Eduardo Galeano Connected the Dots Between Colonialism, Capitalism and Racism

[Judi Lynn]

Eduardo Galeano Connected the Dots Between Colonialism, Capitalism and Racism
Sunday, 06 September 2015 00:00
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Book Review


[font size=1]
It is estimated more than eight million men have died over the centuries mining silver for European colonizers at the Cerro
Rico mine in Bolivia.It is estimated more than eight million men have died over the centuries mining silver for European
colonizers at the Cerro Rico mine in Bolivia. (Photo: Attraction Voyages Bolivie / Flickr)
[/font]
One of the brilliant gifts of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillaging of a Continent is that it stops historically in the 1970s, yet provides a knowledge base with which to understand the contemporary evolution of the relationship between colonialism, capitalism and racism.

Sara Bernard, a journalist for Grist, recently interviewed Melina Laboucan-Massimo, an activist member of the indigenous First Nations in Canada. Laboucan-Massimo spoke of the severe challenges facing First Nations because of the historical and current political forces that control them and their environment:

"The systems of patriarchy, capitalism, colonization, and imperialism are based on a system of power and dominance," Laboucan-Massimo said, "When you have these types of systems governing the way a society lives, that's how people are being treated on the ground."

Although speaking of the Eurocentric domination of Canada's indigenous population - and certainly applicable to the conquest and ongoing relationship with US indigenous peoples - her words also accurately describe the relation of European powers (and more recently the United States) to South and Central America.

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/32667-eduardo-galeano-connected-the-dots-between-colonialism-capitalism-and-racism

[TexasTowelie]

1. K&R

[struggle4progress]

2. I found it a brilliant and thought-provoking rhapsody from the first moment I opened it to

"Part I: Mankind's poverty as a consequence of the wealth of the land"

Others had the same experience. In a 2014 article, Eduardo Galeano Disavows His Book ‘The Open Veins’, the NYT noted: Chilean novelist Isabel Allende. .. describes how she “devoured” the book as a young woman “with such emotion that I had to read it again a couple more times to absorb all its meaning” and took it into exile after Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power

It is still available from Monthly Review Press and still worth reading. I do not know what it meant to Galeano personally as he wrote it, or what it may have cost him to write it, or why he might have come to regard it as too simplistic (if he did arrive at that point, as the NYT article suggests)

Those, who really want to think productively regarding global economic inequalities, are not obliged to regard Open Veins of Latin America as the definitive and final word on the subject; but the famous epigram of F Scott Fitzgerald -- The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function -- contains a certain truth; and the thesis of Open Veins might be one of the important ideas to hold in mind