His claim seems to be (it’s not especially coherent, so I might be missing something) that the “everything wrong” here is the influence of Enlightenment Anglo/American “revolutionary ideology”, rather than any specific U.S. action.
I must say, both the claim that things were lovely before the 19th century (i.e. massive die-off to disease, followed by centuries of military conquest and destruction, forced labor in mines & plantations, horrifically violent suppression of any resistance, relocation away from desirable land, controlled access to credit and trade, complete political control, constant suppression of cultural and religious practice, racial segregation and discrimination, and so forth), and the claim that “revolutionary ideology” is the primary driver of Latin American history for 200 years (rather than, say, changing relationships between colonial élites and Spain, changes in the world economy, shifting power bases within Latin America as it industrializes, conflicts between élites and governments in neighboring countries, two world wars, quite a bit of technological change, and of course the growing world power of the U.S., &c. &c.) are rather extraordinary, and making a case for either one is going to take a rather more solidly grounded and carefully elaborated argument than was provided.
I'm not defending the Spanish conquest - it would definitely be cool if the Incas and Aztecs had been left alone. Not that the Incas and Aztecs were exactly paragons of respect for human rights, you know. (Or do you know?)
I'm simply observing that the quality of government by the late pre-revolutionary period, ie, the 18th century, is a lot higher than the quality of government in the 19th and 20th centuries - by almost any sane metric.
For instance, it's my belief (maybe not yours) that the main purpose of government is suppression of civil violence. If your government fails at this, nothing it succeeds at much matters. Now, imagine the progress of Mexico over the last two centuries, absent pervasive political and civil violence. Don't forget - the first university in the Americas was founded in Mexico City in 1551, almost 100 years before Harvard.
You appear to have been inculcated with a lot of very complex explanations of the tragedy of post-colonial Latin America, whereas my views, obviously, are quite simple. This is no accident. I'm a big believer in Occam's razor. I don't feel it's necessary to construct any intricate explanations of why the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist.
It's not at all unusual for people living in a historical period to misunderstand it completely, generally as a consequence of political corruption. This is as true of the late Roman Empire as of the late Soviet Union. My feeling is that historians of later eras will understand our world much better, and much more simply, than we understand it ourselves.
I'd strongly recommend reading at least one anti-liberal history of this period into which you've put so much study. It'd be a shame to come away with such strong conclusions when you've only heard from the prosecution. Elsewhere on the thread I've recommended Waugh's Robbery Under Law (1939) - not hard to find and very easy to read.
Okay. I don’t claim to know what the proper “purpose” of civil government is, or to have visions of a perfectly just society, but in practice government is a set of systems set up by people living near each-other for mediating disputes, defending the group from common threats, and regulating behavior in a formal way (that is, there is some explicit process involved, unlike with informal norms).
Citizens seem to be generally happier when their basic physiological needs are met, when they feel valued and respected by the community, when they aren’t treated violently for their thoughts and private practices and associations, when they have meaningful work to do, and meaningful goals and aspirations and especially some common purposes with others in the society with whom they can cooperate, when their frustrations and desires are considered & acted upon by their fellow citizens. When they can provide some feedback to the system itself, and thereby improve both it and their own lives and the lives of their neighbors and children.
Now of course, there’s all manner of difficulty with this, because different people have different ideas of what the society should look like and what their roles should be in it, because human societies are very complex games which involve competitive as well as cooperative aspects, and because frequently military, economic, technological, social shocks lead some groups to starvation, disempowerment, etc., in which position they become either depressed or pissed off. Prevention of civil violence is certainly crucial to government (Hobbes’s Leviathan). But that government isn’t working when its information-sharing systems are broken and it fails to respond to citizens’ grievances, to the extent that they are willing to take up arms against it.
Civil wars are horrible and destructive and terrible, and often fail to fix anything, or even make matters worse.
On the other hand, colonial society in places like Honduras (or Chiapas, where I spent half my childhood) was terribly oppressive and violent. It was mostly a kind of constant low-level violence of forced labor, routine rape and torture and murder, political and economic disempowerment through control of every local institution, theft or destruction of any capital accumulation and suppression or subversion of any attempts to form independent institutions. Occasionally dissatisfaction flared up into larger-scale violence, always brutally suppressed.
I don’t know whether this was “higher [...] quality [...] by any sane metric” than the 19th and 20th century governments. I didn’t personally live through it. I do know that nearly the whole history makes me cry to think about.
Thanks for the interesting conversation, jacobolus - but I'm pretty confident that you didn't spend your childhood in colonial society. I think what you mean is that you spent your childhood in a society whose class disparities were vaguely comparable, at least in an ideologically stereotypical way, to colonial society.
(Note that in all Latin American countries, including frickin' Cuba, the governing caste looks like Gael Garcia Bernal and the governed caste is black, brown or both. See under: "Subcomandante Marcos." After the 20th century it should be difficult for any ideology to claim it has some magic solution to this particular problem.)
Without of course disputing the actual reality you've experienced, I would suggest two ways of interpreting this perspective.
One is that the constant low-level violence in these postcolonial societies is not a consequence of how similar to actual colonial societies they are, but how different they are.
You don't see constant low-level violence when formal power is identical to informal power. When the patron is actually an encomendero, there's no reason for forced labor (the distinction between "forced" and "unforced" labor is pretty academic to an unskilled agricultural laborer - either way, he has to work or he doesn't eat) to involve violence, because he has the formal right to command and can call on the lawful arm of the state to assist him.
Whether or not he should have this right, or rather power, is a separate question. But note what happens when you try to eradicate these feudal structures, which of course did not arrive with the Europeans but predate them: you're driving Nature out with a pitchfork. When the patron is just a big man, not an actual government official, his power is not in the form of policemen and soldiers, but thugs and more thugs.
Second, reinforcing this argument, consider the fact that everything you know about the colonial period comes from the enemies of colonialism. Imagine if everything you knew about Jews came from people who hated Jews. Every time a Jew committed some crime or abuse, this would be played up at maximum volume and associated with the entire Jewish race. Exactly how the Goebbels press worked.
In other words, the 20th century image of colonialism is just an extension of the good old Leyenda Negra tradition. I don't have to explain this to you, but for others:
I agree - the story is very sad. I hope Mexico can find its way to a new Porfiriato sometime soon. The first step would definitely be expelling the US Embassy - and taking every other possible measure to pretend there's nothing but ocean north of the Rio Grande.
Mexico is blessed with energy and food security, so it really does have the physical strength to tell Washington where it can put all its fatherly advice. And we're certainly in no political condition to invade you! So the main thing that's missing is cultural self-confidence.
Perhaps it's not too late to reinvent some kind of Franquista Hispanidad, Falangism, sinarquismo, etc:
Until that point, I'm quite confident, the beheadings etc. will continue. Political order is something you take for granted until you find you don't have it, and then it's quite difficult to restore without applying a level of force comparable to that at the disposal of the disorderly.
Or to put it differently, after its century of revolution, Mexico needs martial law the way a camel that's just walked across the Sahara needs a drink of water. It's not alone in this. A friend of my wife's recently spent nine months in Guatemala City on a State Department journalism fellowship. She left as impeccable a progressive as you'd ever see. She came back with the most amazing good words for dictators and dictatorship. If you know Guatemala City, you know why...
Erna Fergusson, an American no less progressive, visited Guatemala in the '30s and wrote this book:
She describes Guatemala as "like Mexico before the Revolution." Politically this is certainly the truth. And the capital, for instance, is described as impeccably clean and crime-free. This did not fit the author's agenda, but was just what she saw. Again, compare!
You’re quite right that élites tended (and tend) to be a lot whiter than those they control. I would argue that’s a significant problem for any government. [As a sidenote, Subcomandante Marcos doesn’t govern much of anything.]
The low-level violence I’m talking about has been constant background since the conquest, and more organized rebellion/military action were not uncommon throughout the colonial period. Some remoter corners of the continent took quite a while to conquer, and others were difficult to control.
To claim that colonial systems such as encommienda and repartimiento weren’t persistently violent is absurd: those Indians who tried to flee were killed; those who rebelled were killed; theft and destruction and rape and torture and murder were routine; local religious and cultural practices were suppressed; access to trade and credit were strictly controlled; indian peasants were treated as effectively slaves able to be forced into mining or construction projects or plantation work (with some weak checks and balances between groups of competing elites, particularly those who had been living there for a while vs. those newly arrived from Spain).
Historical analysis is hard work, and we have to read sources carefully, but there are a wide variety available including lots of material from colonial élites themselves (Severo Martínez Peláez’s La patria del criollo is, despite its flaws, quite an insightful deconstruction of one of these), and your suggestion that current scholars have just been naively deceived by “the Goebbels press” is disingenuous and offensive. As a good place to start, I recommend Murdo MacLeod’s book Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720. (Further disclaimer: MacLeod is a family friend.)
Anyway, that’s enough about that for today. A last bit of friendly advice: I recommend you find a bit more empathy for people unlike yourself, tone down the hyperbolic rhetoric, and spend more effort on facts and explanations and less on speculation and judgment. When confronted with an author who flings expansive insults in all directions, I feel bored and alienated: it’s not worth wading through all the noise to look for whatever signal might lie within.
Because there's nothing hyperbolic about "theft and destruction and rape and torture and murder were routine." As we see, this kind of hyperbole is so normative in your social context that it passes entirely unnoticed. To respond to hyperbole with nuanced moderation is entirely inappropriate, misleading and ineffective.
I think you'll find that in all functioning societies everywhere, including the United States today, the weak are ruled by the strong, and rebels are repressed and/or killed. Try setting up your own liberated zone in Montana and see how far you get. When this principle breaks down, the only thing that can follow is chaos.
Historical research is hard work, but hard work isn't always useful work. When the purpose of your hard work is the service of a political agenda, it's just busywork. The perspective of Western academia in 2012 is a valid one, certainly, but also a very narrow one by historiographic standards. It is much more work to step outside this tradition - especially in the narrow area of Latin American studies - but when you do so you may be surprised at what you find.
In the Mexican Revolution you have the divide in America between mainstream and radical liberals (Woodrow Wilson and Eugene Debs) mirrored almost perfectly in Mexican factions (Carranza and Zapata). The only indigenous Mexican forces are, by definition, people like the Cristeros, who have no foreign base of support. Viva Cristo Rey!
Also, the period is a little different, but Walter Millis's The Martial Spirit is an excellent deconstruction of the Spanish-American War, which leaves both the imperialist and humanitarian strains in US interventionism (rather uniquely combined in that war) in hilarious tatters. It's 1931, but archive.org has it:
It's a shame that "revolutionary ideology" managed to produce a government that's been stable (for the most part) for over 200 years, where Latin America has been a revolving door of governments. I wonder where that "revolutionary ideology" went wrong in Latin America. Maybe they didn't send an angry letter to the King of Spain soon enough.
I must say, both the claim that things were lovely before the 19th century (i.e. massive die-off to disease, followed by centuries of military conquest and destruction, forced labor in mines & plantations, horrifically violent suppression of any resistance, relocation away from desirable land, controlled access to credit and trade, complete political control, constant suppression of cultural and religious practice, racial segregation and discrimination, and so forth), and the claim that “revolutionary ideology” is the primary driver of Latin American history for 200 years (rather than, say, changing relationships between colonial élites and Spain, changes in the world economy, shifting power bases within Latin America as it industrializes, conflicts between élites and governments in neighboring countries, two world wars, quite a bit of technological change, and of course the growing world power of the U.S., &c. &c.) are rather extraordinary, and making a case for either one is going to take a rather more solidly grounded and carefully elaborated argument than was provided.