Or what Alexander did to to Tyre, the Athenians to Melos, Ghengis Kahn or Tamerlane to just about anything? OK, all of the named were colonialists in some sense, but they were not capitalists. And the practice of razing your enemy's city, killing the men, and enslaving the women and children was standard and old in Homer's day: Hector says to Andromache:
I see you there in Argos, toiling for some other woman at the loom, or carrying water from an alien well ...'There goes the wife of Hector' they will say when they see your tears. 'He was the champion of the Trojans, when Ilium was besieged.' And every time they say it, you will feel another pang at the loss of the one man who might have kept you free." . . .Ah, may the earth lie deep on my dead body before I hear the screams you utter as they drag you off. Iliad 6.456-464.
Their son Astyanax was thrown from the battlements of Troy by the Argives to prevent his attempted revenge on his maturity in the almost unbearable depiction Euripides gives to the aftermath of ancient war in The Trojan Women. ("O Danaans, your strength in in your spears, not in your minds," Andromache says over the broken body of her son, presented to her in her husband's shield. -- (I paraphrase from memory; the only on-line translation I found had no line-cites and was wretchedly Victorian.))
Thucydides is much more terse and ambiguous in the "Melian Dialogue."
"The place was now closely invested, and there was treachery among the citizens themselves. So the Melians were induced to surrender at discretion. The Athenians thereupon put to death all who were of military age, and made slaves of the women and children. They then colonised the island, sending thither 500 settlers of their own." The Peloponnesian War 5.116. Plato's Phaedo was a Melian slave, having been one presumes younger than military age during the destruction of Melos.
--- On Fri, 4/18/08, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] What Have We Learned, If Anything?
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, April 18, 2008, 11:52 PM
> You mean like what the Romans did to Carthage and the
> Hebrews to Jericho?
>
> --- dredmond at efn.org wrote:
>
> >
> > The historical record suggests total war was
> > invented by colonialism,
> > which was itself just a stage of capitalist
> > accumulation -- the point was
> > to destroy entire societies, via enslavement and
> > commodification.
>
> Mataiotes mataioteton, eipen ho Ekklasiastes,
> mataiotes mataioteton, ta panta mataiotes.
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________________
> Be a better friend, newshound, and
> know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
> http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ