Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[sebastian@rolux.org]

> On Jun 14, 2020, at 7:30 PM, Iain Boal <boal@sonic.net> wrote:
> 
> > On 14 Jun 2020, at 02:40, sebastian@rolux.org wrote:
> > 
> > "... i'm not a historian, but i'm certain
> > that when columbus set foot in the americas, he came with the best
> > intentions, and even the spanish probably didn't arrive with the
> > primary motive to just kill everyone. but they did."
> 
> If it is the task of the historian to rebut such ignorant certitudes, well then,
> the historical record clearly shows that the ‘christ-bearing dove’ was 
> intent on plundering the new world. He did confess an ulterior motive - 
> the funding of a crusade for the reconquest of Jerusalem. 
> 
> “But they did [kill everyone]”. That outcome has been a phantasy
> of white Christian supremacists since the invasion and is a dangerous falsehood,
> given its implication of terra nullius, which however was in contradiction with the 
> need for a labor force of millions to mine silver in Potosi and harvest 
> the most profitable commodities in history - tobacco, sugar and cotton.
> 
> Iain


you are probably right in that polemics is only one of many forms available
to address the issues of 2020. i would like to hear more from historians.

i'm sure religion played a role. it is regrettable. i sometimes imagine,
maybe naïvely, that there must have been at least some folks who left spain
or portugal with a different "moral mandate" than just to do god's work,
driven by genuine curiousity about geography, and whose "exportable rallying
cry" was to show off all the cool new technology they had at their disposal,
maybe even share an idea or two. it didn't end so well, depending on who you 
ask, and i was just voicing my skepticism with regards to the US or the UK
or the former West being the places that will spread the global virtues the
species is going to thrive on in the 21st century. if you study their track
record, say: the last 500 years, it looks kind of mixed at best. i'm also not
such a big fan of china - compared to the US, the superpower it may supercede
- other than maybe with regards to food, secularism, quality of everyday life
for non-working-class inhabitants, and the clear willingness of the current
government to improve the overall conditions of human life, be it by investing
massively in new infrastructure, or, most notably, by refraining from killing
millions of their own citizens as part of dubious political experiments.
it's also not a binary, and we already know who is going to win: anyone who
invents a form of capitalism that is no longer extractive, financializing
and - in the deleuze/guattari or comité invisible sense - abstractionist.
(dykes as presidents and CEOs would be a big plus, now that i think of it.)

so yes: it's okay to imagine best case scenarios, which is what the text
i was replying to did. the most important concept to me was "agency", and i
find it crucial to insist on agency - as opposed to, say, deliberate on the
mechanics of geopolitics from some remote feldherrenhügel. as long as we
vaguely agree that what is breaking in 2020 was broken for a long time - 50
years for some, 500+ for others - there is a nonzero chance of a nonfascist
future, and room for many voices and tonalities. (and in case i figure out that
part about the bridge behind the mona lisa and gödel's incompleteness theorem -
i haven't, so far - i'd be very much willing to help diagonalize, if needed.)






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