Quote:
Originally Posted by Samba
The Hutu-Tutsi conflict and the Jamaican “Black-on-black” racism you described is nothing more than hate. People can be taught to hate, to hate others as well as themselves. You took the time to explain to us how the Europeans help build some of the corrupt government systems that presently exist in parts of Africa. You however failed to see how “hatred of self” was also institutionalized in Jamaica. The penetration of European power was much greater in the West Indies than in many other parts of the World. The British still own most of the land in several Caribbean countries. The case of the Hutu-Tutsi was easier, all they had to do was teach some people to hate and fear another set of people. It’s the same approach; it was only used differently in the Jamaican and Caribbean case. It’s called hate. The Hutu and Tutsi were taught to hate and fear each other.
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I do not deny that black self-hatred in Jamaica is ultimately of European origin, however I do disagree with your statement that "the penetration of European power was much greater in the West Indies than in many other parts of the World." To my knowledge, the penetration of European power was much greater in Africa, than the West Indies, where it was only minimal. The subjugation of Africa in the late nineteenth century involved a tremendous amount of arms, in the form of cannon and ammunition, and all the leading nations of Western Europe contributed millions of soldiers and mercenaries to fight wars of conquest on African soil. For example, the Germans employed a tremendous amount of both manpower and weaponry in their attempt to physically exterminate the Nama and Herero people of what was then known as German South-West Africa during the early 1900s; the British fought a number of wars against the Zulu, forcing them onto reservations known as Bantustans; millions of African tribesmen were enslaved by King Leopold in the Congo to grow rubber, and many milions more who resisted Belgian occupation and colonization had there arms and legs amputated or were deliberately starved to death by the King's mercenaries in one of the greatest genocides of modern history. Nothing like this, on so vast a scale, ever occurred during the entire history of the European colonial occupation of the West Indies, with the exception of the Amerindian genocide at the hands of the Spaniards.
In spite of this, no other black majority society in either Africa or the Caribbean, except for Jamaica, has ever democratically elected governments dominated by a small white/mulatto elite or allowed the white minority to control the means of economic production. It would seem that the psychological internalization of white supremacist ideology by the overwhelming majority of Jamaicans reflects the fact that the penetration of European values and culture (rather than European power) was much greater throughout the West Indies, especially in Jamaica, than Africa, or indeed many of the islands of the British Caribbean.