re: #55 The Ghost of a Flea

The fastest way to grok the cultivated empire mindset is to look at Japan’s speedrun of imperialism…often explicitly echoing back to European colonists their own justifications.

It’s not that the Japanese couldn’t be bastards beforehand, or their government wasn’t prior rapaciously self-justifying, it’s that you literally have to train your people to not-see other people. The build up of this mindset from the occupation of Hokkaido—a standard “well, fuck the locals” affair—to the Co-prosperity Sphere’s mindfuck combo of condescension and brutality is a kind of microcosm of how it all works.

Another good inflection point is the Belgian Congo, which famously snaps the camel in half in terms of its brutality hidden under paternalism…but the part that gets less talked about is how all the other colonizers use the Congo—including the Belgians that confiscate the Congo from Leopold—to justify their comparatively-less awful practices, conspicuously stepping over both the obvious similarities and how many of their young men cut their administrative teeth in rubber plantations.

Kurtz was an archetype.