One question has
to be addressed, how is it possible that a white minority was able to dominate
a black majority for so long? The answer is complex, compounded by many
mutually supportive machinations. But even for a look at the country’s
architecture such questions have to be asked. There was the argument of racial
superiority. That is a powerful argument aimed to increase the confidence of
one group while conversely shattering that of the other. The violence of
intellectual elitism is one of the most powerful psychological instruments,
which in the case of the West was manifestly backed by the ideology of
technology which, after all was a strong argument to believe in such culltural
paradigms as “relative progress”. It made it possible to compare cultures and
races according to the standards of a racing track. Attached to that was the
technology itself, ever more efficient guns etc. Such machinery works as a
powerful emblem because of its occasional proof of ability. Related to that is
the systematisation of exploitation. System, order and standardisation, all of
them heirlooms from our appropriation of the Greek inheritance are immensely
powerful weapons, as shown by the way that Germany was able to take on the
world for so long, virtually all by itself and exterminating a population in
the process of conducting a war. Technology is a frighteningly efficient
weapon. The aesthetics of system, order, standardisation and the strict
geometry which service that technology as well as the ethics of empiricism have
now brought the world to where it is.