The Dawning of the Apocalypse
by Gerald Horne
Monthly Review Press
£17.67

HISTORY continuously reminds us that racism and capitalism are two peas from the same pod.

Those of a predominantly European descent wreak worldwide havoc, carrying out the much-fabled white man’s burden, imposing themselves as ruling elites.

Black lives still don’t matter in many societies because the miserable claim of “white supremacy” has been effortlessly intertwined with the neoreligion; capitalism.

This book charts the depressingly Holocaustic levels of slaughter and enslavement committed as empires and alliances ebbed and flowed five centuries ago. Prolific author and Professor of History Gerald Horne has unearthed the twisted roots of exploitation in an intensely engrossing, at times dizzying, history lesson.
 
Arguing that the evolution of “white supremacy” is found in the exploitative and deadly hand of religion, Horne emphasises that it was 16th-century London’s moral-free racist variety of colonialism which effectively “changed the game” for the worse. English colonies were far more deadly for indigenous populations than those of its European rivals.

Unlike the earlier murderous Spanish forays into land and resource thievery, which demanded religious conformity among the conquered, England replaced religious homogeneity with “race” as the animating factor of society.

This sleight of hand enabled detente with former “white” enemies and further expanded the base for a conquering class.

Even long-term foes, notably the Scots and Irish, were embraced as fellow settlers in an extreme rebranding exercise of synthetic “whiteness” when they crossed the Atlantic. Class antagonisms among this mixed bag of “white” settler colonialists were also dulled by this official racist policy.

Without these marriages of convenience it’s unlikely that a minor kingdom on the fringes of Europe would have been able to take the upper hand and carve out its disgraceful legacy.

England rose on the backs of enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples and arrested their development on a devastating continental-wide scale.

Of course there is no happy ending to this apocalyptical analysis. When fast forwarded to 1776, even those calculated racist atrocities of the long 16th century seem “almost improvisational” in comparison. Britain’s “revolting spawn” in the US took wanton racism to untold levels of catastrophe.

And as if to prove that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, there are areas of Dixieland that still hold parades and pageants in honour of Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador, enslaver and pyschopathic killer, the “first white hero.”