I would like to direct your attention to a brief article in Responsible Statecraft that sums it all up pretty well.
That article is here.
I think the writer states his case so succinctly, that there is really nothing more to add.
Category: ENGLISH (Page 11 of 28)
There a few posts written in English
Gold mines are worth gold, and wars are fought for them, as we know.
See, below, a famous photo of a gold mine.
See more of Sebastião Salgado’s photos of the mine Serra Pelada.
The above photo and the others on the same site are not from 1895 or even 1905 or 1925 or 1955. They are from 1986.
Brazil’s military dictatorship from 1964, orchestrated by USA, served as a model for a whole string of subsequent dictatorships throughout South America – all orchestrated by the USA and designed to protect the countries in question from the threat of Social Democracy.
In short, the United States of America has a long history of defending liberty and Democracy all over the world.
For a year now I’ve been wondering why the Norwegian authorities are so rabid about the Ukraine war. I mean, their faces don’t turn scarlet when they talk about the de facto genocide of the Palestinian people, the torture going on in Egyptian prisons or the suppression of women in Saudi Arabia. But Russia, now, that is another matter.
An air of fear seems to be wafting through the corridors of power, at least judging from Norwegian press updates about Ukraine. Why?
Are we preparing for war? Are we at war without our, the general public’s, knowing it? Why do the authorities seem so convinced that Russia will attack, and that we will be engulfed and eaten alive unless we become the 51st US state?
I really cannot understand all this hysteria – or could not – until now, since Norway and Russia have traditionally been on very amicable terms. Unfortunately, though, a Norwegian former prime minister has recently been running the NATO show that eventually, in my opinion, led to the fateful Russian invasion of Ukraine. He is pressing for more bombs, more tanks and possibly also long-range missiles and fighter jets to Ukraine. He is contributing in a massive way to the Ukraine disaster and to the destruction of Europe, and nobody in Norway is protesting. Nobody is asking difficult questions, not on the left nor on the right. At least no such protests and no such questions are heard in public. All dissent is suppressed in mainstream media.
But now I, too, am getting uneasy. Sending food, medicines, blankets, hospital equipment, etc. to a war-torn country constitutes “humanitarian assistance”, something that in everyday speech could be termed “the only decent thing to do”. But now we are gifting weapons to Ukraine, yes, and tanks, and that is something altogether different. I, too, now need to remind myself, every time we have a power outage, that we have been having some pretty strange and difficult weather recently and that Russia is not responsible for the weather.
Only today, though, have I realised that Russia might have good reason to retaliate in a very serious way against Norway. Very good reason indeed.
Of course the Norwegian and US authorities have respectively rejected Seymour Hersh’s allegation as “utterly false and complete fiction” and “nonsense”, and the Norwegian media have hardly mentioned it all. One Norwegian paper ran a short article explaining that building a story on information from a single anonymous source was poor journalism. (I put to you that in view of the penalties for whistle-blowing in the US, you would have to be terminally ill to risk informing a journalist of anything at all.) Apart from that, we should all have learnt that whatever President This or Prime Minister That says about what is, or is not, true can safely be disregarded at all times.
In view of President’s Biden’s September statement about Nord Stream 2, US involvement in the sabotage should not come as a surprise to anyone. Norway’s involvement, however, is a bit of a shock, since that effectively means that Norway is a legitimate target for Russian retaliation.
I would say, then, that whoever authorised Norway’s participation (unbeknownst to the general public, not to mention the national assembly) should be indicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Note that Seymour Hersh, who has won a number of prestigious prizes for his journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize, has for some time found it necessary to publish his work on Substack, just as, for example Glenn Greenwald. Seymour Hersh appears to be neither right-wing or left-wing. He describes himself merely as an “investigative” journalist. His departure from NY Times and Washington Post is indicative of something, do you not agree?
Not really much to add to that.
Congratulations, Mr Stoltenberg, you’ve really made your presence felt.
The very word – change – is a little scary. For a child, moving with parents to a different district means moving away from friends and/or bullies, to potential new friends and/or bullies. As adults we may think we have grown out of such starkly black-and-white notions, yet, we are still vulnerable, maybe as vulnerable as we ever were, because now others depend on us. We have nobody but ourselves to fall back upon, yet we have children, ageing parents, mortgages, etc… The idea that we might not be up to the challenge is chilling.
The prospect of change can invite hope, but the future changes we now see dimly outlined do not.
I imagine myself waiting in the early morning fog at a train station in Germany. I’m on my way to work in a nearby town. A voice on the station loudspeakers announces that the train has been cancelled. The next train will arrive in an hour. The station café is closed, but I get a coffee from a machine. I’m not dressed to wait for an hour outdoors in January, so when the train finally arrives after an hour, I’m shivering and an hour late for work.
Under a cold, grey sky, gloomy confabulations can spiral out of hand: My late arrival at work is deducted from my pay – fair enough – and the subsequent two-week sick leave due to bronchitis is covered by the national health insurance, but my mother, alas…. My mother has been poorly for some time but unable to get a doctor’s appointment, and she dies at the end of the month.
So what do I do? I get awfully angry, for one thing, because I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t have to die. The national health service is a mess. That’s a fact. My dead mother is another fact. Or rather, no, it isn’t, because this was just fiction – rainy-day fiction. Somebody else’s mother will have died, and that will be a fact; not mine, though.
What certainly also is a fact, is that during Covid, nurses and doctors worked their asses off. They are now either ill or on strike, apart from those that have up and quit. The national health service is on its knees here, there, and almost everywhere. As you will probably have noticed.
After Covid, the nurses here, there and almost everywhere, asked for a pay rise. People with wages the equivalent of those of a nurse (R.N.) can afford to live in only 1.5 % of all dwellings in Oslo. The number of dwellings available to nurses has actually decreased, even since 2021 not to mention since 2013. (Meanwhile, between you and me: Who is it, then, who lives in all the other 98.5 % of the dwellings in Oslo?)
Everybody agrees that public health professionals carried more than their share of the burden of Covid. But pay rise? NO.
Prices rise and the cost of living rises pretty much to the point of being sky-high rise-wise, but pay-rise? NO, NO and NO. You see, pay rises generate inflation. Inflation is a magic word these days.
Mainstream media is reluctant about calling “these days” a time of crisis. At a time when the price of petrol has doubled in the course of a year, when the price of heating three rooms has risen ten-fold in the course of a year, when the price of food has risen considerably… mainstream media is not reflecting what at least half the population in most of the western world feels: anger, fear, distrust.
Mainstream media’s main preoccupation now is the war in Ukraine for which Russia is exclusively to blame, of course, Russia on which mainstream media blames just about everything – including Trump. (By the way, did you ever hear who blew up the Nord-Stream cables? It certainly wasn’t the Russians because then you would sure as X— have heard about it.)
But hold on!
What did we learn in Business School? We learnt: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” (Those were roughly Milton Friedman’s words, I believe.) That was what we learned, and this is definitely a crisis.
So rather than self-medicate or spend hours on our knees at our neighbourhood chapel, rather than rant at our loved ones or serve cookies laced with emetic agents to our bosses, let us put this crisis to good use.
- Let us kidnap our governments, including prime ministers, presidents, finance ministers, etc, etc and, NOT LEAST, all their business cronies.
- Let us put them all in a very safe place – informing the entire world that if anybody tries to free the prisoners, each of whom will receive three healthy meals a day and a private room with adequate heating and a bathroom (we are not – repeat – NOT sadists), we will instantly liquidate them, painlessly, of course, since we are NOT, I repeat, sadists.
- We shall give our prisoners two choices:
- 1)
- a) for all nurses of the world: a hefty pay rise
- b) for all other citizens of the world (including nurses, now that I think of it):
– adequate heating,
– (healthy) accommodation,
– three healthy meals a day,
– first-class, fully functioning public health services,
– superb lower and higher public education and
– efficient public transportation
or
- 2)
- painless liquidation of all the rest of us.
- 1)
I doubt they will chose option 2 because if they do, they will have nobody to feed them and to replenish their bank accounts.
NB: I don’t mean to force-feed people three times a day. I wish to be very clear on that. For those who prefer heroin to food: it’s their life. Nor do I insist that people living near the equator should be subjected to 24-hour heating. Besides, there are issues such as water or lack of it, locusts, fevers, crime, etc. But all those issues – or a sensible approach to them – start with informed decisions, decisions made for the common good, which is not what our governments are delivering.
So what if I were wrong. What if there was no US-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014? What if the Ukraine war is not a proxy war waged by the USA against Russia? Does that mean that such suspicions, such suggestions, such ideas should be banned from all mainstream and social media on the grounds that they are the product of Russian propaganda, i.e. that they are ideas spawned by the “enemy”?
Almost all my compatriots believe that Putin is “evil”, and that this entire war has to do with his personal megalomanic ideas regarding a land of innocent farmers minding their own business. It’s not that my compatriots are stupid: I put to you that the mainstream media can be compared to the Catholic Church during the Spanish Inquisition. Even Jews and Moslems converted, what else could they do?
There are undoubtedly very many innocent farmers in the ravaged land of Ukraine. Quite many of them, however – true, a minority – speak Russian, think and feel Russian. That part of the story has basically been forgotten by mainstream media.
Now the interesting thing about the Spanish inquisition is not that people were burnt at the stake, but that the Inquisition lasted much longer in Spain than elsewhere, until 1834, in fact. The last person to be executed on charges of heresy in Spain, was a Caetano Ripoli in 1826 – he was a teacher inspired by Enlightenment ideas. Nowadays, we all bow to those ideas, those of the Enlightenment. But the powerful Spanish clergy and the nobility – neither the one nor the other paid any taxes at the time, and between them they bled their peasants to the bone – would have none of such ideas, naturally.
All of Europe executed heretics, by the way, also Protestant nations. In Protestant Norway, for instance, more than 300 people (mostly women) were found guilty of witchcraft and executed. These people were considered the Devil’s tools, so the wealth of extant court records of the trials, which by the way are extremely detailed, make no secret of the use of torture. Torture was deemed a perfectly reasonable tool, not only to combat the Devil, but also to salvage the women’s souls: Only if they confessed would they stand a chance of not burning in Hell till Kingdom come.
I add for the record that between 1400 and 1782, some 40,000–60,000 were killed, mostly in Europe, on charges of witchcraft. (Source: Wikipedia as at 2023.01.04)
So my point is not that the Spanish Inquisition executed large numbers of people, on the contrary, but that it was so tremendously efficient. Basically a network of courts, it held the entire population in thrall for nearly five centuries; people feared God, feared each other, feared being denounced or accused by their neighbours, feared life itself.
The Inquisition’s crusade was against freedom of information, freedom of thought. In short, it aimed to arrest the exchange of ideas. Its success was undeniable, in that it basically halted all progress.
Many countries practised censorship. The Spanish Crown did not need to. With the gold and silver from their colonies, Royalty, the Church and the nobility built extravagant palaces to which they invited foreign artists, but look at the paintings of the great Golden Age Spanish painters (e.g. Murillo, Zurbaran, Ribera and El Greco. Apart from Velasquez and, later, Goya, they painted mainly “the Virgin”, Christ, Cupids, Angels, saints and clouds.
So what did Inquisition censorship do for Spain?
Spain was a total flop, economically, politically and socially, until very recently. That is censorship for you.
With God on its side, to quote Bob Dylan, the Inquisition throttled growth. Whereas England, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, even Poland, prospered, Spain did not. People were terrified of offending God even after the Inquisition; in fact, way into the 1970s. In a fabulously fertile country, most people lived in abject poverty.
So what if I’m wrong. What if there was no US-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014? What if the Ukraine war is not a proxy war waged by the USA against Russia? Let them – those who deny what some of us maintain are facts – counter those facts with other observable facts. Let us calmly and coolly analyse what happened.
Instead, the US Inquisition ( cf. for instance the Twitter Files) has cancelled us, not only in the US but in all of NATO, suppressing freedom of information and even throttling freedom of thought – since without information no real freedom of thought.
Much good that will do us all.
The USA has just given its citizens a great big Christmas gift – that of another 44 billion USD for the defence of Ukraine (bringing the total so far to approx 100 billion USD). US citizens must be thrilled. Russia will be spanked by Patriot missiles – aye, Russia will be spanked, period, and that must be a great comfort to families who could not afford a Christmas tree this year either.
Europe is also spending a great deal – actually, I don’t know how much my country is spending on the destruction of Ukraine, because no news outlet is taking the trouble to inform us. What I do know is that Europe no longer receives gas from Russia, and that Europeans are therefore freezing. I am freezing, too, as I write. So we are also being spanked.
Yet, the silence is deafening, and I am reminded of a film title “The silence of the lambs”. We are the lambs, and nobody even dares mutter imprecations against NATO. Yet, does anybody really believe that NATO is defending human rights, Democracy and freedom of information?
Speaking of freedom of information, I visit a number of mainstream news outlets every day. RTVE.es NRK.no, El Pais, New York Times, le Monde, RUV.is, Klassekampen, Guardian… They all seem to be synchronised! Would you believe it? They all say the same thing. Let me tell you – and I’ve been a news junkie for years – it’s scary! It’s terrifying!
For years, too, Glenn Greenwald has been going on about dwindling freedom of speech in the USA, and as things turned out, he has had every reason to harp on the topic. What is less known to us in Europe – we have no Glenn Greenald here – is that we are almost certainly subject to the same regime. The synchronisation of mainstream European news outlets suggests that news to us is carefully filtered and censored. In my country, for instance, we have a whole and growing series of services (that the general public rarely hears about) designed to protect our national security. No doubt they do – protect our national security – but what else do they do, I wonder.
I don’t know, I only suspect. What I can see, however, is that mainstream media here have not discussed the so-called “Twitter Files”. They have merely portrayed Elon Musk’s dismissal of employees as the bizarre acts of a deranged man.
I do not often say “look to the USA”, but in the country with the world’s highest prison population, some brave investigative journalists are still holding the fort. Glenn Greenwald recently referred to TikTok as an example of government censorship:
Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests.
…
These moves by the U.S. Security State to commandeer censorship decisions on TikTok, accompanied by the hovering threat to ban TikTok entirely from the U.S., appear to be having the desired effect already. …
What TikTok did in response to US demands was to remove a Glenn Greenwald video clip, an
… indisputably true and rather benign review of how media outlets, including The Guardian, had previously depicted Zelensky as surrounded by corruption and hidden wealth. To be sure, the excerpt was critical of Zelensky, but there is absolutely nothing even factually contestable, let alone untrue, given that the whole point of the clip is to show how the media had spoken of Ukraine and Zelensky prior to the invasion as opposed to the fundamentally different tone that now drives their coverage.
Since not all of you have access to the quoted article, I shall quote a source that you will have access to: the Consortium News “compendium of evidence”, regarding events in Ukraine in 2014.
Consortium News is being “reviewed” by NewsGuard, a U.S. government-linked organization that is trying to enforce a narrative on Ukraine while seeking to discredit dissenting views. The organization …. calls “false” essential facts about Ukraine that have been suppressed in mainstream media: 1) that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and 2) that neo-Nazism is a significant force in Ukraine. Reporting crucial information left out of corporate media is Consortium News‘ essential mission.
But NewsGuard considers these facts to be “myths” and is demanding Consortium News “correct” these “errors.”
To make a long story very short, there are two lessons to be learnt from the two quoted articles.
1) the USA is determined to suppress information about its role in the war in Ukraine. One of the methods used is explained by CN. Another method is explained by Glenn Greenwald’s article quoted above.
2) The USA no longer even bothers to conceal the fact that the press is being monitored and heavily censored.
So heavily censored is the press and social media that even the obvious – the fact that the USA is waging a proxy war on Russia – is never mentioned otherwise than as an example of Russian propaganda.
You might agree with a well-informed friend of mine who maintains that in the battle between “good” and “evil” forces, even censorship is legit. I put to you, though, as I put to him, that Manichean Never-never-land stories are extremely dangerous, because they cloud our judgement, undermine our ability to assess our governments and basically paralyse the Democratic process. He responded: “But surely, wouldn’t you rather live in the US than in Russia or China.” I told him that I would prefer to live where I live, but given the choice between the USA and Russia, I would prefer Russia; I would never be rich enough to afford a decent health insurance in the USA.
So on this last day of this last horrible year, from freezing Europe on its way into a serious recession, I wish you luck in navigating through a miasma of NATO, corporate, and government falsehoods during the coming year.
Lets take a look at Haiti.
(Cf. Thomas Piketty, Capitalism and Ideology, Chapter 6).
Slavery was abolished for the first time in modern times, not in England, but in Haiti, and by former slaves.
In 1780, there were 470,000 slaves in Haiti (90 % of the total population). They rebelled in 1791 and, not surprisingly, their French owners fled. Haiti was free. To cut a very long and painful story short, the rebels (i.e. former slaves) had to resist repeated attacks by the French army until they agreed, in 1825, to pay compensation to their former owners for their liberty. The payment demanded by France on behalf of their owners amounted to 2 % of France’s national income, 300 % of Haiti’s national income.
What with interest rates and the French banks’ commissions, Haiti (a population of, I repeat, former slaves) annually paid 5 % of the country’s national income from 1849 to 1915. Nevertheless, the French banks found payment lax, and begged the USA to intervene. The USA kindly agreed to occupy Haiti from 1915 to 1934 to “restore order”, which they did, killing thousands and more or less reintroducing slavery.
Haiti’s debt to the former slave owners was finally settled in 1950. For 125 years, the former slaves and their offspring had been paying for their freedom!
Thus, Haiti never had even the remotest chance of becoming a proper nation. No wonder the country is still struggling!
***
You might argue that this all happened a long time ago and that things have changed for the better. Have they?
A US company is just now suing Guatemala for “failing to protect” its (the US company’s) illegal gold mining activities. The company demands 400 million USD to cover lost investments and “future earnings”. https://inequality.org/research/guatemala-mining-lawsuit/
Now, Guatemala is one of the countries to which the USA has devoted particularly loving care and attention, not least since 1944 when the then dictatorship was replaced with a social democratic government. The new government’s popular reforms were:
disliked by the United States government, which was predisposed by the Cold War to see it as communist, and the United Fruit Company (UFCO), whose hugely profitable business had been affected by the end to brutal labour practices. The attitude of the U.S. government was also influenced by a propaganda campaign carried out by the UFCO. (Source: Wikipedia as at 07/12/2022)
Quoting Chomsky, in What Uncle Sam Really Wants, 1993:
In 1954, the CIA engineered a coup that turned Guatemala into a hell on earth. lt’s been kept that way ever since, with regular US intervention and support, particularly under Kennedy and Johnson.
…
…
Under Reagan, support for near-genocide in Guatemala became positively ecstatic. The most extreme of the Guatemalan Hitlers we’ve backed there, Rios Montt, was lauded by Reagan as a man totally dedicated to democracy. In the early 1980s, Washington’s friends slaughtered tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Indians in the highlands, with countless others tortured and raped. Large regions were decimated.
To substantiate Chomsky’s opinion of Montt I’m including a few figures from the International Justice Monitor:
The short 17 months in which Ríos Montt ruled Guatemala were the most brutal of the conflict. Human rights organizations estimate that 10,000 people were killed in the first three months of his government alone. During the first eight months of his government, … more than 400 indigenous communities were destroyed.
Not until May 10 2013, was he finally found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years’ imprisonment, but the verdict was vacated by the constitutional court, presumably due to pressure from you know who.
Speaking of Chomsky, I should add for the record, that he admitted that
the United States was not, however, lacking in compassion for the poor. For example, in the mid-1950s, our ambassador to Costa Rica recommended that the United Fruit Company, which basically ran Costa Rica, introduce “a few relatively simple and superficial human interest frills for the workers that may have a large psychological effect.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles agreed, telling President Eisenhower that to keep Latin Americans in line, “you have to pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them.”
More quotes from What Uncle Sam Really Wants:
We’ve [i.e. the USA] consistently opposed democracy if its results can’t be controlled. The problem with real democracies is that they’re likely to fall prey to the heresy that governments should respond to the needs of their own population, instead of those of US investors.
Throughout this process, the US press followed Washington’s lead, selecting villains in terms of current needs. Actions we’d formerly condoned became crimes. … The press also began passionately denouncing human rights violations that previously didn’t reach the threshold of their attention. .
If you want a global system that’s subordinated to the needs of US investors, you can’t let pieces of it wander off. It’s striking how clearly this is stated in the documentary record – even in the public record at times. Take Chile under Allende. Chile is a fairly big place, with a lot of natural resources, but again, the United States wasn’t going to collapse if Chile became independent. Why were we so concerned about it? According to Kissinger, Chile was a “virus” that would “infect” the region with effects all the way to Italy.
What Uncle Sam Really Wants was published in 1993, and those of you who have lived all your lives in the USA may not even believe its descriptions about US activities in Nicaragua, Panama and el Salvador. But here in Europe the events referred to in the book were known at the time.
You may want to believe that things have improved since 1993. Maybe they have, though I very much doubt it. With Julian Assange behind bars, the cowed Western press has been brought to heel and obediently trots alongside its masters. Their job is no longer to expose but to justify US activities, and to kowtow to US global leadership, whatever that leadership may involve. So we don’t know, do we, what is going on behind the scenes.
I conclude by adding two items from today’s news (i.e. 7 December 2022):
The Biden administration told a US judge last week that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, should be granted immunity in a civil lawsuit over his role in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. That decision effectively ends one of the last efforts to hold the prince accountable for Khashoggi’s assassination by a Saudi hit team inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. (Source: Guardian)
The United States is opposed to the International Criminal Court’s proceedings against Israel, State Department Spokesman Ned Price said after Al Jazeera filed a legal brief asking the Hague to include the shooting death of its veteran Palestinian-American correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh within its larger investigation against the Jewish state. “When it comes to the ICC, we maintain our longstanding objections to the ICC’s investigation into the Palestinian situation,” Price said told reporters in Washington in response to a direct question about Abu Akleh’s death. (Source: Jerusalem Post)
Rule-of-law, US style, as usual.
Have you heard of the Dominican prelate Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566)? Almost any book about Latin American history will respectfully mention him, usually, however, without quoting him – more’s the pity.
He was an eyewitness in Latin America during the early decades of the colonisation, and he addressed an account of his observations to King Filip II. It was subsequently published in 1552 as Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) and subsequently banned by the Spanish Inquisition in 1659. (However it had been translated by Spain’s enemies, and appeared in Dutch, English, French and even German. It is on the public Domain. I would NOT recommend the 1689 English translation found on Gutenberg.org: apart from being practically incomprehensible, it is full of ghastly errors.
So allow me to provide my own translation of some titbits nipped from three paragraphs of the introduction:
From 2nd paragraph:
God made all the peoples of this part of the world, many and varied as they are, open and innocent, without malice or guile. …They are the most modest, patient, peaceful and calm people imaginable, engaging in no feuds, making no trouble, picking no fights; they know no rancour, hate or vindictiveness. … They are, moreover, extremely poor, with but few possessions – nor do they desire worldly possessions – hence unpretentious, without ambition or greed. Their meals are such that even the Holy fathers in the desert could surely not have been more frugal.
…
From 3rd:
Upon these gentle lambs of said God-given qualities, the Spanish fell like ravenous wolves, tigers and lions of extreme cruelty, as though they had not eaten for days. And all they have done in these parts since, for forty years – and they are still at it – is to tear them to pieces, killing them, terrorising, torturing and destroying them in all manner of strange and varied and unheard of ways that have never before been even read about.
From 7th and last:
The reason why the Christians have killed or destroyed innumerable souls, is that they wished to satisfy their lust for gold, to inflate themselves with wealth in the course of just a few days, and to attain lofty positions regardless of their person. Let it be known that the insatiable greed and ambition that has driven them has been as great as could possibly be imagined in this world, since these lands are so lovely and so rich, and these peoples so modest and patient, so easily subjugated; yet have been shown no more respect, no more due (and I speak truthfully, because I know all that I have seen for all this time) than – not animals, for by God, had they been animals they would not have been so treated – but as dung on the ground.
Hot stuff, right?
So what is my point here?
- That Spaniards are the Devil incarnate?
- That Dominican prelates are “good”?
- That indigenous people from Latin America are genetically better than Europeans?
1) My aim here is certainly not to crucify Spain. On the contrary: I have been given to understand that British, French, Dutch and German colonial powers have left a trail of stories as horrifying as those hinted at above, and very much more recently!
2) As for the Dominican order, I believe it has almost as many sins on its collective conscience as do the colonial powers.
3) The book Potosí that I commented on a few posts back, describes among other things how Quechua and Aymara miners, who have been abused and brutalised for centuries, men who rarely survive to the age of 45, beat and rape their own womenfolk etc. These miners are the offspring of the beautiful mild-mannered people so deeply admired by Bartolomé de las Casas.
As for brutalisation, allow me a few words about the identity of the actual men whose actions the prelate condemns: They were not people like you and me. Many of them were prisoners whose sentences had been commuted to that of “galeotes” (galley slaves). From 1530 on, criminals could be, and were more often than not, directly sentenced to the galleys rather than to prisons, as the traffic on distant Latin America required many hands, and as so many of the crew died on the way. The first ships that set out for Latin America were at any rate manned by the most desperate, brutalised men in the land. Contrary to what some people still appear to believe, life as a galley slave will not make a decent man of you.
Bartolomé de las Casas also wrote a no less remarkable book: The Apologetic Summary History of the People of These Indies, (partially included in vol.V (1876) of his Historia de las Indias on Gutenbeerg.org). It is “apologetic” in the sense that it is a defence of the peoples and cultures that the author visited on his travels. It serves, moreover, as a very early example of what we, today, would call ethnographic studies.
I have declared and demonstrated openly and concluded, … that all people of these our Indies are human, so far as is possible by the natural and human way – and without the light of faith – had their republics, places, towns, and cities most abundant and well provided for, and did not lack anything to live politically and socially, and attain and enjoy civil happiness…. And they equalled many nations of this world that are renowned and considered civilized, and they surpassed many others, and to none were they inferior. Among those they equalled were the Greeks and the Romans, and they surpassed them by many good and better customs. They surpassed also the English and the French and some of the people of our own Spain; and they were incomparably superior to countless others, in having good customs and lacking many evil ones. (Source).
A remarkable man, that. One who despite being a Catholic priest could admire people “without the light of faith”, could study their customs for decades, and have the courage to defend them in writing – five hundred years ago. Yet, what fascinates me more, even, than the man who dared admire “heathens” (who were, moreover, mostly naked, although they covered their “private parts”) is something else:
Those heathens were not greedy.
I repeat: They were NOT greedy.
My question to myself, to you, is therefore:
Are humans inherently greedy or is greed a social construct? As Ghandi allegedly said: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”
So, if greed is a social construct, what are the implications for us, today and for the future?
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.