06-03-2010, 03:41 PM
Peter Lemkin Wrote:PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] "I think our brothers from Africa, our indigenous brothers from [inaudible], have a lot of moral authority. We have been invaded, supposedly discovered in Africa or Latin America, when in reality it was an invasion and plundering of indigenous peoples. Therefore, now, in the face of the asymmetries between continents, our brothers come looking for work, and they’re kicked out of Europe, they’re kicked out of the United States. But our grandparents never kicked anyone out, and our brothers and sisters don’t come here to take hectares of land or mines. "
What is the carrying capacity for Africans and Amerindians of the culture that Europeans have brought to 'their' lands vs. the carrying capacity of their native culture? That is the most obvious and essential of objective measures relating to the issue of the Africans' and Amerindians' lives then, now and in the future.
It is not honest of Morales and other non-Europeans to bitch and moan about their being displaced by European colonists. It's what everybody did pre-Wilson's 'Fourteen Points' if they could get away with it. Native American groups displaced and slaughtered one another, as did African and Asian groups. Europeans were on the receiving end of transcontinental colonisation, slavery, and plunder whenever the Jews, Turks, Moors, and Mongolians could manage it.
In fact the only peoples able to make a moral claim that they were unjustly dispossesed are today's Europeans. This because the essential moral component, reciprocity, was promised but not given: Immediately after our governments recognised the claim of African and Asian peoples to run their homelands in their own interests, including booting us out, the same governments, and the same African and Asian peoples, decided that European peoples didn't have the same rights to our own countries.