IMHO, the answer is in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin

TLDR: Capitalism cannot survive without Colonialism, because it needs new markets to solve the recurring overproduction crises. An overproduction crisis is when the workers earn too little to buy what they produce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism

Europeans are not evil nor good. They are influenced by the material conditions they live in and by ideology.

There are only a few good answers below that even obliquely reference historical materialism, how colonialism is related to different modes of production, the defining features of the columbian era of euro-american capitalist-colonialism, and its connections to race. You’ll likely get much better answers if you cross post this to lemmygrad or hexbear.

As far as we know we have not found the colonialism gene, and there is no evidence that Europeans are somehow genetically different at this locus. So we can, at least for now, ignore the possibility that Europeans are inherently evil, or predisposed towards colonialism. Rather, the actions of any people must be understood as a consequence of their circumstances and culture.

due to all that’s happened in history, white people today are, while not intrinsically or genetically evil, tainted by the colonialism that has already happened and are therefore more likely to be the exploiters than the exploited due to their historical advantage.

White people are not only the beneficiaries of the colonialism that has already happened, they are often also the beneficiaries of colonialism that is currently happening. The CIA didn’t coup random Central American countries because they were bored. The IMF and World Bank don’t give loans to African countries for humanitarian reasons.

But human societies are not species and human-human interactions are not strictly ecological. For one, human societies have overarching coordination and collective will that species don’t have, and human societies as a whole often show more characteristics akin to a single organism than a species (though even that is apples to oranges)

I feel that the same principles that govern other animals should apply, more or less, to humans too. Although it might be more appropriate to compare human societies to populations of social animals (such as ant colonies or beehives) than to different species.

Does that imply that Imperial China was less evil than Imperial Europe? Or are they just as evil but in a different way (land-based conquest instead of sea based)? Or did they just not have the resources to do what Europe did but absolutely would have if they did? I don’t know hence why I’m asking.

I think the difference is that historically China had excellent agricultural land, a relatively modern and stable economy, and was surrounded by poorer and less advanced countries. So people had all the resources they wanted, and had little incentive to go far away. In contrast, Europe was fragmented, with Scotland, the Netherlands and Portugal actually having poor / too little land, and so there was a push for both raw materials and markets.

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They’re not genetically or intrinsically evil, and I haven’t seen anyone in lemmy (.ml, .hexbear or grad’) thus far suggest the idea if that’s what was meant by socialist spaces (if not, ignore this part)…

Europeans’ “uniquely evil” part are in thanks to their geography and other material conditions, which were largely shaped by wrecking and disfiguring more than half the planet (so basically both, but the latter cyclically enriches the former and neither are compartmentalized if that makes sense).

So naturally, reactions from leftist spaces to this will vary, an overwhelming majority of which are absolutely reasonable. It doesn’t help their case that Europe, with spearheading by the U.S., a settler-colony of their creation that they do not attribute as a settler-colony (settler-colonialism + time = totally legitimate state), continues to deprave and violate the sovereignty of the majority of the Global South via invasions, debt-traps, and genocide today.

On a socio-economic level, Europeans, including European settlers from e. g. the U.S. and the Commonwealth mind you, are also afforded privileges and treats that are just beyond the scope of imagination for many people in the Global South.

Today, Europeans generally can travel almost anywhere in the world (with a red carpet and open arms), they have almost an unlimiting access to healthcare, education, technology, food security, shelter etc… limited only by their states’ dwindling colonial reach, they can pursue whatever interests they may have, they can commit crimes within and outside their borders with punishment ranging from next to nothing to a slap on the wrist compared to crimes commited by non-white people (even when sentencing is given by a Global South country!), they do not have to justify their presence amongst the “others” (if the questions “Why are you here?” and “Why did you come here?” seem familiar, you’ll know what I mean), they do not have the same uphill struggle of having to dispel hundreds of years of actively harmful mischaracterizations and racist depictions of your place of origin/ethnicity (e.g. Orientalism) every time they interact with someone unfamiliar with their background (and there a lot of someones to go through), you get the idea.

There are also two (of the sameish) things that aren’t necessarily unique to Europe, but their variant are absolutely 100x detestable over anything I’ve seen: European denialism and whitewashing. I’m talking about things ranging from softer rose-tintedness like “these aren’t applicable to country X in Europe because it isn’t a Western European country” / “My [European] country doesn’t fit in this description” that we already see in this thread to “[European country] had to save them from their barbarism, actually” are precisely the type of white people that will continue to drive anyone so much as empathetic to anti-colonial struggles nuts.

My point is: Europeans that understand their position, privileges and relation to the Global South and actively seek to dismantle capitalism, centimeter by centimeter, and not just for their own sake, unquestionably exist, which gives no room to the idea of ontological evil.

Long story short, Europe was slightly ahead of Africa in terms of development when they began to really interact, around the time Europe found out about the Americas they had a bunch of new land from genocide of the natives and needed manpower Europeans could never hope to fulfill, so the slave trade started in earnest.

Europeans would only trade their goods for slaves, which started the slave industry in various African nations that wanted these goods, which stalled development in Africa while dramatically increasing development in Europe, widening the gap until the colonial era. Over time, this gap began to increasingly be seen as its own justification, and Europeans became increasingly racist towards Africans.

It isn’t about inherent evil. Europe was beginning to become capitalist while the most developed nations in Africa were developed feudal kingdoms, and the geography of Africa and Europe had more to do with that than any genetics could ever hope to cover. The narrow gap was exploited by Europeans and widened until the modern era of imperialism and neocolonialism.

I highy recommend How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. We’re doing a readalong over in Hexbear.net if you want to join!

One of the most interesting explanations I’ve seen is that Western Europe was politically fragmented just enough so that big enough entities were competing with each other for dominance. So there was no central authority strong enough to pacify it, and the individual states were powerful enough to mobilize resources, creating a competitive power race. It was in trying to beat each other that they reached out and colonized the rest of the world.

Edit: I’m thinking now how during the apex of pax Americana, space exploration really subsided for example. When the US and the USSR were competing it was on. Now that US hegemony is declining, it’s seems to be on again. Too strong of a political unification keeps the centrifugal forces in check.

I like the the book “Caliban and the Witch” by Silvia Federici. Among other topics it discusses how European commoners fought the rise of privatization and capitalism. About the “colonization” of Europe if you will. I don’t think Europeans as a whole are uniquely evil, we just lost that initial struggle.

I don’t think so necessarily, look at the Vikings. Sure, they would pillage towns to survive, but even though they discovered America way before Columbus, they didn’t go in and invaded and killed almost every native there like Columbus did. I think the colonization is more of an ideology that came upon some groups that happened to be led by sociopaths (i. e. The Romans, The Greek, and The Mongols).

Hell, look historically at the Incas, the Chinese empire, and the mongols under Ghengis Kahn, none of them weren’t white but they where all colonizers as well, just small fry to the Romans who then turned to the English, Spanish, and I think Dutch.

The other factor is religion, Christianity was a common factor in all these white colonizers who came to America. Buy the real reason was to find gold to fund their expansions. If Columbus wouldn’t have seen any gold jewelry on the chief of that first village and found no other precious metals, who knows what would have happened, maybe other Europeans might have visited later again, but it could have been with a much less colonizer mentality and more of simply exploration.

There was a book a while back called Guns, Germs, and Steel that delves into this topic.

The root cause, as I understand it, is that Europe is on a continent oriented east-west instead of north-south. And Europe in particular is on the part of that continent that has a lot of easy access to the sea.

East-west orientation allows you to transplant plants and animals long distances and keep them at roughly the same latitudes, which means roughly the same climate. That is a big boon for spreading “civilized” agriculture, which is what creates surplus of labor, which creates non food jobs that advance technology.

Among the common 5-7 domesticated food animals people eat today, all but one or two were domesticated in Mesopotamia, but then spread all over Europe.

Access to the sea is the other component that turns tech advantage into colonialism, because it gives the transportation. Even today, China and Russia are great powers, but they are forced to be continental powers instead of maritime powers, because nearly all of their coast lines are hemmed in by narrow seas that are easy to blockade.

There are, of course, a bunch of other factors I’m not even thinking about and competing opinions. But I don’t for one second think that any of this has anything to do with European “innate intelligence” or skin color.

You bring up the parallel with invasive species—I want to expand on that a bit. The enemy release hypothesis holds that species become invasive not because of any properties inherent to themselves, but because in their new environment they are no longer contained by the other species that co-evolved to regulate them in their original ecosystem. In the case of colonial-era Europeans, this meant the commercial institutions that had evolved in the context of the moral authority of the church and the regulatory power of local legal systems were freed of those constraints when they left Europe’s institutional ecosystem.

In principle, this could have gone both ways (and possibly did, in the case of the ideas that sparked the Enlightenment), but by controlling the shipping, colonialists acted as a sort of cultural version of Maxwell’s demon—allowing the spread of invasive institutions in one direction but not the other.

I say why not both,

it is ‘uniquely evil’, because of it both being extraordinary material product of ‘geography and circumstance’, which encourages it, and what the perpetrators decided to do with it (whom it encouraged)

Any human, let alone group, in my opinion can be as uniquely good or evil to one another, but when they are enabled by giving them the material tools they need to reshape the world in their favor, they can show themselves to be that force of good or bad.

If a system that encourages dispossession and destruction of past modes of production and livelihoods, to make efficient exploitation of people’s labor for Capital, creates a group of people who uphold such designs, especially at the expense of others

Then I tell you, while those people may be uniquely evil than the average person, at the end of it, they’re not more evil than what the system does.

Look at it like this: motors are a recent invention. It used to be if some group was big enough to have a city, they had slaves or slave-like laborers that were looked down on and generally abused. Everywhere. Including European serfs. Even Vikings made slaves out of Englishmen. Everything from reaping wheat to making nails was the result of physical labor so an underclass was necessary once you were bigger than a village/town.

For a bunch of reasons, Europeans developed better ships sooner and so had the opportunity to exploit the labor of other peoples as well as their own countrymen. That set up a cascade of development. The French revolution happened early enough that it served as a warning to other governments to spend some resources pacifying the masses at home. The masses were never in a position to know what was going on beyond their own borders, so the people in control – the people gaining all the rewards – had a psychological reason to mentally frame the people of their conquered colonies as inferiors. To be fair, almost every country has considered themself to be a better people than all others. Everyone thinks they do things the best way.

I feel pretty sure that if the Chinese of Japanese had come to Europe in, say, 1200 A.D. with ships and guns, Europe would have been colonized. The same goes for any other power. Sigh I sometimes wish Carthage had defeated Rome.

On the leftist side of Lemmy there is a pervasive theme of calling Europeans (and by extension white people in general) evil and how the only thing they’ve done is make the rest of the world suffer. And while the latter is plainly observable basically everywhere in the world

It was only Britain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Belgium.

Calling it “the Europeans” is a fair shorthand I suppose, but remember the Greeks and Swedes didn’t sail around the world killing natives for the craic.

At one point, I got into indigenous history. Super interesting stuff, but I had to laugh when I read that they landed in a “new” area. They colonized the shit out of it and the poor mini-humans living there, and had a caste system that was apparently pretty brutal (no social mobility, low caste men were used as human sacrifices). Land was distributed for everyone, and nobody “owned” the land, but when a chief died, everyone got their lands redistributed by the new chief and his cabinet, despite it being “everyone’s land”.

Eventually the people had a massive war and collected all the power into one region, euro-style.

Then, Europeans came and colonized the shit out of them, such is the circle of life. Elsewhere in our region, a separate indigenous group practiced slavery, and would enslave people from raids far and wide too. Until they too were dommed by Europeans.

Anyways, this appears to be a serious chink in humanity’s armor, and it allows us to do some terrible things to each other (See Russia’s invasion and systematic slaughter of civilians in Bucha). It appears to be a crime of indifference and opportunity. We’ve apparently been taking each other’s shit since people apparently had shit to take. :/