Western powers have exploited indigenous groups for centuries, and capitalism accelerates it – colonizer powers use scholarship like the 1AC to justify expansion over native groups and shut them out of discussions and wealthy nations!

The European colonial powers used their superior military forces and collaborators to enslave and colonize directly or indirectly pre-capitalist societies around the world to exploit their economic resources and labor power through looting, piracy, terrorism, genocide, expropriation, annexation, and continued subjugation. Consequently, the original accumulation of wealth and capital occurred in the West; this accumulated capital gradually facilitated the transformation of mercantilism into industrial capitalism and the expansion of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and increased the demand for raw materials, free or cheap labor (mainly slaves), markets, and the intensification of global colonial expansion in the world (Marx 1967; Rodney 1972). With the development of capitalism, further division of labor, the advancement of technology and organization capacity in the form of state, the interstate system, and the transnational corporation, and with the limitless capacity to accumulate more capital in a globalized world, certain human groups have demonstrated their capabilities to impose their power on other human groups through political violence that has involved war, terrorism, and genocide. The colonizing nations of the West had justified “their scramble for foreign territories as fulfillment of a sacred duty to spread their form of civilization to the world” (Bodely 1982: 12). These countries used the discourses of the superiority of their race, culture, civilization, and Christian religion to promote and justify destructive and exploitative policies, such as terrorism, genocide, and economic exploitation. John H. Bodely (1992: 37) characterizes the genocide and ethnocide committed by such nation-states as “an immense human tragedy.” The more Euro-Americans advanced in technology and organizational capacity, the more they engaged in terrorism and genocide in order to satisfy their group and individual economic interests. As we shall see below, European countries, such as Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, and Belgium started capitalist colonial expansion to the Americans, Africa, Australia and Asia through engaging in terrorism, genocide, and gross human rights violations and at the same time claimed the superiority of their cultures, religion (Christianity), race, and civilizations. The development of capitalism with its political structures, nation-states, enabled European colonialists to expand and commit terrorism and genocide so that they could extract resources. According to Elizabeth Colson (1992, 278), “Economic systems have emerged that created massive conflicts of interests between classes and also nations. Technologies empower those who are able to seize control of the state apparatus and enhance the stakes for which people contend . . . the further creation of technologies that enable humans to play with destructive emotions and habituate themselves to violence under conditions that give them the pleasure of terror without expectation that it will recoil upon them.” The state and its agents originally monopolized various forms of political violence. Most social scientists of the nineteenth century justified “a deliberate and violent political act carried out as national policy in order to gain access to the natural resources controlled by” indigenous peoples, and “espoused ‘scientific’ evolutionary theories that explained the destruction and suggested that it was inevitable” (Bodley 1992, 38). Terrorism as an instrument of massive violence to terrorize indigenous peoples emerged with the racialized capitalist world system. It was practiced through colonialism, servitude, and racial slavery in order to transfer the resources of the indigenous peoples to European colonialists and their descendants between the 15th and 19th centuries. Most of those indigenous peoples that survived terrorism and genocide were reduced to the status of slavery or semi-slavery (see De Las Casas 1992). Under the guise of “scientific” theories, most Western scholars have justified the destruction of indigenous peoples; they have made “scientific” claims to justify the gross human rights violations and to promote Euro-American personal and group interests at the cost of the indigenous peoples. Accepting ideologically and culturally blind thinking has prevented most of these scholars, colonialists, their descendants, and collaborators from critically understanding the meaning and consequences of colonial terrorism and other crimes against humanity.