with the accidental military superiority of the colonizers and their various ideological descendents, produced that paradox which Galeano so accurately described: human poverty as a consequence of the wealth of the land. The resulting mythology of cultural or racial superiority is best viewed, I think, not as the motive for the rapacious exploitation, but as a mystification of the exploitation -- that is, as a convenient disguise -- parallel to the mythology of the criminality of black men, which served as a mystification of the exploitation underlying rented convict labor in chain-gangs in Southern fields and factories during most of the Jim Crow era. Sometimes the veil was drawn aside, quietly, in private memos, such as Kennan's 1948 PPS23, discussing Asia:
... Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction ...
In short: the desire to exploit always motivated the theories of innate superiority, rather than the other way around
But, again, having stipulated that, I will remark that the thread here does not concern the long history of human exploitation by other humans, or the various disguises sometimes used to distract people from the actual meanings of some of their histories, it concerns the entirely artificial diplomatic crises currently manufactured by Morales
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