How the Enlightenment Led to Colonialism

[Monte Davis]

Umm... no question that the Enlightenment came up with new rationales for
colonialism. Arguably, it came up with the meta-schemata we still use for
every "-ism."

But peoples, states, and nascent nation-states -- many of them not even
European! -- were planting colonies and kicking the shit out of indigenes
for millennia before the Enlightenment.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 5:45 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Kentridge also sketched a brief history of a Herero insurrection in
> what had been German Southwest Africa—“the first German genocide of
> the twentieth century,” he noted. Skulls of the Herero were shipped to
> Berlin, where they were skinned, boiled, and catalogued for
> taxonomical purposes—an attempt to construct a latter-day Great Chain
> of Being.
>
> [...]
>
> “Every act of enlightenment—all ambitions to save souls, all the basic
> impulses—is so dogged by the weight of what follows it, the shadows,
> the violence that has accompanied the Enlightenment. The colonial
> project in its own description of bringing light to darkness is a
> gruesome working out of Plato’s cave.”
>
> http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/04/how-the-enlightenment-led-to-colonialism
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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