serlindsipity

Hey guys!

So i have come to the realization that I have graduated college (with a decent GPA mind you) and I have not accomplished learning how to do hard research. Nine times out of ten, I start at the wrong point and accomplish nothing in the three hours I am knee deep in the wrong book. Its a bit discouraging.

When I came to my senses, I realized I'd ask the people that I get most of my knowledge from (aka You TFPers)

So here it is!

I am looking for a common ground for a series of artwork which is the theme of cultural loss through being conquered by white culture.

What cultures (I would like specific) have been destroyed, altered, or lost due to white colonialism? When were they lost, what was lost, and where are they now?

If you can send me in a direction, I will do the rest of the work. But I just need the direction.

Thanks guys!

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My third eye is my camera's lens.

pig

i would suggest one of my all time favorite, the aztecs and their interractions with cortez. a quick google pulled this as a thing with dates and so forth.

they got conquistadored!!!

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Infinite_Loser

First of all, I'd just like to say that GPA is all but meaningless in the real world. If it were up to me GPA would be abolished.

...But I digress.

No offense, but you really shouldn't need any help on the subject, considering you've got about four/five hundred years of European colonialism, five continents to choose from and no less than a few hundred existing examples.

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roachboy

i might be able to help but i dont understand enough about the project, so am not sure what you might actually need. could you say more about it?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Lucifer

Hawaiian. White Christian missionaries totalled Hawaii.

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- Job 30:29

1123, 6536, 5321

hagatha

you could start with Spanish colonialism....look at Mexico and South America....you know, Guns Germs and Steel deals a lot with how Western cultures basically subsumed so called "primitive" cultures that did not have a documented past .
If you check out this book, it could give you an idea of what societies to focus on.

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Thats the last time I trust the strangest people I ever met....H. Simpson

serlindsipity

Infinite - I am aware there is lots of history and examples to sift through, but frankly, thats a pain. I was just hoping for a select few and I can work from there.

hagatha- that book sounds wonderfully useful. I will check it out.

Roachboy- I am intending to assemble a big variety of lost traditions and culture and appropriate it. I think its the least I can do as a white person who feels badly for my ancestor's past. In a way I want to celebrate and work with cultural images in hopes to give back in some way. So many of these cultures are amazing and thus deserve a sort of visual apology.

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My third eye is my camera's lens.

eribrav

One might wonder if this is the real reason you graduated but still don't know how to do research?

debaser

The Neanderthals, we totally wiped their troglodyte asses out! Whoo Hooo! Go white people!

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JumpinJesus

Two of my favorite books are by Chinua Achebe.

They're titled Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease.

They chronicle Nigeria's experience with British missionaries and then British imperialism.

I hope this is along the lines of what you're looking for.

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

Grasshopper Green

You dont have to look further than our own backyard....Native American cultures were destroyed by white men.

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"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings; steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king"

Formerly Medusa

mo42

I agree with Hagatha- Guns, Germs, and Steel does an excellent job of describing what cultures have been displaced by other cultures, how that occurred, and the fates of those cultures. Plus, it's a fascinating read.

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roachboy

well, i'll put on my historian garb here and say that if i were in your place, serlindsipity, i would be working the other way around, from the pieces outward rather than from the entire history of colonialism inward toward the pieces.

but i'm still not sure i understand what you're up to: are you curating a show or is it to be your work? the idea as you outline it sounds like it'd be an interesting curatorial matter, but as the focus for a collection of your stuff i would think it could get you into problematic areas. this because the space that separates a gesture that you might want to make as an artist and the effect of a show--which is a social thing the meanings for which get assigned it by others many of whom will not share the context that you bring to bear on the production of your stuff. so you obviously need to know not only about the historical situations you want to address, but also about the history of shows like the one you are considering in order to see which gestures are worn out, which might work, which get construed in counter-productive ways, which might work to generate the kind of responses that you might want.

it doesnt seem to me that a giant mea culpa is going to work terribly well. thinking about it, i can imagine you running into alot of static over it.

so i am kind of hoping that this is a curatorial gig of some kind. it'd be much easier to pull off this kind of show if your voice operated at the level of organization and commentary rather than through the work being exhibited

if its your work, then i would imagine that an installation would operate better than more traditional work---but even there, you have questions about what limits are imposed on you by virtue of presenting this type of information, this type of problem, in a gallery context. whether you end up, despite your intentions (as best i can figure them out), in aestheticizing the violence you want to condemn.

there are alot of problems that attend heading down this corridor.
i'm certainly not saying dont do it--quite the contrary--do it but be fore-armed against obvious problems that you can encounter as a function of (a) the gallery setting itself (b) the context that is created for you by other, parallel types of shows and their fates (c) the historical situations that you are trying to address and (d) problems that attend your subject position as the person who is doing the addressing.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Daoust

I agree with Medusa.

Native American cultures, or First Nations cultures as we refer to them in Canada, are prime examples of groups of peoples whose lives, identities and culture have been all but destroyed by European settlers. Using Native American or First Nations peoples is a great example because that repression still continues today through the form of reservations and social programs intended to keep them as far away from us as possible.

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But even when I'm on my knees I know the devil preys

ottopilot

serlindsipity,
Your questions and search is understandable. Roachboy made some very good points regarding where this may lead you. My great grandmother was an Algonquian (they all say we are related to Pocahontas ), my step-mother is Costa Rican and my inlaws are mostly of pure German descent. You can imagine the stories that might come out of that mix.

I guess I don't look like your average white guy. People have always asked me what I "was"(am?)? I know my experiences are probably nothing compared to some, but I have experiences that have both angered and given me hope. I think you are probably very sincere in your feelings. But misplaced guilt for something you never had a hand in could become distructive, much like hatred. Don't let it become self-hatred.

As far as history is concerned, I have come to this rationalization. For what ever the reason, the white Europeans made some huge leaps in technology in the past few centuries. Technology is supreme in warfare. I'm not sure that the Spaniards would have been considered "white", but they sure contributed to destroying much of the indigent cultures of the Americas. I think we can look through history and find many cultures and civilizations that were wiped out, enslaved, or assimilated by ancient conquerors. I'm afraid it has been part of human nature to want to dominate others. The hopeful part that I see is more people like yourself who don't want to hurt others.

This is a weird analogy, I guess it's a bit out there, but here it goes... A guy like Mel Gibson grows up in a home filled with hatred. He has been in the news lately accused for possibly being anti-semetic regarding his work and from drunken outbursts. But up until recent years, he has been a model citizen, seen as a good guy with flaws. Think of all the opportunity a man with his upbringing and influence has had to do really bad things. I think with his drinking, his demons sometime rise up. But in spite of his family "history", he makes a conscious decision not to be the monster his father has been. It is his lifelong struggle and I believe he is really good at heart. He is not perfect, but evolved. I see the world more and more like that.

Don't ever feel guilty of your ancestry. I'm sure you'll find skeletons in every ethnic closet. There are fine examples of good people in all races. Feel proud that you are evolved and live by example. I believe that is the best way to teach compassion and tolerance.

You seem to have a deep need to work this out for yourself ...somehow. Best of luck to you.

Seaver

First off don't fall into this White People Ruined Everything mode. Yes, we effectively whiped out the Native Cultures of the West. Yes we colonized half of the world. We changed peoples culture, philosophy, languages, etc.

However, so has every culture, country, and tribe which ever existed. White Christian culture just happened to do it better and more effectively than any others. Do you honestly believe that the 400-ish year war between the Iriquois and the Huron only lasted that long because they believed in each other's rights to coexist? No, it lasted that long because none had any advantage over the other and were locked in stalemate. How about the Persian Empire, do you believe they stopped conquoring people because they felt guilt for their conquests? No, they were militarily defeated.

I don't understand this white guilt. My ancesters never colonized anyone, they never enslaved a single black, yet I'm constantly told by our own culture that because I'm white I owe things to people. That to me is like asking a Mongol today to apologize to Arabs because of the whole Baghdad/Damascus thing. It's absolutely ubsurd that the sins of the great-great-great grandfather should fall on us now.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

Grasshopper Green

My ancestors were slave owners and KKK members, and I have African American ancestors that I can only assume were slaves. My ancestors forced Cherokees to march to Oklahoma, and my ancestors were Cherokees and Choctaws on that forced march. Do I feel angry about my mistreated family? Nope. Do I feel guilty that I have racists in my family tree? Nope. *I* make who I am today, not the past sins/victimization of my ancestors. I don't feel white guilt. No human on this planet, neither living nor dead, has ever been perfect.

__________________
"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings; steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king"

Formerly Medusa

roachboy

i think i am posting this to distance myself from the previous 2 posts.

i am not sure where this facile meme "white guilt" comes from or what exactly it is to accomplish--beyond of course enabling a meme-worthy separation of the present from the past. in the last two posts, what it does comes at such a high price in terms of reductive thinking that it is hard to imagine the point of indulging it at all.

it is as if colonial-style domination only took place during the colonial period...once "we" were done with that (when did that happen exactly?) "we" were done with everything about it, including all the modes of thinking and acting that made the colonial project seem rational. i dont know how you'd go about showing that this is the case: personally, i dont think it is. on the problem of the reverse of arguments shaped by this "white guilt" meme, see below.

or as if in the states, once the civil war was over, so was racism.
but but but...what about reconstruction?...
no no, we took care of that one in the 1960s--and now you can see that we have a holiday....

but the reverse is obviously not true--we are not simply operating in a colonial context, we are not still operating within an economy that enslaves that many people explicitly....

it is in the setting up of useless, false binaries that this "white guilt" meme demonstrates its emptiness. i dont think the term allows you to even start thinking about anything--all it does is to provide a one-dimensional distancing device that wards off the problem of inherited guilt (original sin)...it doesnt address anything--it just says "i dont like this inherited guilt idea"...


and i dont find the analogies that seaver tries to make convincing at all--the fact is that christian colonialism is so much more pervasive and was so much more self-righteously violent that it is unlike other forms of invasion/domination. to think otherwise is the same as arguing that there is no difference between a tiny stuffed toy elephant and an elephant. the elephant is simply more itself because it is better at being an elephant than the tiny stuffed toy elephant is.


my problem with the project comes mostly from not understanding still what exactly it is.
within that, there are certain moves that i think are excluded up front--the giant mea culpa being one of them--the production of objects meant to represent something of the eradication of Others seems to me another (because it could unwittingly repeat the problem it is set up to criticise)--but both are based on limited information and probably are meaningless with reference to the actual project.
at least i hope that's the case.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Seaver

Fair enough Roachboy, one can make the argument that we are still in a Colonist style economic model. That we rule over other countries by economics, occasionally enforced by military measures. I can not dispute there are plenty of occurances in the Post-WWII era which reinforce this argument.

I am not attempting to post the occurances solely in the past, you must however, concede that the sins of the fathers are passed onto the sons in this situation.

When the Persian Kings conquored 1/3 of the known world at the time, that was not on the same scale of pervasiveness? When the Mongols conquored the Stepp, China, Persia, India, Baghdad, Damascus, and went all the way to the European border that was not pervasive? When the Aztecs conquored neighbor after neighbor in their drive to capture slaves for human sacrifice that was not pervasive?

I simply stated that the technological, social, and religious aspects came together within European-Western culture came together in a "perfect storm" if you will during a time of (re)discovery which is unlike anytime in human history. There is nothing more evil, spectacular, or in any way revolutionary in the White history as opposed to any other. There was a series of technological and sococial revolutions which occured first and most quickly in Western Civilization which expidited the same conquor-thy-neighbor human nature which exists anywhere.

While a bull mastiff and a rat terrier may look different, they're still dogs. They still bark/eat/poop/think the same, the bull mastiff simply wins out in a fight. Eventually there will be a different power and he will flex his muscles the same way.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

uncle phil

i have to ask, what university awarded you a degree without you even performing "hard research?"

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- Robert S. McNamara
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We will leave you your small joys and smaller troubles."
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never wrestle with a pig.
you both get dirty;
the pig likes it.

Ustwo

Being Irish and Welsh in ancestry I think you should do a piece on what those damn Normans did to my people.

Of course everyone is white so I doubt it will have the color contrast you are looking for.

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The_Jazz

Or you could talk about the Soviet genocide of the Cossacks. Or the Japanese against the Koreans. Or Romans against the Carthagenians. Or Egyptians against the Iraelites. Or the Ethipopeans against the Eritreans. Or the....

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roachboy

i continue to be baffled by this thread
so now its time for a bit of a rant.

this "white guilt" meme is of a piece with a facile relativization move which result effectively in this claim:

"people have been exterminating each other since x so therefore all exterminations are interchangeable and no-one particularly responsible either in real time or after the fact--so there's no problem with not thinking terribly hard about the specificities of any of this---so if we take the european rush into africa of the 1870s-1890s, there is no particular need to think real hard about why things might've happened when they did because this colonialism business is simply an expression of this recurring tendency that human beings have to exterminate other populations of human beings for fun and profit."

which is a nice, pious way to avoid thinking--not to mention actual political and historical problems--because pushed a little bit, these recurrent waves of extermination follow as logically from original sin as they do from any social-historical situation--and because massacre recurs, the only problem that is really posed by any given example of it is the question of where's jesus---because like most non-believers, you imagine that only a god could "save us"--which might be true so long as you imagine that we do not DO anything---so context becomes secondary, so rationale becomes secondary, so effects become secondary--and so the belgians in the congo are the same as the romans in carthage are the same as (pick your extermination, insert here)--none of it anyone's fault, none of it even a problem---except in a kind of vague "boo hoo history is tragic, man" kinda way---which translates into "history is a bummer man"-----which translates into avoiding it---and this business of vague reference to massacre upon massacre as if the recurrence is in itself explanatory is a way of avoiding history--you avoid it by erasing agency, erasing ideology, erasing the idea that there was any particular political or personal choices involved in the framing and carrying out of this or that genocide--human beings become like the scorpion--they dont consciously DO any of this--they simply express their nature.

this is the kind of bullshit that follows from watching the history channel---everything from the past that can be crammed onto a screen is interchangeable with everything else because none of it passes beyond the limits of the television and actually impacts on the spectator.

that's what much of the thread is turning into--a performance of and justification for a spectator's relation to history---as if the relations that obtain between yourself, your couch and your tv set are the same as your relation to history. which means that the accumulated interchangable imagery that is the past is presented primarily as therapy, and its effect is to enable you to pretend that you are transcendent, unconditioned yourself--you watch those who are conditioned, who are stuck in history, in footage of manly men running back and forth between explosions or in imagery of carnage.

and that's what you get then: the anonymous interchangeable shadows that run across the screen during history channel programming are conditioned by history--you sitting there watching tv are not--the pattern of recurrent massacre that you can derive from juxtaposing tv image atop tv image demonstrates that Those People are Violent--but you, sitting there watching, you are not effected. you are Outside time, you are Outside socialization: you are pure gaze sitting on a transcendent sofa expressing your inward being by watching. your frame of reference is not problematic--you are not running around inside history channel footage--you are watching that footage---so none of your dispositions are involved in what you are watching--from which it follows that you "make youself"----sui generis--- because we all know that the relation of television to viewer is a trans-historical one, no problem with it.

now to head off the possibility of a response based on this idiotic notion of "white guilt"---what i am saying is that your subject position is embedded within, shaped by, performs ideological claims/images that operate in varying degrees of relation to aspects of the past---colonialism for example has given way in the main to neo-colonialism, but the patterns of economic organization have remained in many sectors more or less the same, and in many others the worst forms of capitalist exploitation have been transferred to southern hemisphere countries--and ignored by the likes of the history channel---so that your way of life in 2007 is not so separate from that of any european bourgeois during the colonial period--same inconsistencies, same problems of what you look at as over against what you dont--the idea that you can point to some imaginary moment and say "colonialism stopped then, we no longer have to worry about it'--which is a correlate of this spectatorship relation to the world, to history---that is absurd. you are still in an ideological context that is geared around the justification/normalization of types of colonial exploitation. you perform this justification every day--but the Spectator chooses not to see that, as for the Spectator, what matters is history as Spectacle, as Montage, as something distant and over with and interesting for antiquarian reasons.

so i dont really understand how many of the posts are supposed to help with the project outlined in the op since they havent started to even think about the problems the project is about, one way or another--instead, you have a series of distancing claims...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Seaver

So I'm just a TV Junky who has never read firsthand the accounts of the massacres and justifications of both the assailant and the assaulted?

Sorry but I've done my share of writing with my History Degree. I'm not some spectator you choose to paint us as, only blindly accepting what is told to us by people who wish only to draw attention and conclude within the hour timeline. If you read what I wrote I agreed you have a very valid point concerning our economic "colonialism" which we use to indirectly control most of the world. My statements concerning the past events is attempting to draw you out to a point where you can show a past which was somehow more perfect, somehow more improved over our current situation.

We currently live in a Capatalist system which paralells, if not mirrors, the economic system which led countries to colonize much of the known world. So once again, you have a very valid point. However every economic system has always had a colonial-esque outcome, no matter what the origional philosophy was. Socialism/Communism engulfed much of Asia and Eastern Europe in a system much stricter and more controlling than European Colonialism. Feudalism merged military and church together to conquor and engulf neighboring territories.

All of these systems worked to expand and procreate their own systems. The only form of government/economics which would inherantly not spread itself would be complete Pacifism, however in order to survive that system would have a measure of control or influence over it's neighbors powerful enough to survive military measures and therefore have a muscle capable of defeating an invader (which contradicts itself).

If you want to discuss the means, ideologies, etc. which would cause a nation to conquor/colonize/etc than that is a completely different argument. You fail to realize I'm not simply saying, "it's all in the past, it has no relevance to the now." If I thought that, I would never have been able to justify an interest in studying History let alone major in it. What I'm saying is it IS in the past, and it DOES affect the present. However, feeling guilt for something we have never done, regardless of the situation we inherit, is pointless. All we can do from here on out is attempt to do right in the present.

It's that "what is right?" question that divides us and procreates the problems which we are discussing. It's never ending and who we think is right doesn't always win.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

roachboy

seaver, actually, about a half hour after i posted the rant above i remembered that yesterday we were moving into a conversation here---but this stupid cold i still have (goddamnit) knocked me over and i forgot to follow up.
once i remembered that, it followed that i should have made some preliminary separations so as not to make it sound like i was simply blowing off your previous post and stating the same thing over again--but when i dragged myself back here to do it, things had changed and it was too late.

so first off, mea culpa for the vagueness of address.

on the other hand, since here:

you say exactly what i was trying to get to, i dont feel so guilty--the way may have been clunky, but this is the reframing of the debate that i have been pushing toward over the last couple posts.

what if this is a better approach to the op project, one that makes the object addressed tangible and ongoing, one that avoids the problems of the Giant Mea Culpa....to stick with colonialism and neo-colonialism, ideological frames are the condition of possibility for both. they shape motive, they frame reality (both in terms of inclusion and exclusion of information, of variables), they delineate and provide justification for actions. it may well be that between, say, 1920 and now there has been considerable movement concerning the notion of colonialism and its explicit ideological underpinnings--but there is also an effect in using the category colonialism or "colonial period" to designate a discrete phase, one that is over, and another set of effects that follow from the usage of the term "globalization" as over against "neo-colonialism" (say) to describe something about the present capitalist arrangement--and among these effects is the possibility that globalization and neo-colonialism are not the same thing.

so the ideological frames which enabled colonialism maybe be understood as a cluster of propositions with certain features emphasized and certain features receding---that of "globalization" certainly shares a dense thicket of attributes, but not necessarily arranged in the same way. i would direct attention toward the continuities AND discontinuities between these clusters or formations.

and it sounds like you would in principle as well--even tho i suspect that our divergent politics would lead us in different directions once we agreed on the starting "object" of analysis (sorry about those last scare quotes--it's a tick generated by stuff i am working on elsewhere)....

the visiting of explicit accusations of guilt across generations seems to me kinda useless---not as bad as its opposite to my mind--but useless nonetheless in that it is all too easy to react as you are with nuance (and others without)--"but i didnt have anything to do with the belgian congo in the 1930s"...that might be true enough, but what follows from it is often so problematic that it's better to go after that entire way of thinking than try to pick apart what is interesting or not from the debris it leaves behind.

that's basically my position.
i suppose it'd make sense to push further into this rather than continue talking about it, but i think this is already long enough. we'll see what happens.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Seaver

Well Roachboy I think our arguments more closely paralell than intersect, though in a very confusing manner.

I agree that we need to learn from the lessons of the past, and apply them towards today. However the manner in which the vast majority, in reality or appearance, attempt to make us learn from the past grinds gears and forces us into a polarization. Take Ward Churchill for example. He has very valid points about what we did to the Native Cultures during the hundreds of years of Indian Wars. However, the manner in which he conveys his points, and the conclusions he draws, purposefully or simply in an attempt to draw attention, is absolutely rediculous. He does not try to get us to think rationally about what has happened, and how we can alter our own situation in order to have learned and adapted from it. Instead he effectively calls the 9/11 terrorists heroes, and those killed Nazis because they were born into a profitable area instead of those unlucky enough to be born on a reservation.

Once again we paralell each other a great deal, it's the manner in which many people who wish us to think differently and rationally about our own culture that breed polarization through rediculous claims. Then again, this could be easily blamed more thoughoughly through the 24 hour, 3 minute per story media which only want to show the most ludacris professors in order to draw attention.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

roachboy

it is confusing...

i wanted to push reset on the debate and move it in another direction.
we're parallel in that we both moved in the same general way.

ward churchill is kinda interesting: his main arguments were directed against the protestations of innocence made by the major media outlets during 9/11/2001 and then repeated ad nauseum. they were simple enough: the trade center and pentagon (leaving aside the field in western pa) were self-evidently symbolic targets, they were directed against symbols of american military and economic domination--to the extent that "globalization" is understood elsewhere as american-dominated capitalism, there was a logic behind the attacks. whether one moves from there to a justification of them or not is a political choice, one that in principle you could argue either way--in other words, it is not obvious that you justify actions when you explain them or try to situate them inside a logic. i dont think explanation and justification are synonymous and have no problem with stating the logic that explains the choice of targets and not moving from there to justification. churchill for whatever reason is presented as having chosen to conflate the two. whether he in fact did or not, i dont know simply because i didnt follow the case closely as it was unfolding--and because i dont think explaining and justification are the same----i did not agree with his political choice to conflate the two. personally, i see the churchill situation as an index of the pathetic political times we lived through after 9/11/2001. that doesnt mean i see him in any way as a martyr--because i think his arguments were wrong and his approach cloddish, i think in the end he did more harm than good by allowing himself to be positioned as an exemplar of a particular type of dissent--at a moment when it was obvious that the public media brigade wanted hysteria unmixed with reflection. and it was that lovely period that brought us the iraq war, yet another gift that keeps on giving.

i say this because i do not personally care whether arguments polarize politically IF they are legitimate interpretations. but i see no reason not to think critically about interpretations, whether i agree with the general political position they enact or not. so the consequence is that whether a particular claim is politically polarizing is not in itself terribly important to me. but if you are going to play that game, you need to have your shit straight. and churchill, to my mind, didnt. but this has nothing to do with the public pillorying he got, nor with the way in which the right used him as a football for their own ends.

the most basic claim he made can be stated in a general manner: the bounded rationality of bureaucratic systems enables people who work within those systems to distance themselves from the effects of what they do---to bracket ethical and politcal questions that attend what they do day after day. so if the symbolic value of the wtc was as an indicator of american economic domination, and if you accept that for the people who carried out the attacks that american economic domination is a political Issue, then it follows that the folk in the wtc were complicit in that domination. period. there is no way around it IF you accept the main argument (the one about american economic domination)---staying away from such complexity to some extent explains the fatuousness of the "war on terror"---incorporating too much empirical reality in empty nationalist sloganeering is not effective.

the point here is that this is an argument about bounded rationalities in general, about bureaucratic administrative apparatus(es) in general--you find it in zygmunt bauman's book "the holocaust and modernity" detailed with considerable power (and in a very discomforting way)...for him, this administrative structure was the condition of possibility for the actual implementation of the holocaust--and this for the same reasons outlined above--bounded rationality, a sense of professional duty, compartmentalization, etc. so these systems have characteristics which are real problems--but they are also central to how contemporary capitalism operates.

(by the way, to avoid the objection, these sentences simply follow one another: i am NOT equating american economic domination with the holocaust...)

so it is a polarizing move to make this kind of critique of administrative systems.
does that mean that one should not make them?
but what if baumann is right?
(btw the book is much better, much more interesting than this potted summary makes it out to be--i'd recommend reading it)

things get ugly quick.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Seaver

In my opinion that is a Luxury, well manufactured, state of the art train that gets derailed by staring so closely at the track you missed the pile of rocks you're heading into.

The logical steps one uses to draw the conclusion requires two pivotal steps which crosses cross-cultural moral boundaries in order to either A) conclude a moral-less situation where no one is wrong, or B) all are wrong so it does not matter.

To conclude that the US economic domination caused the WTC to be legitimate targets requires on ethical grounds a number of situations which are blatantly false. Either the WTC is simply a symbol, or those people in the WTC were soldiers in an economic war where the side that was defeated lost real lives. The WTC is absolutely a symbol of globalization, in fact one could say it was THE symbol. However the destruction was not like the pulling of the Wall of Berlin, nor the pulling of the Stalin statue, which were powerful symbols in their time. Instead it more closely parallels the pyramid of skulls after the Mongol sacking of the Persian capital. History tells us the Persian Emperor killed a messenger, which wrought the destruction upon them. The immense wealth the Persians was due to withholding economic access of it's neighbors to the silk road and gold mines it sat on. Would you then consider the population of the Capital legitimate targets? According to Ward's logic train it's perfectly acceptable, because the economic power the country held assured anyone within said nation is an "Eichman."

Ward Churchill decided those in the WTC were not just warriors, they were the "Eichmen" of the 3rd Reich. That is where all the attention is drawn, but the logic train took the broken path back when they decided that businessmen are legitimate military targets. As said, one can only conclude those things only after cross-cultural morals have been broken. If you want to live in a moral-free world, where no judgment is passed on anyone due to legitimizing the retaliation in a bubble, that's fine. However I don't believe there is a single person here who wishes to live in such an anarchistic and lawless society. Therefore we must hold moral accountability to actions, and weight actions and intents accordingly.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

Sion

wow...I feel like I just read some James Joyce or Dostoyesvsky...

some densely packed writing there fellows...

whew!

__________________
He's the best, of course, of all the worst.
Some wrong been done, he done it first. -fz

I jus' want ta thank you...falettinme...be mice elf...agin...

xxxafterglow

serlindsipity - it sounds like you're working on an art project????

I have to put on my Fine Arts major hat here and suggest that you start rethinking your idea and be EXTREMELY specific about the critical point you are making.

It's common for works dealing with themes of "White Guilt" to be so cliche as to further promote the ideas they are criticizing (e.g. White people have the privilege of feeling guilt and therefore have the privilege of forgiving themselves for injustices done against other people). Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai present the idea that some White people were good and came to the rescue of the oppressed. Ok, do you feel the irony that the Last SAMURAI is some white dude parading around with a big sword? Even Memoirs of a Geisha falls prey to the same old Oriental cliches. It's the white man's fantasy of old Asia which is, to put it succinctly, a crock of shit.

By the way, it's worth noting that market globalization is the new imperialism. There's a lot to be said about the way the fact that kids in Asia want to eat McDonalds or how ethnic trends are co-opted, packaged and marketed in the West as the "next big thing" (see Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls). Whatever you want to say about laissez-faire capitalism, I hate seeing all these freaking Starbucks' where they shouldn't be (they finally shut down the one in the Forbidden City, woot).

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that you are dealing with a very hairy issue. I'd suggest starting with one instance you find interesting and exploring that in-depth. Read up on the meaning of imperialism. Read up on contemporary instances of imperialism (you do want your piece to be relevant to today and not a shallow rehash of some historical event). Find a story that you care enough about to WANT to research it extensively.

It's a deep issue that is still a reality for many people; don't treat it lightly.

__________________
Uh huh her.

Al & Sarah

How about the impact of imperialism on the Polynesian diet, pushing cannibalism off the menu?