Colonialism — cum s-a construit prezentul

Hello, in the previous clip I mentioned colonialism several times in the tone of, you know, colonialism. But then I realized that actually no. We don't know. And I only had quite fragmented information on this subject, so I decided it was a good time to fill in my knowledge and share my findings with you. The discoveries were far beyond what I could have imagined. So here we are, in this situation and in this unreasonably long clip, because out of all of Europe's undiscussed histories, the story of colonialism is, without a doubt, the most important for understanding how we got to where we are now. The true story of this Western civilization, of how it flourished and how it became technological, is the story of colonialism. And yet we know almost nothing about it. More seriously, in today's internet discussions, mentioning colonialism often identifies you as belonging to the much-maligned woke culture. As if, you woke up to talk about colonialism. Somehow discussing this defining period for what our world is today is, apparently, a kind of pretentiousness. If you want to discuss how Europe came to control 85% of the Earth's surface and the consequences of this fact, you're being pretentious. You're being fussy. During the documentation period for this clip, I was asked at one point if I thought colonialism had emancipated the world. If it had spread freedom and prosperity across the globe. So let's start there. First of all, the colonialism we are talking about is the one that happened after the 1500s when various Western Europeans set sail for distant lands. There have been various types of colonization throughout history, but what interests us is that after 1500, a whole complex system developed through which Europe subjugated the rest of the world. The main goal of this system was always the enrichment of the most powerful European states. They made a real competition out of decimating peoples from distant lands, taking their lands, turning people into slaves, and extracting the resources thus acquired for the purpose of multiplying money. Today, the word "colonialism" most often refers to this very specific system of exploitation. If you've never read anything on this subject and have only caught stray words flying around, the first opinion you might form is that at some point Europe developed technologically and conquered the rest of the world because it was very strong. Simply put, Europeans were the best, the rest of the people on Earth were rather weak, so inevitably the civilizing force followed its course and spread the seeds of progress across the globe. Although it didn't always suit them and there were all sorts of conflicts between Europeans and indigenous people, in the end, when you draw the line, railways were built where there was nothing, right? Did the steam engine arrive where there was only the oar? Even as a joke, the answer to these questions is no. European technology never left European hands, and where it was deployed, it was always under European control and interest. No one received anything as a gift. But let's say it wasn't anyone's responsibility to give any gifts either. Fine. But the problem arises when there is a claim that by pursuing this self-interest, Europe developed the surrounding world. This history is formulated as if, for all the immense destruction caused by colonialism, the rest of the world should say thank you very much. And here we must stop. The stake in the discussion about colonialism is not to ignite any ancient individual guilt, because that would be completely unproductive and confusing. Where would I have room to suddenly place guilt about the fact that Englishmen 300 years ago kidnapped people from Africa and legally turned them into their own property? The feeling of individual guilt is a paralyzing angle through which to process a history in which you did not choose to find yourself. So, beyond guilt, the reason why the discussion about colonialism is essential today is that the political and ideological structures born with the immense movement of colonialism form the engine that drives the world today. And if we understand our past better, we have a chance to understand our present better. For example. Today's capitalism operates based on notions and measures called neoliberal, and I've used this word in clips before. If they are neoliberal, then what were the liberal measures and where did they come from? The word liberal automatically sounds good, because it is built on the word "free" and who doesn't want to be free? But liberalism, the original one, not today's, was born with the massive development of colonialism around the 1700s. Liberalism, with its obsession with freedom, was born in parallel with the largest system of slavery that has ever existed on this Earth. Although it may seem so, there is no contradiction here. The men who fought fiercely for freedom were usually educated, wealthy aristocratic white men who discussed increasingly complex philosophies to guarantee their sacred right to private property. Among all private properties, slaves were at the forefront, so the freedom to own slaves was an essential point of conversation. The American Declaration of Independence from 1776 begins with the very moving words: Absolutely superb. That's how the moment of signing this supreme liberation of humanity looked. And only 34 out of the 47 men in the picture owned slaves. This was not just what could be called a coincidence. Of the first 16 presidents of America, 12 were slave owners. Their income came from owning, as property, a lot of people who worked for them for free until they died and were replaced by others who worked until they died. So, although as a marketing slogan this beginning of the declaration of independence worked wonderfully, it is actually based on very non-obvious definitions of who exactly those equal people are and what freedom means. Non-obvious now. Because then they were obvious enough not to have to burden the text with the specification that "people" strictly meant rich white men. I wish I didn't have to keep saying white, but unfortunately skin color, the number of properties owned, and being male were extremely clear conditions for who could benefit from these inalienable rights. They were by no means meant for everyone, and to the extent that they were extended to initially unintended people, it always happened through intense struggles. As we will see, there were enough people who, even in this context, insisted that all people are people, regardless of skin color, but they were considered absurd radical fanatics who were being pretentious. Other fussy people. In the efforts of these aristocrats to justify more and more scientifically why Africans are incapable of anything other than slavery, a clear hierarchy is established in which the white man is at the top, and any deviation from this hue seriously calls into question your humanity. This is the exact point where European racial thinking is built step by step, which ultimately culminates directly in Nazism. We will explore this evolution at length, because it seemed particularly revealing to me how it develops into Nazi logic, which did not appear out of nowhere, but was methodically developed over 200 years by the most enlightened European minds. Meanwhile, in Europe, until the mid-1800s, it became, however, rather unsightly to own slaves, so liberal philosophy migrated to the importance of having workers who worked like slaves. The introduction of that "like," meaning they weren't literally slaves, they were just like slaves, is considered a great European moral victory and is one of those civilizational achievements we are proud of today. Therefore, this dubious legacy of colonialist liberalism, repackaged today as neoliberal notions, is particularly important to understand because it is the source of our freedom, with all its flaws and advantages. Then, all these slaves who created a new wealthy Western class did not fall from the sky, but were people kidnapped from their continents or subjugated at home. These peoples who were thrown into the European meat grinder, which at one end ingested people and at the other spat out profit, still strongly feel the effects of this history today. If in Europe you can wake up yesterday and say, hey, sorry for all those hundreds of years of slavery and exploitation, that has no effect on the areas in question. Despite the healing power of accepting guilt, it, miraculously, does not overnight solve the problems of the systematic destruction of local communities. Division and underdevelopment of controlled territories were key goals in the colonialist system, and they were pursued with maximum intent. Division so that a critical mass does not gather against you, and underdevelopment so that you can keep people under constant oppression from which the opportunity for dramatic change never arises. Romania lived through the trauma of a communist dictatorship for only 45 years. What do you say, is that experience still felt in our society today, or has it all disappeared like a nightmare from which you wake up and everything is good again? The histories of these places colonized by European powers are atrocious; some of the cruelest things imaginable between human beings happened there. They are not talked about because they happened in these distant and dubious places and, practically, they don't matter. Unfortunately, for the people in those places, they do matter. Their history is an unwritten history, irrelevant because the story is that of European civilization which generously shared progress left and right. To such an extent that the head of European diplomacy finds himself saying with a heart full of solemnity that Europe is a garden and the rest of the world a jungle; that's it, you can't do anything about it, we have no idea how we got here, but we must accept this terrible fact. So the reason we are having this discussion is because the question is possible and popular: did colonization mean the emancipation of the world? No. It meant the destruction of what could be destroyed and then the chronic underdevelopment of the remnants, in ways that still determine the dynamics of this world today. It meant the transformation of humanity into a monologue spoken in a single voice, namely: the voice of money. If equitable cooperation between the peoples of this globe is ever possible, it cannot ignore this history of colonialism. Because its effects have not ceased. Wherever colonizing powers withdrew, they left room for economic control of the regions. The few countries that managed to develop despite these conditions are exceptions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the revelation was that you don't need soldiers on the ground to control a poor and divided state; you can simply do it from a distance through the power of capital. This is the point where the concept of neocolonialism is born, which becomes synonymous with global neoliberal capitalism. A vicious cycle is formed in which vulnerable countries are forced to sell their local raw resources cheaply, such as oil or minerals, they are processed in rich countries, and then finished products made from their own resources are bought expensively. If there is no interruption in this cycle, then there is no respite that allows for the development of industries and means to valorize those resources locally. It is profoundly in the interest of the exploiting entity that this respite does not exist, because then it could no longer buy the resources cheaply. Profits would decrease. And if there is any law in our world, it is that profit cannot decrease. Factually, between colonialism and neocolonialism, there has been no such respite for most countries, in which they could stand on their feet and develop self-sufficiency to build a more functional society. This was perhaps a slightly dizzying introduction. We will revisit all these things at length, and others, but first, let's start from the beginning. What follows is a jump from iceberg tip to iceberg tip, to mark at least a few of the essential things in this entire complicated history. Colonialism in Asia will be dramatically absent from it, because it was becoming too dizzying and the chances of even a small degree of coherence were significantly decreasing. Many things are missing, but my intention is to offer as many general coordinates as possible within two hours. In Romania, high school history textbooks dedicate only a few paragraphs to colonialism, the main concern in the text being rather the adventure and emotion of new geographical discoveries. In the 9th grade, we read this paragraph: "The consequences of geographical discoveries. The main effects of European expansion will be the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of the discovered lands, through the formation of colonial empires, a process that will entail a veritable economic globalization. For the first time, the European economy asserted itself on a global scale. The great trade, in its early boom, will move from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, which will become the commercial axis of the world, favoring the riparian countries (Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, England, and France), which became economic and commercial powers." As a European summary of 300 years of colonialism, this paragraph is perfectly representative. Europe became a major player as a result of the new territories discovered, which practically did not exist before. A perfectly representative sentence again, which made me burst out laughing, we find in the 12th grade, when we learn that "In the 17th century, through the expeditions of Abel Tasman, the Dutch discover New Holland, Tasmania, New Zealand." And it was exactly like that. At one point, European navigators got into boats and there seemed to be nothing around when suddenly the Dutch stumble upon New Holland. The French also spectacularly find New France, and New England was practically just hiding all this time. There is nothing factually wrong with the sentence in the textbook. Australia, on which about 1 million people lived at the time, was named New Holland when the Dutch arrived on it. But this language fundamentally instills in your mind the idea that where there were no Europeans, there was nothing. This idea was central to the colonialist effort; all these territories were vast deserts waiting for the European seed. People did not live on them, because if they were not Europeans, they could not be people. To its credit, the next sentence in the textbook is: "in all these areas, the aborigines were dispossessed of their lands, forced to retreat to regions unfavorable to their traditional way of life. Sometimes, aborigines only received rights similar to whites in the 20th century." This last sentence, I assume, means that sometimes they received similar rights and sometimes they did not receive them at all. There are a few more such sentences in the 12th grade about how the indigenous people didn't quite like what was happening, plus scattered mentions from time to time regarding the African slave trade, which was, it seems, essential for this veritable economic globalization. Let's start, then, by unpacking these sentences. The ceremonial starting point of colonialism is considered to be the moment in 1492 when Christopher Columbus discovered America. He never actually reached North America, but the islands off its coast, the Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti in the first 2 voyages, then a bit of Central and South America in the last two. At this point in history, it was clear that the Earth was round, but it was not known that if you got in a boat and went west, there was still a whole other continent between Europe and Asia. However, upon arriving in these territories that did not exist before, Columbus, in his interaction with the natives, set the tone for the next hundreds of years of colonialism. He describes the encounter in his logbook like this: "They brought us parrots, balls of cotton, and spears, and many other things, which they exchanged for glass beads and hawk-bells. They offered in exchange whatever they had. [...] They carry no arms and know them not, for I showed them a sword and they took it by the edge and cut themselves in their ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of reeds. [...] They would make good servants. [...] With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." And that's what they did. The 9th-grade textbook tells us that until this point, naval trade was centered around the Mediterranean Sea because it was through it that goods from Asia reached commercial centers like Venice. But in 1453, the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople and imposed its control over the area. So Europeans developed a concrete interest in finding new trade routes to Asia that did not pass through the Muslim world. Columbus's voyages were part of this new effort. He convinced the King and Queen of Spain that he could reach Asia, where it was rumored there was a lot of gold in the fields, you just had to bend down and pick it up and bring it back. Without knowing exactly where he had arrived, Columbus began to carry out his mission. The people he encountered on the first island were called Taino, and they lived in communal dwellings, cultivated corn and potatoes, wove, sewed, played many games, and generally went about their lives. They had no iron, but they did have small gold earrings. Seeing the earrings, Columbus began to capture and torture indigenous people to lead him to the source of the riches. He spent a few weeks searching for gold without much success in the Bahamas, Cuba, and the island he named Hispaniola, which today is divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The golden fields stubbornly refused to appear. Returning to Spain, Columbus reported that he had found an island off the coast of China full of precious metals, fertile land, and naive indigenous people. Of them, he said: "So naive and generous with their personal belongings that if you don't see them, you won't believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. On the contrary, they offer to share with anyone." As a result, Columbus said he could bring them to Europe as slaves and asked for more people and ships. On his first voyage, he had left with 3 ships and 86 men. On his second, he was given 17 ships and 1200 men. Upon arriving on the islands, they began to kidnap people to take back to the king. When the rumor spread among the local communities that this was happening, the indigenous people fled and abandoned their villages, which Columbus often found empty. Despite his efforts, he didn't find much gold, so he had to compensate with slaves. He gathered 1500 people, selected the 500 most seemingly capable to deliver, 200 died on the way, 300 arrived in Spain and were sold in a market by an archbishop. Columbus noted in his journal: "Let us continue, in the name of the Holy Trinity, to send all the slaves that can be sold." Due to the conditions, many of the 300 people transported also died shortly after, so eyebrows began to be raised in Columbus's direction, who had promised the moon and stars, and yet, only sent people who died. Faced with these pressures, Columbus established a reign of terror in which every indigenous person had to collect a certain amount of gold each month, otherwise their hands were cut off and they were left to die. Since the task was impossible, as gold did not grow on trees, mutilations became a daily occurrence, practiced even just for fun, to pass the time. The efforts then evolved towards capturing as many local people as possible and putting them to work in so-called gold mines, something that often involved desperately searching for gold among stones continuously until you died. It is estimated that once every 6 months, a third of the people forced to work in this way died. There is a debate about how exactly the Spaniards managed to commit genocide on the local populations of the islands and the Americas. Was it due to this slavery or due to diseases? But after several decades of arguments, it has become quite clear today that these two things worked perfectly together. People were weakened by the brutal conditions they were forced to live in and thus died more easily from diseases. Because they were chased by the Spaniards, they also gathered in uncharacteristic ways, thus facilitating the transmission of diseases, while they died of hunger. Estimates of how many people were on the island of Hispaniola before Columbus arrived vary between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. What is clear, however, is that after only about 50 years, only a few hundred remained. In the case of Hispaniola, for example, it is quite clear that the vast majority of the population had already been decimated before the first smallpox epidemic appeared in 1518. The local peoples tried to fight back, but the Spaniards had swords and horses, so resistance was overcome quite easily. When it became evident that resistance was impossible, people began to commit mass suicide out of terror, so as not to fall prey to the Spaniards who dismembered them and burned them, among other truly unspeakable things. This is how the first contact with the new world looked, this is how the civilization of the barbarians of the new world began. In Mexico and Peru, where the Aztec and Inca empires were located, the situation was a bit more complicated, as they were complex societies already in the midst of political tensions. These were exploited by European visitors who brought diseases that immediately killed their leaders, triggering a multitude of civil wars. The result, in any case, was ultimately the same: the decimation of the population and the subjugation of those who remained in a way that further decimated the population. Estimates of how many people existed in the Americas before Columbus arrived vary dramatically between 10 million and 110 million, as it is something extremely difficult to determine. The fairly widely accepted midpoint is that there were about 60 million indigenous people spread across North and South America. At that time, this represented 10% of the planet's population. By 1600, only about 6 million of them remained. So many people died in such a short period that the planet's temperature seems to have dropped slightly. This is because the lands they cultivated were taken over by new vegetation that absorbed enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cool the planet a bit. Given this situation, the Spaniards found themselves masters of lands where there were no longer enough hands to enslave and exploit. So, for this purpose, the trade in people from Africa began, brought as slaves to work on lands left vacant after a genocide. European ingenuity in action. In Mexico alone, for example, between 1521 and 1650, 100,000 Africans were brought into slavery. In terms of colonialism, the 1500s were dominated by Spain and Portugal. Spanish colonial policy in the 1500s was one of complete plunder; the strategy was to extract as much precious metal as quickly and brutally as possible. The entire century was dominated by the myth of El Dorado, a city made of gold from the interior of the continent that just needed to be found. Europeans named territories according to the riches found there. Thus, at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, meaning River of Silver in Spanish, was the country Argentina, a word that means "of silver" in Italian. Despite the golden myths, the Spaniards extracted overwhelmingly silver from the Americas they controlled. Between 1492 and 1560, 100 tons of gold were sent back to the mother country. But by 1600, 25,000 tons of silver had been sent, ten times more than the production of all European mines combined. In 1622, a Spanish ship sank with a cargo of precious metals and diamonds valued today at 400 million dollars. From such shipments came the stories of lost treasures and Aztec gold. In short, the extraction of riches from distant lands through a combination of genocide and slavery was clearly working very well, so the other European maritime powers also wanted to be part of the discovery adventure. In the first hundred years of colonialism, Spain and Portugal took over Central and South America. Starting in the 1600s, England, France, and Holland also entered the game of territories that had not existed until then and began to colonize North America, which had remained untouched. Surprisingly, in the 1600s, the seas were dominated by Holland. The Dutch strategy was to establish as many trading outposts as possible around the world, where they placed Dutch people to trade with the goods the locals had. This model had been practiced by Portugal for a century, and the Dutch came and said, okay, our turn, and took over the most profitable locations. The Dutch also marked their quota of terrorizing and destroying local populations in South Africa and especially in Indonesia, as they were strategic points in their global trade. This trade and colonialism of the 1600s happened through the establishment of new entities that could be called the first corporations in the world. The Dutch East India Company had a privileged status, a monopoly on trade with Asia, the right to execute people, to form colonies, and had its own army. In England, at the same time, the East India Company was being formed, which would acquire a private army larger than England's army, which they used to extract resources from Asia. India became a British colony after 200 years of terrorism practiced in the area by this private company, because in 1857 there was a huge revolt of the Indians. The result of the revolt was that the British Empire then officially assumed the status of colonizer, and the state absorbed the private company. For the African slave trade, the English also had the Royal African Company. Doesn't that sound nice? Returning to the Dutch, the Dutch East India Company was valued, at its peak, at the equivalent of today's money, at $7.9 trillion. That's as much as the economies of Germany and Japan today, combined. It was by far the most valuable private company that had ever existed, and all participants became dramatically rich. From these riches, today's Dutch cities, like Amsterdam and Utrecht, were built, which is why in December last year the Dutch Prime Minister said: do you remember all that stuff about colonialism and exploitation and slave trafficking to build our beautiful canals for boating? Sorry. Sincerely, sorry. This period in Dutch history is called the Golden Age, a time when culture and pretty houses flourished and produced artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer. It is important to emphasize that this prosperity was not spread throughout the population then, just as it is not now. The riches were accumulated at the top, so it was only a Golden Age for 1% of people, for the rest, only incidentally, if at all. The story of colonialism as a whole is about elites who, over hundreds of years, became increasingly richer. Here, for the first time, a true international solidarity emerges among capital owners who discover they have a fundamental common interest in making even more money, and therefore, the more money they had, the more they had in common. The majority of populations felt a positive impact from these riches only incidentally and after many struggles, but more on that later. The Dutch state also benefited from a colony in South America in the country now called Suriname, then known as Dutch Guiana. To own it, they traded with the English and gave them New Holland in North America, with its New Amsterdam, which after 1664 became New York. Here's a reason why the number of details needs to be limited so as not to get lost in the colonialist vertigo. In Suriname, the Dutch brought 300,000 Africans from across the ocean, turned into slaves and put to work on sugar plantations. But this was more of an exception; the Dutch specialized in the trade of goods and people and less in investing the necessary time to establish plantations. Because it had a considerable fleet, the Dutch state voluntarily offered to sell slaves to European colonies regardless of their nationality, thus marking a first great emotional cooperation between European countries. If Portugal needed slaves in Brazil, or England in the Bahamas, in exchange for a modest sum, Holland took care of it. Starting around the mid-1600s, the plantation and slavery system slowly but surely became the most profitable field of so-called "venture capitalism." For a very long time, there was no more profitable business than buying people to work your lands for free, lands that had not existed until then, to produce luxuries from which to enrich yourself. These luxuries were mainly sugar, tobacco, coffee, and, very importantly, cotton. The 1700s were dominated by the sugar trade, essential also because rum was made from its molasses, and who didn't want rum? An English nobleman, a plantation owner, once informed his noble brothers that if you have 100 slaves working to extract sugar, in 19 years they will all die. His calculations seemed correct. The entire process of converting a plant into usable sugar was very long and complicated and had to be executed quickly, otherwise the juice from the sugarcane would spoil. This work involved not only simple planting and harvesting but also the processing of the harvest itself, in record time, and in dangerous ways, so the whole system was more like a factory operating against the clock. In 1740, in Jamaica, the largest British sugar-producing colony, there were already 100,000 Africans in slavery. Between 1748 and 1788, in 40 years, 1200 ships brought over 335,000 more Africans. And yet, a census from 1788 recorded that there were still 226,432 living slaves, men, women, and children, on the island. In just 50 years, on a single island, in the service of producing sugar sold in Europe, over 200,000 people died. This was the standard rate. These places are known in history as plantations, but they were, in fact, forced labor camps that systematically decimated Africans. If African peoples had ever gained enough political power to name events in history, this system would have been called a genocide system, not a plantation system. But the history of Western civilization is written with profit from plants, so it remains the plantation system, because that's what interests us here. From the new world, the hottest real estate properties were the islands where Columbus had landed at first. Firstly, because the genocide was already done and there was no longer any indigenous resistance, and secondly, because the islands were the closest points to the African coast from where labor was kidnapped. So the most profitable plantations were found in, by today's names, the islands of the Bahamas, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the other many islands usually grouped today under the name of the Caribbean. In colonial language, this region was called the West Indies, remaining named after Columbus's initial impression that he had reached off the coast of Asia. To be clear, they are the West Indies, not the classic East Indies. By the 1770s, Haiti, for example, which became a French colony, produced 40% of all sugar circulating in the transatlantic economy and 60% of all coffee. The island hosted 800 sugar plantations, 2000 coffee plantations, and 700 cotton plantations. In this very impressive labor camp, over 330,000 Africans produced a quarter of the annual income of the country France. With the help of this income, the cities of Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, and Marseille were built. This system began to gain great momentum starting in the 1700s, and it laid the foundation for Europe's industrialization. The so-called Triangular Trade of the Atlantic was formed. Europeans sailed with rum, textiles, and other goods to Africa, where they bought Africans with them, whom they delivered to the labor camps, from where they returned with the plantation harvests. From this system, in the 1700s, Europe's first great capitalists and the first great banks were formed, because around these shipments, endless opportunities for insurance and credit emerged. The English took out credit after credit to buy and sell slaves. With the unprecedented accumulation of wealth, these entities began to argue more and more violently for the sacred right to do as they pleased with their money without being accountable to anyone, no monarch, and no church. Over time, this current slowly but surely melted away the power of Christian institutions and political institutions in general, which reorganized themselves only to ensure an uninterrupted flow of money. This point, where politicians are merely obedient administrators of a global flow of money, is called, today, neoliberalism. It is now time to take a look at the philosophical discussions that took place at the time around this new thrill of liberalism, which involves a host of European figures revered under the banner of world-transforming enlightenment. But before that, perhaps we should discuss how all this slave trade worked. So maybe now is not the time to take a look at the philosophical discussions that took place, at the time, around this new thrill of liberalism. But we still have a little bit. Also, the next part is quite harsh, you know, and I'm not saying that just for nothing. The idea of kidnapping Africans and using them as private property did not come to Europeans. They were directly inspired by what had already been happening in the Arab world for 700 years. Columbus, in his voyages, managed to kidnap about 5000 people in total, and some of them ended up being sold in Arab slave markets. Africans began to be trafficked in the Arab world starting in the 600s, something that continued for about 1200 years. From the African continent to the west, people were kidnapped to be transported across the Atlantic to European economies, and to the east, they became luxury items in Muslim worlds. There are several quite significant differences between these two systems of slavery. The first is magnitude. Over 1200 years, the Arab world kidnapped about 9 million people from Africa. Europeans, in 300 years, transported about 12 million Africans, but in this process, from one end to the other, due to the conditions, mortality was huge, so it is estimated that a total of at least 24 million people disappeared from the continent due to the slave markets. For this reason, in the year 1800, Africa's population was half of what it should have been. By the end of the 19th century, a quarter of the entire population of West Africa had been kidnapped and deported to European camps. Another difference is that two-thirds of the people sold in Arab slave markets were women. They were primarily placed in harems and sexually exploited, and then forced into domestic labor. For this reason, the slavery of African men and women in the Arab world never took root as an essential socio-economic aspect for the state's well-being. Since it was not essential, no desperate system developed to extract as many people as possible to introduce into the economic production assembly line. Consequently, a culture designed to endlessly demonstrate the inferiority of African human beings did not become rigid. Arab racism, although intense, was somewhat more nuanced, and because one of the most important apostles of the Prophet Muhammad was an African freed from slavery. Because they were difficult to obtain, African slaves were also much more expensive in the Arab world, which is why they were considered a relatively precious luxury. This, however, did not prevent Arabs from committing all sorts of atrocities, and in terms of brutality, it is absurd and disgusting to compare who was more or less gentle in kidnapping people and turning them into private property. The process was incredibly violent on both sides; the major difference was that Europeans made the turbo version, industrialized it, and created an entire machine that ran on African batteries. People from whom all energy was squeezed until they died and were replaced, because it was cheaper to replace them than to keep them alive. In the transatlantic trade, over 70% of them were men, because they were considered batteries that died more slowly. The major difference, then, is that Africans were used as raw material for the industrialization of Western civilization, and for this reason, the profits from this slavery remained as cultural forces that continued to dictate the form of Western civilization. This industrialization comes with factory logic; if people are commodities, then there are systems for optimizing the transport of goods based on certain impersonal calculations. Ships were specially built to cram as many people as possible, accepting that many of them would die due to these conditions, because in the final calculation, the transport remained profitable. The margin was about 10-20%. If 400 out of 500 people survived, that was considered a success. People were chained and transported for two months in spaces like coffins, where they lay on their backs and had no room to even turn from one side to the other. Many of them, in these conditions, among all the other ways they died, simply suffocated. Being commodities, it was common practice that when there were problems, such as a shortage of drinking water, a hundred Africans would be thrown into the ocean as an accounting loss. They often threw themselves into the ocean as well, if they escaped their chains, to escape the terror of the transport conditions. In this system, we find for the first time a systematic, industrialized extermination of large groups of people. For the first time, genocide can be carried out on an assembly line, on a large scale, optimized. The word genocide was invented in 1944 by a Pole to describe the extermination of Jews. It means the mass destruction of a certain specific type of people. The need for a word for this became urgent when such exterminations began to happen visibly in the heart of Europe. But genocides had happened before, and they were as intentional as possible in America and Africa. In this entire system of slavery, a particularly controversial fact is that Africans themselves were an essential part of facilitating it. Europeans very rarely ventured into the depths of the continent to kidnap people themselves. Basically, because when they tried to do so, they usually died from various diseases. The life expectancy of a European on the African continent was one year. So they only colonized the ocean coasts, where they built forts and buildings where Africans were brought and kept in infernal conditions until a ship arrived to take them to the other world, the new world, as it was called. In Africa, the phenomenon of slavery existed, but it was much more complex than the European definition of the phenomenon. Slaves were not personal property; they could, in turn, own land, hold positions, marry as they wished, and some became important political figures. This information comes from the descriptions of Europeans surprised by how these people are slaves if they seem to exercise more authority than their masters in various administrative matters. There were also various levels of slavery depending on how you reached that position. If you were a prisoner of war or a criminal, then your rights were reduced; otherwise, orphans and poor people technically became slaves, yet they retained their human status and were part of society. It is possible that there was no clear consciousness of what was happening to the people who were taken on ships and disappeared over the horizon. In Africa, there were no European plantations standing as testimony to the treatment received, although attempts were made and failed because people kept revolting. One of the main local ways of turning people into slaves was if they became prisoners of war. So Europeans did everything they could to stir up as many local conflicts as possible. Although I have said "Africans" throughout this clip, obviously, they did not see themselves as "Africans." They were a multitude of different cultures and ethnicities that existed in various forms of peaceful or not-so-peaceful coexistence. What Europeans did was equivalent to: let's say that in 1700, representatives of an apparently impressive African empire appeared in Constanța and said they wanted to buy 5,000 Hungarians to take them to work.

In their empire, and that they pay for it with all sorts of interesting things that you want, because it raises your local status. But you say no, the Hungarians are my brothers, everyone knows that. So they say, fine, then I'll go to the Hungarians and pay them to deliver 5,000 Romanians to me. And if that doesn't work either, I'll talk to the Bulgarians and maybe they'll deliver 5,000 Romanians and 5,000 Hungarians. Someone, somewhere, at some point, starts delivering people out of a desire to protect their own people. This sets off a chain reaction where the main pressure and terror on the continent becomes the competition for who manages to escape slavery and who doesn't. Colonialism, from 1500 onwards, was based on this, on the ability to divide local communities and pit them against each other for the colonizer's gain. In his 1965 book, Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister of Ghana, even calls this "the Balkanization of Africa." The triggering of conflicts between already existing sects. The conflict in question here was who was kidnapped and sent across the ocean and who wasn't. A rather large conflict. Europeans had all sorts of incentive schemes for kidnapping, such as you can save your brother or sister from the slave fort where they await deportation if you kidnap and bring 2 other people in exchange. A pyramid scheme, with slaves. The phenomenon was of such magnitude that African empires, like Dahomey and Asante, were built around the ability to protect their own people. They captured people and offered them in exchange for weapons, which they used so as not to be captured themselves. There were certainly countless Africans who did this voluntarily, for personal enrichment, for fun. But this was to satisfy a network imposed by Europeans that made slavery an inevitable phenomenon on the continent. It just depended on which side of the chain you wanted to find yourself. For centuries, these were the political conditions in which African societies existed. The situation ended when Europeans became capable of conquering the entire continent and no longer had to limit themselves to ports. After about 300 years of this, in 1884, the great European powers divided Africa at a conference in Berlin and, with the help of new automatic firearms, easily conquered the entire continent, which they owned until the 1950s. Under all these conditions, it is indeed a true wonder how the countries of Africa failed to flourish like beautiful European gardens. This question gives scientists a lot of headaches. Most likely, as has been suspected for centuries, it is only the fault of the Africans, that they lack the gardener's touch. In the 1700s, the largest transporter and beneficiary of slave labor was England, which at some point became Great Britain. In 1647, an English colonel who financed a plantation on the island of Barbados reported that in three years he had turned an investment of 1,000 pounds into 100,000 pounds. This was the level of profit from this entire business. This is how capital accumulates, seeking new investment avenues. The long and complicated process of developing the steam engine was financed by plantation owners. It then fueled the Industrial Revolution, which was launched at breakneck speed by the first automation of cotton processing, done by people who had made their fortunes from slaves. In that era, testimonies were countless and full of enthusiasm regarding the transformative effect of slave capital on British society. A well-known economist wrote: "The slave trade and its natural consequences can be estimated as an inexhaustible source of wealth and naval power for this nation. [They were] the basic principle and foundation for everything else, the mainspring of the machine that sets every cog in motion." He was trying to explain that the British Empire was merely a "magnificent superstructure" founded on this trade, so more should be done. 200 years later, Winston Churchill, in a speech at a banquet, said: "Our possession of the West Indies, as well as India [...] has given us the power, the support, and above all the capital [...] to save ourselves in the great struggles of the Napoleonic Wars, in the fierce competition of trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, and has allowed us not only to accumulate the variety of goods we have, but also to lay the foundations of that commercial and financial leadership which has allowed us to build our great position in the world." When serious discussions began about stopping the slave trade, but not slavery itself, in the late 1700s, politicians from Bristol, Liverpool, and Birmingham protested that this would mean the destruction of these cities. That just as quickly as they were built, they would collapse without the main industry of trading people. At this point, 60% of the nation's slave trading ships and 40% of the European total were operating out of Liverpool. In all these cities, there are statues in honor of the great entrepreneurs who developed the local economies, and the status of these statues is controversial for all the reasons we keep indexing here. In 2018, someone from the British Government considered it appropriate to publish this serene Tweet: "Did you know that in 1833, Britain used £20 million, 40% of the national budget, to buy the freedom of all slaves in the Empire? The sum of money borrowed for the abolition of slavery decree was so large that it was paid off until 2015. This means that British citizens alive today contributed to paying to stop the slave trade. £20 million was 5% of GDP in 1833. So the equivalent today, as a state effort, would be £100 billion." These payments were the standard way in which various emancipations of the era took place. What is particularly important, and not at all evident from such Friday Fun Facts, is where this money went. With today's mind, when you read such things, you would be tempted to believe that compensation was paid to the victims, and in a way, you would be right. Except that the victims were someone else. The victims were the slave owners who, with the abolition, had just lost important property. So that they wouldn't cry too much, and to appease them, the British government paid the equivalent of 113 billion euros to the slave owners. This means that until 2015, British taxpayers continued to compensate these owners of human beings. In history, there has been the practice of states reneging on certain debts considered immoral legacies of older regimes. Great Britain did not consider it appropriate, because the entities born with money from slavery had continuity between then and now. Numerous British citizens are descendants of slaves exploited in the Caribbean, so for them, it is particularly a Friday Super Fun Fact to learn that they, with their own money, have continued to pay compensation to the people who owned their families. You say it's not a fun fact. The magnitude of this payment, unparalleled in history until the 2008 economic crisis, also demonstrates how essential these slaves were to the British economy. It shows the estimated market value of these properties called people. The owners also rushed to collect their damages, so much so that in 1834 a very comprehensive register was produced of the individuals who profited from slavery. The families of two British prime ministers were on this register. One from the 19th century, William Gladstone, and one from yesterday, David Cameron. In exchange for the 2,500 slaves owned by Gladstone's family, the equivalent of £80 million was paid. David Cameron's family, for their 202 privately owned Africans in Jamaica, received only £3 million. Among the 47,000 entities that claimed compensation were priests, politicians, and banks. Most of this capital was reinvested in British society and its industrialization, in railways, banks, and factories. This tweet, however, manages to be wrong in a multitude of different ways. The abolition of the slave trade happened in 1807, and this trade was curiously considered a completely different problem from the ownership of slaves. When slaves were freed in 1833, they actually had to wait another 4 years, because it was considered that they were not ready to transition from the status of private property to that of human beings and that they needed to be trained for this through another 4 years of unpaid compulsory labor called apprenticeship. So that it wouldn't be too much of a shock for them, so they would have time to get used to the idea of freedom, because everyone agreed that if they were simply given it, they wouldn't know what to do with it. They would panic, they would lose their heads. I think perhaps now is the time to see what the learned people of the time said about all these things. John Locke is considered the father of liberalism, a great theorist of private property, and a strong advocate of democracy. He was an intensely read political philosopher while still alive, and his writings served as a kind of bible of freedom that one consulted when confused. Consequently, it is worth investigating a little further. Locke had a particularly major influence on how America developed. English politicians in the new overseas colonies wrote to him and begged for his help: Mr. Locke, tell us, what should we do? How should we establish our legal system? Controversially, in 1669, Locke participated in writing the constitution of the state of Carolina, and it stated that "every free man in Carolina, of whatever opinion or religion, shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves." Absolute power in legal terms meant that these people were considered private property and could be killed or not at their master's discretion. Another problematic aspect was that Locke was a shareholder for three years in the Royal African Company, whose purpose was the trade of Africans. From these two points, some academics consider him a great promoter of transatlantic slavery. But when he did these things, Locke was an official within a monarchy that he would intensely challenge 20 years later, when he published his treatises. His participation in that constitution may have been only as a notary, who legally validates a document. He seems to have had shares because the government at one point, lacking liquidity, paid its officials in this way. These are not Locke's most problematic points, but the things he wrote and signed with his name. He never explicitly wrote that this African slavery was a good thing, something desirable. But he didn't write that it wasn't either. He managed to dance around this issue in a way that ultimately finds its echo in the legal phrasing by which slavery was abolished in America in 1865, after the Civil War. In short, for the sake of not deceiving, Locke said that slavery was perfectly okay if it resulted from a just war. The most just war is the struggle of civilization against savagery. Thus, those captured in such conflicts lose their right to life and liberty, and slavery is a merciful option compared to death. Under these conditions, the victors gain absolute power over the captives. People who committed crimes against society could also become slaves, because, again, they threatened civilization. When slavery was abolished in 1865 in America, the 13th amendment was added to the constitution, the only place where this word appears in the American constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Half of the words are dedicated to the exception. Through this exception, forced labor remains a very present phenomenon in America. To turn someone into a slave, you just had to convict them of a crime, and since Africans were criminals by their very existence, the prison industrial complex, which is still one of the many areas where America is number one today, slowly but surely developed. For more details on this subject, the documentary "13th" is very good. Returning to Locke, it must be repeated that the most just war was against any combatants who opposed the European civilizing process. In his treatises, he endlessly calls the indigenous people of America "savage beasts," "predatory beasts," "dangerous hungry beasts," and generally animals with whom man cannot coexist, "therefore they can be destroyed like lions or tigers." The so-called black human species, Locke said, appeared when African women started having sex with monkeys. Locke's objections to slavery were related to the establishment of an oligarchy; if a few people owned too many slaves, it would destabilize the concept of freedom, which he held very dear. So, while it can be said that Locke never explicitly encouraged the institution of plantation slavery, there is no doubt about his contribution to the racial hierarchy that was increasingly scientifically established during the Enlightenment. The racial core of the Enlightenment movement is best summarized by Carl Linnaeus, a great Swedish biologist, after whom a Swedish university is named. In 1758, he wrote that, purely scientifically speaking, the situation with human species is as follows: Europaeus albus: ingenious, white, sanguine [lively], governed by law; Americanus rubescus: happy with his lot, lover of liberty, tanned and irascible, governed by custom; Asiaticus luridus: yellow, melancholic, governed by opinion; Afer niger: cunning, lazy, negligent, black, governed by the master's arbitrary will. Given this situation, it was widely accepted that it was impossible to civilize these cunning Africans, but if you felt benevolent and wanted to try, the only way they might have a chance was if you made them slaves. This was a matter of education; knowing that things were this way meant you were educated. If you cried for Africans, it was simply because you lacked education and didn't know they were made for slavery. You still had to study. The discussion about freedom and its many forms exploded in the 1700s. In the previous clip, we talked about how certain notions of what it means appear as a result of interaction with Native Americans. Even Linnaeus, in his 1758 list, defines them as lovers of freedom. More precisely, tanned and irascible lovers of freedom. The irascibility presumably came from the fact that they were constantly being killed, something that would annoy anyone. In this century, two parallel discussions about what freedom means were born. The first, coming through the indigenous line and then reformulated by Rousseau, eventually transformed into ideas that came to be called socialist, of equality, fraternity, and pleasant coexistence at the level of the entire society. The other is the freedom of capital, the freedom of the aristocracy and corporations to be as little restricted as possible by any government and, essentially, to treat their employees and slaves as they wished. This second freedom came to define capitalism, and the notions behind it are repackaged today under the title of "neoliberalism." Symbolically, we can say that we have the French Revolution versus the American Revolution, so let's follow them one by one. The American Revolution means their war of independence, which began in 1775, when wealthy people in America revolted against dependence on England and refused to pay taxes and tributes to an empire in which they had no political participation. John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers, even formulated the slogan "We will not be their negroes!" Something formidable. For the purpose of this revolution, in the first phase, freedom was defined as follows: the right to political self-governance, not to have someone from across the ocean tell you how to organize your farm. In 1764, Benjamin Franklin, the man on the banknote, went to London to try to argue for American freedom. In response, he received various ridicules: "You Americans make a great fuss about every little imaginary infringement of what you consider your liberties; and yet there is no people on Earth who are such enemies of liberty, such absolute tyrants, as you are." Or, from an enlightened Scottish philosopher who gives them a piece of his mind: "It presents a curious spectacle to observe how the same people who speak eloquently about political liberty, and who consider the privilege of taxing themselves as one of the inalienable rights of mankind, have no scruples in reducing a large proportion of their fellow beings to circumstances in which they are not only deprived of property, but also of almost every species of right. Fate has perhaps never produced a situation more calculated to ridicule a liberal hypothesis, or to show how little human behavior, at its core, is dictated by any philosophical principles." Or, most concisely and to the point: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?" This last question manages spectacularly to be insulting on multiple levels at once. The English ridiculed the Americans especially because they owned so many slaves within their own society. And that is not done. Everyone knows that a truly civilized and free man keeps his African slaves outside the country, not in plain sight, where you might stumble upon them when you go to the bathroom. The Americans, in turn, responded: how are you lecturing us about slavery when you are the biggest slave traders? And indeed, at this point, England was even forcibly delivering Africans to the colonies, and when they protested that they no longer needed them, like a caring mother who keeps putting slaves on your plate when you can't take any more. Well, these two civilized societies argued like this for about 10 years until the war broke out. The final retort is given in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson writes that America must be free from the tyrannical king of England who traffics in people and sells them in markets, something absolutely scandalous for the American president who was a slave owner. In English liberalism, not having slaves within the country was indeed an essential point, justified in all sorts of ways under the heading of "the uselessness of having slaves among us." The general conclusion, in any case, was that European air was too pure to tolerate the presence of slavery on its soil. But beyond these airs, the theorists of slavery intuited that there was a danger in having a large, explicitly enslaved population amidst public discourse that increasingly vehemently promoted freedom. And indeed, the American Civil War, 100 years later, stemmed precisely from this, from the irreconcilable tensions between the slave owners of the South and the theoretically emancipated North. The main problem was the legal coherence of the nation, not the morality of owning people or not. It was no longer possible for people in one part of the nation to be legally personal property and in the other not, and still call it the same country. What is important is that the American Revolution of 1775 was carried out by a local elite and their militias with the aim of having even greater autonomy over their own capital. This great patriotic achievement was to be taken over in 2009 by a radical group within the American Republican Party, called the Tea Party, which eventually became the entire Republican Party and culminated in Trump. Their goal was, similarly, to promote the autonomy of capital under the banner of patriotism, recalling that this is how America was formed. And indeed, that is how it was formed. The French Revolution, on the other hand, started from a familiar European liberalism and then exaggerated. Everyone agreed post-factum that they got carried away and exaggerated with freedom. In 1763, France had just lost a major seven-year European war, called the Seven Years' War. Having lost, France was stripped of most of its colonies, which gave the French an extra impetus to begin to criticize the surrounding colonialism with a clearer eye. At the forefront of liberal doctrine was the importance of eliminating despotism in all its forms, so that there would be no absolute power in the hands of any divinely touched monarch, and generally, such powers should no longer be inherited, by blood, but elected through a legislative forum. All liberals agreed on these points. However, certain Frenchmen began to say that this colonialism resembled the regimes from which they supposedly tried to escape. That in place of royal nobility, they were now putting the nobility of skin color. The absolute power of the king became the absolute power of the slave owner, of the colonizer. Isn't that strange? Plus, what kind of liberalism is it if the people who can participate in it depend on hereditary qualities? Namely: whether they were born white or black? Certain Frenchmen interpreted the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence not as all property owners having equal rights, but as all people, in general, regardless of shade and property. This current of opinion, at the time, was no longer called liberalism but radicalism. Because the people who preached it were considered unreasonable fanatics. One of them said: "I will not pervert this assembly, or myself, by seeking to prove that negroes have a right to liberty. You have decided this question when you declared that all men are born and remain equal and free. And it is not on this side of the Atlantic that corrupt sophisms will dare to insist that negroes are not men." Rousseau, whom we have discussed extensively in the previous clip, imagined a society that each individual could call home. In which each individual is a citizen with equal rights and no one feels like a stranger in their own country. This, dramatically, included the poor and peasants who had no trace of property. Something radical. Because, again, in all liberal discussions up to that point, it was always about the rights of men in the sense of men who were white and who were men and who owned property. What do you mean all people have rights? Even women? But African women? They should have rights too? But indeed, these positions, before the revolution began in 1789, were rather marginal. The central current was defined more by Montesquieu, who was aligned with his English brothers. Montesquieu was of the opinion that slavery occurred because some people in certain climatic zones are cowardly, and that's what turns them into slaves, and that in Europe it's cold, thus people are courageous. This theme of climate dictating a degree of servitude in human nature was a very popular argument at the time for validating the destruction of millions of people. The great, great philosopher Immanuel Kant also popularized it intensely, plus a recommendation on how to beat an African best so he wouldn't be lazy and would do what you wanted. He said it was best to "Use a split bamboo stick instead of a whip, so that the negro suffers a great amount of pain (due to the negro's thick skin, he would not suffer enough agony from a whip) but without dying." For such reasons, there is the notion that Enlightenment philosophers were racist, specifically for the reasons that many of them indeed were. They were composing in real-time a culture that endlessly reiterated how all people who were not European were inferior beings who deserved to be dominated and subjugated by the civilizing power of colonialism. This fundamental racism remains today one of the very real legacies of the Enlightenment. It validated the brutal economic exploitation of peoples from the rest of the world while justifying that this was the best thing that could have happened to them, to be brutalized and stolen from by Europe, because thus they were civilized. Because at least they were noticed, they were on the map. Let's remember, if a tree exists somewhere in a distant land and it is not economically exploited by Europe, does it really exist? In France, Montesquieu was for the amelioration of slavery by introducing laws to regulate it against abuses. This became the moderate liberal position: yes, slavery has some problems, but they can be resolved if we regulate it a bit better. In a way, this is what eventually happened; slavery was abolished in name and replaced by a type of industrial labor where legally no one had the right to kill you with their own hand, but they didn't need to, because you died on your own from the factory work regime anyway. What happened in the French Revolution is that where at first everyone cited the moderate Montesquieu, by the end, 10 years later, everyone had Rousseau on their lips. Rights for everyone, without exception, the poor, the peasants, women, all to be full citizens participating in the governance of the country. For the rest of the liberal community, this evolution of events was shameful. A true disaster. The atmosphere around was one of condescending chuckles regarding this absurd radicalism. These radical ideas did not survive for long, however. In 1793, revolutionary France abolished slavery in its colonies, but in the 10 years of instability and armed struggle that began in 1789, a certain general recorded spectacular victory after spectacular victory; his name was Napoleon. One coup d'état and a half later, when Napoleon became the supreme ruling despot, emperor, in 1802 he reinstated slavery in the colonies and was surrounded by intellectuals full of good things to say about slavery. One of them, the one who actually brought Napoleon to power, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, was already contemplating how a species of fundamentally servile people could be produced who could be used forever for hard labor. Sieyès also imagined a "gentle" revolution, with the aim of producing a class or race of workers as docile as possible. Like [Jeremy] Bentham, the French liberal conceived of a eugenic utopia (or dystopia). He imagined a "crossbreeding" between monkeys and "negroes" to create domesticated beings adapted to servile labor: "a new race of anthropomorphic monkeys." In this way, whites, who remained at the top of the social hierarchy as production directors, could do without blacks as auxiliary production tools, or slaves themselves, replacing them with anthropomorphic monkeys." It may sound strange, but Sieyès assured everyone that he had thought about it a lot and it was the best option. "However unusual, however immoral this idea may seem at first glance, I have reflected on it at length and can find no other way, in a large nation, and especially in countries that are very hot or very cold, to reconcile production directors with simple work tools." Beyond shades and colors, Sieyès defined most people, namely all poor people, as "work machines," "work tools," "human production tools," or, more concisely, "bipedal tools." It is important to remember that the loudest and most beautiful radical slogans of the French Revolution remained just that, slogans that awaited an implementation that never came. The chaos of the French Revolution remains in liberal discussions a concrete argument for why everyone clearly should not have rights. A moment of political recklessness, which must be overcome. And it has been overcome. There are two important aspects to why Sieyès sought eugenic solutions for the future. The first is that in the 18th century there was a third extremely important revolution, which is never talked about anywhere. In 1791, the over 500,000 Africans gathered and thrown onto the island of Haiti revolted, began to fight, and over 13 years won their own freedom and independence as a country. It is a unique revolution in history, an immediate and real abolition of slavery through the slave revolution. In these 13 years, they were attacked by England, Spain, and France, sometimes simultaneously, and managed to repel tens of thousands of soldiers. Haiti was the most profitable French colony in the Caribbean and one of the most profitable in the world, so the idea of it disappearing was unacceptable. This was the language in which it was discussed: the freedom of Africans on the island meant its disappearance from the world. The Haitian Constitution, written after the revolution, is the only one in the world that defines the victims of slavery as slaves and not slave owners. Beyond the economic challenge, there was also the problem that an African revolution overturned all that European science. It was as if Africans were a lazy human species waiting to be told what to do. How could they revolt and win their self-determination? This revolution, undiscussed today, inspired terror in all corners of the free world at the time. The nightmare had happened. Thousands of white people had been executed by their property, animated overnight. The great slave masters panicked at the possibility that their slaves would learn of this revolt and feel encouraged. In America, in particular, the panic intensified, because Africans were part of society, the danger was always there, just across the street. And for this reason, America developed one of the most brutal and dehumanizing forms of supported slavery in the world. Concrete strategies were implemented to systematically destroy the spirit of these people so that they would no longer know they were human and that they had any chance or right to freedom. And yet the Haitian revolution managed to have a huge global impact. A few years later, Simon Bolivar began to fight independence wars in South America to escape Spanish rule, and for this purpose, he visited Haiti to ask for help. The president at the time said he would offer him thousands of soldiers on the condition that in all territories occupied by him, Bolivar would free the slaves. Which he did, even if it didn't happen instantly. Following these independence wars led by him, the states of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia emerged. In these places, Bolivar imposed a constitution in which all human colors are equal before the law and must benefit from the same opportunities. He argued that only by embracing this ethnic diversity can South America preserve its independence and govern itself successfully. By the late 1700s, groups, sort of NGOs, were already appearing in America, England, and France, campaigning for the abolition of slavery. The Haitian Revolution offered them even more arguments and decisively contributed to creating public pressure that increasingly loudly supported the immorality of this system. The legal abolition of slavery in the colonies eventually happened through a combination of these pressures and constant violent revolts of the subjugated people. The fiction of the African man as three-fifths of a man was fractured here, but the response to this fracture in European culture, just like in the American camps, was to reiterate it even more intensely and violently in a way that ultimately became the notion and practice of eugenics. But before that: I said there were two reasons why in the early 1800s eugenic solutions were sought for a new docile class of workers. The first was that the fiction of African inferiority suffered concrete challenges, like the Haitian Revolution, and then the danger of revolt became something more real and, as demonstrated, something achievable. Revolts always existed; on 1 out of 10 transatlantic transports, Africans revolted, and on plantations, there were always escapes and fights, but they were swept under the rug because they spoiled the perception of man as an inanimate object. No one was supposed to know about them. But for the Haitian Revolution, there was no rug large enough. The second reason was that all this surplus of material from the new world's camps transformed the nature of labor within European societies. England's true economic boom during the Industrial Revolution came from the cotton industry. The factory itself and its labor model were invented by the cotton industry, which moved millions of people from rural areas and placed them in conditions bordering on slavery. In 1770, the cotton industry represented 2.6% of the British Empire's economy. 60 years later, in 1831, it was 22.4%. By comparison, iron represented 6.7% of the economy, coal 7%, and the wool industry 14.1%. By 1830, one in six workers in England worked in the cotton industry. And yet cotton does not grow in England. Over 150 years, the British East India Company worked diligently to capture the trade of the coveted Indian textiles, which were by far the best in the world. This was the reason for the intense presence of the British Empire in the area, because cotton was extremely precious, and even more so the advanced way in which Indians processed and styled it. In its traditional phase, before 1770, this trade operated within parameters where Indian workers had a significant say in when, how, and how much they produced. In this traditional system, a weaver retained about 30% of the value of a fabric. Over time, however, through the military power of its private army, the British East India Company managed to reorganize the subcontinent so that workers could no longer sell to whomever they wished, were forced to accept payment in cotton, respectively in the raw material which they then had to process, and were intensely supervised and disciplined by the company's employees. As a result, by the end of the 1700s, weavers were left with only 6% of the value of their labor, and if they protested, they were beaten. Indian textiles were very important because they were accepted as payment for slaves on the coast of Africa. Half of the Industrial Revolution was this globalism, the way the English forcibly extracted textiles from India with which they bought people from Africa whom they turned into slaves in the Caribbean who worked to produce European sugar. From this triangle, the capital was formed, necessary to invest a lot of time and money in optimizing these processes. Until the late 1700s, cotton plantations were not the most profitable, because the manual process of separating the usable material from the seeds was long and difficult. But in 1793, an American invented a machine that did this automatically, which enormously reduced the processing time for a cotton harvest. Thus, this invention, along with others in England that optimized weaving and spinning, launched a whole new huge wave of slavery. Half of all Africans sold in the Americas until 1888 arrived there after 1780. Industrialization actually poured fuel on the fire of colonialism, the pace was accelerated even more, because now more material could be processed, so more slaves were needed, more land from which indigenous people had to be driven out for the planting of "white gold," as it was called. By 1800, the United States of America was economically irrelevant in the world. America became a great economic power only through the expropriation of indigenous people, their killing, bringing Africans as slaves to these lands, and planting cotton which they sold in Europe or processed in their own factories in the industrialized North. Cotton is also a crop that inevitably destroys the soil after a certain number of harvests, so new lands were always needed for plantations. Hence the great impetus in American expansion to the South and West, because new lands were directly convertible into a lot of capital. In the first colony, in the state of Virginia, after all the arable land was depleted by cotton cultivation, the main activity became the forced reproduction of Africans and their sale to new states where the land was still viable. Hallucinatory, this was the economic model: a state that depleted its cultivable land transformed into a slave-breeding state, exporting labor to territories where indigenous peoples were massacred. In 1764, England processed 1,750 tons of cotton per year. In 1858, America exported this quantity, on average, in a single day. The vast majority of cotton processed in the English Industrial Revolution came from the labor of slaves on American plantations. America grew the cotton, and Great Britain processed it. This is how America and England developed economically in tandem. By 1850, cotton was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution story, and slavery was at the heart of cotton. The history of the Industrial Revolution is written as if Englishmen were struck by genius overnight and invented increasingly automated wheels, because they were very rational and because the Enlightenment is very powerful. But what were these wheels turning? And where did that material come from? Half of the story is missing. We'll shorten it, because we have a present to reach, but there is this very good book that meticulously follows the path of cotton over hundreds of years. The idea is that a very large part of the proletariat, about whom Marx would write, was born to process the labor of slaves, these first workers whose shade made them invisible in history. Before the destruction of Europeans in factories, there was always the destruction of Africans on plantations. The specter of communism and socialism appears when the slave labor regime is imported into European factories, and Europeans begin to die in droves from this regime of working 12-18 hours a day, 6 days a week. Just as colonialism was culturally supported by infinite theories about the hierarchy of human races, so as to rationally justify Enlightenment-era genocides, now the need arises to justify the destruction of Europeans themselves, of regular shade. Starting from the 1800s, an economic hierarchy is increasingly theorized. The poor man becomes the subhuman, and the rich man is placed at the top. This is how we arrive at defining poor white factory workers as bipedal tools. Poverty itself becomes a species of man, a race. Christianity here, as in all other places, is used to put a divine seal on this reality. These people were poor because they were sinful. The misery in which they lived was God's punishment because they were not good people, unlike the rich. Working 96 hours a week in dangerous conditions had nothing to do with anything. We haven't talked much about Christianity in this whole story because it was used rather easily, though ubiquitously. Aristocratic liberal political movements were always stamped with God's will, because all these individuals were great religious Christians, priests of capitalism. As Columbus set the tone at the beginning, so it continued: "In the name of the Holy Trinity, let us continue to gather as many slaves as we can." One of the favorite biblical justifications for slavery was the myth of Ham, from the Old Testament. Noah with the ark gets drunk and falls asleep naked in a tent, and his son Ham sees him, which is a great divine shame, so much so that Ham's descendants are cursed to have a darker complexion and be in chains forever. Africans were considered descendants of Ham, so the colonizers were merely applying God's will and putting them in chains. We didn't have time in this clip, but there is also the complex story of how Christianity adapted and oriented itself in all these conditions, but it was rather a violin that accompanied all these movements according to how and where political power manifested itself. For example, in the Bible, you also find passages like "There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." But how do you make money from this idea? It doesn't work very well. In England, the country where freedom was born, between 1688 and 1820, the number of crimes for which the death penalty was applied increased from 50 to 250. Almost all were new crimes against private property. If attempting to kill someone was considered a minor offense, if you stole the equivalent of 100 lei today, or a handkerchief, or cut an ornamental bush, you were hanged. You could be an 11-year-old child and be hanged for stealing a handkerchief, or for damaging a beautifully cut bush. John Locke argued that in such cases, it's not about the handkerchief, but freedom itself that is attacked, with a capital F. The sacred right to property is under siege, so such wicked thieves must be killed with the same passion with which the fight against despotic monarchs must be waged. In the exodus from rural areas to factories, many people in times of crisis lost their jobs and occupations, and thus became defined as vagrants. In England, if you couldn't support yourself, you were put into a so-called "workhouse," an institution where you lost all your rights and became a kind of slave. Locke and his friends said that the children of the poor should be forcibly taken from them at the age of 3-4 and put to work. Families who ended up in such workhouses were broken up and scattered to the winds, for

The commission of the crime of poverty. Factory owners stole children from these asylums and orphanages and put them to work spinning cotton. The conditions were so severe that people committed crimes to end up in prison rather than in asylums. They were intentionally draconian, because no one should get the idea that if you can't support yourself, the state will take care of you. On the contrary. If you reached a degree of poverty where you would starve to death, the state would punish you in the cruelest ways, so that you would learn your lesson and never starve to death again. These being the conditions, poor people tried to unite and build common fronts, but between 1793 and 1820, 60 laws were passed in England that prohibited not only unionization but also solidarity of any kind. Poor people had to be as isolated from each other as possible, so these laws ranged from the illegality of political organization to the illegality of intervening when a fellow man was whipped by an entrepreneur. What is understood by liberalism begins to transform from the right to self-governance into the right to do what you want in your factories without any state intervention. The right to exploit your employees like slaves without anyone being able to say anything. This is the context from which the urgent need for socialism arises, respectively for a policy that brazenly asserts that even poor people are still people, with rights and desires and personalities. Marx writes the Communist Manifesto in 1848, and in it he urges all these people who lived under these conditions to unite and fight for the rights not to be destroyed anymore. He was only 29 years old when he wrote this manifesto, which effectively synthesized a collection of ideas stemming from the French Revolution. He chose the word communist because at that time socialism was surrounded by a bourgeois aura, which only sought to ameliorate the present conditions, not to change them completely. The word echoed the Paris Commune, the name of the French government in the first 6 years of the revolution, and it was meant to mark the radicalism of the movement. That total changes were needed, not small adjustments. After the manifesto, Marx spent the next 35 years composing the most exhaustive critique that had existed until then of how capital reshapes human societies. He also wrote extensively about colonialism and slavery, in ways that remain as relevant as possible today because the system has not undergone any total change, but has enjoyed continuity. The way the communist dictatorships of the 20th century unfolded are used as a bogeyman argument against Marx, as if he had done anything other than precisely identify the mechanisms by which capitalism destroys human beings. And he also said, it's true, capitalism, stop, and you don't talk to capitalism like that. The very fact that we talk about neoliberalism and neo-Marxism today shows that at a certain fundamental level, in power relations, nothing has changed. The fact that we are surrounded by devices and screens and funny cat videos can very easily create the illusion that all these slaveries and destructive factory work are problems of distant pasts. But this illusion is precisely the quintessence of the privilege of being European. Colonialism always operated by defining an interior, a community of free people, no slavery at home and so on, and an exterior in which there is absolutely no rule other than that of profit. That unaesthetic brutality is kept at the periphery of visibility, because it happens anyway in uncivilized lands, so we shouldn't bother too much and better watch our funny cats. In this regard, just as this mechanism worked 300 years ago, it works exactly the same today, despite the fact that violent exploitation relations have always remained essential for this garden of Western civilization. We will eventually, soon, get to the present, but before that, let's jump back in time a bit and see how we get to Nazism. After the Haitian Revolution, starting in 1810, as a much-needed revalidation of racism, the pseudoscience called phrenology became popular. It studied the shape of the skull and determined what percentage human you were. This science rediscovered that there was something about the African skull that made it need a master. The same science also determined that women had inferior skulls and were therefore destined for eternal subjugation. And yet, even at that time, phrenology seemed a bit shaky and did not offer a decisive and final argument, as would have been desired, for the eternal supremacy of the white. The moment came only in 1859, when Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and racism finally gained scientific confirmation beyond any doubt, which even the most intellectual of people could latch onto, because it became a matter of advanced education. Although Darwin does not even talk about humans in this volume, the idea that the natural world is a competition between species that have evolved to become better than each other was sweet music to racist ears. Precisely because Darwin's scientific work was so respectable, the conclusion seemed finally as clear as possible to everyone. In 1871, Darwin nevertheless gathered courage and published a volume solely on the origins of man, titled "The Descent of Man," in which his position was quite complex and contradictory. On the one hand, he argues an entire chapter that so-called human races clearly do not exist, because biologically speaking we are a single species with very wide variations, on the other hand, he then discusses races and their hierarchy. What seems to be happening in all these contradictions is that Darwin, in this case, does not seem to have the courage to fully embrace his own analyses as a biologist. And he himself was a product of a racist Enlightenment history in which the hierarchy of human species had been definitively decided by the great Carl Linnaeus a hundred years earlier. So, despite the internal contradictions between the biological man and the racist man, Darwin has phrases in The Descent of Man that validate the entire imperialist colonialist effort: "At some future period, not very distant measured in centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace, throughout the world, the savage races." In his definitions, the African man being the most savage race, and then the rest. This consecration of racism, by one of the greatest scientists of the time, had a devastating impact. It gave a complete green light to put eugenics into practice. If this is the situation, then perhaps we can help the process of natural selection through some artificial selection and speed it up by getting rid of all irregular people. From here, the ideas of social Darwinism develop, which manage to combine racism and capitalism in a holy union. The slogan now is: every man for himself, and if you couldn't make it, it's because biologically you don't have what it takes to perpetuate your genes, and your destruction is not only justified but also necessary, because it is an achievement of the progress of the species. The outdated Christian arguments that said people are poor because God gave them that way are now replaced by the light of science, which shows how they actually biologically deserve nothing else. Currently, the more polished version of this idea is that we live in a meritocracy. Whoever deserves to have money and be healthy and well, has it and is, whoever doesn't, it obviously means they don't deserve it, they haven't worked enough, too bad, it's their fault. Under these conditions, socialism becomes an enemy of science itself, because if you help people who have problems, you disrupt the natural balance. You disrupt the struggle for survival. Being against the destruction of people in factories thus becomes an act against human nature. You are unnatural. This social Darwinism worked on all levels, at the individual level, between poor and rich people, and at the global level, between colonizing countries and colonized, obviously inferior peoples. The logic was always self-confirming. If they weren't inferior, then how would we have colonized them? How we colonized them means they are inferior. QED. This logic remains present today, just like social Darwinism in general. And it is true, the willingness of Western civilization to commit atrocities on an unimaginable and unprecedented scale in the name of capital is of unparalleled superiority. In terms of violence and genocide, no one in the history of the world has been better. The most civilized civilization is the one that is the most barbaric. How do you like this logic? But again, we get carried away and don't get to Nazism. At this point, I don't know if there's any suspense left. As the hierarchy of human races becomes a cornerstone of Western rational culture starting in the 1700s, increasingly specific distinctions begin to be made even among European peoples. Slavs were clearly to be avoided, as the word slave comes from Slav, Latins were lazy, Greeks too oriental, French weak-willed with all their socialism, and in all of Southern Europe it was too warm anyway for quality people to develop, so in the end it becomes obvious that Anglo-Saxons are the number 1 species of Europeans. By the end of the 1800s, Great Britain, America, and Germany were at the top of the Western civilization food chain, so it was decided that they were the Anglo-Saxons. The notion of Aryan is intensely popularized in an 1853 essay titled "On the Inequality of Human Races." Through an extremely dizzying pseudoscience, it ranks even shades of white and concludes that the most worthy white is called Aryan, the ancestor of the original whites from the first batch off the assembly line. Not everyone agreed with this Aryan mythology, because it implied a people who migrated from a place that was not the West, and that was not good to say. In any case, after hundreds of years of scientific racial discrimination applied to the exploited peoples of the world, the hierarchies finally extend to Europeans as well, and a real competition begins for who is the whitest white. This is the soil from and in which Nazism grows in the most direct way. It is in no way an entirely unpredictable exception, a small slip impossible to explain. A hundred years before the Holocaust, this was the accumulated dominant culture that was babbling in Europe. What is truly unique about Nazism is that these genocides happened, this time, in Europe, and that they happened with the full force of the industrialization of the civilized world, so that record quantities of human species classified as undesirable could be exterminated in record time. But for hundreds of years, the colonialist culture had desperately demanded this. This is what it did in the non-European territories, the invisible ones, which did not exist before. Nazism manages to produce the paroxysm of this culture in such a atrocious, so shocking, and so visible a way that the hundreds of years before that led to this moment are swept under the rug. Suddenly, in fact, no one had said anything about any race in European history, and these Nazis with their ideas fell from space. There was that philosopher Nietzsche, and someone at one point said the word superman, and somehow the Germans got the idea that they were a superior race of humans, a bizarre idea that no one had ever heard of before. Or, as Aimé Césaire, a writer and politician from the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, said: People are surprised and become indignant. They say: "How bizarre! But let it be, it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and hope; and they hide the truth, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the maximum barbarism that summarizes all other daily barbarisms; this is Nazism, yes, but before being its victims, they were its accomplices; because they tolerated Nazism before it was imposed on them, because they excused it, they looked away, they legitimized it, because, until then, it had only been applied to non-European peoples; that they cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before it engulfed the entire Christian Western civilization in its bloody waters, it festered, oozed, and flowed from every crack [of Western culture]. The European Holocaust happens at the intersection of hundreds of years of conspiracy theories surrounding Jews and the colonialist culture of extermination, well-founded and practiced equally for hundreds of years. The German doctrine of expansion, starting in 1900, was called Lebensraum, which means living space and implied the need for new territories for the flourishing of German culture. The Nazis take it and explicitly try to carry out the maneuver called the United States of America in Europe. They determine that they need all the surrounding space to prosper, and for this purpose, the indigenous Slavs of Central and Eastern Europe had to disappear. You sit peacefully at home and mind your own business, and suddenly an empire from who knows where suddenly decides that you are an indigenous people standing in the way of progress. After racism is scientifically consecrated through the ways Darwin is interpreted, the eugenic drive gains total international proportions at the beginning of the 1900s. And in Romania, a lot of people with street names enthusiastically participated in the formation of a true national project to determine who had the right to propagate their genes further and who did not. All this eugenic enthusiasm ends abruptly in Europe after the catastrophes of Nazism, but not in America. Until 1967 – that is, for another 22 years – 16 states in America maintained their laws against marriage between whites and people of any other shade. In this fortress of freedom, it was illegal to love non-white people, and if you did, you were put in prison for defiling racial purity. These eugenic laws were finally declared unconstitutional in 1967 after a couple arrested for illegal love fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to cohabit and won. There is a beautiful film about them, which I highly recommend. We must now take another leap in time and space to reach the eternally elusive present. Under all the conditions we have discussed, after 300 years of exterminating colonialism, in 1884 the great European powers decided it was a good time to invade Africa entirely and claim its territories properly. The conquest of Africa had already begun for several years, but in 1884 the civilized world met to formalize exactly which piece belonged to whom, so as not to step on each other's toes and for everything to be well organized. In these endeavors, borders were drawn in Africa that had no connection to how the various peoples and cultures living there were settled. As the British Prime Minister at the time said: "We have undertaken to draw lines on maps [of territories] where no white man has ever set foot; we have given each other mountains and rivers, the only small impediment being that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were." In pre-colonial Africa, there were no nation-states according to the European definition that emerged in the 17th century. It was not certain imaginary lines on a map that dictated your loyalties, but belonging to a certain culture or ethnicity, regardless of its geographical spread. When Europeans imposed national borders, a double, nonsensical violence was committed. On the one hand, they grouped cultures that had no connection to each other, and on the other hand, they imposed this new reality of imaginary physical boundaries. The same applies to the Middle East, where Europeans equally decided on borders that crammed rival cultures into the same state, which now had to fight for the nation. Because apparently, there was now a nation to be won. The constant tensions in the Middle East were a direct result of these arbitrary partitions, with no regard for the reality on the ground. In Africa, too, it led to infinite conflicts, which were only heard about in the European world when they reached alarming levels, such as the genocide in Rwanda. The conquest of Africa happened through a general massacre. Europeans were now armed with automatic machine guns that were completely indifferent to the Africans' courage to run at them at breakneck speed. There were so-called battles in which European losses were 50 men and African losses were 20,000. I don't think there's any mental space left here for another list of genocides, because I, at least, can't anymore, but I'm afraid two must be mentioned. The first, briefly, because it is quite well-known. At the Berlin Conference, King Leopold II of Belgium received the state of Congo, a huge region in the heart of Africa, ten times the size of Romania, as his personal territory. 76 times larger than Belgium itself. Congo was full of rubber trees, and in 1888 the Dunlop rubber tire was invented for bicycles, the first air-filled tire that actually worked. At the same time, cars also appeared, so there was suddenly an infinite market for rubber. So Leopold founded private companies to handle rubber extraction, under the military power of Belgian bullets. All Africans in the region were forced to start collecting rubber; anyone who refused was killed in the most sadistic ways possible. Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness, is about this, because he spent a few months in Congo and saw with his own eyes what was happening. The novel is also important because it offers the European world a first faithful mirror of what capitalist colonialism looks like, a reflection of how the civilizing mission was put into practice at the beginning of the 20th century. Because in Congo, as everywhere else, the rhetoric was about sharing the gift of European progress across seas and countries. The book was ignored at the time of its publication, but in the 1960s, when discussions about the colonialist past of this civilization were very heated, it became essential. For rubber, over 23 years, until 1908, between 2 and 10 million Africans were killed. It is impossible to estimate exactly, and both ends of this estimate are well-argued, but in 1919 the Belgian state concluded that in these 23 years, half of the local population had been killed. This story, in its full horror, can be found in the book King Leopold's Ghost, but we move on because one last genocide must be discussed. It illustrates, in a very representative way, an essential mechanism of colonialism. In Rwanda in 1994, around 1 million people were killed. The news surrounding this event confirmed the suspicions of the Western world about African barbarism: here's how they, even left alone, do nothing but kill each other with machetes. But the Rwandan state, like all others, was a product of colonialism. There has always been a minority called Tutsi and a majority Hutu in the region, and there have always been tensions and conflicts between these two ethnic groups. When Germany was given this territory as a slice of cake, they began efforts to form a Tutsi elite to help them govern the colony. They began institutionalized segregation, where schools were built that only the Tutsi minority had access to, while the Hutu majority was put to forced labor. When the Belgians took over the territory in 1916, they divided society into Tutsi rulers and Hutu poor and further rigidified this division, which produced endless animosity between the two ethnic groups. Tutsis gave orders, and Hutus carried them out. This division was based on dizzying racial considerations: Tutsis were taller and slightly lighter-skinned, so the Belgians decreed that they were actually Europeans in black skin, worthy of carrying the burden of the civilizing mission. Under these conditions, over decades, a fervent hatred developed between the two ethnic groups, which found its final explosion in the 1994 genocide, when the Hutus, defined for decades as inferior, killed hundreds of thousands of superior Tutsis. Wherever colonialism has passed, from the destruction of the Aztecs to the present day, it has been based on inflaming such regional conflicts. Regional conflicts are found everywhere, but when someone intervenes and dictates that some are superior and others are slaves, according to the good teaching of European culture, the effect is to redirect hatred away from the inventor of the cage towards the unfortunate with whom one must share it. Thus, the problem was not with the Belgian colonizers, but with the damn Tutsis. This formula has been repeated successfully countless times, the success being the prevention of the formation of a sufficiently large common front to challenge the yoke. In other words, it's not some great philosophy, but just divide et impera from the smallest levels to the largest. It is a political method that enjoys as much success today as ever, on the internet, or on the ground. One of the most dramatic partitions was suffered by the Indian subcontinent. After World War II, a global wave of decolonization began, in which empires withdrew their flags from the territories they held. This happened largely because Nazi despotism had caused the entire community of free people to trumpet incessantly for 6 years about people's rights not to be invaded and controlled by another country. Under these conditions, and after so many struggles and atrocities, overt imperialism became downright unaesthetic. In 1945, the United Nations was formed, and Article 1 of the statute of this new organization states that the peoples of the world have equal rights and the right to self-determination. A good slogan, like all other slogans that look good framed, but rarely have any connection to the reality achieved in their name. Something similar was attempted with the League of Nations after World War I, but then no one took the commitment to decolonization too seriously. In 1947, however, dramatically, Great Britain withdrew from the territory then called the British Raj, and thus set the tone, because if Great Britain gave up India, it meant that this time it was for real. On the Indian subcontinent, there was a Hindu majority and a Muslim minority. The British said that if they left them all in the same country, it would lead to civil war, so they decided to divide the area into Muslim Pakistan in the north and Hindu India in the south. By doing this so quickly and without any planning, overnight about 15 million people found themselves caught on the wrong side of the borders, suddenly having to leave their homes and move towards their designated ethnostate. This chaos led to all sorts of violence and massacres, and in some regions, like Kashmir, the fighting continued. For decades, the main activity of the United Nations was to mediate all these post-colonial conflicts through so-called peacekeeping operations. Societies declared free, after endless years of colonialism, were profoundly dysfunctional, intentionally defected by European imperialism, so chaos set in almost everywhere. Colonialism always operated on the principle of underdevelopment. Despite infinite rhetoric about civilization, there was never an aim to support any progress of the dominated peoples. They were to remain docile so as to fulfill the empires' goals. All mechanisms were designed to support stagnation, total submission to authority. European empires always relied on corrupt local conservative groups, often religious, to maintain things as they were, for decades or centuries. When decolonization happens, either there are civil wars between the previously divided ethnic groups, or the corrupt elites who had collaborated with the empires until then take control and, essentially, continue to collaborate with imperial demands. That is why the notion that Western civilization ever tried to support the progress of the surrounding world is ridiculous. The propagation of this idea today does nothing but repeat hundreds of years of colonial propaganda that repeated it endlessly while exploiting the conquered territories for its own needs to the great detriment of the locals. The railways built always had the sole purpose of facilitating resource extraction by the colonizers. Perhaps the most resounding and cliché argument in favor of colonialism is this: well, but railways were built where there were none. Genocide is genocide, but who has railways? The points connected by these railways most often had no social relevance; they merely connected mines and plantations to the ocean coasts, where European ships came to collect their prizes. Many of these railways were also abandoned when the resources to be extracted were depleted and the soils destroyed. It's like I build a road to your yard so I can come with cars to steal everything you have, destroy your society, and subjugate your mother, and then I say, don't be sad, look, now you have a road. We can all agree that objectively, the road is good. If other things can still be debated, the road is good itself, we have finally found it. In the 19th century, at a point when slavery was too conspicuous, the possibility of forcing people to work in a similar regime but under a different title began to be explored. Instead of forcing them through the force of the whip, you can force people through the force of economic conditions. Either work under the conditions dictated by the great industrialists, or starve to death, or end up on the streets from where you are taken and put into forced labor institutions. In this way, the system is clean; the work is not forced but is mandatory. The despot disappears, and yet the obligation remains. A very similar revelation happens in the process of decolonization, where the whip disappears but economic pressure remains. We spoke about the triumphant victory of the Haitian Revolution, but the story continues with a considerably smaller dose of triumph. Haiti is today one of the poorest countries in the world. After Europeans attacked the island repeatedly without succeeding in conquering it, they took a short break to contemplate the situation, during which Haiti suffered the status of a non-state, and no Western country interacted with it in any way. In 1825, after 20 years of embargo, France positioned its fleet off the Haitian coast and extended the offer of recognizing independence in exchange for compensation to the former owners. In the act by which Africans freed themselves on the island, they practically stole from themselves, and someone had to pay for this theft. So, in exchange for 37 billion contemporary dollars, Haiti could call itself a country. They obviously didn't have this money, so the French made them borrow from a French bank to pay them, which they did. After the first installment, the state of Haiti went bankrupt, so it had to take out another loan to pay the first loan, and on top of that, the interest on the interest. The conditions of these loans were impossible; their purpose was to show the world what happens to a people who have the arrogance to liberate themselves. As they repeatedly failed to pay the loans of loans, Haitians were pointed at as living proof that Africans cannot govern themselves. For 120 years, until after World War II, 80% of Haiti's state revenue went towards paying these loans and interest, called the cost of emancipation. Despite the Haitian constitution which defined slave owners as criminals, they were ultimately forced to accede to the global system and politely, civilly, compensate the people who owned them. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are two institutions founded by Americans and British in 1945. Once the chaos of decolonization calmed down a bit, they began to offer loans to newly independent states so they could get on their feet. In 1980, these loans were formalized under the title of Structural Adjustment Programs. To receive loans for, supposedly, the development of their own economy, states had to open their doors wide to foreign investment and privatization of resources, so that Western corporations could enter with maximum ease and do what they wanted. The force of the imperial flag is thus replaced by the force of imperial loans. To participate in the international community, the price was merely surrendering control over one's own economy. Although the African continent is by far the richest in natural resources, there are no processing industries for these resources in African countries. Valuable materials are extracted and transported to the West where they are valorized and then sold back to these countries. Since you cannot refine your own oil, sell it to me very cheaply, and I will sell it back to you very expensively in the form of gasoline. In this process, it is essential that you can never process your own resources, otherwise, where would I get all that profit? The interest on loans is the whip that forces an uninterrupted continuation of this rhythm of resource extraction from Africa. Then, in addition to loans, there are countless creative ways of economic exploitation of vulnerable countries, developed by very rational and civilized people. Between the period when the most important resource of the African continent was people to be turned into slaves and today, there has been no respite for these countries in which they have not been ridden by the West and the economic interests of global capitalism. Today, in addition, China is also intensely involved in the neo-colonization of Africa, also through the mechanism of loans. African countries borrow from China to pay off Western loans. A real party. In the 1960s, this relationship of neo-colonialism began to be theorized, and there were intense debates on the subject, whether it was true or not, but today it is proven by concrete data. In the 1990s, underdeveloped economies were still grouped under the name Third World, but as this term sounds pejorative, it is replaced today by the distinction between Global North and Global South, although geographically speaking this is not entirely correct. The Global North category includes the world's best-performing economies, and the Global South includes the poorest, all with an intense colonial history. In recent years, intense efforts have been made to quantify the value of the neo-colonial exploitation that is happening today, and one of the most serious studies in this field was published last year by Jason Hickel and his colleagues. They analyze this exploitation through the lens of what is called "unequal exchange." The mechanism of unequal exchange means the difference between the price you would pay for a resource, a day of work, or a piece of land in rich countries versus poor countries. The wave of moving industries to Southeast Asia because workers could be paid $1 a day there is an example of this mechanism. It is generally about the ability of strong economies to dictate the prices under which hundreds of millions of people work to deliver essential materials to the North. In colonialism, when slavery was used, this profit was total; land was stolen, local resources were appropriated by simply planting one's own flag over them, and people were forced to work for free. As we have modernized, now these peoples can do the same work, but in exchange for symbolic sums of money. This sum of money also increases symbolically, little by little, a cent here, a cent there, and this is what makes great thinkers of Western civilization celebrate the world's progress and the slow elimination of poverty. Money sent to Africa as humanitarian aid also most often functions as an extra credit to maintain the status quo. It's like, I send you some money for free so I can be sure that you can continue to plant things that I buy very cheaply from you and sell expensively. The effects of IMF loans are also studied, and in 135 countries they have led to a dramatic increase in economic inequality; the rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer, because inequality is what Western culture exports best. Other studies show how in recipient countries, women are employed less, people commit suicide more, and generally, human rights disappear more and more, because who has time for human rights when interest must be paid? There is a fundamental hypocrisy, to put it in its civilized name, in public discourse about these countries. On the one hand, they are imposed conditions whose effects are clearly underdevelopment, and on the other hand, they are pointed at for not managing, for something being wrong with the people in them that they don't prosper, probably they are not made of the right stuff. If it needs to be mentioned, this attitude is a very explicit continuation of colonialist culture. Jason Hickel's study is complex enough to require a considerable amount of time to explore it meritoriously, but its conclusions are that, for example, in 2015 the value extracted from former colonies was $10.8 trillion. For comparison, this is about half of America's GDP. One way to understand this sum is that if the resources of the South had been paid at prices not of slavery and subjugation, this is the sum that would have remained in those economies, and with this money they would have developed. In their absence and in the presence of this exploitation mechanism, these countries cannot develop, except, perhaps, at an incredibly slow pace. With $10 trillion, the sum from a single year, you can eliminate extreme global poverty 70 times over. In the period analyzed, between 1990 and 2015, the study estimates that through this unequal exchange, the North has become richer by $242 trillion, respectively 25% of the total Northern GDP during this period. These sums are astronomical, but they are just estimates, which can be contested, because the task of arriving at an exact number in this whole story is relatively impossible. What is as clear as possible to everyone involved, no matter how the numbers are spun, is that this relationship of subjugation and exploitation remains extremely present and that it has continued step by step, uninterrupted, from the colonial world to today. A very popular argument in discussions about how well colonialism has taken hold of everyone is that these societies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas were anyway in a bad state and nothing would have come of them. This argument belongs to science fiction. It cannot exist. In our reality, factually, the development of these places has been interrupted almost everywhere in the world by European interventions, at key moments. We will never know how they would have developed without the infinite systemic violence brought as a gift by the European civilizers. Colonialism is not something that happened at a certain point, a few hundred years ago, a small historical event that was then moved past and everyone went about their business. The capital in question, from the word capitalism, is capital accumulated in colonialism through slavery. The way this system is born is through the abduction and subjugation of tens and hundreds of millions of people from all over the world, forced to work for free for the enrichment of a very small group of individuals. This is what forms it and what determines its rules and mechanisms. To keep it functioning, there must always be someone very poor for someone else to be very rich. At the local and global level. This is the DNA of this system, and this is what it propagates at every step, from 1700 to today. Capitalism cannot reduce inequality because it is inequality itself; its functioning depends on it, that is the fundamental cog that keeps it turning. For this reason, superficial amendment of capitalism cannot produce anything other than a superficial amelioration of the inequalities within it. For this reason, if we do not want to perpetuate indefinitely a world divided between incredibly rich individuals and people who barely live from day to day, radical changes must be made to how this world functions. Minor adjustments will never have the power to change these rigidified power relations. The problem identified as early as 1776 is that wealth comes with political power, and this political power will never legislate in favor of its own diminution. It will never legislate its own disappearance. So here we are, found in this curious situation. How do you propose we proceed? Today we also have the added problem that all these things do not happen in a vacuum, but in an organic environment that reacts to its transformation into a planetary factory. Despite the heated discussions that have taken place in recent years on global warming, the institutional measures taken by the wealthy states that contribute most to consuming the planet continue to be derisory. The latest IPCC report published on March 19 shows that based on current policies, we are most likely heading towards an average warming of 3.2 degrees Celsius. The threshold considered a limit until now was 1.5 degrees, beyond which a chain of cataclysms with a domino effect that cannot even be calculated is triggered. It is very important to emphasize in these discussions that this is a planetary average. In specific places on the planet, this can actually mean a warming of 10 degrees. And the difference between 40 degrees and 50 degrees determines to what extent it is still possible to live in such areas, respectively, not at all. Coincidentally, the most dramatic effects of these changes will be felt by the poorest countries in the world. In a true display of poetic anti-justice, the planetary factory built through the exploitation of the global South will lead to disasters from which the global South will suffer the most. When people start fleeing 50 degrees Celsius, when water disappears and the environment catches fire, will it still be said that it is their fault? That they are not made of the right stuff to prosper? This planet-transforming capitalism was born in parallel with a toxic culture that for hundreds of years has been hammering the idea that a person's value is determined by how much money they produce and how much they consume. The idea of man as a smaller or larger cog in a machine, the idea of man as a consumption battery, more or less perishable. There is nothing inevitable, obligatory, or natural about this idea; it is just a perspective that has come to dominate our existence through constant repetition for 300 years. Furthermore, the hierarchies carefully constructed in the Enlightenment were organized around a fundamental racism that dictates that a certain European shade of human is the least perishable, and too bad for the rest, because it's obvious from their color that they are savages. Beyond shades, ultimately, the poor are also savages, and the rich are the pinnacle of civilization. This is the inertia of Western culture deeply encoded in institutions and beliefs over hundreds of years, and it was not suddenly wiped off the face of the earth in 1945. The reason I made this clip is that last year the High Representative of the European Union's diplomacy considered it appropriate to declare that Europe is a garden and the rest of the world is a jungle. In the jungle, we all know that only animals live. So I wanted to explore at length the problematic nature of this idea, which turns out to be, in fact, the core around which this present civilization has developed. Josep Borrell only woke up to name it explicitly in 2022. But it is precisely the fertile ground from which, when needed, purges and mass dehumanizations are born, and we are at a historical point where the necessity of considering other people as less human, depending on various criteria, will become increasingly pronounced, so that we do not have to make any radical changes. In order to keep the current system functioning, the price will be, again, total numbness in the face of the suffering of other people who, according to European culture, are not really human, especially if they are very poor and especially if they have a different shade. So we shouldn't bother too much. From my point of view, from this seat where I am, this seems to be what is happening. I have managed, in this clip, to reproduce about 10% of the things that struck me powerfully during the documentation process. If you found yourself very stirred by this information, there are countless resources that offer much more interesting details and develop 2-minute segments from this clip into books of hundreds of pages. I have left the sources I used in the description, plus recommendations for adjacent books. From my point of view, what is most dramatically missing from the story told here is the colonization of Asia, what happened in American society once slavery was abolished, the way slaves in the colonies were replaced by millions of Indian and Chinese workers who actually worked under slavery, and

The fights and assassinations that happened in the decolonization period, after the Second World War. On this last point, I would have liked to explore at length the story of Algeria, which only escaped French control in 1962, and only through a long war. Probably, in one way or another, these subjects will find their place in future clips, but until then, I leave you the recommendations in the description. The book with which it would be easiest to start is "The New Age of Empire," which strives, in a not terribly rigorous academic way, to offer an overview of the hundreds of years of imperialism and succeeds, I believe, in producing a good starting point in all this history. Another aspect I would have liked to address is what the difference between imperialism and colonialism can mean. As far as I understand, imperialism involves the mechanism of exploitation of colonialism plus the force of culture. Respectively, the force of ideas with which all this exploitation is justified. In India, for example, the British had installed an education system in which Indian children were taught about how they were an inferior species who had to obey the superior English, who were there to guide them in life, that they would have brought ruin upon themselves. The arrogance of European culture, which we discussed, was not manifested in whispers on its own continent, but was imposed by force on distant peoples who had to understand and assimilate the fact that they were inferior. Which, often, they did. These cultural violences have a much longer and unpredictable life and continue to produce their effects long after the flags have been withdrawn from territories. One of the palpable legacies of enlightened colonialism is the notion that all these things were perfectly normal and inevitable. We can contemplate today with serenity endless strings of horrors that happened on an unprecedented scale, because we are told that they happened in the name of progress and could not have been otherwise. In this way, yesterday's inevitability becomes today's inevitability. All these relationships and perceptions installed through endless violence could not have been otherwise yesterday and, therefore, could not be otherwise today. What colonizes, in the end, all this secular imperial momentum is our minds themselves. The flags planted there are those of racism and the notion that man's natural way of existence is to be a factory himself and to treat himself like a factory among factories. These flags are planted as deeply as possible and often they are what is meant when, in various contexts, people talk about decolonizing oneself. And I will stop here. I thank the people who have supported me on Patreon all this time, extra intensely, for their trust and patience, and I wish you all a pleasant decolonization.