True Left

Colonialism & The Lost World


An excellent vlog. Stays within PC, yet makes very valid points that show a good direction.
An overview of the 5 major screen adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" with a focus on colonialist tropes and Western bias.

Opening quote:
"...a deep sympathy for (indigenous) people as an ideal while being hostile
towards those (Natives) who fall short of that construct." ~Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Critical Points Made:
*9:13* - a take down of "A Patriots' History of the United States" which is described as a "a self-congratulatory white supremacist fantasy fable" and a fave of Steve Bannon.
NOTE: The common opposing piece (not mentioned in the vlog) "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn (Jew) is not mentioned.

*10:15* - Facts about Christopher Columbus, including the one that many of his own men hated him for his treatment of Americans. Columbus was arrested, stripped of his titles, and imprisoned by the Spanish Empire itself.

*11:31* - "The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated. As a result... all colonial population estimates were too low. Many of them, put together just after epidemics [due to plagues from cattle herding "explorers"], would have represented population nadirs, not approximations of pre-contact numbers." ~ Charles C. Mann, "1491" (2005)

*11:58* - Tawantinsuyu, the name the "Inca" used for themselves.
They were hit with the first smallpox epidemic in 1524, seven years BEFORE meeting Europeans.
Half of them died.

*12:56* - town names explained --> basically Europeans arrived onto already cultivated land.

*25:22* - a quote from one of Columbus's men:
"While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful woman, whom the Lord Admiral [Columbus, there's his title] gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked - as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. I them took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for ****."
This was during Columbus's second voyage and shortly before his arrest.
And to think, it was ONE OF THESE GUYS that grew to hate Columbus.

*27:18* - Take down of the "white savior" trope
"The Desire to make contact with those bodies deemed Other [aka goy?], with no apparent will to dominate assuages the guilt of the past... even take the form of a defiant gesture where one denies accountability and historical connection" ~bell hooks (aka, Gloria Jean Watkins)

*28:07* - "advancedness"

*28:05* - Native tech and tools, it was BETTER than European stuff.

*29:05* - "Natives didn't yet even invent the wheel" = total bullshit. They did, just on a small scale (kids' toys) and didn't have horse and cattle carts since the in dense jungle, mountains, streams, rivers, etc it's just easier to carry stuff.

*29:39* - Tenochtichlan had a bigger population that Paris and better food security. Americans were generally very well fed, tall, and muscular. Incoming Spaniards and Anglos were hairier and shorter (lol).

*29:52* - Africa was very well developed (aka "advanced") for its people's lifestyle, they had EVERYTHING they needed and they made it all themselves.

*30:55* - intro to "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" by Walter Rodney
"Most African societies raised the cultivation of their own particular (food) staple to a fine art. Even the widespread resort to shifting cultivation with burning and light hoeing was not as childish as the first European colonists supposed... and when the colonists started upsettig the thin top-soil the result was disastrous."

*31:34* - "Mono-culture was a colonialist invention... In Africa, this concetration on one or two cash-crops for sale abroad had many harmful effects. Sometimes, cash-crops were grown to the exclusion of staple food - thus causing famines."

*32:00* - "Zimbabwe was a zone of mixed farming... Irrigation and terracing reached considerable proportions. There was single dam or aqueduct comparable to in Asia or Ancient Rome, but countless small streams were diverted and made to flow around hills in a manner that indicated an awareness of the scientific principle governing the motion of water. In effect, the people of Zimbabwe had produced 'hydrologists,' through their understanding of the material environment."

*33:26* - The vlogger's own best quote:
"...if you read more than two books about the history of capitalism, you'll learn there's no such thing as an 'under-developed' country, only and over-exploited one."

*38:40* - It was Indigenous men taking "white brides" but rather Western men taking Indigenous brides, yet the "The Lost World" (1999) makes it seem like the former.

*42:24* - "The Lost World" (2001) and it's themes of Western religion. Interesting take.
"The Christian missionaries were as much part of the colonizing forces as were the explorers, traders and soldiers. The church's role was primarily to preserve the social relation of colonialism, as an extension of the role it played in preserving the social relations of capitalism in Europe. Therefore, the Christian church stressed humility, docility and acceptance."
     ~Walter Rodney in "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa"

NOTE: What's not mentioned is that Old Testament part, the root is the Jewish religion and feeling "chosen" and thus eshewing the simpler and humbler vague Buddhist-like parable and stories that Jesus told in favor of bowing to YHWH.

*45:20* - intro to "Decolonizing Methodologies" by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
"The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples... just knowing that someone measured out 'faculties' by filling the skulls of our anscestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are."

About the "Charter of the Indigenous Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests" from 1993:
"The Declaration calls on governments and states 'to develop policies and practices which recognize indigenous peoples as the guardians of their customary knowledge and has the right to protect and control dissemination of that knowledge and that indigenous peoples have the right to create new knowledge based on cultural traditions.'"

Search link to actual Declaration:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Charter+of+the+Indigenous+Tribal+Peoples+of+the+Tropical+Forests%22&t=ffsb&ia=web

*46:41* - "...belief in the ideal that benefitting mankind is indeed a primary outcome of scientific research is as much a reflection of ideology as it is of academic research. It becomes so taken for granted that many researchers simply assume they as individuals embody this ideal and are natural representatives of it when they work with other communities."

A final point made in the 2001 version, and also here by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
*50:20* - "Moreover, it is also important to question that most fundamental belief of all, that individual researchers have an inherent right to knowledge and truth."