Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Month: November 2022

Discombobulation

29.11.2022 /

Rhetorical skills are as important today as they were in ancient Rome, except that today, we don’t admit it. In general, in the relationship between those who hold power and the rest of us, there is much that is never admitted. Very much.

Business management, for instance, is as much about honing rhetorical skills as about knowing how to add and subtract. As a CEO you must be prepared to explain your company’s lay-offs not as “a need to increase profits” but as a need to “cut losses”.

You will never, not under any circumstance, admit to having artificially throttled supplies so as to engender a price hike. As a property investor, for instance, you will just shrug apologetically:

“Sorry Mac, supply and demand and all that: for the price you are willing to pay, all I can provide is a room without a window and a toilet in the hall that you share with the other tenants. Maybe your wife and kids can live with your mother in the country? After all, you work 12-hour shifts 5 days a week, so you will need your sleep,”

And as a nation state you will never admit to having sabotaged the Nordstream pipelines. Your silence on that score will be deafening. (Even long before the Ukraine war, there was fierce opposition to the pipelines, both in Europe and in the USA.)

As an economist, or as a journalist (as either the one or the other you will, after all, be needing a job) you will stress that in spite of the countless lives “lost” (not “killed”) in US client regimes, Latin America’s “macro-economic” situation has much improved since the Roosevelt Corollary, “a foreign policy declaration by U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in 1904–05 stating that, in cases of flagrant and chronic wrongdoing by a Latin American country, the United States could intervene in that country’s internal affairs“.

You will of course not explain that “macro-economic improvement” does not necessarily mean improvement for the majority of a country’s citizens. In fact, it means that since the full deployment of “neoliberal” economic policies in the 1960s, the majority’s share of most countries’ national income has decreased sharply (cf. Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century).

There are honourable exceptions: I warmly recommend a piece that appeared in Time in 1961, a moving SOS on behalf of Peruvian peasants.

A historian wishing to apply for a research grant, will not explicitly point out that the liberation wars against Spain were not fought on behalf of Latin Americans; they were fought on behalf of the descendants of the initial “conquistadores”, land owners who wanted to keep the profits for themselves rather than sending them to the Spanish King. And they did! They kept the mines, the fertile lands, the silky wool, and above all: they kept the serfs. They retained their forebears’ stranglehold on the indigenous populations (except, perhaps, in Mexico and in Mapuche territories, and they are doing their utmost to retain it to this day.

See Britannica about modern serfdom in Latin America today:

Although debt bondage no longer exists in Latin America, the tenant worker on the remaining large haciendas in some of the Andean areas seems as closely bound to the soil as peasants ever were. The Chilean tenant is legally free to move as he pleases, but he cannot, in fact, usually do so. He works his ancestral land, which he understands belongs to the hacienda, whose owner he has been conditioned all his life to regard as his master and protector. Were the worker and his family to leave, the other haciendas would not accept him. And since there is no vacant fertile land he could not become a squatter. Most peasants fear the city, which is already filled with the unemployed younger sons of peasants.

You were not told that USA was protecting the interests of its business tycoons, but that it was defending itself against Communism in, for instance, Paraguay. You think Trump was vainglorious. Consider, then, Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, who throughout his rule of terror enjoyed warm US support:

Stroessner was [in 1963] elected to a third term by a 10-to-1 margin, which gives him a mandate to continue spending Paraguay’s $45 million annual budget (buttressed by $9.8 million last year in U.S. aid) as he sees fit. Last year 33% went for the army and police force. 15% for education. 2% for public works. Stroessner grandly said that he would accept re-election “not because I wanted it, but because it was the request of the Paraguayan people.” (Source: Time)

The US continues to support “Development”, “Democracy”, and “Freedom” in Latin America. No wonder Americans in both continents are confused, angry, distrustful; in short discombobulated.

Historians are currently reluctant to use the expression “class struggle”, which is so redolent of Marxism. But the indelible fact is that economic power is not willingly relinquished and even less willingly shared.

Injustice cannot be remedied unless it is admitted. In the relationship between those who hold power and the rest of us, there is much that is never admitted. Very much.

The meaning of life

24.11.2022 /

There were a lot of us – young people during the 70s – who struggled with questions of an existential nature. Although a lot of young Western kids are killing themselves these days – overdose and whatnot – questions about the “meaning of life” do not seem to figure in young people’s cognitive equations. What worries them more is image. Gosh, what a relief not to be a kid!

Ten years later – no longer kids – many of them will have a partner and children of their own. Parenting means – apart from constant sleep deprivation – an incessant sense of letting someone/something down (my partner/our love, my children, my job, myself…) and that is when the “meaning of life” reappears on the mental horizon.

What if the world we are leaving to our children does not bear thinking about? That is where we are today. There are those who will accuse me of fear-mongering. Frankly, they are, at best, ignorant, possibly downright stupid or, at worst, cynical liars. (There are certainly many cynical liars!)

What worries me more are those who accuse me of being depressing. Am I spreading the idea that there is no hope? That would be a great pity. Because change is really possible.

  • Did anybody see that the Berlin wall would come crashing down?
  • Did anybody believe that Pinochet would lose the 1988 vote?
  • Did anybody even in his dreams imagine in 1917, that after years and years of civil war Mexico would adopt a constitution that would serve as a model for the rest of us to this very day. And yes, until 1992, Mexico retained Articles 3 (about a free, mandatory, and secular education), 27 (about return of land to the peasants and smallholders) and 123 (about workers’ rights, 8-hour day and the like)?

Alas, the 90s were a period of deterioration all around, it seems, although most of us who were reasonably well-informed didn’t realise it at the time. Even now we find it difficult to come to terms with the turning of the tide that started in the 70s.

We have been brought up to believe in progress. We have been taught in school and by Steven Pinker that henceforward, progress is more or less preordained; after all, humans are now armed with enlightenment.

Our parents and grandparents have corroborated the view that life can only get better: Consider bathrooms, for instance, they say, sanitary napkins and tampons, not to mention internet. Yes, they are right about all that, but No, progress is not preordained.

***

In the West, we are basically spared old-fashioned dictators. Instead, we are discombobulated by rhetoric. We haven’t yet learnt to deal with discombobulation, but we will, just as people learned in the past to deal with physical oppression.

For the pursuit of (whose?) wealth…Part II

21.11.2022 /

Officially, of course, the motif is never greed. When the British Parliament approved a series of “Enclosure Acts” that culminated in the 18th century, they argued that this was for the common good. However, as more and more peasants were denied access to “common land” and had to leave their homes to seek underpaid labour in the big cities, average life expectancy at birth fell from forty-three years in the 1500s to the low thirties in the 1700s. (Source: Jason Hickel, in Less is More, citing Edward Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871.)

They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
(source)

Did anybody admit that this theft – for theft it was – was committed out of greed? Of course not! Jason Hickel gives us some characteristic quotes from the period:

“Our forests and great commons make the poor that are upon them too much like the Indians,” wrote the Quaker John Bellers in 1695; ‘[they are] a hindrance to industry, and are nurseries of idleness and insolence’.

Lord John Bishton, author of a 1794 report on agriculture in Shropshire, agreed: “The use of common lands operates on the mind as a sort of independence.” After enclosure, he wrote, “the labourers will work every day in the year, their children will be put out to labour early,” and “that subordination of the lower ranks of society which in the present time is so much wanted would be thereby considerably secured.”

In 1771 the agriculturalist Arthur Young noted that “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious”.

The Reverend Joseph Townsend emphasised in 1786 that “it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour”. “Legal constraint,” Townsend went on, “is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise … whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions … Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.”

David Hume: Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.

Patrick Colquhoun, a powerful Scottish merchant, saw poverty as an essential precondition for industrialisation: “Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

The cynicism of these quotes is all the more striking in view of the idleness and indolence of the British aristocracy. However, the aristocracy had a lot to defend! (See Piketty: UK distribution of property 1780-2015). It also had the means to do so, as even in 1820, only 5 % of adult men were sufficiently wealthy to be eligible to vote, not to mention to be elected to Parliament. (See Piketty: Male suffrage in Europe 1820-1920).

In Chapter V of Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty explains just how the aristocracy was able to cling to power in the face of emergent humanitarian ideals in the 19th century. Basically the House of Lords controlled Parliament until 1911.

No wonder, you will say, no wonder the aristocracy clung to their beautiful palaces and gardens. But as we all know, all those empty rooms and all those acres require care, i.e. staff that must be paid, so stealing the commons from defenceless peasants and using the land to produce crops to put on the market, must have seemed like a splendid idea.

To this very day, the Conservatives tend to have the upper hand in the UK. That must mean that their rhetoric is well attuned to people’s dreams, ideas and beliefs. Alas, our fascination with and shamefaced admiration of the rich and beautiful is our Achilles heel. It undermines our better judgment. By the way, was the dress worn by Florida’s first lady made of lamé?

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

(source)

In the pursuit of (whose?) wealth

20.11.2022 /

Tonight I raise my glass to Padre Gregorio Iriarte, although he is no longer with us. He passed away quietly on 11 October 2012, having miraculously managed to reach the age of 87. I say “miraculously”, because he was for many years pursued by the authorities as a dangerous public enemy, and several of his closest friends had been tortured and killed.

Who was Padre Gregorio Iriarte, you may ask. A hero. A real honest-to-goodness hero, not of the day-dreaming, flame-spitting Che Guevara-kind, but of the sort who quietly saved countless lives at the risk of his own. While living underground in La Paz during the Banzer years, he documented among other things the innumerable killings committed by successive Bolivian dictators propped up by the CIA and their rather colourful henchman Klaus Altman, alias Barbie.

No joke, this, for as Encyclopedia Britannica writes: “After the war Barbie was seized by American authorities, who recruited him (1947–51) for counterintelligence work and then spirited him and his family out of Germany to Bolivia (actions for which the U.S. government later officially apologized to France).” I ask, rhetorically: did the US apologise to the Bolivians, so many of whom the said Barbie had the pleasure of personally torturing – doing so was apparently one of his favourite pastimes – until he reluctantly left for France in 1980.

Bolivia was cursed with a wealth of valuable minerals. We keep seeing, all over the world, that in the pursuit of gold and silver, no ethically reprehensible expedient is waived.

You will find plenty of literature about Klaus Altman, not much about Bolivia, and virtually none about Padre Gregorio Iriarte, not even his invaluable book “Analisis crítico de la realidad”. Born in Spain, his career in Bolivia started when he was posted to a Catholic radio station in the destitute mining community Llallaga, Bolivia, to preach against Communism (i.e. anti-Christ). But as he laughingly told the journalist Ander Izagirre many decades later (cf. Potosí, Spanish edition 2017, The Mountain that Easts Men, 2019), he had only been there a few days, when he realised that the problem wasn’t Communism (besides, the “Communist” miners were all devout Catholics) but poverty. Working conditions in the mines and the living conditions for the miners’ families were such that life expectancy was no more than about 35 years. The padre’s book can no longer be found in bookshops. A pity, because I find that US Crimes against humanity tend to be all too soon forgotten.

Why were so many people incarcerated again and again, so many tortured again and again? Why the massacres, the bestiality? Because… well, quite simply, to make the miners work! To make them work more. Why, then, not feed them properly, pay them properly? The answer is astonishingly simple, of course: Because paying them a pittance was cheaper than paying them properly.

Why was the US involved? Because US owners had assets in Bolivia and because US investors all over the world blanched at even the thought of worker empowerment in general. Worker empowerment in one country will inspire workers in other countries, and that will ultimately reduce investors’ profits. The miners had to be prevented at all cost from organising themselves to demand proper wages, proper living conditions. The US would have none of it, and via their lavishly paid Latin American client regimes, persecuted all Latin American union activists and had as many as possible of them killed, and many others, too, for good measure.

To this aim, i.e, to discourage worker empowerment, they established what to this day is commonly known among Latin Americans as Escuela de las Americas. Note: The link is to a Cuban site. I am also giving you a link to the equivalent entry from the National Library of Chile. You might find the comparison interesting. While you’re at it, you might read Chapter 1 of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (“The Torture Lab” about Ewen Cameron and the CIA).

I wish to make the point that statistics tell us next to nothing about the actual horror of living in a Latin American dictatorship. Waking up to hear your neighbour’s wife and children howling when armed men have broken into their flat and torn her man out of her arms is almost as much of a trauma as … not least if your children have heard it all too. Not knowing where they’ve taken him, what they’ re doing to him…

Pelshval?

09.11.2022 /

While I was rebuilding this website after it collapsed like a house of cards a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me that perhaps I should finally explain a thing or two:

What is pelshval? Or who? And what is he, she or it doing here?

The Norwegian word “pelshval” means furry whale. There is no such thing, you will argue, as a furry whale, and I will concede that you are most probably right. But can we be absolutely sure? To this day new species are being discovered, not least in the sea, species that have been there forever, but have managed to evade our attention. If whales are as singularly intelligent as they are said to be, could there not be some individuals who have had the sense to stay clear of humans?

At any rate, just as so many other species, the furry whales will have become extinct by now, if they ever existed, except – perhaps – for one single individual leading a solitary life, keeping out of site, in the seemingly endless seas surrounding our continents. It must be terribly lonely down there; nobody to sing to in waters that are no longer pure and hardly even refreshing.

Things have changed, for the better for some of us, for the worse for others. Personally, I remember a time before all my friends started spending the better part of their free time lolling around in social media on their smart phones. I won’t even begin to enumerate the sweet memories from back then – from before then, that is. I’m sure you have some too, if you’re old enough. If you’re not that old, you will coolly tell me that my memories are selective, that there is plenty of stuff I decline to remember. And you will be right, not just probably right. You will be absolutely right!

But that does not alter the fact that some of us are a little slow. While most whales have discarded superfluous fur, there might be at least one who has not. While most people have lost interest in wasting time finding a lonely spot by a river where they can light a small fire and lie on the bare ground singing mournful songs to the stars, some very few have not.

And while most of us get lost, from time to time, in sweet-smelling memories of the camp fires of our youth, a minority obstinately ruminates on the bitter leitmotif that something invaluable has been lost and can never be retrieved without a great communal act of will. The shorthand for the previous sentence is: We have irretrievably lost our way.

Since time immemorial, our species has found ways to form tribes, to cooperate tribally, to share and sacrifice tribally. I’m not an anthropologist, but I find myself wondering whether a human tribe’s existential raison d’être isn’t merely an enemy tribe. If all Russians and all Chinese were to commit collective suicide, what would we in the West do? Would we then, finally, buckle down to doing the right thing by our planet or would we also commit collective suicide?

The furry whale shakes his shaggy head as he circles the continents. No, premeditated collective suicide is not on the agenda, neither for the one nor the other block, just the average human’s great confusion of ideals, visceral reactions, misunderstood science, childhood traumas, loves, empowerment, bad digestion, unhappy marriages, vengefulness, etc., etc.

Solve all that, the furry whale snorts, and you will heal the planet. Else, we will see involuntary collective suicide.



Excerpt from a phone call

08.11.2022 /

Interpellant: “… by the way, have you heard about the Greenwood massacre?”

Other: “… the Green…?”

I: “—wood. 1921”

O: “Oh, yes, now I remember! Tulsa, wasn’t it. I saw a horrifying documentary about it about a year ago. Apparently, after the police’s cold-blooded killing of that guy, you know – ‘I can’t breathe” – there was a reckoning of sorts, and the truth about the massacre finally started to seep through the cracks when somebody dug up a mass grave or something.

I: “Right. I only heard about it today. I’d never heard a word about it before. The New York Times wrote about it in 2020, I now see, and again in 2021 – a very low-keyed article, in view of the horrors. Apparently, kids in the US were never told about it at school. I wonder if that’s changed.

O: “Maybe in some communities…White supremacy is still going strong, I gather.”

I: “No insurance paid, no compensation, no arrests, no count of the dead… That’s Republican ‘Freedom’ for you! Guns and impunity!”

O: “Not so fast!”

I: “Since when are you defending—”

O: “I’m not defending – it’s just that blaming the Republicans for everything is not constructive! Besides, things are not so good in Europe either. Have you heard about the Melilla massacre in June this year?”

I: “I heard there was an incident—”

O: “—incident!!! Yes, I guess that’s what they call it. The Spanish at least have the decency to call it ‘La tragedia de Melilla’. However, the case is currently exploding in their national assembly. That’s how I learnt that the BBC has managed to recreate what happened in a remarkable documentary: Death on the Border. The so-called “incident” was premeditated mass slaughter! BBC made a particular point of demonstrating the premeditation.

In 2022! In Europe! Or rather “for” Europe. That is what it takes to keep Europe afloat, so to speak, to keep Africans off the raft.

Africa makes up 20 per cent of the world’s population and is responsible for only 3 per cent of global climate gas emissions. Yet, Africa is the continent that suffers most from climate change, so far. No wonder, Africans want out. But Europe, with all its “Democratic” values is willing to not only let them die from droughts and disease, but even – it turns out – to actively slaughter them.

Of course Spain, alone, is not to blame! Or even Morocco! This is highly unofficial EU policy.

Hello?

Are you still there?


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