"indigenous culture" defined

Occasionally I encounter a post that explains the true definition of certain PC-speak shibboleths. For example, a free translation of the word “wetlands” is swamp. Much of leftist argot and PC doublespeak is intended to reverse the meaning of certain understandings.

Another example is the word abortion. Originally a medical term for the phenomena of a early termination of a pregnancy by natural causes ("spontaneous abortion" or miscarriage, which ends 1 in 5 of all pregnancies, usually within the first 13 weeks). This medical term was hijacked to provide an emotionally non-judgmental word for the practice of deliberate homicide--initiated by the mother—and inflicted on a her unborn baby.

Now our covert VRWC apparatchik mole, member of the State Department's Republican Underground reports on the actual meaning of the phrase indigenous culture:

Having served and visited extensively in Central and South American countries with large "indigenous" populations, I can freely state that the region's "indigenous" cultures largely ceased to exist hundreds of years ago; "indigenous" culture today means rural poverty. As the saying goes, "I was born at night, but not last night," so even I understand, therefore, that calling to protect "indigenous culture" really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to half lives consumed with superstition, disease, and of watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five. It's a call to keep certain people as either an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as exploitable pawns for the use of political activists.

When I hear these calls, I think, "We don't protect rural poverty in the USA. Western man no longer lives in caves or trees, terrorized by solar eclipses and at the mercy of an unforgiving environment. Why should these people? Why should humans live little better than animals in disease-infested jungles, or exposed on wind-swept plains?" I am struck, for example, by how much effort "pro-indigenous activists," often themselves urban upper-class types or foreigners, expend on "land reform." Instead of working to develop an economy where land ownership does not determine whether one lives or dies, the activists seek to chain the "indigenous" to, at best, a brutal life of scratching out a living on postage stamp-size plots of land. Often land reform involves "giving" the rural poor these plots but without the right to sell or use them to secure loans from banks. The poverty and hopelessness increase.

The foreign activists are particularly loathsome; they invent and distort history, introducing distinctly 20th and 21st century concepts into the study of pre-Colombian cultures and their remnants. Worse, these activists seek to manipulate poor people for their own political agenda, and often get them killed in pursuit of "liberation theology" or some other fashionable cliche. They overwhelm and corrupt legitimate "indigenous" activists with money, trips, attention, and promises of fame. In exchange, the once-legitimate local activist becomes a servant of Americas Watch, Amnesty International, etc, required to produce ever more dire stories and accusations. Or they merely make up a leader for the "indigenous"; the most famous being Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu Tum -- virtually unknown inside Guatemala (having lived most of her life abroad); a creation of European Marxists; a tool of Guatemala's Communist URNG insurgency; a pro-Castro hater of the USA; an author of a major hoax; and, as you would expect in such cases, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now Diplomad’s post was purported about the antiglobalization movement but the part that I liked best was the revelation about the actual meaning of the phrase indigenous culture.

Thank you Diplomad. I learned something.

The other part of Diplomad’s post, which I haven’t quoted, pertains to the antiglobalization movement and how its malignant activists justify their themselves in the name of protecting indigenous culture; which as the Diplomad says, means perpetuating rural poverty, to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five.

As Glen says, read the entire thing.

Update:

I thought about the Diplomad's post for a few minutes and it occured to me that prosperity can only happen when the “natural” state of man is transcended.

Put another way, the normal state of mankind is poverty and has been so since modern man evolved some 50,000+ years ago. Yes, yes, the elites were able to acquire an “above average” standard of living but they always acquired wealth by simply stealing a little from all of the serfs, commoner or whatever the underdogs were called that that particular culture.

Recently, a couple hundred years ago, western European culture (mostly the part located in the U.S.) achieved a breakthrough whereby the average man could exist in some state superior to poverty. In western cultures the common man was able to escape poverty—and this was the true innovation—through other means than stealing their wealth from everybody else.


Our improved culture (i.e., improved over indigenous cultures) enabled peoples to become wealthy. Today the poorest American can purchase medical treatment that a king’s ransom could acquire 300 years ago.

Of course the indigenous cultures didn’t enjoy any such upgrade in lifestyle. They enjoyed the same lifestyle that mankind had enjoyed for the last 50,000+ years: poverty.

This is known as the gap between rich and poor nations that antiglobalization activists complain about.

This gets this little conversation to the point where I usually confound all but the most doltish leftists. After explaining the preceding, I usually say something like “the solution to the rich-poor nation gap is obvious. We must reduce ourselves to stone-age poverty. We become a nation of goat herders and that unsightly rich-poor nation gap will disappear!”