In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen writes the following:
"Historians have chronicled the rise of racism in the West. Before the 1450s Europeans considered Africans exotic but not necessarily inferior. As more and more nations joined the slave trade, Europeans came to characterize Africans as stupid, backward, and uncivilized. Amnesia set in: Europe gradually found it convenient to forget that Moors from Africa had brought to Spain and Italy much of the learning that led to the Renaissance.
Europeans had known that Timbuctu, with its renowned university and library, was a center learning. Now, forgetting Timbuctu, Europe and European Americans perceived Africa as the "dark continent."
By the 1850s many white Americans, including some Northerners, claimed that black people were so hopelessly inferior that slavery was a proper form of education for them; it also removed them physically from the alleged barbarism of the "dark continent."
This reversal of European and American perspective about Africans, from exotic and intelligent to savage and stupid, is shaped by the economic forces of the "profit motive," which Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" of the markets.
This "profit motive" is what the Bible refers to as "the love of money," which the Bible also defines as "the root of all evil.” And like that invisible hand polishing a gemstone, this passage illustrates how the profit motive shapes our morality over the course of generations, with the enlightened path always being the one which leads to the greates profits at the end of the rainbow.
And since Capitalism is an economic religion which is simply one branch of the tree of the Christian religion (the other two branches being the economic religions that were equally founded on Christian concepts, namely Communism and Socialism), the" invisible hand" of this sacred "profit motive" functions basically like the economic version of the "Holy Spirit."
That's why Christianity worships the Golden Calf, for the will of the Christian God is animated purely by the love of money. And why a system where money functions as the blood supply, is always willing to spill blood to make money, for crucifixions and cash flows rise and fall in tandem.
"Historians have chronicled the rise of racism in the West. Before the 1450s Europeans considered Africans exotic but not necessarily inferior. As more and more nations joined the slave trade, Europeans came to characterize Africans as stupid, backward, and uncivilized. Amnesia set in: Europe gradually found it convenient to forget that Moors from Africa had brought to Spain and Italy much of the learning that led to the Renaissance.
Europeans had known that Timbuctu, with its renowned university and library, was a center learning. Now, forgetting Timbuctu, Europe and European Americans perceived Africa as the "dark continent."
By the 1850s many white Americans, including some Northerners, claimed that black people were so hopelessly inferior that slavery was a proper form of education for them; it also removed them physically from the alleged barbarism of the "dark continent."
This reversal of European and American perspective about Africans, from exotic and intelligent to savage and stupid, is shaped by the economic forces of the "profit motive," which Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" of the markets.
This "profit motive" is what the Bible refers to as "the love of money," which the Bible also defines as "the root of all evil.” And like that invisible hand polishing a gemstone, this passage illustrates how the profit motive shapes our morality over the course of generations, with the enlightened path always being the one which leads to the greates profits at the end of the rainbow.
And since Capitalism is an economic religion which is simply one branch of the tree of the Christian religion (the other two branches being the economic religions that were equally founded on Christian concepts, namely Communism and Socialism), the" invisible hand" of this sacred "profit motive" functions basically like the economic version of the "Holy Spirit."
That's why Christianity worships the Golden Calf, for the will of the Christian God is animated purely by the love of money. And why a system where money functions as the blood supply, is always willing to spill blood to make money, for crucifixions and cash flows rise and fall in tandem.
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