Dawning of the Apocalypse, The¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Gerald Horne
- ASIN: B07ZKV4GCQ
- ISBN: 1583678735
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZKV4GCQ
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
1453—the Ottoman Turks seizing Constantinople (today’s Istanbul)—that played a critical role in spurring Columbus’s voyage — location: 69 ^ref-57239
the Ottomans enslaved Africans and Europeans, among others, as contemporary Albania and Bosnia suggest. The Spanish, the other sixteenth-century titan, created an escape hatch by spurring the creation of a “Free African” population, which could be armed. Moreover, for 150 years until the late seventeenth century, thousands of Filipinos were enslaved by Spaniards in Mexico,10 suggesting an alternative to a bonded labor force comprised of Africans or even indigenes. That is, the substantial reliance on enslaved African labor in North America honed by London was hardly inevitable. — location: 72 ^ref-38093
London and Washington created a broader base for settler colonialism by way of a “white” population, based in the first instance on once warring, then migrant English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh; then expanding to include other European immigrants mobilized to confront the immense challenge delivered by rambunctious and rebellious indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans. This approach over time also allowed Washington to have allies in important nations and even colonies, providing enormous political leverage. — location: 83 ^ref-61508
the “discovery” of the Americas, leading to the ravages of the African slave trade, the Iberians, especially Spain, accumulated sufficient wealth and resources to confront their Islamic foes more effectively. — location: 94 ^ref-7316
land enclosure in England was tumultuous, making land three times more profitable, as it created disaster for the poorest, providing an incentive for them to try their luck abroad. — location: 102 ^ref-38093
the discrediting of the status quo that was feudalism provided favorable conditions for the rise of a new system: capitalism. — location: 108 ^ref-26821
this apocalypse spelled the devastation of multiple continents: the Americas, Australia,17 and Africa not least, all for the ultimate benefit of a relatively tiny elite in London, then Washington. — location: 115 ^ref-14709
in California, the indigenous population was about 150,000 in 1846 at the onset of the U.S. occupation, but it was a mere 16,000 by 1890,20 a direct result of a policy that one scholar has termed “genocide.” — location: 129 ^ref-802
Madrid’s minions envisioned turning the southeast quadrant of North America into a feudal empire staffed by indigenous workers and enslaved Africans, but the latter’s joint revolt buried yet another exploiter’s dream. — location: 139 ^ref-14342
those who triumphed in what is now the United States had a kind of “second mover’s advantage,” advancing in the wake of Spanish retreat and, as shall be seen, learning lessons from this competitor’s defeat that proved to be devastating to Africans particularly. — location: 162 ^ref-18141
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason,” — location: 234 ^ref-13458
the firm implantation of settler colonialism in what is now the United States—including the enslavement of Africans—originated in today’s “Sunshine State” and, as shall be seen, in New Mexico, the “Land of Enchantment.” — location: 242 ^ref-50385
armed Africans in Spanish Florida played an expansive role, in a way that would have been difficult in Virginia or Massachusetts, for example. — location: 246 ^ref-24436
London, then Washington, decided not to build on the “St. Augustine exception” created by Madrid but to strangle it instead. It was left to London, then Washington, to leapfrog Madrid altogether by developing a sturdier axis of colonialism, namely “whiteness,” the privileging of “race” over religion, a process (again) extended by Britain’s erstwhile stepchild in 1776, allowing for the incorporation more readily and easily of a growing number of European immigrants, with little room to compromise with a “Free Negro” population. — location: 253 ^ref-65272
In a sense, Madrid took religion too seriously, seemingly oblivious to the rising notion that settler colonialism required “race” more than religion. — location: 269 ^ref-7277
this difference between Madrid and London is to be found in religion, not necessarily because Catholicism was more “progressive” than Protestantism,53 but more so because the former was a more centralized faith, better able to enact and enforce edicts, as opposed to the fissiparous latter. — location: 271 ^ref-14987
the heralded “religious liberty” that characterized the republican secession in the late eighteenth century coincidentally allowed for a Pan-European mobilization to crush rebellious Africans and indigenes alike. — location: 276 ^ref-23265
Madrid’s self-defeating religious sectarianism, which hindered the necessity to build, à la London, a “whiteness” project, crossing theological borders, left few alternatives beyond seeking to co-opt Africans, creating a “Free African” population that could be armed, an endangering process that certain settlers may have deemed to be a cure worse than the illness. — location: 284 ^ref-36917
the elongated process whereby religion was supplanted by “race” as the animating axis of society, which reached its zenith in the Americas, especially Protestant-dominated North America. — location: 287 ^ref-14594
“the success of Britian as a colonizing power was ascribable to its strict policy of racial separation and that the failures of France and Spain”—and Portugal too, it might have been added—“were due to the absence of such a policy….” — location: 294 ^ref-45518
the wealth accumulated by Spaniards and other Western Europeans in the Americas allowed Madrid and their immediate neighbors to reverse what appeared to be insuperable advantages enjoyed by the Ottomans. — location: 320 ^ref-30306
Western Europe’s contestation with the Ottomans was a precondition of the rise of plundering of the Americas and Africa. — location: 326 ^ref-9907
a Pan-European Christian campaign against Islam extended to a campaign against non-European/non-Christians (especially in the Americas and Africa); arguably, this Pan-European initiative was a prelude to the rise of the similarly devastating “whiteness” project. — location: 330 ^ref-22276
in fifteenth-century Valencia, Spain, captors sought to misrepresent what amounted to Senegalese and Gambians (West Africans) as Moors (North Africans)—religious-cum-political antagonists—so as to enslave them consistent with theological mores. — location: 332 ^ref-47749
part of the diabolical “genius” of settler colonialism, notably as it matured in North America, was that those who had once been victimized by enslavers instead were invited to become enslavers themselves—or perfidious discriminators—in the new guise of “whiteness.” — location: 346 ^ref-52153
a telling indicator is that from the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, Russia’s trade with the East was more profitable than European trade, but then, as the impact of slavery and settler colonialism in the Americas began to assert itself, this commerce with the Ottomans, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, and China began to decline,74 then reawakened in the twenty-first century. — location: 360 ^ref-13642
unlike the “whiteness” project captained by the slaveholders’ republic that led to the creation of a powerful capitalist economy, the Ottomans deigned to enslave Europeans too. — location: 370 ^ref-8998
the eclipse of the Ottomans’ equal-opportunity enslaving policy and the rise of London’s—then Washington’s—single-minded focus on bonding Africans and indigenes. A by-product of this lengthy process was the formation of today’s “Latin America,” characterized on this side of the border in a decidedly racialized manner, — location: 381 ^ref-39250
California—where “New Albion” was declared, making the so-called Golden State, appropriately enough, the “founding site for the overseas British Empire,” — location: 386 ^ref-27969
not only did Western European nations, especially England, rise on the backs of enslaved Africans and dispossessed indigenes, but that this too arrested development on a continental scale. — location: 389 ^ref-49456
The Iberians’ “first mover advantage” in looting the Americas, then sanctified by the Vatican in the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the world between Madrid and Portugal, provided London with disincentive to continue adherence to the One True Faith. — location: 401 ^ref-37113
The abject terror of the horrendous Protestant-Catholic conflict in Europe was in a sense a dress rehearsal and precedent for what was visited upon indigenes in the Americas and their African counterparts. — location: 407 ^ref-8873
Catholic Spain’s military prowess was honed in a centuries-long battle with Arabs and Muslims, which was then exercised brutally not just against Protestants but indigenes in the Americas and Africans there too. — location: 415 ^ref-24533
Certainly, military experience in Europe proved to be quite useful for London on the battlefields of the Caribbean, Africa, and North America. — location: 426 ^ref-20838
European elites often sought to depend on mercenaries rather than domestic forces to suppress domestic dissent, with the resultant benefit flowing to these guns-for-hire, serving as yet another boost for a Pan-European identity that could easily morph into “whiteness”—a militarized identity politics, — location: 431 ^ref-10449
the failure of the Armada “laid the American continent open to invasion and colonization by northern Europeans and thus made possible the creation of the United States.” — location: 450 ^ref-59996
ANOTHER CONDITION PRECEDENT for the rise of London and the simultaneous decline of Africa and the Americas took place a few years after the failed Armada, in 1591. The site was north central Africa. Morocco, yet another predominantly Islamic nation courted by London, had invaded with England’s assistance the once mighty Songhay Empire. This proved to be a double disaster, with both victor and vanquished emerging weaker, a boon to an ascending “Christian”—if not Protestant—Europe. — location: 462 ^ref-58425
the Moroccan conquest did irreparable harm to the trans-Saharan routes that had enriched both Morocco and West Africa, and this instability radiated to the aptly (and unfortunately) named Gold and Slave Coasts of Africa, — location: 466 ^ref-13644
In a sad coda to a bygone era—and the commencement of a newer one—they reportedly cried, as they fell, “We are Muslims, we are your brothers in religion,”90 apparently unaware that this newer era was in the long run to sideline religion in favor of conquest and commerce and capitalism. — location: 470 ^ref-57757
Relations between England and Morocco were so close—perhaps a key to understanding Shakespeare’s Othello, for example—that less than a decade after the transformative 1591 vanquishing of the Songhay Empire, the two powers were huddling and discussing a joint invasion of their mutual foe, Spain, then followed by a joint ouster of the Spaniards from the Caribbean. — location: 477 ^ref-48317
In undermining existing beliefs, Protestants set the stage for the rise of others: racism, not least, a point that Ambassador Young could have mentioned in 1977. — location: 497 ^ref-52656
the radical decentralization of Protestantism, as opposed to the hierarchical centralization of Catholicism, provided fertile soil for the rise of racism and other “faiths.” — location: 498 ^ref-44633
as besieged underdogs in the midst of religious wars, Protestants were poised to make overtures to the Jewish community and Islam alike, as a matter of survival if nothing else but contrary to past praxis,97 and, ultimately, Protestants and Catholics, then the Jewish, were rebranded as “white” republicans, curbing murderous interreligious conflict and ushering in an era of racialized conflict, victimizing Africans and indigenes alike. — location: 500 ^ref-25668
“race” as they were rebranded as “white” in North America, easing the path for racialized slavery and uprooting of indigenes, which in turn was disrupted by the Haitian Revolution,98 which then gave rise to an emphasis on class as the animating axis of society with the rise of socialism and working-class movements. — location: 505 ^ref-26849
that English, Irish, and Scots warred against each other but then united as “white” in the colonies to fight “others.” This book is about the earliest stage of this centuries-long process. — location: 508 ^ref-57258
in any case, comparing the legacy of racism centuries later in North America, including lynchings and immolations, with what unfolded in what is now Iraq centuries earlier, seems once again to be an extended effort to exonerate perpetrators in London, then Washington: that is, “the Arabs made them do it.” — location: 518 ^ref-53654
the fact remains that enslavement of Africans reached a high point under the aegis of London and its descendants, not least because it was turbo-charged with emerging notions of “race” (a term with hazy roots at best in the mire of 1,300 years ago) and the shift from religion as the axis of society, which characterized the post-1492 dispensation. — location: 522 ^ref-18850
from the eighth to eleventh centuries, neighboring France was a center of selling of Irish and Flemish slaves, while in the ninth century the Vikings sold tens of thousands of Europeans to the Arabs of Spain. — location: 529 ^ref-31406
a Pan-European Christian crusade, which was galvanizing continentally and which imbricated a fungible religious intensity that could be transferred into the succeeding epoch of white supremacy and conquest. — location: 595 ^ref-43235
By the late eleventh century, the Pope encouraged French knights to aid Castilians and Aragonese against Muslims,23 a project that also carried the seeds of Pan-Europeanism, “whiteness,” and the borderless essence of what became capitalism and imperialism. — location: 597 ^ref-64498
Saluted since that time at the end of the twelfth century, he has also been blamed for blunting the intellectual growth of Islamic societies and has not been viewed benignly by non-Sunnis. — location: 606 ^ref-17721
The hysteria and revenge-seeking that was gripping European Christendom was manifested in 1250 when the Moors were expelled from Portugal. — location: 612 ^ref-52813
The very compactness and contiguity of Western Europe, combined with the overlapping and often borderless warfare that eventuated, served to contribute to advancements in warfare and weaponry that ultimately leveled then destroyed cultures and polities in the Americas and Africa. — location: 617 ^ref-40689
By the late fifteenth century, France had what has been described as the “first modern army,” — location: 638 ^ref-34345
when Wales revolted against England in the fourteenth century, France was blamed, just as when King João I in Portugal defeated Castile in a protracted conflict from 1385 to 1433, English aid was essential. — location: 645 ^ref-2845
More than a century and a half before Columbus headed westward, a Tartar army besieged his own Genoa, then the Black Death arrived and the defense observed happily as the marauders began dying. But then joy became horror as the attackers began catapulting their dead combatants over the city walls, intentionally creating an epidemic inside. — location: 662 ^ref-26742
This comprehension of the potency of infectious disease was to be unleashed in the Americas particularly. — location: 665 ^ref-63634
it is possible that anti-Semitism played a similar role in the fourteenth century, bracing and uniting Christians for the final push against the Muslims, which culminated in 1492 with their ouster. — location: 672 ^ref-55971
it allowed for the looting of more affluent Sephardim, which in turn allowed for war against Moors and Muslims and plundering of the Americas too. — location: 675 ^ref-14603
the tremendous depopulation of the Black Death also drove the enslaving of Moors on the Peninsula and the compulsion for labor, especially in Valencia. — location: 680 ^ref-39496
“In the fifteenth century when European ships first arrived on the West African coast to procure slaves, the economic difference between Africa and Europe was not vast; yet by the nineteenth century there was no denying the gulf,”51 as conquest and mass enslavement ensued. — location: 683 ^ref-18552
it was not only free labor but the presence of gold that helped to propel Africa on its downward slide, serving to exacerbate the “economic difference” between this continent and its continental neighbor due north. — location: 696 ^ref-57775
by 2 January 1492 Granada had been captured by the Christians, ending 800 years of the still potent shards of Islamic hegemony. By 31 March an edict was rendered to expel the Jewish community and some may have been alongside Columbus on 2 August. — location: 715 ^ref-23443
as Africa went into decline, so did other regions disrupted by this radical change in the status quo. Quite logically declining was also Venice—then a major power— — location: 718 ^ref-10116
1437 with Portugal’s successful attack on Tangiers, employing arms developed by craftsmen from Flanders and points north and east, yet another Pan-European project that carried the germ of an arriving “whiteness.” — location: 723 ^ref-7943
The response in the receiving region of the Maghreb was the fomenting of religious fundamentalism, which was arguably not conducive to socioeconomic progress, as Western Europe began to take off post-1492. — location: 746 ^ref-18895
A NINETEENTH-century scholar concluded that a “Frenchman, a Briton, a Dane and a Saxon make an Englishman,” as full-blown “whiteness” had emerged. — location: 761 ^ref-53408
Protestants flocked—often fled—to London from various European sites, bringing their ingenuity and capital, enhancing England, then Britain, and germinating “whiteness.” — location: 763 ^ref-907
the Portuguese reached what is now Sierra Leone by 1446 and began enslaving Africans, aboard ship were translators of African languages. These were “New Christians” or forced converts to Christianity, who had been chased southward. — location: 765 ^ref-5229
religious persecution endemic in late feudalism prepared the stage for the racism that was so crucial to the rise of capitalism, and settler colonialism in particular. — location: 768 ^ref-30825
feasting on the continent to the south served to curb often fatal conflicts in Europe. — location: 772 ^ref-62478
1428 Yeshaq I, emperor of today’s Ethiopia—across the sprawling continent—was proposing to the royal court of Aragon an alliance via marriage targeting Islam, — location: 776 ^ref-18568
Apparently, the idea still reigned that Africans could be helpful in making Christian domination of Jerusalem permanent, a replay of the Crusades in other words. — location: 783 ^ref-60627
notions of “White Over Black” had yet to take hold,85 and would only take hold not just with the rise of colonialism but, more specifically, the rise of settler colonialism, when the oppressor and oppressed resided side-by-side and a mechanism was needed to demonize enslaved Africans and indigenes alike. — location: 792 ^ref-14630
Essentially, London had the colonial wisdom to export Catholics and other presumed dissidents to settlements, where they were relabeled as “white,” with many soaring to fame, fortune and prosperous careers as ingenuous propagandists for the purported liberty delivered by republicanism. — location: 3634 ^ref-47504
Spain, which had expelled Sephardim, then Muslims, was a master of the self-inflicted wound but was convinced that the expulsion of the latter would remove a potential Ottoman and Moroccan ally, — location: 3653 ^ref-51916
the tactic reportedly used to entrap the Huguenots—employing “fraud and deception” to lure them to talks, then slaughtering them simultaneously in major cities—had been and would be a primary tactic deployed against North American indigenes, — location: 3678 ^ref-27733
religious extremism had transmuted into colonial expropriation, soaked in racism. — location: 3679 ^ref-40234
Intermarriage among Europeans, Africans, and Natives took place regularly,74 which was not the case among the eventually victorious republicans, who were supposedly far more progressive than their royalist competitors. — location: 3755 ^ref-8834
As liberal republican William Channing put it, under Mexican rule “settlers were to adopt the Catholic faith … as the condition of settlement.” — location: 3761 ^ref-58113
Mexico enjoyed what has been described as a “Black Indian President” almost two hundred years ago, — location: 3762 ^ref-3188
though natives like the Cherokees in the Republic sought vainly to “assimilate” to dominant norms, up to and including religious conversion and holding Africans in bondage, they were still ethnically cleansed, expelled, expropriated78—just as Mexico’s “Black Indian President” was assuming office. — location: 3764 ^ref-39455
the racist virus unleashed by genocide against indigenes and the enslaving of Africans created conditions that helped to compromise the rudimentary Republic pledge of religious liberty as well. — location: 3769 ^ref-3545
In Russia, the continent’s giant, crisis meant a third of the population perished and the country lapsed into murderous civil war, accompanied by famine. — location: 3870 ^ref-17250