Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Page 13 of 42

Not greed?

04.12.2022 /

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?

  1. That Spaniards are the Devil incarnate?
  2. That Dominican prelates are “good”?
  3. 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?

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?


Hubris

13.10.2022 /

In 1809, Napoleon’s troops surrounded Vienna, bombarded the city for 24 hours or so, until it surrendered. By then, the local aristocracy, of which there was more than enough to go around, had long driven off in their splendid equipages to go and visit aristocratic relatives in other duchies, princedoms and kingdoms, whereas the dismayed populace had to pretend, after Vienna’s defeat, to celebrate Napoleon’s birthday.

The history of war is full of miscalculations, luck, hubris, coincidence and, above all cynicism. Writers, poets, gamers and innumerable nameless mostly men study past wars as though war were a fascinating sport; advances here, retreats there, trenches, camaraderie, the grisly life-changing sight of a comrade’s death, and the look in the eyes of an enemy soldier before you kill him. War enthusiasts glorify “brilliant generals” such as Caesar, Hannibal and Napoleon, who all had at least one thing in common: They did not balk at committing genocide, real genocide, not the kind of genocide that Mr Putin has referred to, but the kind that the US has contributed to on several occasions.

In 1809, during Napoleon’s bombardment of Vienna, the composer Beethoven, who by then had become a Viennese superstar, lay screaming in his bed with a pillow over his head. As you may know, Napoleon had disappointed Beethoven, who was in many ways a revolutionary. Not only was his music revolutionary, but his temper and pride were so exceptional that dukes and princes cringed before him, a mere composer, a poor man. “Prince, ” he wrote to Prince Karl von Lichnowsky at whom he had attempted to throw a chair, “what you are, you are through chance and birth; what I am, I am through my own labour. There are many princes and there will continue to be thousands more, but there is only one Beethoven.” That is hubris.

Hubris is not an adjective; nevertheless it is used as an epithet, an unflattering one. Beethoven’s hubris may have been unattractive – apparently, he was a rather horrid person – but it killed nobody, and his music is, for those of us who like that sort of thing, no less than transcendental.

The hubris of Napoleon is of a difference order. He was truly a liberal reformer. Most importantly, his seeds of reform to jurisprudence have survived to this day in all liberal democracies. He reformed education, introduced the metric system, allowed religious freedom, stimulated the arts, etc., etc. But the Viennese would have none of him.

The Spaniards would have none of him either, or of his brother. Now Spain at that time has sometimes been described as the “Tibet of Europe”. The socio-political progress embodied in the renaissance, which subsequently rippled through country after country, had not penetrated Spain. Most Spaniards were so suppressed, so desperately poor and exploited that they rejected the reforms offered by Napoleon’s brother. They must have thought: “He offers us longer life expectancy; we certainly don’t want that. Our only chance of getting out of this living hell is to starve to death.” (The Catholic Church prohibited suicide under pain of perpetual damnation. You can imagine what a catch-22 that was for the average Spanish peasant!)

Spanish peasants heroically defended their horrible king, i.e. their right to die of starvation.

Psychologists agree about one thing: Never tell the patient what to do, because the patient may then want to do the exact opposite. Dictators tell their people what to do, what to think, even.

Mind you, some dictators are visionary and maybe even wise when they are still young, e.g. Mugabe, but as they age, they tend to turn into monsters. We all know that, except dictators of course.

There are other ways of making people do what you want them to, as any reasonably honest psychologist will tell you. For decades, US American voters have politely declined longer life expectancy, just like the Spanish peasant back in the beginning of the nineteenth century. For decades the US has had – and still has – all of western Europe dancing to its tune of Marche Funebre.

Now, of course, things are starting to unravel even in the USA. What, I ask myself, will my grandchildren – assuming they survive the inevitable ecological collapse – tell their children about USA?

Meanwhile, time is running out: We are following the Pied Piper, marching full speed from the frying pan and into the fire (e.g. forest fires, due to which climate gas emissions are soaring, causing more forest fires…,etc.) cf. “Less is More”.

Debattklima

05.10.2022 /

Jeg liker Glenn Greenwald, av flere grunner. Han har vært stille i flere måneder nå fordi mannen hans har vært (og er enda, later det til) dødssyk. Det lille han har skrevet i det siste, har ikke interessert meg. Men nå kom det noe jeg mener er viktig, nettopp fordi det kommer fra ham, en brennende forsvarer av frimodig dialog på tvers av partiske, religiøse og andre skillelinker; en mann som forsvarer reell tale- og trykkefrihet: Glenn Greenwald: Some personal reflections.

Jeg finner det på sin plass å dele innspillet til Greenwald fordi jeg for to dager siden så noe som tydet på at det også i norsk debatt er noe som skurrer, mer enn det: Noe er forferdelig galt! En venninne på besøk nevnte Cecilie Hellestveits nye bok. I den anledningen googlet jeg “Cecilie Hellestveit”. Øverst i treff-listen fant jeg som vanlig link til Wikipedia. Men det jeg leste, vist nedenfor, skremte meg. La det være klart: Ingressen var blitt hacket.

(Da jeg klikket på linken var selve artikkelen helt grei. Dagen etter var også ingressen rettet opp.)

I Norge har omtalen av krigen i Ukraina generelt vært sørgelig ensidig og unyansert. Hellestveits saklige forsøk på å bøte på det har vært som rop i ørkenen. Jeg tror jeg vet hva hun mener om krigen i Ukraina og jeg deler langt på vei hennes synspunkter. Å stemple en høyt kvalifisert person som folkefiende fordi hun eller han med utganspunkt i sin ekspertise stiller betimelige spørsmål om Norges utenrikspolitikk tjener i hvert fall ikke fedrelandet (i dette tilfellet Norge) og antakelig heller ikke (i dette tilfellet) Ukraina.

Jeg håper Hellestveit har bedt om politibeskyttelse. Samtidig tenker jeg med sorg at nå har også nordmenn annammet et Tolkien-inspirert verdensbilde: Noen er gode, andre er onde; enkelt og greit. Vi nordmenn er, forstås, gode. Det er med utgangspunkt i et slikt verdensbilde at religionskriger oppstår.

Good news!

23.09.2022 /

Those of us who can still bear to read, watch or listen to the news do so at our own risk. The emotional cost of learning, day after day, that just about everything is going from bad to even worse is high. This morning, I learnt that ten per cent of all Norwegians use sleeping pills. I hasten to add that Norwegians are health freaks (they jog, ski, exercise in gyms, eat sensibly and don’t drink alcoholic beverages on weekdays). The real intake of sleeping pills is probably much higher since many people buy prescription drugs in countries that are less restrictive. Add to that all the people who have several glasses of wine before they go to bed – a new trend in Norway.

“The News”, as we used to call it back in our days of innocence, when grown-ups would gather around the radio to hear what was going on in the world, was implicitly trusted. It was, we were told, fact, not conjecture, hence not biased.

For my part, I make a point of regularly reading/watching/listening to Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera caters to people with business interests, but is not Euro-/US-centric. Also, they run very interesting debates to which they invite people of all ideological shades. Nevertheless, I was very surprised to see, among the list of Al Jazeera headlines on my phone app: “Degrowth is not austerity – it is actually just the opposite”.

Mind you, this turned out to be only an “opinion” piece (which I read jubilantly). Still, it had been given a prominent place, and that was truly good news. Maybe parts of the business world are starting to understand a thing or two.

Now, have you heard about “degrowth”? You probably wouldn’t have if you rely only on mainstream news outlets, where degrowth is considered a four-letter word. To the extent it is uttered, it is perfunctorily slated, because degrowth would mean the end of … – well, a lot of things. It would, however, save the planet and save those of us (including other species) who are still around. Most of us would even fare very much better than we do today, said the opinion piece.

Cheered by finding it in Al Jazeera, I decided to give degrowth another chance. (I had previously dismissed it as being wishful thinking: Those greedy fools who own most of the world would never allow it, I thought.) So I bought a book that has swept me off my feet. I recommend it to you with all my heart. It will make you feel that maybe there is hope after all. Don’t be frightened by the fact that the preface is written by members of Extinction Rebellion. The author is called Jason Hickel – he must be the smartest guy in town – any town. I say no more.

The book is called:

LESS IS MORE 
HOW DEGROWTH WILL SAVE THE WORLD

Enjoy, and have a much better day!

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Pelshval

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑