How the Enlightenment Led to Colonialism

[Ian Livingston]

Isn't it the same impulse that drives all militants? "I believe, therefore
it is right, and, because it is right, those who do not believe as I do
must be converted to my belief or they must die, for they are wrong. Wrong
belief must be expunged from existence."

Well, and then there's whole argument regarding resources....

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 6:33 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> or, How the Enlightenment Justified Colonialism:
>
> http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic97823.files/I_/Sept_27/KANT.pdf
>
> 2015-03-01 15:22 GMT+01:00 Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>:
>
>> 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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