pagliacci the hated 🌝@Slatzism
“wHy aRe tHerE iNdiaNs In pOrTuGaL?!”
Because they are good slaves, you are not.
I hate essay-posting but allow me a rare indulgence:
To understand what is happening now, you need understand that this isn’t the first time it’s happened.
Why are there Indians in Kenya? Suriname? Fiji? Burma?
Because Indians have always been the preferred servile class of elites. The evidence for this goes back hundreds of years.
I’ve spoken about British colonial Burma before, and it is a great example of what this looks like.
Even after extensive efforts to bring them to heel, the majority of the Burmese ethnic groups were far too resistant to submit to the British empire to be reliable labor. They refused to abandon their culture and ways of life to be slave drones for British pocketbooks. So the Brits started importing Indians to be their colonial administrators, preferring them as labor because they were easier to control and satisfy.
By the 1940s, Indians made up almost 20% of the population of the entire country.
Another great historical example of this is Suriname - a small country in South America that had been under Dutch colonial rule for 300 years.
The Dutch abolished slavery in 1863, forcing colonial plantation owners to have to hire labor to do the work they had previously been using slaves for. But… they didn’t want to pay former slaves or Indigenous locals a living wage for the work.
So what did the Dutch elites do instead? Import Indians.
Today, Indians still make up 27% of the population. 27%. Of a tiny, obscure South American country.
We could basically go through the list of every country with a non-negligible Indian population and the theme would be consistent: They were brought there by elites who needed a submissive, easily exploitable labor pool when local labor asked for better living conditions or wages.
Why? Because Indians never did. They are a population that seems fully content with subjugation (even Marx noticed this).
So it’s easy to see why they were such an ideal population for the intensive global expansion era of colonial empires. And it’s even easier to see why they are perfect subjects for late capitalism now.
They are the culturally, psychologically, and physically ideal organism for the dominant system.
There’s 1.4 billion of them. They are deeply socially stratified and so expect and even enjoy inequality. Their cuisine is cheap, meat-free slop. They live amongst trash and filth with no qualms. They don’t care about the environment. Their reaction to death and abuse is blank-eyed indifference. They are physically and spiritually malleable. They not only adopt and internalize the demands of the dominant system as personal ambition, they believe this servitude makes them better than everyone else who hasn’t.
Absolutely IDEAL subjects.
You, on the other hand, are not the ideal subject.
You want to live in a high-trust society. You would shed tears if someone tried to cut down the apple tree you climbed as a child to build a data center. You want to see and experience beauty. You want your own space. You have an expectation that your living conditions will improve over time. You would not be content to live in a room with 10 other people, work 16 hours per day for pennies, and eat cheap slop.
You are a liability. Just like the Burmese and Surinamese slaves were.
And as we continue to crawl deeper into this late capitalist hellscape, you and your silly little needs will come into increasing conflict with those of the system.
Thus, you WILL be replaced by people far easier to control and far less concerned about their own welfare or the welfare of everyone and everything around them.
… Unless you do something about it. But the system has already locked-in that you won’t, and that you’ll just sort of fade into nothingness, distracted by meaningless comforts and terrified of the uncertainty of change.
So “why are Indians in [wherever]?”
Because you are about to not be.
