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Tag: Latin America

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.

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