A couple days back OnePeterFive ran a (qualified) defence of our Pope. That site caters to Catholics on the furthest Right, and as such became rebels against the previous Pope we had. That Pope was a north Italian raised in Argentina. Argentina, when Bergoglio was there, was a sort of decrepit Southwest-European colony. The present one is a Chicagoan whose main ministry was Peru. Argentina was not really a poor nation. Peru, on the other hand...
OnePeterFive is trying to get across the concept of "real poverty". The American South had this after Reconstruction and its failure, when the South lost its slave structure and evolved into a serf-to-peasant structure. We are now hearing the same held for India. Early seventeenth-century England was hardly a nice place to live, true; that's one reason they had a civil war, and so many fled west. India at the time was more like the fourteenth century.
I think it fair to call the Mughal administration a colonial empire on about the same level as the French in Saint-Domingue, or the Spaniards in Peru. Where is a throng of cheap labour who are not you, you don't better their lives. You pay them the least possible and invest in personal security.
As for the American South, from the youtube I linked the farmers were already (belatedly) replacing their sharecroppers with machines. The children of the liberated sharecroppers just remembered not seeing their parents over their childhoods, which they resented. Do we judge them for their resentments? The Pope would not judge them. OnePeterFive is not ready - yet - to judge the Pope.
I suspect however that 1p5 won't be long in following me.
No comments:
Post a Comment