Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift
Some time last week my two most recent posts were highjacked by a hactivist. In other words, this site was subjected to a cyberattack. Let me add, for the record: The message was clear and it was not Russian.
I am reinserting, herewith, the two posts that were destroyed.
Looking back, the wonderful 2013 documentary Inequality for all, in which Professor Robert Reich humorously and with endless patience explained a few very basic economic facts about what is absolutely vital for a healthy capitalist society, seems prophetic indeed. Many of the US citizens he interviewed for the film spoke their mind back then, and have presumably cast their votes now.
Those that did not vote for Mr Trump, should have paid better attention when the film was released. Or maybe the US media, as opposed to The Guardian (review), did not inform the US electorate about it?
The non-Trump media scathingly refers to Trump voters as, at best, victims of “populism”. The word populism is generally used in a pejorative sense, but I shall quote a definition I found in Wikipedia today. Interestingly, it is not pejorative.
Populism is a political style of action that mobilizes a large alienated element of population against a government seen as controlled by an out-of-touch closed elite that acts on behalf of its own interests. The underlying ideology of the Populists can be left, right, or middle. Its goal is to unite the uncorrupt and the unsophisticated (the ‘little man’) against the corrupt dominant elites (usually the orthodox politicians) and their camp followers (usually the rich and the intellectuals). It is guided by the belief that political and social goals are best achieved by the direct actions of the masses. Although it comes into being where mainstream political institutions fail to deliver, there is no identifiable economic or social set of conditions that give rise to it, and it is not confined to any particular social class.
On the basis of that definition, I’d say people would do well to vote populist.
However, assuming, as most of us do over here, that Mr Trump is even more corrupt (if possible) than the average US politician, and even less concerned (if possible) with the plight of “der kleine Mann”, I’d say the problem lies not with the voters, but with the fact that his voters actually believed that Mr Trump cared about them. And why did they do that, I ask? My question is rhetorical, of course, because I know the answer, as do you, I hope, so I won’t spell it out.
I too am worried about what havoc the dangerously reckless and ignorant Mr Trump will wreck after 20 January. But above all, it saddens me that far too few have understood the lesson to be learnt from his victory. It is not, repeat – NOT – that the majority of US voters are more fundamentally racist, misogynist and sexist than voters in other countries. Nor are they more stupid and easily duped.
The lesson to be learnt is not really very difficult. The problem is that neither on this side or on your side of the Atlantic do people want to learn it. It hurts. It’s like finding out that Father Christmas is just a fairytale.
I can only repeat: Start by watching Inequality for All, and pay close attention.
We must all hope that as many as possible of us will live to see next year’s New Year.
A word to look out for these days is narrative. Although it might be defined differently in dictionaries, the word narrative has come to mean: an analysis or explanations – in short, a storyline – from a party with whom you tend to disagree on most but not all points. In other words you will not use a frankly derogatory term to dismiss the analysis or explanation in question, but you are subtly letting people know you don’t think much of it.
More importantly, you will find that a narrative, as the term is used today, will tend to be a little tricky to refute.
To wit, it is one of the preferred terms used about references to the Russians’ stand on the war in Syria. The thing is, we (i.e. NATO countries, the EU) need the Russians in Syria, so we can’t tell them to piss off, but we don’t quite agree with them. Why don’t we “quite agree” with them? Well, it’s all a bit awkward: After all, it is true, is it not, that when we (see definition above) did it our way, we made terrible messes of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya? Also: We are increasingly resorting to surveillance of the general public at a level that we associate with the former Soviet Union and the present Russia.
You won’t hear any reference to “the US narrative”, except perhaps in Russia. I put it to you that the US narrative is: “the Russians are supporting Assad in order to gain hegemony in the Middle East.” Mind you, I am in no doubt that the Russians are attempting to gain or maintain hegemony here and for that matter there. But are not the US Americans also doing their damnedest to do so too? Why else are we all (see definition of “we” above ) such great buddies with, say, Saudi Arabia, where they publicly flog dissidents, not to put too fine a point on the Saudis’ human rights record?
The US narrative may be subtle since it isn’t strictly speaking incorrect, but it is misleading and beside the point.
Had Assad’s so-called “moderate” detractors somehow miraculously won the Syrian civil war, Syria would most certainly not have become a democracy. Assad’s “moderate” detractors may have been moderate, but their opposition was basically only anti-Assad (understandably, to be sure). Theirs was not a coordinated movement to create a “democracy”. Had it been so, they would not have demanded such sacrifices from the Syrian people.
You don’t create democracies through civil wars, at least not in our day and age, when there is no limit to foreign intervention, arms deals and transnational financial cynicism. There is absolutely no denying the Russian narrative as far as this point is concerned.
I wish our own “narrative” were a little more credible.
Why murder? Why the inevitable corpse in all crime films? After all, the basic plot is almost always that Protagonist A is missing or found killed and that Protagonist B (police officer, accused innocent by-stander, or close relative/friend) sets out to discover what happened, in a life or death race with Protagonist C (perpetrator).
Why do we keep watching these things? What is there to be learnt from glimpsing, for the umpteenth time, a killer’s warped mind? Occasionally, the victim’s mind is as warped as that of the killer. So?
Each murder is a personal tragedy for the victim, of course, and for the murderer, and for anybody who deeply cared for either of them. Say a dozen people, maybe two.
On the other hand, financial crimes, whether or not they have been deemed such in court, can harm, more or less dramatically, all the tax payers in an affected country. In an article 24 January 2016 “We all want Apple to pay more tax”, the Telegraph writes:
About a month ago the bankers Goldman Sachs published a list of the biggest and richest firms in the world. The top three, in order, were Apple, Google and Microsoft – and Facebook and Amazon were also in the top 10. All these tech companies make staggering sums from an avid British population. We love this stuff. We can’t get enough of it. We buy tens of billions of pounds’ worth of American hardware, software and services – and yet these companies pay quite derisory sums in tax to the UK Exchequer: derisory, that is, when you consider how much dosh they are earning from us all.”
The article goes on to defend the practice of tax avoidance schemes. It is true that technically, the Gargantuan tax avoidance schemes hatched out by influential transnational corporations are not necessarily violations of law, but they certainly would be if the average voter/tax payer had a say in the matter. But we voters don’t see and cannot understand the intricate technicalities involved.
Worse, we lack the technical insight to see our own countries’ dirty financial linen. Speaking of Iceland again: The entire country went bust, mostly as a result of the book cooking and irresponsible investments of a few financial crooks who would probably never have been exposed had it not been for the domino effect in the wake of the Lehman Brothers.
In my country, most of us hardly even noticed when the great big multinational Transocean was let off the hook a couple of weeks ago: The public prosecutor who had been pursuing Transocean for years on charges of criminal tax evasion was forced to apologise (!) to Transocean. A rather touching local article describes Norwegian legislators’ reaction as shocked and dismayed after a lecture about multinationals’ tax avoidance machinations. There’s a bad world out there, so bad that most of us think it’s just fiction.
Afterall, how can you fathom, if you run a little shop and pay your weight in gold to the taxman, that Transocean or Google or Apple can cheat and lie as much as they like as long as they have a battery of top ranking tax lawyers on their payrolls. Who can grasp there is so much iniquity in a civilised country?
Whose informed opinion weighs the most, Google’s or the voter’s? By whom is the voter’s opinion informed? Why do we prefer a film about a murder to a film about the effects of multinationals’ crooked machinations? Why don’t we even know about multinationals’ crooked machinations in spite of people’s loosing their jobs and/or homes because of them?
Whose acts, then, are the more sinister, the murderer’s or the multinationals’ crooked machinations? So lets have lots of crime films about multinationals’ crooked machinations. We might learn something we really need to know.
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