You wrote 30,000 words to ask whether racism is cool. The answer didn’t change.

The comments that already exist are pretty good but I’d like to bring up that I dont think it’s all that unique to Europe. Look at imperial Japan, for instance. I haven’t witnessed this myself, but I hear Korea has some cultural resentment towards Japan (particularly from older folk) thats not unlike how some affected cultures feel about their former European colonizers.

IMHO, the answer is in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin

TLDR: Capitalism cannot survive without Colonialism, because it needs new markets to solve the recurring overproduction crises. An overproduction crisis is when the workers earn too little to buy what they produce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism

Europeans are not evil nor good. They are influenced by the material conditions they live in and by ideology.

As far as we know we have not found the colonialism gene, and there is no evidence that Europeans are somehow genetically different at this locus. So we can, at least for now, ignore the possibility that Europeans are inherently evil, or predisposed towards colonialism. Rather, the actions of any people must be understood as a consequence of their circumstances and culture.

due to all that’s happened in history, white people today are, while not intrinsically or genetically evil, tainted by the colonialism that has already happened and are therefore more likely to be the exploiters than the exploited due to their historical advantage.

White people are not only the beneficiaries of the colonialism that has already happened, they are often also the beneficiaries of colonialism that is currently happening. The CIA didn’t coup random Central American countries because they were bored. The IMF and World Bank don’t give loans to African countries for humanitarian reasons.

But human societies are not species and human-human interactions are not strictly ecological. For one, human societies have overarching coordination and collective will that species don’t have, and human societies as a whole often show more characteristics akin to a single organism than a species (though even that is apples to oranges)

I feel that the same principles that govern other animals should apply, more or less, to humans too. Although it might be more appropriate to compare human societies to populations of social animals (such as ant colonies or beehives) than to different species.

Does that imply that Imperial China was less evil than Imperial Europe? Or are they just as evil but in a different way (land-based conquest instead of sea based)? Or did they just not have the resources to do what Europe did but absolutely would have if they did? I don’t know hence why I’m asking.

I think the difference is that historically China had excellent agricultural land, a relatively modern and stable economy, and was surrounded by poorer and less advanced countries. So people had all the resources they wanted, and had little incentive to go far away. In contrast, Europe was fragmented, with Scotland, the Netherlands and Portugal actually having poor / too little land, and so there was a push for both raw materials and markets.

There are only a few good answers below that even obliquely reference historical materialism, how colonialism is related to different modes of production, the defining features of the columbian era of euro-american capitalist-colonialism, and its connections to race. You’ll likely get much better answers if you cross post this to lemmygrad or hexbear.

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They’re not genetically or intrinsically evil, and I haven’t seen anyone in lemmy (.ml, .hexbear or grad’) thus far suggest the idea if that’s what was meant by socialist spaces (if not, ignore this part)…

Europeans’ “uniquely evil” part are in thanks to their geography and other material conditions, which were largely shaped by wrecking and disfiguring more than half the planet (so basically both, but the latter cyclically enriches the former and neither are compartmentalized if that makes sense).

So naturally, reactions from leftist spaces to this will vary, an overwhelming majority of which are absolutely reasonable. It doesn’t help their case that Europe, with spearheading by the U.S., a settler-colony of their creation that they do not attribute as a settler-colony (settler-colonialism + time = totally legitimate state), continues to deprave and violate the sovereignty of the majority of the Global South via invasions, debt-traps, and genocide today.

On a socio-economic level, Europeans, including European settlers from e. g. the U.S. and the Commonwealth mind you, are also afforded privileges and treats that are just beyond the scope of imagination for many people in the Global South.

Today, Europeans generally can travel almost anywhere in the world (with a red carpet and open arms), they have almost an unlimiting access to healthcare, education, technology, food security, shelter etc… limited only by their states’ dwindling colonial reach, they can pursue whatever interests they may have, they can commit crimes within and outside their borders with punishment ranging from next to nothing to a slap on the wrist compared to crimes commited by non-white people (even when sentencing is given by a Global South country!), they do not have to justify their presence amongst the “others” (if the questions “Why are you here?” and “Why did you come here?” seem familiar, you’ll know what I mean), they do not have the same uphill struggle of having to dispel hundreds of years of actively harmful mischaracterizations and racist depictions of your place of origin/ethnicity (e.g. Orientalism) every time they interact with someone unfamiliar with their background (and there a lot of someones to go through), you get the idea.

There are also two (of the sameish) things that aren’t necessarily unique to Europe, but their variant are absolutely 100x detestable over anything I’ve seen: European denialism and whitewashing. I’m talking about things ranging from softer rose-tintedness like “these aren’t applicable to country X in Europe because it isn’t a Western European country” / “My [European] country doesn’t fit in this description” that we already see in this thread to “[European country] had to save them from their barbarism, actually” are precisely the type of white people that will continue to drive anyone so much as empathetic to anti-colonial struggles nuts.

My point is: Europeans that understand their position, privileges and relation to the Global South and actively seek to dismantle capitalism, centimeter by centimeter, and not just for their own sake, unquestionably exist, which gives no room to the idea of ontological evil.

Some interesting tidbits from Wikipedia:

Activity that could be called colonialism has a long history, starting at least as early as the ancient Egyptians. Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans founded colonies in antiquity. Phoenicia had an enterprising maritime trading-culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550 BC to 300 BC; later the Persian Empire and various Greek city-states continued on this line of setting up colonies. The Romans would soon follow, setting up coloniae throughout the Mediterranean, in North Africa, and in Western Asia.

The Japanese colonial empire began in the mid-19th century with the settler colonization of Hokkaido and the destruction of the island’s indigenous Ainu people before moving onto the Ryukyu Islands (the indigenous Ryukyuan people survived colonization more intact). After the Meiji Restoration, Japan more formally developed its colonial policies with the help of European advisors. The stated purpose from the beginning was to compensate for the lack of resources on the main islands of Japan by securing control over natural resources in Asia for its own economic development and industrialization, not unlike its European counterparts. Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War to control Korea and the island of Formosa, now Taiwan, and later fought off the Russian Empire to control Port Arthur and South Sakhalin.

While colonies of contiguous empires have been historically excluded, they can be seen as colonies. Contemporary expansion of colonies is seen by some in case of Russian imperialism and Chinese imperialism. There is also ongoing debate in academia about Zionism as settler colonialism.

Of course, historical facts rarely matter when it comes to rhetoric like this.

Long story short, Europe was slightly ahead of Africa in terms of development when they began to really interact, around the time Europe found out about the Americas they had a bunch of new land from genocide of the natives and needed manpower Europeans could never hope to fulfill, so the slave trade started in earnest.

Europeans would only trade their goods for slaves, which started the slave industry in various African nations that wanted these goods, which stalled development in Africa while dramatically increasing development in Europe, widening the gap until the colonial era. Over time, this gap began to increasingly be seen as its own justification, and Europeans became increasingly racist towards Africans.

It isn’t about inherent evil. Europe was beginning to become capitalist while the most developed nations in Africa were developed feudal kingdoms, and the geography of Africa and Europe had more to do with that than any genetics could ever hope to cover. The narrow gap was exploited by Europeans and widened until the modern era of imperialism and neocolonialism.

I highy recommend How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. We’re doing a readalong over in Hexbear.net if you want to join!

The former.

Other people did similar things everywhere, the Europeans just managed to be the top player right when the industrial revolution made it easier. There’s even cases of native groups getting a hold of European technology and using it to genocide other native groups.

People on the “left” turn it into an ethnicity thing, because humans have always liked to do that. It’s ironic.

Most human societies had been terrible and atrocious. Europeans just got the technology to be terrible and atrocious at a global level first.

One of the most interesting explanations I’ve seen is that Western Europe was politically fragmented just enough so that big enough entities were competing with each other for dominance. So there was no central authority strong enough to pacify it, and the individual states were powerful enough to mobilize resources, creating a competitive power race. It was in trying to beat each other that they reached out and colonized the rest of the world.

Edit: I’m thinking now how during the apex of pax Americana, space exploration really subsided for example. When the US and the USSR were competing it was on. Now that US hegemony is declining, it’s seems to be on again. Too strong of a political unification keeps the centrifugal forces in check.

Of course. Just look at europeans : their squinty eyes ! their devious mouths ! always plotting, discussing their next colony !

I like the the book “Caliban and the Witch” by Silvia Federici. Among other topics it discusses how European commoners fought the rise of privatization and capitalism. About the “colonization” of Europe if you will. I don’t think Europeans as a whole are uniquely evil, we just lost that initial struggle.

There was a book a while back called Guns, Germs, and Steel that delves into this topic.

The root cause, as I understand it, is that Europe is on a continent oriented east-west instead of north-south. And Europe in particular is on the part of that continent that has a lot of easy access to the sea.

East-west orientation allows you to transplant plants and animals long distances and keep them at roughly the same latitudes, which means roughly the same climate. That is a big boon for spreading “civilized” agriculture, which is what creates surplus of labor, which creates non food jobs that advance technology.

Among the common 5-7 domesticated food animals people eat today, all but one or two were domesticated in Mesopotamia, but then spread all over Europe.

Access to the sea is the other component that turns tech advantage into colonialism, because it gives the transportation. Even today, China and Russia are great powers, but they are forced to be continental powers instead of maritime powers, because nearly all of their coast lines are hemmed in by narrow seas that are easy to blockade.

There are, of course, a bunch of other factors I’m not even thinking about and competing opinions. But I don’t for one second think that any of this has anything to do with European “innate intelligence” or skin color.