Vollständiges Transkript von „Colonialism, Explained“. Klicke auf einen Zeitstempel, um das Video an dieser Stelle zu öffnen. Du brauchst ein anderes Video? Nutze den YouTube-Transkript-Generator.
0:01 In 1899, a poem was published. Take up the white man's burden. Send forth the best ye breed. Go bind your sons to exile to serve your captives need. To wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild, your new caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child. The poem is speaking to the USA, encouraging it to go forth and colonize its newly acquired property, the Philippines. This will make more sense if we see what the world looked like around 1899. In capitals across Europe, human zoos were showcasing exotic specimens from the rest of the world. People were
0:47 displayed alongside animals right up until 1937. [Music] Rubber barons were enslaving entire Amazonian tribes in Peru. Aboriginal children were being stolen from their families in Australia. And the Germans were carrying out a genocide in Namibia. It was about time to be non-European. See, the past 400 years leading up to this poem had been open season on today's global south. A free-for-all of claiming and carving and conquering. spearheaded by European colonial powers. Each man's need is that of his neighbor. They called the first few centuries of this the age of discovery, but it was just a really
1:32 long, brutal, and bloody Monopoly game. And they weren't acting in silos. They were watching each other, competing with one another, and learning and refining each other's techniques. Looking back hundreds of years later, it seems they developed a concrete system, a five-step process on how to kill a civilization. And it all starts with step one, mission. Before we dive deeper, a special thank you to our supporters on Patreon for making videos like this possible. Doing this work takes time, resources, and editorial independence, and we're only able to do that thanks to our community. So, if you believe in what we're doing and if you want to be a part of this with us, you
2:18 can join our Patreon. It's how we keep this going. Now, back to the video. If you're going to set sail to destroy another people, that's an expensive task morally and financially. Sending valuable men and resources off to the unknown for unknown amounts of time for an unknown outcome is a risk, and success will definitely require immorality. So, you need a narrative to justify your actions to yourself and the people and politics you might have to answer to. Enter mission to make conquest sound less like pillaging and more like a favor. Think of it like each white man's burden. This was the mission of choice for the Portuguese and the Spanish who were the first to begin colonizing overseas. Spanish explorers
3:04 and concistadors set sail to a new world and from where they would ultimately return with gallions laden with treasure. They claimed to be spreading Christianity and saving souls. In reality, they were massacring indigenous populations, and the Portuguese would even pioneer what would come to be known as the Atlantic slave trade, which the Spanish would then use to populate their colonies in South America. We came to serve God and King, but also to get rich. And all of this was sanctioned by the church. In 1452, the pope decreed the Portuguese right to conquer and enslave quote sariss, pagans, and other enemies of Christ. And 40 years later, the first
3:51 Spanish pope put out a decree declaring a vast part of the world for [Music] Spain. Now, the French and the British had a different mission. They saw it as their duty to spread their culture and values to more primitive people. They spoke of this openly. [Music] One prominent French thinker believed that black people were made to till the soil. The Chinese were made to be good workers and Europeans were made to be masters and soldiers. As for the British, well, it was a prominent British writer that wrote this poem. Much of the empire was
4:37 built on greed and a lust for power. But the British came to believe they had a moral mission, too. A mission to civilize the world. And there were other missions. The Belgians claimed a humanitarian mission, the Dutch a merchant mission, the Zionists a return mission, and the colonizing descendants of older colonizers, the Americans, would claim manifest destiny that these lands were meant for them. To be clear, whatever they might have called it, the real mission was power and resources. Lands whose size and virgin wealth drew forth extremes in men. Wealth lay wasting. And what these empires did to secure this mission was far from Christian or
5:24 civilized. Now that you've landed ashore, it's time to guarantee the desired outcome. Here you have some options. The first obvious choice is organized violence. They all went for this in some [Music] capacity. But there's the more insidious options, too. Famine was orchestrated by the British in Ireland and India, by the Germans in Namibia, and white settlers in North America when they slaughtered the buffalo that many Native American tribes relied on for food and overall sustenance. Some nationalists have always maintained that the famine was artificial, that Ireland had plenty of grain, but it was all exported to England while the people starved. Disease is another one.
6:10 Settlers in the Americas would give blankets and handkerchiefs infected with smallpox or other diseases to indigenous tribes intentionally. Stories of this happening exist across the Americas, speaking to a systematic approach used by settlers. It resulted in the deaths of millions of indigenous people. Other insidious options include displacement, settlements, and slavery. Now, you might think that people couldn't fathom this as immoral at the time, but they could. As early as 1550, just 58 years into the age of discovery, there were moral debates discussing the treatment of indigenous peoples. [Music]
7:04 [Music] And yet they continued. These age-old tactics have been in play for centuries all the way until today. Nowhere is this more clear than in observing one of the world's remaining colonies. There are currently at least 196 illegal outposts in the West Bank. More than a million people, the majority of Gaza's displaced population, are sheltering here. About 300 people died in waves of air strikes over the past 72 hours. It is an absolute disaster and it is not an unexpected result considering that Israel is purposefully targeting any kind of healthcare facility. Every day the cries of hungry children fill the halls of Kamal Adwan Hospital in North Gaza. Some children here at the
7:49 malnutrition clinic have never known a full meal in their lives. Now that you've conquered the local population, you need to keep it that way. Time for step three, management. Let's not forget that within each of these colonies was a resource to be plundered. Sometimes several sugar in Haiti, Jamaica, the Philippines, and Brazil, cotton in Egypt and the American South, spices in Indonesia, palm oil in Nigeria, silver in Peru, etc. And the biggest resource to be extracted of all, labor. Here's the problem with labor. You need it in large amounts to extract everything else. And you need the people behind the labor subdued and
8:36 participating in your machine for it to function. So to get the labor that you need to get the resources, you need a system. System here is just a nicer way of saying forced labor. and a lot of them were based on making people work to pay taxes that the colonizers invented when they got there. The riches bestowed by the new world would usher in a golden age for Spain. Not just making it the most powerful nation in Europe, but a global superpower. The Spanish had the incomand system. In the Congo free state, there was the dominoal system. The Dutch had the cultivation system. The Portuguese the Eneno system. the French, Code Noir, and Corv systems. And of course, there's the explicit use of slavery where tens of
9:23 millions of people from Africa were kidnapped and taken all over the Americas to work on plantations and extract resources. These ships would then return loaded with merchandise from the plantations, coffee, sugar, and cocoa beans. These systems didn't just organically emerge for each colonizer with no knowledge of what was going on in other parts of the world. Systems were being observed and refined. In 1861, a book was published called Java or how to manage a colony. It's a thorough evaluation of the Dutch colonial enterprise in Indonesia for the British to study and use in India.
10:09 [Music] It was also read by the king of a newly established country seeking out a colony of his own, the Belgian king Leopold II. From this book, he learned how profits from the colony were used to develop railways and canals in the Netherlands. He'd then travel and visit British and Dutch colonies, eventually acquiring his own. buried in their jungle, too backward to realize the inheritance it offered, the untapped resources of their vast continent. Millions of Congalles are estimated to have died during King Leopold II's rule. Failure to meet rubber production targets was a capital offense. He pillaged the land for its rubber and
10:56 then used the profits to fund many projects in Belgium, leaving him the nickname King Builder. and then their systems for demographic control and organization. The Nazis would study and borrow from the Jim Crow laws of the US. German eugenicists were in uh contact with in continuing dialogue with American eugenicis in the years and decades leading up to uh the the third right that uh American eugenesis wrote books that were big sellers in Germany in the years leading up to the Third Reich. and Zionists would take inspiration from Africaners and their apartheid system. The granting of self-government to the trans sky, the first one to homeland. So now you have your systems
11:43 in place to extract your resources and keep your labor in line. Except this isn't going to work forever because eventually people are going to resist and you're outnumbered. And colonizers knew this from watching history unfold around them. So now you need friction. This will prevent people from coming together to overthrow you. This part of the playbook goes way back. Often known as divide and conquer, the British did it in India, Nigeria, and then in Palestine by favoring Zionist immigration. The Belgians in Rwanda classified people into rigid HOU and Tootszie identities and empowered tootssis disproportionately. A system that laid
12:29 the groundwork for future genocide. The entire country had become a killing field. Hoous armed with machetes searched every house, every hill, and killed every tootsie they could find. Then there's the more largecale execution. Good morning, gentlemen. Good morning. of literally carving up mass swats of land into artificial borders, creating more long-term conflicts that continue to today. Like at the Berlin Conference of 1884, where Europeans came together to split the whole of Africa between themselves. Africa rich in resources that lay untouched since the world began. Or a few decades later, the Sykes Pico agreement where the British and French carved up the Middle East. I should like
13:15 to draw a line from the Ian acre to the last K and Koku. Once you've split territories between yourselves and split up the people within those territories, it's time for the last step. To kill a civilization for good, you don't just conquer the land. You erase the story the people tell themselves about who they are. Enter assimilation. Start with the language. In Algeria, French was forced into schools and administration. In North America, native children were stolen from their families and put in residential schools where they were beaten for speaking their language. Professor Gabriel D. Roier is teaching Anisha Moan, the native language of the Ojiway people 120 years ago on the very
14:03 soil he's standing on. Speaking this language was forbidden, even punished. Cultural genocide. [Music] Then go on to religion. In the Philippines, Catholicism was forced on the people at sword point by the Spanish. Its top is ornately carved with the crest of ancient Spain. In the Americas, entire spiritual systems were declared devil worship and violently stamped out. The concquistadors decided to build the original church right on top of the site of the Aztec's temple male using the actual stones from the destroyed Aztec temples. And it was a very defiant statement that we're here and our god is
14:49 better than your god. The last thing to target is the family. Historians and scholars use the term fictive kin, the creation of of family ties in order to replace the family ties that have been so brutally wrenched from you. In the Americas, enslaved African families were routinely separated. In Australia and Canada, indigenous children were stolen on mass to re-educate them into white society, the stolen generations. He was in the front yard and somebody just pulled up and took him. Yeah. Policemans or rangers would come, pull up, just grab these half-colored kids. But the ones who were taken have suffered ever since. With no identity, family, or bonds, many
15:36 now suffer from homelessness, alcoholism, and other issues. This last step is a more long-term process, one whose consequences are still unfolding today. This five-step blueprint is not random. It is the result of centuries of experimentation refined through generations of empire watching empire, learning from each other's mistakes, adjusting to the changing tides of politics, morality, and optics. And the blueprint is alive and [Music] well in two ways. First, in the
16:22 remaining colonies of the world [Music] like Israel where we see the culmination of that refinement from holy mission. From the Messiah will take us to Israel. To violent might to carving colonial geographies and continued erasure. There are currently at least 196 illegal outposts in the West Bank. All five stages are not only present but thriving and backed and funded by the very empires that wrote the original playbook. The second way is more covert. It's called neoc colonialism. Big dream, big hope. It was very
17:10 romantic. Decolonization and independence movements eventually swept through the world. But the machinery of empire never stopped. It just changed uniform. Hello and welcome to the World Bank Group. Institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and countless Western funded NOS perpetuate the same playbook. Instead of Christianizing the savage, we have developing the global south. Instead of direct rule, we have debt diplomacy, foreign aid. [Music] The white man's burden is alive and well. [Music] Centuries of plunder built up some parts of the world and left the rest dealing with the [Music]
17:58 aftermath. But it's not without cost to the colonizer behind the pen because in the process of civilizing the barbarians, you start to behave like one. Emma Cazer, an anti-colonial writer from Martineique wrote, "The colonizer who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. [Music]
