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Date Posted: 20:05:20 05/11/02 Sat
Author: Don
Subject: See Also
In reply to: Buffy's vampire 's message, "An essay on colonialism, terrorism and any other ism you may want to know about." on 14:24:52 05/11/02 Sat

I was taken by the phrase/question
" So how did the West gain so rapidly in economic, political and military power that, by the 19th century, it was able to conquer virtually all of the other civilisations? That question demands to be answered and the oppression theorists have never provided an adequate explanation."

Then the answer provided:

"The reason the West became so affluent and dominant in the modern era is that it invented three institutions: science, democracy and capitalism. All those institutions are based on universal impulses and aspirations, but those aspirations were given a unique expression in Western civilisation."


I recently started reading "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. It's addressed to this same issue and, though I have not read enough yet to be certain, I think it will strongly disagree with the conclusion provided above.

Some of you will have heard of Jared Diamond. Indeed some of you may know him as he has been off and on the island for 35 years or more. It is almost certain that someone here has an ancestor who met Jared Diamond. The book starts in PNG before it was PNG when it was still under Australian adminstration -- in July 1972 -- and it tells of a conversation between Diamond and a politician named Yali who by chance were walking on the same beach at the same time. During the conversation Yali asked "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea but we black people had little cargo of our own?"
The book is, many years later, an attempt at answering this question which is very similar to the one above.

I'll try to remember to bring this up again when I finish it.

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