cjh (02/03/83)
In response to your message of Wed Feb 2 12:27:19 1983: Flame on, eh? I don't think this is quite the place to argue Zimbabwe vs. the "Republic" of South Africa (though I might venture a guess that the standard of living (both present and potential) \for/ \blacks/ is higher in Zimbabwe. But I'm a bit surprised that someone who reports Cherokee descent is an Anglophile; after all, it was the exclusively English-descended inhabitants of the southern US who sent your ancestors on a long trek westward. Also, you're leaving out two other factors. First, both Anglic and Latin systems (to use the simplification of this discussion) were failures where they actually had to deal with a substantial surviving native population; consider the British in India and China or the Dutch in Indonesia, and note that one of the continuing problems in much of Latin America today is that [Indians] are still a significant (and generally distrusted) force (compare this with the US, where the [Indians] are significant only because of their potential for lawsuits and the valuables (mostly) under their land). The second is that the Anglics were interested in land-as-wealth, while the Latins were more interested in portable wealth and in subjects (the Latins killed enough of the natives to impress the rest, while the Anglics killed any that got in their way). I hold no brief for Latin methods, but the only thing the Anglics can be proud of is the transplantation of their system to essentially empty lands.