Cheeni wrote: > If they were a better educated lot, they could even have declared independence > and broken away from Spain and Portugal and formed a United State of South > America > on a democratic model, but they didn't.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas Pizzarro's brother Gonzalo did try - and defeated and killed a viceroy that the king sent to replace him. Which didn't help him any .. yes, de la Casas did advocate a whole lot of social reform which did get promulgated to some minor extent, but all this was undone after his death. That guy was amazing, centuries ahead of his time in his activism against oppression and forcible conversion of the Indians, over a period of decades. But it is quite a stretch from there to the conclusion you draw. Which is precisely what a few generations later Don Bernardo O'Higgins, Jose San Martin etc (and later, Simon Bolivar) did - forcing out a much weakened Spanish empire from Peru and starting the fairly rapid process that turned South America into a series of banana republics. Those guys were hardly pureblood Mayans, or uneducated. And I seriously doubt that educated rebels had anything very much to do with what O'Higgins and later Bolivar etc accomplished given that Spain's navy was crippled in the various wars leading up to the Napoleonic wars (from the defeat of the Spanish armada to the battle of Algeciras bay in 1801..) and quite unable to project power that far away from their home ports. In any case, O'Higgins etc succeeded with the informal aid of the Royal Navy who sent Lord Cochrane and a well armed warship over on a sort of consultancy basis, never mind that Great Britain was, back then, technically allied with Spain against Napoleon. History is rather more nuanced and subject to far more influences than can be explained with a single theory or world view - somewhat similar to my extremely irritated reaction at yet another Bruce Schneier soundbite - this time at a conference I'd have attended if my wife hadn't given birth a few days back. http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/schneier-gov-big-data-pose-bigger-net-threat-than-criminals.ars?comments=1#comments-bar Or for that matter, these dismissals of Neal Stephenson - another pet peeve http://www.mail-archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg21842.html long stephenson passage about the gold rush Which I debunk a bit at http://www.mail-archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg21843.html And Shiv has a go as well - about Stephenson on nukes and missiles - http://www.mail-archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg20596.html srs
