Assignment 5

Blog.

“Anyone who refused to submit to what God himself had commanded was thus by definition a ‘rebel’ or an ‘unlawful combatant.’”

(Last Days of the Incas, p. 33)

“Most serene Inca! You will know that there are in the world two princes more powerful than all the rest. One of them is the supreme pontiff who represents God. He administers and rules all those who keep his divine laws, and teaches his holy word. The other is the emperor of the Romans, Charles V. king of Spain. These two monarchs, aware of the blindness of the inhabitants of these realms who disrespect the true God, maker of heaven and earth, and [who] adore…the very demon who deceives them, have sent our Governor and Captain General Don Francisco Pizarro and his companions and some priests, who are ministers of God, to teach Your Highness and all his vassals this divine truth and His holy law, for which reason they have come to this country.”

(Last Days of the Incas, p. 62)

From the perspective of a citizen living in 2011 with all that is going on in the world today, what do the statements above make you think? They were pronounced 500 years ago. How do they strike you? 130 years after Pizarro, the Puritans fled England in search of religious freedom in the New World. Nevertheless, within two years of their arrival they began slaughtering Indians under the same justification. That is, the Indians were heathens, non-Christian, barbaric and deserving of death. That slaughter lasted for 200 years in North America. In Guatemala during the 1960s U.S. Christian missionaries (Catholic Action) forcibly imposed their beliefs upon Mayans who they continued to consider primitive and backward. Today throughout Central Asia, in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the same words used by the Spaniards are appropriated by radical Muslims in the name of Allah instead of the Christian God. Pizarro, the Puritans, and Muslims invoke these words with some degree of sincere belief. But they also do it to justify conquest and control over other people and their land.

The point is to see constancy in human behavior, hypocritical as it has been and is. That which is constant is the use of ideology or theology (which is to say belief systems) to justify acquisition or control over other people and their resources. It’s important to be on the look-out for this behavior in the past and the present. Therefore, for your blog contribution this week I want you to find an example of the use of ideology or theology for the purpose of manipulating and/or controlling other people and their resources. That is, find an example (from the newspaper, history books or your own experience) in which an individual or group invokes an abstract belief (religious, patriotic, political or other) to legitimate their subsequent forcible control over other people and their resources. Describe it in roughly 100 words. Remember to insert your class-list number at the start of your posting. All postings are due by Saturday, April 2, at 5 pm.

Assignment 4

Blog. This week we will partner with the blog and not with the wiki. Each pair of partners will be assigned one of three essays in Chapter III that aren’t included in the assignment above. They are listed as essays 4,5, and 6. The essays are: 4) “The Lions of Payara,” pp. 72-76; 5) “Ribbons and Rituals,” pp. 76-79 and 6) “Protagonist on a National Stage,” pp. 79-81. The pairings and assigned essay are:

[1+4] #4, [2+12] #5, [3+13] #6, [5+14] #4, [6+24] #5, [7+23] #6, [8+22] #4, [9+21] #5, [10+20] #6, [15+17] #4, [16+18] #5, [11+19] #6.

Read the assigned essay. Contact your partner and determine what the two of you think is the most extreme form of manipulation used by the caudillo in the essay. Compose 100 word description of that manipulation and post it between 5 pm Friday, March 25 and 5 pm, Saturday, March 26. As before, I don’t want leaders to have too many followers.

Assignment 3

The blog contribution requires a small bit of additional reading in one of our texts, The House of the Spirits (HoS). This novel is essentially an historical autobiography. The character in the book named Alba is the author, Isabelle Allende, but Alba comes late in the book. The history covered in The House of the Sprits (HoS) runs from 1925 to 1975. Therefore, it begins at the tail end of the neocolonial period and runs into the heart of the Cold War.

I have an edition of the book published in 1993. You have an edition published more recently. Because of that, the page numbers in my edition may not correspond to those in yours. So, what I want you to do is find the last seven pages of chapter 4. In my edition those are pages 134-141. I want you to read those seven pages which begin with this sentence:

“Esteban Trueba entered a very prosperous period.”

That paragraph very quickly describes the way neocolonial wealth was made. The book is a history of Chile, one of the only countries in Latin America that traded in both temperate agricultural goods and minerals. Be sure to look back on the geography map to know where Chile lies. After you read that paragraph go back to MLAH, p. 129 and read the second paragraph. Note the following sentence:

“A sharp price rise on the international commodities markets triggered national euphoria; a sharp fall spelled national disaster.”

Then go on in HoS to read about the “exanthemic typhus” that struck Chile in the aftermath of a price drop in nitrates on the world market (1932). Keep reading about how the characters in the book cope with the disaster by consulting psychics. Clara and Blanca are the two main characters in this scene and they take to the streets to help the poor, sick and dying. Clara explains the following to Blanca,

“This is to assuage our conscience darling. But it doesn’t help the poor. They don’t need charity, they need justice.”

Read on from there to learn how the character Esteban Trueba reacts to the idea of justice. His argument corresponds to the notions of evolution and progress embraced by Latin American elites in this period as described by E. Bradford Burns in our Reading in MLAH pp. 134-140. These are the notions of Social Darwinism and Positivism that constituted the spine of white ideology in this time period. Keep the paragraph in HoS handy to better understand what Burns is talking about.

As you read the following five or so pages in HoS to the end of chapter 4, you will be introduced to the interplay of characters who favor justice and are called Socialists, Communists and Bolsheviks versus Esteban Trueba, the patron (Spanish for boss), who looks at justice from an elite perspective.

It is at this juncture that I recommend you do the MLAH Reading (pp. 129-151) and Response (questions 1&2, p.130). After you have done that, then go to the blog and post 100 words (more or less) providing your interpretation of the story told at the end of chapter 4, HoS, about the fox and the chickens. The story is metaphorical. What is it about (not just chickens and a fox) and how do you feel about it? Post by 5 pm, Saturday March 19.

The blog assignment will be posted on the blog as Assignment 3 on Friday at 5 pm.

Assignment 2

“In the international “Cold War” climate of the time Cuba needed and got support and solidarity from the Soviet Union. The rapprochement between the two countries led the vast majority of specialists to interpret

the events surrounding Cuba in terms of the East-West confrontation. The commonplace Western explanation of the Cuban Revolution—including its causes and origins—has been to see it as arising from that

antagonism, as if Cuban national life had started in 1959, as if Cuba had no history and was merely a product of events beyond its shores. Half a century later and nearly twenty years after the end of the Cold War, that

is still the deciding factor in the mindset on Cuba of a large part of the West’s “liberal” academia.”

In this quote from the first page of the Cuban article, the author suggests that the Cuban Revolution occurred for more reasons than just the Cold War, or the struggle between communism and anti-communism. Based upon your reading of the article, in 100 words, describe three causes other than the Cold War that led to the Cuban Revolution.

Please post your responses between Noon and 5 pm on Saturday, March 12.