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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
PUERTO RICO THE COLONIALIST EXPERIMENT; IRAQ AND IRAN THE REALITY: IT'S THE OIL!!, June 17, 2008
This academic historical study from a few decades ago recounting the history of US invasion, conquest, and occupation of the tiny island of Puerto Rico for vampiric imperialist sucking dry of its resources including agricultural workers for the Northeast's tobacco and fruit industries as well as monopolizing and making its local agricultural into a few exportable cash crops (sugar cane, pineapple, banana, coffee) makes important reading for us now as the crumbling US imperial project attempts to establish colonies in the oil reserve regions of the misnomered Middle East.
But let future generations should they care to take the time and effort trace the sad historical record of whether we have become simply the proxy army of our own old colonialist oppressors in their petroleum thirst and profit. Meanwhile let us read this present dismal history of one of our early colonialist enterprises as if well and truly limed by this Oxfordian scholar Raymond Carr, chosen by the editorial team as one who bears no ideological ax to grind, and thus published by the academic Vintage Classics in its Twentieth Century Fund Study series.
This thick 500 page study serves the interests of every researcher from neophyte to the field to those seeking a valuable, reliable and comprehensive resource under one cover for any academic and historical purpose.
As the Director of the Twentieth Century Fund, MJ Rossant, explains their difficulty a quarter century ago in selecting a researcher for this project who had not already made up their mind regarding the relationship of the USA with Puerto Rico: "The major problem in mounting a Puerto Rican study had been the difficulty of finding a scholar whether Puerto Rican or American (sic - Puerto Ricans are US citizens and America encompasses an entire hemisphere of separate nations, Rossant himself displays prejudicial thought patterns and set political paradigms in this one word) who had not already made up his (sic) mind about what the relationship ought to be. The Puerto Rican scholars, I must add, are even more committeed to specific points of view than Americans (sic) perhaps because nothing is more important to them than the US relationship with Puerto Rico. Our solution, arrived at after careful deliberation, was to interest an English scholar, one who could handle the peculiar history of the Puerto Rican - US relationship with dispassion and sensitivity, in the project. In Raymond Carr, a (sic) historian noted for his work on Spain, now Warden of St. Anthony's College, and formerly professor of Latin American studies at Oxford, we found the ideal choice for the assigment (p. viii)."
Overlooking for now the underlying and fallacious misconceptions evident in that statement, let us see the back matter which states: "In its depth and insight (this work) is certain to prove a major contribution to the resolution, not only of the growing controversy over the political status of Puerto Rico, but of the larger problems of colonialism and imperialism in the modern world."
Although such a "resolution" is even further off now than ever, unless through a deeply undesirable violent revolution or further unsustainable military occupation, we find in this scholarly analysis of a quarter century ago important reflection for our current position not only in our expensive and fruitless Iraqi efforts, but also in our so-called "free trade" agreements which destroy local independent farmers and industries, and in fact evidence the effects of multinational for profit corporations and globalization as a whole. Despite therather fallacious selection of the author by the editorial team, whose continued anglophiliac and colonialist subservient mindset should be obvious to all in the contorted quotation cited above, one may discover here an important and highly recommended study which we do well now to read again. Let us free ourselves from our own continued colonialist oppressive mindset which entraps us unto emperor worship of the British throne most embarrassingly revealed in the Torry Bush regime, and let us liberate as well those whom we ourselves oppress. The greater and more difficult liberation of mind which we require is in believing ourselves superior to other nations in any way.
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