The film then took us to Tazmania in the 1830s. In that decade, Great Britain decided to end slavery after battle fought by religious institutions and abolitionists (an abolitionist is someone that fought to end slavery). The scholar David Dabydeen explained that for 50 years, since 1787, "thousands of ordinary people" had organized to end Britain's role in the slave trade. Nonetheless, white Britain's still considered non-whites to be "little brothers." They were not equal.
Another scholar, Catherine Hall, added that culture and civilization became the new imaginative 'screen' by which the British measured equality. Perhaps non-whites would be equal to whites in the future, she summarized, but to reach that measure Britain would have to "raise" non-whites up to the "English level." Ironically, to accomplish that they would need utilize Christian missionaries to convert non-Christians. Thus, the same religious institutions that rejected slavery now gave impetus for colonialism. This process of colonialism, however the British justified it through spiritualized civilization, would destroy indigenous cultures around the world. This violent process of destruction via a complex colonization of other cultures is what we call imperialism.
This imperial colonization, if that's not redundant, also gave the British discretion to "exterminate" those that they could not "civilize." Yet such exterminations would occur sometimes in strange ways, with some British practicing an outright method, and others, the religious, attempting to secure colonization and missionary conversions as an alternative. Slavery might have ended, but the painful appropriation of power from other cultures' labor and bodies had not.
To demonstrate these parallel attitudes of British colonization, the film takes us to Tasmania, Australia, in 1803. (Note: this example begins in an era that precedes the 1830s battle to end slavery discussed earlier in this blog and the film.) The film observes that when the British colonists encountered indigenous peoples in Tasmania, they "saw people through ideas," and this 'screen,' or filter, helps us to understand why the British felt "disgust" and "shock" (indigenous refers to those peoples that called a place home before others arrived). The indigenous peoples practiced a radically different kind of culture than the British; the British, in turn, saw them as "left behind by history." They believed that they needed the British to help them. After all, in the "Great Chain of Being" that the British conceived, the "races" were arranged in an hierarchy, with the white British at the top. Colonizing and settling Tasmania - and these people - was their moral duty.
As you might expect, this process of colonization turned violent. Many of the indigenous peoples were displaced and abused. Bain Attwood relates how the struggle with white colonists over territory led to violent clashes. The British settlers, armed with sophisticated weapons, began to kill the indigenous peoples with the goal of wiping them out. This was genocide, or the practice of exterminating another group or ending its ability to reproduce according to the group's own desires. Kidnapping and rape became commonplace. Both groups came to view each other as "sub-human," or non-human. The film argues that this "non-human" demonstrated how "racial division tips into hatred."
With the indigenous peoples of Tasmania on the verge of "extinction," George Arthur, the British Governor of Tasmania," received orders to halt the annihilation. On orders from England, he began a campaign to 'rescue' the remaining Tasmanians and began to promote an inter-racial fantasy through colorful posters pasted everywhere (an early propaganda campaign!). He sent the Army to capture aboriginals, who in turn began a campaign of guerrilla warfare. He enlisted the help of George Augustus Robinson, a missionary who knew some of the aboriginals. Robinson sought to convert the aboriginals in order to save them. He wanted a peace treaty.
Lacking superior numbers and technology, the aboriginals knew that they would never end the conflict with the British settlers. They could never win in conventional war, and would never expel the British from their homeland. Fighting would lead to their extermination.
Arthur had Robinson send many of the remaining aboriginals to Flinders Island, with Robinson as their Chief Protector. On the island, they built a European-style settlement where they hoped to finally turn the aboriginals into British subjects. The film describes the settlement as a "factory" for "transforming savages into Christians."
Yet this form of settlement proved lethal. In combination with newly introduced viruses, the aboriginals broken spirits led to the death of the entire settlement, one by one. Children stopped being born. The health of everyone went to steep decline. Robinson fretted over the conditions of what we might call an unintentional "death camp," but salved his conscience by reflecting that the aboriginals had received the message of the Gospels. These beliefs protected him, as someone in our class noted, from any feelings of guilt.
No comments:
Post a Comment