#16 Understanding Colonialism: Death and Impoverishment Part I

Wealth and Power has set out to understand how a small part of the world, i.e Western Europe in 1500 AD, became not only richer than any other continent but also more powerful. What was the mechanism that led to certain parts of Europe becoming richer than the rest of the world? If you have read this far, you will already know that Britain, France, Russia, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal managed through colonisation to invade every continent on earth. Of course, this was not all at the same time, nor in any form coherent or with necessarily planned intent. The events that lead to one invasion after the next is all the stuff of history. But in the end, over 400 years beginning in 1492 and ending in 1918, every continent of the world had been invaded, conquered and the vast majority of peoples run as newly created colonial states. The forms that colonisation took varied widely, and we will examine that in the following blogs.

Colonisation led to impoverishment on a scale that has never been measured as such measurements are hard to create with any degree of accuracy. In the following three blogs, I examine the most intense two forms of impoverishment: holocausts and famine. The processes of impoverishment varied widely. In the continent of Africa, the colonising nations enslaved tens of millions of men and women. In the Americas, the indigenous people were almost but not quite eradicated. In India and China, the richest and most powerful parts of the world in 1500, the mechanisms of impoverishment were more complicated. Both territories, once proud and complex civilisations, were brought low so that their European rulers could enrich themselves. I provide detail of this in future blog posts. Colonisation as a process varied widely, but as a whole process, the primary purpose was to transfer wealth from the colonised to the coloniser.

There are well-known common objections to this position: that many people today wished they had the stability that the coloniser brought with them; that their country received many benefits, such as the rule of law, democracy, railways and so on. These arguments are false; some people in every colony were given new responsibilities. The coloniser was always too weak to rule without the help of a small coterie of local people, and this made for a new middle class that was always below the coloniser status-wise but with access to education. People who offered and held on to such privilege supported the invaders.

This counter-argument misses the point. Overall, in every territory, both the people and the resources were exploited for the benefit of the invader. In this process, the invader benefited, often personally and always their home country, and very often the colonised peoples were impoverished. In this blog, I examine the most extreme aspects of impoverishment through an understanding of various holocausts and famines and the lack of famine relief.

Holocausts

Holocausts were not an inevitable corollary of colonisation, but they had perhaps the most extreme consequences.

The early Holocausts included the events that removed the indigenous peoples of North and South America, Australia, and to a lesser extent New Zealand. I deal with these important issues in later blogs. The Holocausts for the indigenous peoples of the Americas were the early genocides that continued from the initial invasions in the 15th century right through to the end of the 19th century.

Recognition of the concept of Holocausts is relatively new. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, is said to have invented the term. Lemkin had a lifelong interest in the mass murder of the Armenian people in the years 1915 to 22, and the term ‘Holocaust’ came to be widely used from the 1940s when he drew up a draft convention for the United Nations. His concept was defined with the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts in mind:

By genocide we mean the destruction of a people or an ethnic group… It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed again the national group as an entity.

Lemkin’s definition of genocide can also be applied to the destruction of Australian and North American peoples when the invaders expropriated the land. Even as late as the 20th century, in both Australia and America, there were widespread attempts under the Eugenics movement to sterilise women and to Christianise children by removing them from their parents.

First I concentrate on five of the holocausts of the 20th century. They progressed from the Herero and Namaqua Genocide 1904, the Armenian Holocaust 1915-1922, the Jewish holocaust 1941-1944, the Rwandan Holocaust 1975-79 and the Cambodian Holocaust 1975-79.

The process in each case was distinctly different, but each had in common the definition of genocide used by Raphael Lemkin, and they were all attempts to "purify" the peoples who remained.

In the Herero case, the German invaders were simply attempting to remove the indigenous peoples so that German settlers could take their place. There was no purification process; the genocide was more akin to that in the Americas. The Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan holocausts were attempts by the dominating power to cleanse the area of one or more groups of people who had been living in the area for hundreds of years.

Why was there a need felt by dominating powers to purify, to remove and kill very large numbers of people who had lived for many generations in peace and security? This question requires readers to imagine a world very different from the one they know today.

Purification of groups can occur in many ways when a group, large or small, feels deeply threatened with annihilation from outside forces. In such cases, anybody who is labelled as 'foreign' is thrown out.

In the Armenian genocide, the Ottoman Empire had been threatened with annihilation for at least 100 years and had only continued due to the complex politics between Russia, Britain and France. During the 1914-18 war, the Empire was under dire threat and would have been dismembered under the Sevres Agreement. The creation of Turkey was the last throw of a violent dice in 1922: an attempt by Ataturk to become like the Europeans through ridding himself first of the Armenians and then, less violently, of the Greek-speaking population living in what is today’s Turkey.

In the Jewish Holocaust, it was the Germans who were attempting to purify themselves. Other blog posts go into detail about the threat of annihilation of Germany and the rise of Hitler as a vital response to this threat. The mass killing of the Jews and other minorities was a direct consequence resulting from the attempt of the German people to remake themselves in the image of the time, as an allegedly great race of people.

In the Cambodian case, the context was the end of the wars in Vietnam. Cambodia is the state next door. As you can read below, purification was perhaps the major goal of the Khmer Rouge leadership. The Vietnam War can be seen in retrospect as the final ending of the colonial past. It remains one of the few attempts to successfully win independence for the Vietnamese people, at a huge cost in terms of death. The Cambodian holocaust that followed was the final part of that conflict.

Finally, there was the Rwanda Holocaust, where the Hutu peoples had been demoralised by the German and then Belgian colonialists, who had placed the Tutsi over and above them.

In all five cases, everybody spoke the same language, everybody had been living alongside each other over hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. And in all three cases, the people who were to be killed were denounced by the killing majority as animals with no rights whatsoever. All these cases, from the killings in the Americas right through to Rwanda Holocaust, colonialism was either a direct cause of the killings by the invaders or a direct consequence of colonial expansion.

I have argued in previous blogs that most colonised societies deliberately impoverished so that the colonising country could be enriched, with racism as the ideological justification. There may not have been centrally directed policies from European capitals to create Holocausts abroad, yet that is what happened. European settlers lived long distances from their home countries in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it was they who changed local societies. The earliest Holocausts of North America and Australia in the 19th century occurred over many decades; while later Holocausts in the 20th century were official government policy and occurred more rapidly. Neither was it a colonial policy to mitigate hunger and starvation. Famine was thought to be brought about by the hand of God, whereas Holocausts by humans were justified through racist ideas, up to and including the Jewish Holocaust in the 1940s.

Holocausts and Colonisation

Mass killings to obtain land were not an automatic consequence of the European invasions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet the Native American Holocaust (see blogs 12 and 13) can be understood as a 500-year war to eradicate the peoples of the continent to take and own their land. From the earliest settlements in Virginia, Europeans brought with them the concept of private property, a concept entirely alien to the indigenous peoples. It is estimated that at least 120 million people were killed in this process. After sustained periods of Indigenous resistance, those that remained were removed from what had been their homelands. There followed an attempt to forcibly assimilate the remaining ‘heathen’ indigenous people into what white Americans understood as their superior civilisation. Indigenous children were incarcerated and indoctrinated with Christian values in schools that were set up by Jesuits who taught in English. The purpose was to uproot and destroy an entire culture. Finally, separate health services were created for indigenous people and women were sterilised.

The Australian holocaust was similar; with the purpose of the taking of the land by force and eradicating the culture and peoples who inhabited it. The indigenous peoples of Australia were hunter-gatherers, unable to withstand the military technologies of the invaders. In a similar manner to those in the Americas, the indigenous people were infantilised and seen as lesser humans to the newcomers. There were conscious attempts to sterilise women, assimilate and Christianise children, and destroy an ancient culture.

Today there are tendencies to ignore these Holocausts, with both these offending countries establishing themselves as havens of civilised democracy. Yet even in the mid-20th century, the Australian government banned the immigration of people of colour. Racism as the ideology that accompanies mass killings remains with us as I have already argued.  When we teach our children that there is only one race of people we will ensure that mass killings are something of the past.

In the late 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries, new Holocausts occurred where the acquisition of land was not the prime purpose.  The intense desire to purify a racial concept was often the driving force. These were the Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian and Tutsi/ Rwandan holocausts. They occurred in differing circumstances, but each was closely connected to colonisation, and each falls within the definition adopted in the 1946s by the United Nations General Assembly: 'a denial of the right of an entire human group to exist'. 

Whereas examining the past as it occurred a long time ago can be relatively straightforward, the recent Holocausts occurred in living (or near living) memory, and are deeply politicised subjects. Discussion of them often offends and hurts people. Each has been historicised and explained by vast amounts of writing and research. Yet there are major differences, both in the events leading up to them and in the motives of the people involved. All had the same aim, however: to eradicate a people and its culture.

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Further Reading

Holocausts:

Each holocaust mentioned in these blogs has attracted many studies.

Holocaust studies reveal a multitude of books and articles. General studies of this subject include:

• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Meridian Books 1958.

• Raphael Lemkin founder of the United Nations Genocide Convention: see United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention, Crimes Against Humanity 1944.

• Raphael Lemkin on the Holocaust, Journal of Genocide Research vol 7 Issue 3.

Also:

The Holocaust Encyclopedia at the Holocaust Memorial Library.

Dan Stone, The Historiography of Genocide, Palgrave MacMillan 2005.

The Jewish Holocaust

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Tantor Media Inc 2011.

North American Holocaust

D Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, Oxford University Press; Revised ed. edition (18 Nov. 1993).

Kahentinetha Horn, The North American Indian Holocaust.

Memi Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonised, Beacon Press 1965.

Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the present, City Lights Publishers 2001.

The West African Holocaust

Perhaps the most forgotten holocaust:

See Wikipedia’s page on the Herero and Namaqua genocide, where there are detailed sources and translations from the German language.

Jurgen Zimmerer and Joachen Zeller, Genocide in German south-west Africa: The Colonial War of 1904-1908, Merlin Press 2008.

The Rwandan Holocaust

The Rwandan Holocaust occurred during the middle of the Cold War and accounts are often affected by Cold War rhetoric and biases. Wikipedia has some excellent brief, well-researched accounts of the Rwanda Holocaust.

The Cambodian Holocaust

Kiernan, Ben (2008). The Pol Pot regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Yale University Press. p. 431.

Hinton, Alexander Laban (2005). Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. University of California Press. p. 54.

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