Very Backwardness
an amateur critique of A People's History of the World by Chris Harman (Verso 1999)
Howard Zinn considered A People's History of theWorld to have been the one book that does for world history what his own bestselling A People's History of the United States did for American history [], an indispensible volume on his reference bookshelf. []
The first footnote of this book directs us to S. Lewontin. This is a bad portent. For a critique of Lewontin's scholarly ethics, see The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker (pub? 2002?) Quote Lewontin on Mao.
Engles on prehistory!
Whether human nature changes over time is not the issue. Human nature, over time, changes: everything does. Anyone who believes in the origin of species through natural selection and random mutation believes this to be so.
Richard Lee
Marshall Sahlins
Colin Turnbull, Mbuti of Congo. Pit him against Ted Kaczynski's Critique of Anarcho-primitivism.
Friedrich von Hayek is called Maragret Thatcher's favorite economist. Marx is not named Stalin's, Mao's or Pol Pot's favorite economist (Pol Pot isn't even mentioned)
European backwardness. Europeans were the only people in world history who were ever, at any point in their development, backwards: their very backwardness precisely explains their rise to historical dominance: they needed to steal from the rest of the world, characterized presumably by forwardness, what they were incapable of producing for themselves. It was all due, you see, to their very backwardness.
At times this book stops little shy of Nuhabism. (sp?)
Side by side comparisons of this book's treatments of the Mongols and the Conquistadors, of Cortez and Ghengis Khan (not mentioned) Cortez, who was "proud to have a child by a 15 year old girl." The parochial nature of this statement: marriage customs, worldwide, 15 is a perfectly proper age to marry. The imputation of child molestation on top of genocide is silly and calculated to outrage the sensibilities a parochial, middle class white audience.
If any human being ever had an historically important sex life it was Ghengis Khan, almost certainly the most prolific rapist in history, from whom about half of one percent of earth's human population (more than 30 million people) are descended thanks to the opportunities afforded by his conquests. I have no information on how old the Great Khan's victims were, but it's reasonable to conclude that some of them were no older than 15: there would have been thousands. Ghengis Khan's sex life is not mentioned.
Neither is Ghenis Khan. [] The Mongol impact on world history is generally trivialized and marginalized.
The prophet of Islam is discussed, but there's nothing on his sex life either. One of his brides was between 6 and 16, depending on the source. If Cortez was a child rapist, so was Mohammed.
A thorough summary of Mongol atrocities...
The People's History of the World is Eurocentric. It trivializes outstanding Arfican and Asian personalities, and glosses over central phases of the history of these continents. There's no mention of Tammerlane. It claims to tell the story of the maginalized, the disenfranchised, the victims, but it really tells us next to nothing about them. They barely exist in the narrative until backwards European imperialists invade and enslave and despoil them. Harman's narrative infantilizes its ostensible protagonists while showing European civilization, although uniquely evil, as dynamic, as proceeding through stages, as inhabited by personalities.
The fall from an edenic prehistory, of which the closest remaining exemplars are the Mbuti as (sometimes) represented by Colin Turnbull, into a wilderness of patriarchy and class. A deluge of European civilization. A narrative of paradise lost and recovered, complete with a prophetic Savior.
Henry VIII's harsh penal code, but nothing on that of the Chinese emperor's, the Mugal's, the Turks
et cetera. Furnish examples. Tailand! Nothing on the Zulu except that they defeated an English army in a famous battle. No mention of the brutal, brilliant Shaka Zulu, contemporary of Napoleon who carved out a comparable empire in southern Africa. Pre-European conquest subSaharan Africa's chapter is three whole pages, less than a fifth the space devoted to the English Civil War (1641-45?) This book is Eurocentric.
Nothing on the Ming warrior's cutting off the feet as the price of failure. Nothing on the Barbary Corsairs, who dragged as many as a million Europeans from their homes into slavery in north Africa, raiding as coasts as far off as Iceland for fresh free labor. Nothing on female genital mutliation in Africa. Nothing by the Ismali. [always, always, always stress the European equivilents of these barbarisms too]
Nothing on the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Nothing, as mentioned, on Pol Pot. I wonder why not? Find his most Marxistic quotes.
The samurai get one dry line. Nothing on the Tokugawa shogunate. Nothing on samurai testing out their newly forged swords on bound prisoners, cutting helpless human beings to pieces like swine in a slaughterhouse.
Nothing on the Rape of Nanking.
Robert Davis: 1 1.25 million Europeans enslaved by Barbary Corsairs.
z. A White People's History of the World
bibliography
Harman, Chris A People's History of the World
Kaczynski, Theodore Technological Slavery: the Collected Writings of Ted Kaczynski
Keely, Lawrence H. War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage
Khaldun, Ibn The Muqaddimah
Lander, Christian Stuff White People Like
Musico, I. (?) Blue Eyed Devil
Pinker, Steven The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Ratti, Oscar & Westbrook, Adele Secrets of the Samurai: The Martial Arts of Fedual Japan
Welsing (?) The Isis Papers
White The Great Big Book of Horrible Things
Wilson, William Scott (ed.) Ideals of the Samurai: Writings of Japanese Warriors
cultural history of beheadings, human sacrifice, history of torture, public executions,
This is for Pat Doneville.
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