[PEN-L:11615] Clarification:

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "James M. Blaut" <70671.2032@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 09/23/99 11:36PM >>>

Here, now, in simple, easy to understand language, is my basic argument.

1. Economic and technological development was going on during the Middle
Ages in a number of civilizations (examples: Europe and China). Europe was
neither ahead of the other civilizations nor was it uniquely pregnant with
qualities that would lead Europe, later, to "rise" above these other
civilizations.

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Charles: Jim, I have a slightly different theory than yours. Europe was a little behind its close neighbors in the Middle Ages ( this is why the Europeans referred to it as their Dark Ages).  So, Europe was in a sense pregant with qualities that would lead it to later rise. Those qualities were that it was behind the other areas. It was this being behind that gave it the impetus to leap ahead of them in the next phase.

The internal quality was also a greater willingness to use force and violence in extracting surplus value from its own peasants/proletarians and its colonial slaves.

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Jim B.:
One final point. Nobody on this list is prejudiced, much less racist.
But some of the contributors to this thread seem not to realize that many
of the propositions they consider to be true were really validated by
racism or prejudice; today, mostly, it is what I sometimes call cultural
racism: the belief that some superior cultural (not genetic) trait, usually
a mental quality, has been present in Europeans for millennia. I made this
argument in The Colonizer's Mopdel of the World, Vol. 1, and will continue
it in vol. 2, forthcoming.
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Charles: Perhaps the term you want to use here is "white supremacy". The notion of millenia long European superior traits, cultural, economic, political, genetic or other is a form of "white supremacism", racism being just one type of it.  There are plenty of evidences that this is a false ideology, including a lot of what has been adduced to this thread on China's development.  Perhaps one of the most striking evidences is that millenia long European supremacy is a false ideology is the European terminology "Dark Ages" which is a conclusion from the Europeans themselves that their culture, economics etc. in the immediately period prior to capitalism was not very successful.

Charles Brown