Viking Reenactors - Iceland. Helgi Halldórsson from
Reykjavík, Iceland / CC BY-SA
It’s easy to look at what happened between the so-called Western nations and the rest of the world and call it racism. But what if the problem with white people isn’t racial, but geographic?
These speculations began while I was reading a Geography textbook from 1920 — that’s 100 years ago this year. Reading about the land and resources of people around the world is interesting in and of itself — Vermont was a wood state, Maryland grew a lot of strawberries, that sort of thing. But where it got especially interesting was when it came to the differences between peoples of foreign lands.
In 1920, it was entirely acceptable for a respected publisher such as Ginn and Co. to issue textbooks which characterized people in what we would today call racist ways. For instance, they describe people from the northern temperate zones as thrifty, hard working, resourceful, and smart. People from the tropical zones, however, are described as lazy, indolent, and in need of white people to exploit their resources for them. I kid you not. They say exactly that about Venezuela (some things never change).
It seems that people in the northern zones felt that their way — capitalism — was best. Seeing lots of natural resources just laying around in other parts of the world, they did what any rational businessman of a hundred years or more ago would do: they took the resources, by whatever means necessary. They told the people of the world then as now, that we were giving them a great gift in exchange — civilization, modernity, and all that goes with it.
But the gift of modernity turned out to be a double-edged sword. To paraphrase Joni Mitchell, Western capitalists paved paradise and forced capitalism on its inhabitants. Regardless of its many supposed benefits, the people didn’t really need capitalism, living as they did in regions where people had been living off the land for millennia. But hey, they got washers and dryers!
Northern Raider Culture
Back in the day and right through the Dark Ages, northern Europeans from the areas that are now Scandinavia, Germany, and Poland survived and thrived by raiding other people and stealing their goods. My name for this is raider culture.
Raiding tribes emerged out of northern Europe where as a result of climatic conditions, people had a hard time raising food. As a result, they developed a raiding culture where they took what they needed from others. The thieving nature of the northern tribes does not seem to have been bred in the bone, however. Most of the great raiders — Vikings, Angles, Saxons, et al — settled down and became fat farmers as soon as they were able to establish themselves on arable land.
The raiders from the north became the fierce warriors who terrorized coastal settlements and inland villages alike. As a result of all this raiding and conquering, their stock, and more importantly, their world view, came to dominate throughout many parts of Europe, particularly France, England, and the Low Countries.
Once they had finished raiding each other, they branched out into other continents, leading to a lengthy period of colonialism from the 17th century on, which is nothing more than raiding in more civilized form.
Western European peoples have forgotten why they raid, but their origins may help to explain why. For the most part, they are the product of northern raider culture. In the back of their minds, they remember that the way you get what you want is to simply take it from someone weaker. Hence, capitalism — the great economic invention of Western Europe — is a raider culture ideology as much as it is an economic system.
White people 100 years ago regarded themselves as superior to other races, and the idea was hardly new. That world view, coupled with superior power and weaponry, enabled “the West” to lord it over the other peoples and races of the world for many hundreds of years. White supremacy has been fact for so long that we fail to even see its existence, but it is nevertheless true that the world is currently run, to a large extent, by white countries from the northern temperate zone — Europe and the United States. If that isn’t white supremacy, then we aren’t being honest with ourselves.
Stealing Out of Habit
White people don’t need to be supremacist and most don’t even want to be. They just happen to be descended from people who had a strong incentive to conquer other people and steal their things. The less hospitable climate to the north inclined them to create technology. They value work and education because these were skills that helped them survive and improve their quality of life. Where the northern raiders were wrong is that their skills and achievements do not make them better than other people — just more motivated.
Few people think about the role of climate and terrain on the development of culture or how our mythologies and national creeds have been influenced by local myths as old as the rocks we build on. Instead, we’re replaying old scripts, even though the old scripts don’t serve us anymore. Hell, we don’t even know there are scripts or what they’re making us do. Hail Britannia. Vive la France. God Bless America.
And that, dear friends, is why we need to learn geography. It helps us to understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Only then will we finally be able to free ourselves from the Iron Age thinking that keeps the people of the world trapped in capitalist raider culture. Because that’s what it is, and it benefits almost no one except the 1% billionaires who own the world.
