Modernization | Melanesia is ONE

Melanesia is a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean and forms, together with Micronesia and Polynesia, one of the three cultural areas of Oceania. Melanesia includes New Guinea, the Torres Strait Islands of northern Australia, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and the Fiji Islands. The name Melanesia derives from Greek words meaning black islands and refers to the dark complexions of the indigenous inhabitants.

Human beings have inhabited Melanesia for at least 40,000 years, and Melanesians were among the first peoples to develop agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. Scattered islands and rugged terrain led to the formation of small cultural groups, often isolated from each other, and over 1,000 indigenous languages are spoken in the region. Traditional Melanesian society was not based on a system of hereditary chiefs; instead, individuals became politically powerful through their own actions.

Although the coast of New Guinea was reached by the Portuguese possibly as early as 1512, most historians consider the Spanish expedition of Alvaro de Mendaiia (1541-1595) as the first European contact. Mendana reached what he called the Solomon Islands in 1568. Despite naming the islands after a legendary king of great wealth, the Spanish found no gold and consequently the islands held little interest for them. The Dutch arrived later and landed in Fiji and New Guinea in 1643. English explorers, including Captain James Cook (1728-1779), visited the New Guinea area in the 1770s at about the same time the French visited Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.

Western colonization did not really begin until the nineteenth century, and even then was limited by the presence of tropical diseases and the resistance of the indigenous population. Missionaries started arriving around 1839, and by the 1850s the Dutch, British, French, and Germans began claiming parts of Melanesia. The Dutch claimed the western half of New Guinea, whereas the eastern half was divided between Germany and Britain. These countries also split the Solomon Islands, with the British taking Fiji as well. France claimed New Caledonia, Vanuatu, then the New Hebrides, which was jointly ruled by Britain and France. Britain later transferred its holdings in New Guinea to Australia, and after Germany’s defeat in World War I (1914-1918), Australia acquired German New Guinea.

European colonialism united disparate ethnic groups under one administration, and imposed European languages, religion, economy, and political systems on top of the indigenous ones. Europeans introduced agricultural plantations using indigenous labor, and some Melanesians were brought to Australia in a form of slavery known as blackbirding. The British also brought laborers from India to Fiji.

Independence came late to Melanesia. Fiji became independent in 1974. The Australian territories in New Guinea became independent as Papua New Guinea in 1975, followed by the independence of the Solomon Islands in 1978 and Vanuatu in 1980. New Caledonia remains a French colony, and the western part of New Guinea is part of independent Indonesia, despite independence movements among the indigenous population. Postcolonial Melanesia has been troubled by ethnic conflicts, such as the recent coups in Fiji and secessionist movements in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands.

June 15, 2010, By Kevin Jackson

When slavery is implemented by force, it is certainly a despicable institution. But is it any less despicable when the slaves are there by choice?
The interesting point about slavery is that whether it’s forced or voluntary, the master is responsible for the slaves. The master feeds, clothes, and cares for his slaves, some masters better than others. But masters also manipulate their slaves. Eventually, all slaves start to notice the dichotomy between their lives and the lives of their masters.

There is an urban legend of a slave owner named Willie Lynch who recognized that slaves needed to be controlled. In a purported speech he gave to slave owners in 1712, he laid out a strategy that he said would keep slaves (blacks) in check for three hundred years. This strategy of control replaced hanging rebellious slaves with using fear, distrust, and envy. Lynch supposedly said, “[D]istrust is stronger than trust and envy is stronger than adulation, respect, or admiration.”

Another thing the likely fictional Lynch went on to say in his speech was,
Don’t forget you must pitch the young Black male against the old Black male … You must use the dark skin slaves versus the light skin slaves … You must use the female versus the male … You must also have your white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect, and trust only us.

Whether Lynch existed or not is unimportant. Whoever it was, the true author of this strategy was right in his approach for the continuing servitude of blacks and in establishing a slave mentality in our race. All that was subject to change is exactly who the master is at any given time.

Regardless of the time, however, one thing we do know is that the master was a man of means, and it doesn’t matter how he came to financial prominence. The one obvious truism is that the master lived comparatively lavishly, and even more so because of his slaves.

Think of all you could do if you had the free availability of somebody doing your cooking, cleaning, running errands, sewing, watching your children, performing chores, and so on.

Then when the lean times came, you could occasionally loan out your slaves for barter or even to create extra income for your home. What an amazing life that would be! Your complete focus could be on personal or creative endeavors.

Are things much different today? Not really. I contend that the government is the 21^st-century master — new and improved. And the new Master has a monopoly on slavery. That monopoly on slavery has allowed for enough creativity in the government that all the government seems to occupy its time with is considering, “How can I get more productivity out of my slaves?“
During lean times in the old days, the master would work slaves incrementally harder and harder, providing them incrementally less and less. Longer work hours, cramped quarters, and leftover food, all for the slaves to live their lives of quiet desperation until the next day, and the next.

Slaves would finally become desperate with hunger. When the master ordered a pig slaughtered, the entrails, feet, hide, and head were all that didn’t go to the master. Yet nothing went to waste, with slaves eating everything on a pig, “from the rooter to the tooter!”

Slaves ate pig’s feet, skin (pork rinds), or “chitterlings” (pig intestine), while the master ate pork chops, pork steaks, and pork tenderloin wrapped in bacon.

For slaves, minutes dragged into hours that limped lazily into days, weeks, and months, as they slowly developed the “slave mentality.”
In my book, I described the worst kind of prison: the prison of the mind. Slaves then and now are more captive than prisoners in SuperMax facilities — because the prison of the mind has no need for walls or guards. Escape is as simple as walking away, yet few people leave.

There is little argument that blacks are the biggest sufferers of the slave mentality today. Most blacks believe the government will take care of us from the cradle to the grave. What they don’t know is that the government carefully guards that ratio of black votes versus black sycophants, employing stealth weapons like placing abortion clinics mainly in black neighborhoods, ignoring crime in black neighborhoods, and essentially ushering blacks to prison.

The government has not forgotten the lesson of the Willie Lynch, pitting black liberals against black conservatives. Use fear, distrust, and envy.
Many think that the “slave mentality” is for only blacks or the poor, but they are wrong. How many things are all Americans conditioned to accept without question or protestation? Once you buy your home, the government demands a property tax, and you have been conditioned to pay it. Is there a time when enough taxes have been paid, and you can own your home outright?

Perhaps we have willfully accepted illegal immigration, only now getting to point of making it an issue thanks to Arizona. Perhaps all but Arizona have bought into the new terminology of “undocumented worker.” Do all illegal immigrants work? Are some of them undocumented criminals or even undocumented terrorists?

One could educate oneself out of the slave mentality if it weren’t for the fact that we begin acquiring the slave mentality in government schools.
It is mandatory that children attend school in America, with only a small percentage of kids who opt out of government schools in search of alternatives. Still, our master takes tax money from all and gives it to the 70% of the students who attend government schools. The schools get paid by the master for attendance, not results. So attendance is enforced, but results are dismissed as arbitrary.Everybody passes; just show up.

In our slave mentality, we have become comfortable with the idea that the fox is guarding the henhouse. Teachers control the schools through their unions. Our tax dollars pay the salaries of teachers, who pay money to their unions, who lobby for the rules. Circular dysfunction.
The 30% of the kids who are not educated in government schools get none of the funding, yet ironically produce the best results! Yet, our master laments, if only he had more of our money.

Americans have all been enslaved little by little for many years. There can be no doubt that the federal government is the new slave master, something the Founding Fathers warned us against.

We have all made the unconscious choice to be slaves. Now the question is, can we make the conscious choice to leave the plantation and truly become our own masters?

If we can, then 2010 will truly be Emancipation II — the year everybody gets freed!
Kevin Jackson is a best-selling author of The BIG Black Lie. Follow Kevin at www.theblacksphere.net.

Melanesia is ONE

Category Archives: Modernization

Melanesia and Western Colonialism

The Slave Mentality

United Tribes of Melanesia!