled extensively and mingled with local populations while making no effort to exploit them. It was only the Europeans, after 1492, who began systematic exploitation of "foreigners."
This exploitation grew increasingly oppressive once the economic system of capitalism had gotten underway with the Dutch and slightly later English circa 1600. E.g. The East India Tea Company. Again, at the risk of solidifying my credentials as the bore who comes to the party and starts scolding everyone, thereby ruining the evening, Capitalism is an economic system that ineluctably leads to exploitation and colonization. Capitalist are compelled to seek out new, overseas markets from which to obtain cheap resources and to dump their excess production. By 1940 most of the "Global South" was colonized by Western capitalist powers.
Around 1940, Franklin Roosevelt professed his discomfort with overt colonization and exploitation. After Roosevelt's death and the conclusion of WWll ( a war fought largely between capitalist powers for regions to be exploited) overt capitalist colonization was gradually ended so that by 1964 it was largely over. In it's place had been put a more subtle form of exploitation. This was achieved through the Bretton Woods Accord in 1947 in which the Global South was made a vassal to U.S. capitalist corporations. If one wishes to find out a little more about this simply Google: The Bretton Woods Accords c. 1945-6. As well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; institutions set up after WWll to funnel what little wealth the Global South had into the pockets of Wall Street Bankers.
So, I am like the drunk at the pleasant party who barges in and, after several more drinks of his host's liquor, tells the host that his wife is an ugly old hag. (Thinking that honesty rather than discretion, is the better part of valor.) Sorry to be rude folks.
The great Chinese fleet you speak of reached as far as the African east coast. I have read that, quite contrary to exploiting the locals, the Chinese made a point of leaving a huge amount of valuable goods everywhere they went. As the "Middle Kingdom" and center of the world, they needed nothing from anyone else, and wanted them to know it.
If I recall correctly, one of the Chinese emperors abruptly shut down this nascent world discovery tour, and slammed shut the door on further Chinese exploration, until Europeans finally started stumbling in a century or two later, finally forcing them to take notice that there was another world out there that could no longer be ignored.
Thank you. That is exactly what my Somali student-friend told me. Thank you for refreshing my memory.
My limited understanding is the Chinese emperors were focused on cultivating their internal society (through Confucianism and Taoism) and were not interested so much in interacting with the rest of the world either through exploration or exploitation.
What the Chinese emperors perhaps failed to foresee was this turning inward would leave them vulnerable to exploitation by others.
I am no expert on this topic but it is my understanding that, because the Chinese did not want to trade with the British (the Chinese possessed much coveted porcelain, silk and tea which the British wanted while the British had little if anything to trade) the British forced opium on China which compelled the Chinese to seek opium imports and thus opened trade.
Around 1840 the Chinese became sick of Western exploitation which lead to a century of closure to the outside world.
After the death of Mao the Chinese (more or less) undertook the old Western adage: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." And they are currently beating them resoundingly at the cynical game of capitalism with China's GDP having recently surpassed America's.
Last I heard China was in a position to flood the U.S. with inexpensive, reliable EV cars which would devastate the U.S. auto industry (already on government life support despite the bullsh*t rhetoric about "free markets") and get it's ultimate revenge for being forceably opened to the West.
If memory serves, the Chinese were only interested in precious metals as payment for their tea and silk--nothing the West produced in their vaunted factories was of interest to the Chinese. That is what led to the British to try bringing in the opium.
The Chinese weren't exactly closed to the outside after 1840--they probably only WISHED they were. That was when the emperor tried to ban the opium trade by the West, resulting in the opium wars that so badly fractured China and resulted in its domination by first the West, then also the Japanese.
The Japanese case is instructive. Unlike China, they saw that they needed to adopt certain aspects of Western civ in order to avoid being dominated by it. I have always admired the way the Japanese were able to preserve their own cultural distinctiveness while modernizing. The Chinese failure to do the same was why they lost the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95.
PS It is important (at least to my limited mind) to note that European nations (but not the United States) after World War ll essentially voluntarily curtailed the worst exploitative tendencies of capitalism within their own capitalist systems: they put, by mandate, workers of companies on the boards of directors so companies were not exclusively controlled by a small, exploitative capital class. They mandated a living wage so workers could feed and house themselves and they made sure affordable public housing was available so the lowest paid of the working class could live in some at least modicum of dignity. And thus one doesn't see the vast hordes of homeless one sees in e.g. San Francisco or San Diego.
And shame, shame, shame to hell the American reactionary morons who blame the victims of the American capitalist system for what the economic system has imposed on them! Over the last 43 years (since Reagan) wages have barely kept up with background inflation and the cost of housing has increased almost exponentially by 200 to 300 percent.
Shame on America for utterly failing it's lower classes. An absolute disgrace on this nation.
Any nation that feels projecting homelessness upon its citizens is becomes essentially a Death Cult... or encouraging genocide by an ally over its repressed. The humiliation is complete when those that don't care begin to self-annihilate, whether by Jew Jabs, ATM War in Ukraine or insisting to circle the wagons with their "coffee-clutch clique".
Didn't realize you were a closet Marxist. Many passages here seem lifted from some text book on colonialism written by a left wing college prof for high school students. Perhaps you're just recalling lectures you attended or reading from notes you've saved from collegiate days. I guess internet search is probably more likely. But in any case, is this from the same Tom Herzog I've been reading for months? You do seem like you're drunk and coming out of some too long suppressed ideological closet.
There's a whole lot that could be contested but let me just deal w/ the two assertions I found most ill-founded. WW2: "a war fought largely between capitalist powers for regions to be exploited." Hello, the SU was not capitalist, tho they did colonize and exploit smaller nations. Germany's war against them was ideological not a resource grab. Granted lebensraum was a secondary consideration.
Re your Somali student and the Olmec heads, their origin remains mysterious and controversial while their discovery site was not actually on the Yucatan peninsula but nearby on the gulf coast. It therefore seems unlikely the Negro stone faces were from West Africa. Moreover, the idea that sub Saharan Africans were trans oceanic sailors is unfounded, whether east or west coast Africans were involved. The Chinese fleet is more credible. They could have stopped off at meso-America. Less well known than the giant stone heads are a couple of Olmec archeological finds - the Wrestler statue and a piece of pottery speak of Asian visitation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrestler_(sculpture)
It is hard to know were to begin in order to correct the errors in your thinking.
First, I am not a "closet Marxist." I am an anti-capitalist leftist. And I believe the worst excesses of capitalism can be mitigated as FDR and his New Deal were mostly able to accomplish.
World War One and World War Two had capitalist/ colonial empires vying for power at their basis. Western history text books generally skirt this issue because it is a black mark on the economic system of capitalism and history book authors would prefer we see the world in terms of the "good" allies and the "evil" axis powers. In actuality capitalist, colonial expansion was at the basis of the World Wars: what Western powers would get what colonies they could to exploit.
I suggest you peruse a map of the world prior to WW l and see how Western European powers were seeking t exploit the "global south."
If you want to understand what lead up to WW One and Two (and you may not want to, most people don't) I suggest you read up on capitalism and capitalist imperialism. (And I won't divert attention into the oppressive and punitive Treaty of Versailles. That is another issue.)
I erred about the Olmec stone heads being found in the Yucatan; you are right, they were found a couple of hundred miles to the west nearer to Veracruz. It seems a conclusory and fatuous statement that therefore Africans could not have sailed to the area of Vera Cruz. Do you have any good, rational basis for this assertion or is it just your whim? Not that it really matters.
By the way, just for your edification, the Soviet Union was never really communist in the Marxian sense. (The working classes never owned the means of production.) It was a state run capitalist society just as it's competitor, the United States was a private, corporate run capitalist society.
And for that matter the majority of Soviet leaders throughout the Cold War wanted no such war with the U.S. It wasted the limited resources they the Soviets had ,expending them on war material rather than consumer goods for the people. It is fairly well know by now, at least to people with some knowledge of post WWll history, that the American establishment cooked up the Cold War to have a pretext to keep U.S. military spending at high levels (now amounting to about one trillion dollars a year). I suggest you read what George Keenan had to say about finding a pretext for the Cold War. And Keenan was about as stalwart, U.S. establishmentarian as you can get.
I'm not aware of leftists who actually reject Marx. Isn't he the cornerstone thinker of leftism? But perhaps you'd be more comfortable considered as a socialist. I said "closet" because you'd not previously come out w/ this sort of left of center fiery rhetoric.
More than the direction of your dialectic what bothers me is your new found attitude which you characterized as being a rude drunk at a party. As if we are too complacent and convivial and need to hear some real history from someone who has read and understands 20th century history. One day you're apologizing for being too hard on Jimmy Carter. Wouldn't hurt a fly Tom. Next day you're praising the SU as Cold War peaceniks who only wanted what was best for its people and condemning all European powers as exploitative colonialists driven by maniacal capitalism.
WW2 was ideologically motivated not as a cover for the expansion of colonial holdings. Britain even jeopardized her empire to fight the Nazis. Hitler offered Britain that she could keep her colonies and he would even give up Germany's Africa holdings to maintain peace. None of the democracies were fighting other demos to seize their colonies. Nor sadly did they try to seize communist territories when they could have. They were fighting against the fascist powers only. Post war they were fighting the spread of international communism which motivated the new colonizers.
The only African sea faring I'm aware of was by Semites (Phoenicians, Libyans, Egyptians) not Negroes. The Olmec heads are Negroid. The explanation I accept is the meso-American ball game option. They were idols of sports worship. The headgear is not royal but more like a helmet. We know later Arabs were involved in slave trading and African Negroes were trafficked to the New World. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/604/the-ball-game-of-mesoamerica/
I meant "sea-faring" in the sense of discovery voyages in the Age of Exploration. I know Jews owned trans-oceanic vessels that engaged in slave cargoes later on. I believe in their history as slave owners too. That they considered prohibitions on their not being allowed to buy and own slaves in the New World as example of anti-Semitism is a hoot.
Assuming the Olmec stone heads were created two millennia before Columbus (500 BC) is what makes their presence controversial. Olmecs have created these Negroid heads but no other monumental architecture. Leftists like Tom and Ivan Van Sertima will say their artifactual presence proves the Olmecs were Negro-ruled or, less controversially, that Negro sailors visited the gulf coast of Mexico and local artisans were so impressed by the dark gods from afar they immortalized them in stone.
I've always liked Linh's writing and the perspective he provides but lately I've found myself falling in love with Vietnam. It's a beautiful country and people.
The pop art demagogue Obama graphic. Hip and propagandistic, the hope and change era.
I've got a little glass souvenir that I picked up in Afghanistan of Obama and Hamid Karzai shaking hands. I remember that he'd just extended the Patriot Act that year, 2011. Hope and change?
At the risk of becoming the metaphorical drunken bore at an otherwise lively and interesting party I will say this: Only Western Europe, particularly the Atlantic nations of Portugal, Spain and England (and to a lessor extent the Dutch) undertook extensive sea exploration, colonization and exploitation of other nations. (I will concede the French had colonized parts of North Africa, also.)
I was informed by a student of mine, originally from Somalia, about what he described as two African princes,one from the east (Indian Ocean) and one from the west (Atlantic) who each built a fleet of ships to undertake world exploration. (My Somali friend said the Olmec heads of the Yucatan region of Mexico were clear evidence of Sub-Saharan African visitation. Apparently most scholars of pre-Columbian-Meso-American civilizations disagree. Let you the reader look at some of those Olmec monumental head sculptures and decide yourself). He also informed me that about 100 years before Columbus a Chinese emperor had commissioned a great fleet of ships for world exploration. All three of these expeditions traveled extensively and mingled with local populations while making no effort to exploit them. It was only the Europeans, after 1492, who began systematic exploitation of "foreigners."
This exploitation grew increasingly oppressive once the economic system of capitalism had gotten underway with the Dutch and slightly later English circa 1600. E.g. The East India Tea Company. Again, at the risk of solidifying my credentials as the bore who comes to the party and starts scolding everyone, thereby ruining the evening, Capitalism is an economic system that ineluctably leads to exploitation and colonization. Capitalist are compelled to seek out new, overseas markets from which to obtain cheap resources and to dump their excess production. By 1940 most of the "Global South" was colonized by Western capitalist powers.
Around 1940, Franklin Roosevelt professed his discomfort with overt colonization and exploitation. After Roosevelt's death and the conclusion of WWll ( a war fought largely between capitalist powers for regions to be exploited) overt capitalist colonization was gradually ended so that by 1964 it was largely over. In it's place had been put a more subtle form of exploitation. This was achieved through the Bretton Woods Accord in 1947 in which the Global South was made a vassal to U.S. capitalist corporations. If one wishes to find out a little more about this simply Google: The Bretton Woods Accords c. 1945-6. As well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; institutions set up after WWll to funnel what little wealth the Global South had into the pockets of Wall Street Bankers.
So, I am like the drunk at the pleasant party who barges in and, after several more drinks of his host's liquor, tells the host that his wife is an ugly old hag. (Thinking that honesty rather than discretion, is the better part of valor.) Sorry to be rude folks.
The great Chinese fleet you speak of reached as far as the African east coast. I have read that, quite contrary to exploiting the locals, the Chinese made a point of leaving a huge amount of valuable goods everywhere they went. As the "Middle Kingdom" and center of the world, they needed nothing from anyone else, and wanted them to know it.
If I recall correctly, one of the Chinese emperors abruptly shut down this nascent world discovery tour, and slammed shut the door on further Chinese exploration, until Europeans finally started stumbling in a century or two later, finally forcing them to take notice that there was another world out there that could no longer be ignored.
Thank you. That is exactly what my Somali student-friend told me. Thank you for refreshing my memory.
My limited understanding is the Chinese emperors were focused on cultivating their internal society (through Confucianism and Taoism) and were not interested so much in interacting with the rest of the world either through exploration or exploitation.
What the Chinese emperors perhaps failed to foresee was this turning inward would leave them vulnerable to exploitation by others.
I am no expert on this topic but it is my understanding that, because the Chinese did not want to trade with the British (the Chinese possessed much coveted porcelain, silk and tea which the British wanted while the British had little if anything to trade) the British forced opium on China which compelled the Chinese to seek opium imports and thus opened trade.
Around 1840 the Chinese became sick of Western exploitation which lead to a century of closure to the outside world.
After the death of Mao the Chinese (more or less) undertook the old Western adage: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." And they are currently beating them resoundingly at the cynical game of capitalism with China's GDP having recently surpassed America's.
Last I heard China was in a position to flood the U.S. with inexpensive, reliable EV cars which would devastate the U.S. auto industry (already on government life support despite the bullsh*t rhetoric about "free markets") and get it's ultimate revenge for being forceably opened to the West.
America messed with the wrong guy this time.
If memory serves, the Chinese were only interested in precious metals as payment for their tea and silk--nothing the West produced in their vaunted factories was of interest to the Chinese. That is what led to the British to try bringing in the opium.
The Chinese weren't exactly closed to the outside after 1840--they probably only WISHED they were. That was when the emperor tried to ban the opium trade by the West, resulting in the opium wars that so badly fractured China and resulted in its domination by first the West, then also the Japanese.
The Japanese case is instructive. Unlike China, they saw that they needed to adopt certain aspects of Western civ in order to avoid being dominated by it. I have always admired the way the Japanese were able to preserve their own cultural distinctiveness while modernizing. The Chinese failure to do the same was why they lost the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95.
PS It is important (at least to my limited mind) to note that European nations (but not the United States) after World War ll essentially voluntarily curtailed the worst exploitative tendencies of capitalism within their own capitalist systems: they put, by mandate, workers of companies on the boards of directors so companies were not exclusively controlled by a small, exploitative capital class. They mandated a living wage so workers could feed and house themselves and they made sure affordable public housing was available so the lowest paid of the working class could live in some at least modicum of dignity. And thus one doesn't see the vast hordes of homeless one sees in e.g. San Francisco or San Diego.
And shame, shame, shame to hell the American reactionary morons who blame the victims of the American capitalist system for what the economic system has imposed on them! Over the last 43 years (since Reagan) wages have barely kept up with background inflation and the cost of housing has increased almost exponentially by 200 to 300 percent.
Shame on America for utterly failing it's lower classes. An absolute disgrace on this nation.
A disgrace on ALL Western Nations.
Any nation that feels projecting homelessness upon its citizens is becomes essentially a Death Cult... or encouraging genocide by an ally over its repressed. The humiliation is complete when those that don't care begin to self-annihilate, whether by Jew Jabs, ATM War in Ukraine or insisting to circle the wagons with their "coffee-clutch clique".
Didn't realize you were a closet Marxist. Many passages here seem lifted from some text book on colonialism written by a left wing college prof for high school students. Perhaps you're just recalling lectures you attended or reading from notes you've saved from collegiate days. I guess internet search is probably more likely. But in any case, is this from the same Tom Herzog I've been reading for months? You do seem like you're drunk and coming out of some too long suppressed ideological closet.
There's a whole lot that could be contested but let me just deal w/ the two assertions I found most ill-founded. WW2: "a war fought largely between capitalist powers for regions to be exploited." Hello, the SU was not capitalist, tho they did colonize and exploit smaller nations. Germany's war against them was ideological not a resource grab. Granted lebensraum was a secondary consideration.
Re your Somali student and the Olmec heads, their origin remains mysterious and controversial while their discovery site was not actually on the Yucatan peninsula but nearby on the gulf coast. It therefore seems unlikely the Negro stone faces were from West Africa. Moreover, the idea that sub Saharan Africans were trans oceanic sailors is unfounded, whether east or west coast Africans were involved. The Chinese fleet is more credible. They could have stopped off at meso-America. Less well known than the giant stone heads are a couple of Olmec archeological finds - the Wrestler statue and a piece of pottery speak of Asian visitation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrestler_(sculpture)
It is hard to know were to begin in order to correct the errors in your thinking.
First, I am not a "closet Marxist." I am an anti-capitalist leftist. And I believe the worst excesses of capitalism can be mitigated as FDR and his New Deal were mostly able to accomplish.
World War One and World War Two had capitalist/ colonial empires vying for power at their basis. Western history text books generally skirt this issue because it is a black mark on the economic system of capitalism and history book authors would prefer we see the world in terms of the "good" allies and the "evil" axis powers. In actuality capitalist, colonial expansion was at the basis of the World Wars: what Western powers would get what colonies they could to exploit.
I suggest you peruse a map of the world prior to WW l and see how Western European powers were seeking t exploit the "global south."
If you want to understand what lead up to WW One and Two (and you may not want to, most people don't) I suggest you read up on capitalism and capitalist imperialism. (And I won't divert attention into the oppressive and punitive Treaty of Versailles. That is another issue.)
I erred about the Olmec stone heads being found in the Yucatan; you are right, they were found a couple of hundred miles to the west nearer to Veracruz. It seems a conclusory and fatuous statement that therefore Africans could not have sailed to the area of Vera Cruz. Do you have any good, rational basis for this assertion or is it just your whim? Not that it really matters.
By the way, just for your edification, the Soviet Union was never really communist in the Marxian sense. (The working classes never owned the means of production.) It was a state run capitalist society just as it's competitor, the United States was a private, corporate run capitalist society.
And for that matter the majority of Soviet leaders throughout the Cold War wanted no such war with the U.S. It wasted the limited resources they the Soviets had ,expending them on war material rather than consumer goods for the people. It is fairly well know by now, at least to people with some knowledge of post WWll history, that the American establishment cooked up the Cold War to have a pretext to keep U.S. military spending at high levels (now amounting to about one trillion dollars a year). I suggest you read what George Keenan had to say about finding a pretext for the Cold War. And Keenan was about as stalwart, U.S. establishmentarian as you can get.
I'm not aware of leftists who actually reject Marx. Isn't he the cornerstone thinker of leftism? But perhaps you'd be more comfortable considered as a socialist. I said "closet" because you'd not previously come out w/ this sort of left of center fiery rhetoric.
More than the direction of your dialectic what bothers me is your new found attitude which you characterized as being a rude drunk at a party. As if we are too complacent and convivial and need to hear some real history from someone who has read and understands 20th century history. One day you're apologizing for being too hard on Jimmy Carter. Wouldn't hurt a fly Tom. Next day you're praising the SU as Cold War peaceniks who only wanted what was best for its people and condemning all European powers as exploitative colonialists driven by maniacal capitalism.
WW2 was ideologically motivated not as a cover for the expansion of colonial holdings. Britain even jeopardized her empire to fight the Nazis. Hitler offered Britain that she could keep her colonies and he would even give up Germany's Africa holdings to maintain peace. None of the democracies were fighting other demos to seize their colonies. Nor sadly did they try to seize communist territories when they could have. They were fighting against the fascist powers only. Post war they were fighting the spread of international communism which motivated the new colonizers.
The only African sea faring I'm aware of was by Semites (Phoenicians, Libyans, Egyptians) not Negroes. The Olmec heads are Negroid. The explanation I accept is the meso-American ball game option. They were idols of sports worship. The headgear is not royal but more like a helmet. We know later Arabs were involved in slave trading and African Negroes were trafficked to the New World. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/604/the-ball-game-of-mesoamerica/
And Bretton Woods was only a forest without trees.
Or:
Not only by Semites:
https://www.unz.com/article/the-ways-of-the-jewish-slave-traders/
Not just Arabs, which I am also familiar with.
World History loves to avoid the Jew.
I meant "sea-faring" in the sense of discovery voyages in the Age of Exploration. I know Jews owned trans-oceanic vessels that engaged in slave cargoes later on. I believe in their history as slave owners too. That they considered prohibitions on their not being allowed to buy and own slaves in the New World as example of anti-Semitism is a hoot.
Assuming the Olmec stone heads were created two millennia before Columbus (500 BC) is what makes their presence controversial. Olmecs have created these Negroid heads but no other monumental architecture. Leftists like Tom and Ivan Van Sertima will say their artifactual presence proves the Olmecs were Negro-ruled or, less controversially, that Negro sailors visited the gulf coast of Mexico and local artisans were so impressed by the dark gods from afar they immortalized them in stone.
Not sure that the current day Mexicans themselves believe in the Black Olmec dynasty. They don't see royal crowns but hockey helmets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_Stone_Heads
Elohim.(Olmecs)
How to prove or rationalize their alleged existence.
Had a local Jew Jeweller (no kidding) bring up the Elohim.
I said, "Ahh! Maybe they were the aliens that emptied thi bilge from their spacecraft a couple billion years ago."
There is a SubStacker, Cliff High, that loves to wax prolifically on the Elohim.
God bless those badly dressed Vietnamese hicks - a nation of HEROES
I've always liked Linh's writing and the perspective he provides but lately I've found myself falling in love with Vietnam. It's a beautiful country and people.
The poster with Obama and Monroe is quite interesting.
The pop art demagogue Obama graphic. Hip and propagandistic, the hope and change era.
I've got a little glass souvenir that I picked up in Afghanistan of Obama and Hamid Karzai shaking hands. I remember that he'd just extended the Patriot Act that year, 2011. Hope and change?
Change you can make believe in!