Natewazere did a nice job of summarizing a debate on the uses and limits of force in imperialist endeavours. How much force can we use to guarantee our “place in the sun”, so that we can spread our fairy dust of civilizing benefits? NWH suggests that there are limits—in the long run, echoing Major Tom, who thinks that brutality cannot secure what the Europeans need in the long run. WHat then is one to make of the Hereros, who the Germans basically wiped out?
If we visit Tyblogmeh, TY holds that it is part of human nature to up the level of brutality to get what we want. Elizabeth F supports this view with her meditation on the Heart of Darkness—brutality wasn’t a side effect of imperialism, it was an essential feature, given the mindset of Europeans interested in exploitation of material resources and markets. No matter how you sugar coat it, some excuse to differentiate those folks who needed to be crushed from the imperializing Europeans would be made, as Classier Hoeing argues, even if you happen to be European in ancestry—not just the Irish, but also the Boers, as several readings made clear. Zak P laments the loss of European decency that it had tried to attain after the first phase of imperialism in 16th and 17th centiries, with the interdiction of slavery. I wonder how the Africans who fought the Europeans throughout the period to keep the Euros away from their land might have felt, or the Indians for that matter? At least one blogger spoke about the brighter side—those who resisted the imperialist enterprise, but just as those who resisted were a minority so was letstalkaboutmeh--an outpost of some hope in a see of pragmatic economic, political, and military necessity.
On some level—could we argue that it was “nothing personal”? Did the treatment of the Boers and the Irish show that for Europeans it really was just about economics, plain and simple, as Lenin suggested—afterall, the British were quite prepared to ruthlessly crush European descended stock in South Africa; or, to oppress the European Irish. The concentration camp is an innovation, though it had been echoed earlier in time.
This points to an increasing power of technology to help shape brutal practices—railways help us to gather and move populations efficiently, as well as increase the distance between those who give the orders and those who carry them out. We can see a sense of “diffused responsibility” that will be a classic hallmark of later atrocities like The Jewish Holocaust that accompanied the rise of Nazism. Is it the fault of the soldiers who gathered the Boers and sent them to the railheads for their journey? What off the rail workers who got them there? Or, the guards at the camps. Or the doctors who were overwhelmed? Or the supply masters who didn’t get the supplies to the camps? No one was solely responsible for the tragic end of those in the camps. Is this a great comfort for those who suffered? Or does it make the suffering worse, not to have someone to blame, except the amorphous—“English.”
Two caveats to my sweeping claim--JED makes the excellent point that the Congo worked in Leopold's favour precisely because he was able to play the French and English off against each other--a balance of power issue. Though obviously informed by economics, as Lolette shows us, , this is also clearly a political issue. And second, I borrowed a link from LTAM for the picture you see above. I think it is instructive as to the mindset (also in our text, p788). That ideological/military stuff surely will not go away...
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