I’m in the first or second chapter of 's Dawn of Everything, and the unearned arrogance the Europeans display to the indigenous Americans is constantly thrown back in their faces.
“You don’t feed the hungry, even when when you have food to spare?”
“The only reason your men obey you is because you compel them with fear of violence?”
He goes on to argue that “enlightenment” ideals of human freedom and equality entered the primitive European brainpan through their experiences with truly free people who actually embraced equality. It’s a fun read
If you’re into the Indigenous critique of colonial capitalist patriarchy / settler society or whatever name you like, As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a must read. I am telling everyone.
Dawn of Everything is the first book I would hand to a lib if I was going to try and turn them into a Marxist. Gotta shake those “west is best” and “muh human nature” brainworms first before you will get anywhere, IMO
I’ve been reading “The Many-Headed Hydra” and it covers a similar idea. However it is focused on the Northern Atlantic and Anglos. They go into some detail about the wreck of the ship Sea Venture and the mutiny to stay free on Bermuda rather than return to class based rule. That wreck actually inspired The Tempest
My god is real and if you look at it your eyes will burn.
It’s honestly still a mystery to me how they managed to brute force their way into hegemony, time and time again. Joyless, drab, unappealing…and yet they somehow got the numbers to pull this shit off in the first place.
Guns, manufactured goods, liquor, guns, sugar, medicine, guns, and guns.
One of the common tactics was to pick one ethnic group or whatever to be the “civilized” group, then give them guns and tell them that if they want to continue to get guns they’d better get the rest of the region under control, quick, or the guns would stop. YOu make one group really powerful, but not as powerful as your troops, then use them as a club to beat the rest of the region in to submission while also making your aid contingent on wearing clothes, drinking tea, producing export crops, etc.
Going back further, I wanna know how they even managed to secure enough power to pull off shit like the crusades – How Christianity became an institution in the first place. I need to look into that at some point.
It had the advantage of the pre-existing structure of the Roman Empire. Religions catch on fast when there’s a ton of money, swords, and land already associated with it. Also helped that the Roman religion didn’t care too much about heresy or adopting new gods, so the average Roman citizen didn’t care that Jupiter is now Jehova. A lot of early Christianity was like madlibs, just changing the names of various polytheistic deities into various Christian things.
Some early Christians in England for instance would emphasis the similarity of Jesus on the cross with Odin dying on the world tree.
Also material reasons
sun gods are so in right now, everyone is saying this
