Conquest (by -8000) is taking and keeping land by military means. Conquest goes back to at least -8000, when the walls of Jericho were first built. The English word comes from the last conquerors of England: the Norman French.
The conquered: The four main ways to deal with the conquered:
- Taxation: Leave them pretty much alone so long as they pay tribute or taxes or give over enough land. Examples: Persian Empire, Norman French.
- Assimilation: privilege or force one’s culture (language, religion, etc) on them. This is in addition to taxation. Examples: the Arab Empire privileged its culture, while the French and ISIS forced theirs, as did Anglo Americans in the late stages of their conquest.
- Deportation: kick them out. Examples: Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, Cherokee Trail of Tears.
- Annihilation: wipe them out – aka genocide. This is above and beyond the battles and massacres necessary for mere conquest. Examples: Taino and Tasmanian genocides.
Nothing says a conqueror has to stick to just one of these.
The conquerors: The people of a conquering nation, meanwhile, are often heavily brainwashed. You get otherwise intelligent people like Victor Hugo saying stuff like this about conquest:
“It is civilization marching against barbarism. It is an enlightened people setting out to meet a people living in darkness. We are the Greeks of the world, we must enlighten the world.”
Words and phrases to make murder respectable:
- Civilization,
- Progress,
- Manifest Destiny,
- The White Man’s Burden,
- Freedom and Democracy,
- War on Terror.
Lao-tzu was not among the brainwashed:
“He who delights in conquest, delights in pain.”
Conflating conquest and genocide: Anglo apologists first assume that all human societies are bent on conquest, when in fact few are. Second, they project their own extreme sort of conquest onto all other conquerors. So, for example, they assume the Arab Empire wiped out North Africans and then violently forced their religion on those who remained. Because that is what Anglos did to Native Americans. In fact, it took 700 years for Egypt to become mostly Muslim.
Compare: 512 years after conquest:
- Egypt: over 50% Christian.
- US: 0.003% Native by religion.
“Tribalism”: Anglo Americans project their own extreme history – not even Genghis Khan went so far – onto all of history, all the way back to the invention of the spear. That makes what they do seem “normal”, “natural”, “understandable”, “inevitable”, part of “the human condition”, a thing not to be questioned. So it barely enters their heads that instead of genocide they could have, say, created a multiracial society, or respected Native American sovereignty – or gone back to Europe. No one “needed” tobacco.
Technological determinism: If genocidal conquest was technologically determined, then the Americas would be, say, 75% Chinese, not 50% European. New Zealand would be 2% Maori, not 15%. There would be, say, 3 million Berbers in North Africa, not 36 million. And so on. The US is an extreme case. There was nothing normal or inevitable about it.
Making past genocides “reasonable” makes future genocides “reasonable” – and therefore more likely.
– Abagond, 2015.
See also:
- brainwashing:
- genocide
- Anglo Americans
- ISIS
- Genghis Khan
- Lao-tzu
- technocentric history
- guns, germs and steel
- clash of civilizations
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This shows that White Americans went much further than White South Africans in their conquests. Strange, then, how White South Africans are often seen as the epitome of White supremacy. As bad as the apartheid government was towards people of color in South Africa, it appears they never went anywhere near as far as Anglo-Americans did in the U.S.
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@Kiwi
Good point. Pretty sure Hitler drew his inspiration for the Holocaust from both the Armenian Genocide and the genocide of the Native Americans in the U.S.
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Benjamin: Only because they were incapable of actually doing that. They were able to wipe out the native Americans for the most part because of biological warfare. The Native Americans did not have natural resistance to Old World diseases–and that is how most most of them died.
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Hey, Abagond, if i’m half-AngloAmerican, and that culture is the worst evil or at least irredeemably evil, and i can never fully leave it, and never fully leaving it is bad or makes you not enough, why bother?
What’s your solution to make individual AngloAmericans enough without making them living objects for non AngloAmericans to use to fix bigotry?
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@Jabari Jones,
If that were the case, why did Europeans wipe out nearly all the indigenous Americans in the USA, but practised other forms of accommodation in other places, such as amalgamation or separate settlements or multiculturalism?
Even much of that biological warfare was on purpose. Once the English learned that Natives were more susceptible to their infectious diseases, they would give them infected blankets and clothing on purpose, while sealing them inside of a very small reservation or village where the disease would spread easily and wipe them out without the need to kill them directly.
Why does one need to portray it as something that could not be helped?
Anyhow, the biological warfare argument does not explain many of the other methods used, eg,
– actual wars with deadly weapons, eg, the Anglo-Powhatan wars, the Seminole wars, Bacon’s Rebellion, Mystic Massacre, Battle of Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, etc.
– removal programs, eg, the trail of tears and the general reservation system
– Indian boarding schools and cultural genocide
– the Dawes act and Jim Crow
Even today, the Federal and State governments and corporate interests appear to be on a quest to obliterate the Native American. They will not let up until they are gone, once and for all.
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“…instead of genocide they could have, say, created a multiracial society, or respected Native American sovereignty – or gone back to Europe.”
Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report says this about the English Settler project
(http://www.blackagendareport.com/no_more_american_thanksgivings):
“The English arrived with criminal intent…Indians who had initially cooperated with the squatters were transmogrified into “savages” deserving displacement and death…The necessity of genocide was the operative, working assumption of the expanding American nation.”
Anglo Americans did have a lot of options in their contacts with Native Americans, but consciously chose to plunder, enslave, rape and murder the human beings they met in North America. I wish they had chosen peaceful trade, cultural exchanges, learning and normal human intermingling—–and returned to Europe.
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Abagond, I would like to know what your view is on where this Anglo-Saxon behaviour comes from? Is it cultural or is there a genetic disposition to evilness?
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Folks, the original European ‘settlers’ were sh*t stirrers(Puritans), criminals and generally rot off the earth. It is no surprise they devolved into a murderous lot. Being especially good at propaganda, they were able to candy coat their history and turn zeros into heroes.
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Reblogged this on Raimanet.
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This was a great post, and brainwashed Americans and other westerners still speak like Victor Hugo today.
I was just bothered by the Jericho wall date because I don’t know of any evidence that dates it to 8000 BC. That year references some pottery sherds that were found nearby, but the mud walls radiocarbon date between 1950-1550 BC.
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I don’t think that being white is a bad thing nor that they all intend to do harm.
The problem irises when they act like rogue Lymphocytes by creating more problems than they intended to solve.
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@Herneith
LOL! The Puritans were such hated oppressors in England that when their leaders died, they had to physically line the route to the cemetery with armed men to keep the “regular folk” from attacking the pallbearers and trashing the bodies of the deceased.
Yet, we are taught in school that the Puritans were oppressed by the non-Puritan English population and sailed to the New World seeking “religious freedom”. Propaganda through the ages…. (Double LOL!!!)
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[…] Sourced through Scoop.it from: abagond.wordpress.com […]
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Reblogged this on League of Bloggers For a Better World.
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I wish somebody would take all this information and assemble it into a full effect documentary film just to showcase the actual devastation of blood and pain of the Anglo conquest around the world. Not just the Americas but the true story of the colonized world.
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I wish somebody would take all this information and assemble it into a full effect documentary film just to showcase the actual devastation of blood and pain of the Anglo conquest around the world.
You might hurt their feelings, snooka snoow!
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my wife is in my ear on this type of tip as well, like it’s in our dna or something or was it just the right moment with the north american continent being ‘discovered’ ie introduced to europeans, but slavery was the way the catholic church/roman empire did things, and everyone else ottomans, arab, abrahamic, etc etc not to decend into an arab trader trap of course ‘it was the thing to do at the time’? karma and a negative impression left by it is also considered a trap by some?
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we been having this conversation every day out of a clear blue sky a plane you can’t even see blows up the whole block and she’s like let them in here (ie the us) and it’s like the one’s that don’t fight, i mean we could go get a couple machine guns right now if it was like that (ie aleppo here in philly) , back and forth all day
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it never gets nowhere and everyone misses out the fact there is nuclear missiles pointed at every city on earth
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To Abagond:
There was nothing normal or inevitable about it.
I think one could make a good case that the brutality, although horrific at times, in the conquest of the Americas by the British in the US and Canada was less than that of Mongols and the Romans. Europeans conquered and dominated much of the planet by the early 20th century, yet indigenous people today form the large majorities in most former European colonies of Africa and Asia..It wasn’t technological prowess that won the day for Europeans but very good luck for them and very bad luck for the native people. It’s estimated that 95% of the indigenous people were wiped out by disease in the first 100 years of contact with Europeans, Jared Diamond’s book fully acknowledges this. The opposite conditions existed for Africa, fear of diseases kept Europeans at bay in the African continent, known as the “white man’s coffin”, till the later part of the 19th century, not enlightened benevolence.
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To Abagond:
The sentence above should read:
“It wasn’t technological prowess that won the day for Europeans..”
“In the Americas, it wasn’t technological prowess that won the day for Europeans….”
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There is a scene from ‘The Matrix’ in which Agent Smith explains to Morpheus how humans (in this case ‘European Civilization’) spread like a virus. I’ve heard it compared to a Cancer and a virus in it’s affect by some of those who support the Gaia Hypothesis.
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