The argosy of the New World! In search of eternal youth.
William Carlos Williams. In the American Grain. 1925
The old theme of America as a new world to be rediscovered at every turn has rather more than its full share of contradictions. The impulse to make all things new, to build new cities in a clearing of the forest, to abandon projects with the scaffolding in air, to move onward to another El Dorado is a familiar complex of the American tradition. It contains within it the sources for our wealth and poverty, our despair and hopefulness…
It is the 'happier world' that seems so often to elude us… To make these discoveries seem alive and new implies the cheerful will to outface the dangers of a theme that grows too large for habitation, and too many writers have already lost themselves in the blue vault in which the images of rebirth and the sensations of becoming are reiterated with alarming regularity. One might almost say that our long-continued faith in the American renaissance is a habitual response to living on this continent, as though we waked each morning to find a new world stillborn at our door. The faith contains so many apparitions of a dead new world…
It is true that one whole side of Puritan culture represents a destructive element in the American tradition and something of its bourgeois decadence was felt and recognized in Eugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown. In itself it contains the ambiguity of Melville's wind that 'sins against the way it drives' and like the image of that wind it seems to stir hatreds and admirations that are both too vague and too large for hasty discrimination.
Horace Gregory. Afterword. In the American Grain. 2009
'The argosy of the New World! In search of eternal youth,' Het vrachtschip van de Nieuwe Wereld, op zoek naar de eeuwige jeugd is de metafoor van wat de Duitse filosoof Nietzsche de blinde 'Wille zur Macht' noemde, de eeuwige manifestatiedrift van het individu, waarbij 'strijd de vader van alle dingen' is, zoals lang vóór Nietzsche de Griekse wijsgeer Heraclitus stelde. Vanuit die strijd stijgt de sterkste op, de 'Übermensch,' die zichzelf verlost. In deze wereld wisselt de 'waarheid' voortdurend, is afhankelijk van tijd en ruimte. De 'waarheid' is tegelijk waar en niet waar, en deze opvatting is dan ook de bron van het postmodernisme. Het past naadloos in de neoliberale ideologie, die net als elke heilsleer alleen als totalitair systeem kan bestaan. Het paradoxale is dat de ideologie die de 'waarheid' ontkent, tegelijkertijd de 'waarheid' claimt. 'Argosy of the New World.' Die wereld was natuurlijk helemaal niet 'nieuw.' Zij was net als de Oude Wereld 4,4 miljard jaar oud, en werd al tenminste 12.000 jaar bewoond. In de zoektocht van de Argo naar het Gulden Vlies, naar goud dat, zoals Columbus verklaarde, 'who has it can do whatever he likes in this world.' Op die manier kon de 'Wille zur Macht' tot ultieme gelding komen. Jason en zijn Argonauten uit de klassieke oudheid zijn op zoek naar 'a land of golden grain,' dat de Oude Wereld moest redden. Het Gulden Vlies, waar de blanke Europeaan altijd naar op zoek is, symboliseert de hoop op rijkdommen van elders. Al vanaf de Griekse oudheid zoekt Europa de verlossing buiten zichzelf. De beschaving kwam vanuit Afrika via Kreta naar Europa, de religie kwam vanuit het nabije Oosten via het eiland Patmos naar Europa, de materiële rijkdommen kwamen vanuit het continent Amerika via Spanje naar Europa. De Oude Wereld had niet genoeg aan zichzelf, het heil moest altijd van elders komen. Europa was en is als een zwart gat, dat door zijn zwaartekracht alle energie naar zich toe trekt. De intense drang die tot de 'ontdekking van de Nieuwe Wereld' leidde, is in de VS tot volle wasdom gekomen. De Europeaan die zijn Oude Wereld ontvluchtte dacht zichzelf opnieuw te kunnen uitvinden in de Nieuwe Wereld. Daar zou de mens worden verlost van De Ander, en zodoende van zichzelf.
Tabula rasa, de mens als onbeschreven blad, het individu zou opnieuw kunnen beginnen, bevrijd van de last der geschiedenis, zonder heersers, zonder materieel tekort, zonder remmingen. De mens groter dan zichzelf. Dinsdagavond 15 juli 2003 schreef ik tijdens een reis door de VS het volgende in een notitieboekje:
De drang om te presteren, nóg sterker, nóg groter, nóg massaler. Dat zagen we vanochtend bij Mount Rushmore. Huizenhoge hoofden van vier Amerikaanse presidenten die met drilboren en dynamiet uit een granieten berg zijn gehakt. Grootscheeps geweld tegen één van de oudste steenlagen van het Amerikaanse continent om een prestige object mogelijk te maken ‘to astound the world,’ aldus Lincoln Borglum, de zoon van de beeldhouwer Gutzon Borglum die in de jaren dertig van de twintigste eeuw de leiding had.
Het is interessant even stil te staan bij de figuur van beeldhouwer Gutzon Borglum. Hij was de zoon van
Mormon Danish immigrants, Danish-American Gutzon Borglum was born in 1867 in St. Charles in what was then Idaho Territory. Borglum was a child of Mormon polygamy. His father, Jens Møller Haugaard Børglum, had two wives when he lived in Idaho: Gutzon's mother and Gutzon's mother's sister, who was Jens's first wife. Jens decided to leave Mormonism and moved back to Omaha, where polygamy was illegal and taboo; he left Gutzon's mother and took his first wife with him… Borglum was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He sat on the Imperial Koncilium in 1923, which transferred leadership of The Ku Klux Klan from Imperial Wizard Colonel Simmons to Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans.
In 1930 gaf Gutzon Borglum een illustrerende definitie van de door hem bewonderde ‘Bigness.’ Het is de 'Bigness' van de imperium-bouwers, beginnende bij de piramides van Cheops en de Assyrische Leeuwenpoort, het Parthenon, de Romeinse triomfbogen tot de Rijkskanselarij van Hitler en het Amerikaanse Pentagon. De bouwkunst van imperia is altijd kolossaal geweest, omdat de allereerste functie ervan is om te intimideren door de mens letterlijk en figuurlijk te kleineren. Hoe kolossaler de vorm des te kleiner de mens. De blanke racist Borglum begreep dit als geen ander. Hij formuleerde het zo:
Colossal art has [a] value – human and soul-stirring – that should be incorporated permanently in all National expression – consciously and deliberately in scale with its importance [and] with the people whose lives it express.
En dan geeft de beeldhouwer een kenmerkende anecdote:
Some few years ago, a sculptor visited me who showed me the head of a pin, on which he had carved the head of a president. Quite apart from my feelings regarding the purpose, the meaninglessness of this… product of the magnifying glass and patience, I began to think more seriously on the subject of making things larger and better. This pin-head sculptor was shaping the dimensions of his life and soul… into smaller and more cramped dimensions. In thinking of this, I realized how the whole process of life in its healthy form [is expansive] in character… multiplies the forms of pleasure. I recalled distinctly that volume; great mass, has a greater emotional effect upon the observer than quality of form; that quality of form (when it is understood) affects the mind; volume shocks the nerve or soul-centers and is emotional in its effect.
Klein is 'betekenisloos.' Alleen datgene wat groot is en hard als graniet, kent waarde. Een 'gezond' leven is 'expansief,' een heerser heeft 'Lebensraum' nodig. Alleen via 'shocks' dwingt hij 'awe' af. Het ontzag voor het gewelddadige, hoe meer geweld des te meer ontzag. Zo dacht ook Albert Speer, architect van Hitler en de minister van Bewapening onder het Nazi-regime. Het taalgebruik verraadt het totalitaire denken: ‘soulstirring, meaninglessness, larger and better, cramped dimensions, healthy form, great mass, expansive, volume shocks the nerve.’ Het is de ideologie van de overtreffende trap. Klein heeft geen recht van bestaan. Alleen wat 'groot’ lijkt, is ‘beter.' Klein is ‘verkrampt.’ Massa bezit ‘een groter emotioneel effect’ dan ‘de kwaliteit’ van de vorm, want ‘volume shockeert het zenuwgestel.’ Deze beschrijving illustreert in een notendop waar het imperia om draait. Ze dienen te groeien, anders kunnen ze niet imponeren en intimideren, en komt er een einde aan het expansionisme waardoor ze de macht verliezen. Juist dit laatste is de grootste vrees van de hegemonistische elite van een imperium. Geheel conform de ideologie schreef Borglum over zijn kolossale beelden en daarmee over de blanke, christelijke Amerikaanse cultuur:
A monument's dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated. We are not here trying to carve an epic, portray a moonlight scene, or write a sonnet; neither are we dealing with mystery or tragedy, but rather the constructive and the dramatic moments or crises in our amazing history. We are cool-headedly, clear-mindedly setting down a few crucial, epochal facts regarding the accomplishments of the Old World radicals who shook the shackles of oppression from their light feet and fled despotism to people a continent; who built an empire and rewrote the philosophy of freedom and compelled the world to accept its wiser, happier forms of government…
We believe a nation's memorial should, like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, have a serenity, a nobility, a power that reflects the gods who inspired them and suggests the gods they have become.
In alle openheid geproclameerd, niet door een literator of een politicus, door een filosoof of een bankier, maar door een beeldhouwer, een handwerksman die 400 medewerkers met drilboren een granieten bergtop liet veranderen in vier 18 meter hoge afbeeldingen van de macht die 'de wereld dwong om haar wijzere, gelukkigere regeringsvormen aan te nemen.' Tot het einde der tijden moeten de beelden, die ooit Mount Rushmore waren geweest, de wereld eraan herinneren dat de moderne mens vooral zichzelf bewondert. De nieuwe mens, die groots en meeslepend wil leven, hebben de goden van hun troon gestoten om er zelf op te gaan zitten. Hybris, 'ijl en ijdel,' zegt Prediker, 'alles is ijdel.' De joden en christenen vertellen elkaar de woorden van een koning die zou hebben gezegd:
Ik bekeek al het gedoe onder de zon. En het bleek allemaal ijdel en grijpen naar de wind. Wat krom is krijg je niet recht en wat ontbreekt kun je niet meetellen.
Hoe groter de beelden des te totalitairder is het systeem dat ermee geëerd wordt. Maar hoe groot de beelden van de macht ook mogen zijn, ze zijn lachwekkend klein in de oneindigheid van tijd en ruimte. De hoogdravende woorden van Borglum zelf benadrukken dit alleen maar; de bezoeker kijkt naar kitsch, het toppunt van smakeloosheid. Wie dit ziet, ziet de macht uiteenvallen. Die waant zich altijd en overal onkwetsbaar, tot ze schijnbaar plotseling ineenstort. En die ineenstorting vreest ze als niets anders, hoe onkwetsbaar ze ook meent te zijn. Daarom wapent de macht zich altijd en overal tegen De Ander. De Ander is in dit geval het volk, de massa is het grote gevaar. 'L'enfer c'est l'autre.' Uiteindelijk kan de macht daarom nooit zonder 'onderdrukking en angst.' Hoe anders de slaven eronder houden. Geen imperium is mogelijk zonder slaven, de accumulatie van kapitaal kan niet zonder slavenarbeid. Door alleen hard werken wordt de rijke niet rijk, De Ander moet de rijken rijk maken en rijk houden. De parasitaire economie van de elite is gebaseerd op slavernij, hier maar vaker nog daar, vroeger maar nu nog steeds. En zo zijn de slaaf en de slaveneigenaar door de geschiedenis heen aan elkaar geketend. Het vrije individu bestaat bij de gratie van de onvrije slaaf. Zonder slavernij zou de Europese en Amerikaanse elite nooit zo machtig zijn geworden. William Carlos Williams:
Poised against the Mayflower is the slave ship — manned by Yankees and Englishmen — bringing another race to try upon the New World, that will prove its tenacity and ability to thrive by seizing upon the Christian religion…
They helped to build 'a society that was rich and in some way sumptuous and curiously oriental. 'Puritan Massachussetts unable to rid itself of the idea of man's essential wickedness, could not envision this earthly paradise, Georgia —' In many families every child had his individual slave; great gentlemen almost openly kept their concubines; great ladies half dozed through the long summer afternoons on their shaded piazzas mollified by the slow fanning of their black attendants, and by the laving of their feet in water periodically fetched anew from the spring house...'
De Nieuwe Wereld leek verdacht veel op het Keizerlijke Rome. Maar dat geldt alleen voor de onafhankelijke waarnemer die niet door een ideologische bril kijkt. Voor de anderen is er de Readers Digest-versie van de Amerikaanse geschiedenis in Geert Mak's boek Reizen zonder John, met zinnen als deze:
Thomas Jefferson was nog maar drieëndertig jaar oud toen hij in 1776 de Onafhankelijkheidsverklaring optekende, een van de mooiste staatsdocumenten die ooit zijn geschreven… Zijn uitgangspunt was een staat waarin de burgers niet alleen rechten hadden om zich tegen machthebbers te verdedigen -- zoals hier en daar in Europa al het geval was --, maar waarin alle soevereiniteit bij het volk werd gelegd.
Daar staan de zinnen keurig in een rij al meer dan twee eeuwen te pronken:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,
opgetekend door één van de vooraanstaande 'founding fathers,' en derde president van de Verenigde Staten, Thomas Jefferson. Had Geert Mak de Amerikaanse geschiedenis bestudeerd, dan had hij geweten wat de bijvoorbeeld Amerikaanse historicus Richard Drinon heeft geschreven in Facing West. The Metaphysics of Indian-hating & Empire-Building (1997), een studie die door Amerikaanse historici als de hoogleraren Walter LaFeber en Richard Slotkin wordt gerekend tot
the best-written, the most comprehensive and scholarly, and certainly the most provocative account of the policy that over four centuries resulted in exterminating 'savages' who stood in the path of American expansion.
Drinnon's onderzoek 'makes vital connections between our past and our present, between the events and ideas that have shaped American history and the way we think, act, and see the world now.'
De historicus constateert over Jefferson's hypocrisie:
hints of living relationships between the ideals and the man are most difficult to find.
Bij weinig andere mensen is het verschil tussen mythe en werkelijkheid zo groot als bij Jefferson. Drinnon verwijst naar het 'brilliantly iconoclastic' portret van Jefferson and Civil Liberties' uit 1963, waarin historicus en Pulitzer Prijs-winnaar, wijlen, professor Leonard W. Levy beschreef hoe deze
ideologue of freedom came out for dictatorship in times of crisis, supported loyalty oaths, favored prosecution -- at the state level -- for 'seditious' libel, accepted concentration camps for the politically unreliable, adopted censorship, and indulged in other authoritarian acts that led Levy to find 'a strong pattern of unlibertarian, even antiliberatarian thought and behavor extending throughout Jefferson's long career.
Over Jefferson's diepgeworteld racisme merkt Drinnon op dat
in Notes on the State of Virginia (Paris, 1785) he tried to extricate himself by depicting blacks as creatures of the body and sensation rather than of the mind and reflection, and doubted their fitness for freedom; but he disguised this 'anti-negro diatribe' by casting it as a scientific hypothesis...'
Jefferson, die kinderen verwekte bij één van zijn zwarte slavinnen, was tegelijkertijd een rijke aristocraat uit Virginia met een 'great personal aversion to miscegenation, or, as he put it, ''to the mixture of color here.''' Om te voorkomen dat er rassenvermenging zou ontstaan en
stain 'the blood of the master,' the great revolutionary proposed to rid the country of them all, those previously freed and those newly emancipated: through 'expatriation' to Afrika or the West Indies -- he wavered on 'the most desirable receptacle' -- the problem would disappear with the last shipload,
aldus de politicus die volgens Mak 'alle soevereiniteit bij het volk' wilde leggen. Ook Jefferson's standpunt ten aanzien van Indianen is opmerkelijk. De oorspronkelijke bewoners van wie hij en de zijnen het land stal, mochten van Jefferson blijven op voorwaarde dat
they should give up the chase, dispose of lands needed only for hunting, become tawny yeomen farmers, and intermix with the white population.
Op 3 november 1802, Jefferson was inmiddels president van de VS geworden, schreef hij aan Handsome Lake, de grote profeet van de Seneca-indianen dat diens angst voor het verlies van nog meer land aan de blanken volkomen ongegrond was. Jefferson:
You remind me, brother, of what I said to you when you visited me the last winter, that the lands you then held would remain yours, and shall never go from you but when you should be disposed to sell. This I now repeat and will ever abide by.
Deze woorden zijn even helder en 'mooi,' om in de terminologie van Mak te blijven, als de woorden in de Onafhankelijksverklaring. Even 'mooi,' even helder maar ook even leugenachtig als die van Geer Mak, want nog geen twee maanden na deze geruststellende woorden
a working paper 'Hints on the Subject of Indian Boundaries' contained Jefferson's covert suggestions for extinguishing titles to lands they refused to sell; the following month a confidential message shared his disingenous hints with Congress -- minus some awkward details -- on how to undermine Indian leaders who persisted 'obstinately in these dispositions.' Though duty required him to submit his views to the legislature, he warned that, 'as their disclosure might embarrass and defeat their effect, they are committed to the special confidence of the two houses.' Therewith he secretly launched a systematic campaign of psychological warfare against the tribes... it entrapped their leading men into running up debts at government trading posts so they would have to sell their lands to pay... Jefferson's letters to lieutenants in the field filled in the details,
aldus de historicus Richard Drinnon, die hieraan toevoegt:
Jefferson's letter to Governor William Henry Harrison of the Indiana Territory revealed most candidly how the trap should be sprung, leaving the Indians dependent on the market economy and relieved of their extensive forests:
'To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.'
Zoals gezegd: de Nieuwe Wereld leek verdacht veel op de Oude Wereld, de willekeur van de macht, de arbitraire macht van het kapitaal, de bloedbaden, de doortraptheden van de elite en hun woordvoerders, er was niet veel veranderd en getuige de propaganda van Mak is er nog steeds niet veel veranderd. 'Poised against the Mayflower is the slave ship.' Het was de dichter William Carlos Williams die de moed opbracht geschiedenis te schrijven. Het vertelt de Europeanen waar zij de fout ingingen. De VS is een culturele zijtak van Europa, met een eigen specifieke ontwikkeling als gevolg van de onbegrensde ruimte. 'The land was ours before we were the land’s,' zo omschreef Robert Frost het in 'The Gift Outright,' het gedicht dat hij op 86-jarige leeftijd voordroeg tijdens de inauguratie van president Kennedy in 1961. Dit voor Amerikanen beroemde gedicht eindigt met de woorden:
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
Geen woord over de oorspronkelijke bewoners, de Indianen. Zelfs in gedichten kan men liegen. Het land was vol verhalen, de natuur was een adembenemend kunstwerk, en het landschap hoefde niet om geldelijk gewin verkracht te worden. Zoals het was, was het goed genoeg, en wat werd was zielloos. Zo zielloos dat de kunstenaars het begonnen te ontvluchten, terug naar Europa, waar ze in het interbellum in vrijheid een eigen cultuur ontwikkelden. 'The deed of gift was many deeds of war,' dat klopt, eerst de oorlogen tegen de Indianen, en toen zij rond 1900 bijna volledig waren uitgeroeid of waren opgesloten, begonnen de voortdurende overzeese expansie-oorlogen. Nu, na al die eeuwen geweld is de VS een permanent gemobiliseerd militair industrieel complex, 'realizing westward,' maar dan zover westwaarts dat het 'The Gift Outright' nu tot het Midden-Oosten is doorgedrongen. Waarom zouden ze stoppen, zolang er overal 'braakliggend' land is, bevolkt met Indianen die verslagen moeten worden om hun 'still unstoried, artless, unenhanced' land te kunnen exploiteren? ‘Braakliggende ruimtes’ moeten niet ‘gereserveerd worden voor het gebruik van verspreid levende primitieve stammen, wier leven slechts een paar graden minder betekenisloos, smerig, en meedogenloos is dan dat van de wilde beesten met wie ze het gebied delen,’ aldus rechtvaardigde president Theodore Roosevelt het Amerikaanse expansionisme.
Onlosmakelijk verbonden met dit zoeken naar Lebensraum was het diep gewortelde racisme bij president Theodore Roosevelt. De imperialist heeft immers een rechtvaardiging nodig om de gekleurde medemens te vermoorden, dan wel als slaaf te misbruiken. In zijn boek Imperial Alibi's schrijft de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Stephen Shalom hierover:
To Theodore Roosevelt, the 'most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman,' but no matter, because it was 'idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities....' Not that Roosevelt went 'so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.'
Toen ik Shalom in 2003 interviewde benadrukte hij de continuïteit van het Amerikaanse racisme dat volgens hem niet meteen zou verdwijnen als gekleurde politici het buitenlandse beleid mede bepalen, zoals naderhand ook bleek uit de beleidsdaden van minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Condoleezza Rice, haar voorganger Colin Powell, en niet te vergeten president Barack Obama, zoals nu weer blijkt uit zijn steun aan de zionistische terreur tegen de opgesloten Palestijnse bevolking. Imperial Alibi's:
Racism was one of the key founding principles of the United States. The Puritans exterminated Pequot Indians, hoping, in the Puritans' words to 'cut off the Remembrance of them from the earth.' To George Washington, Indians and wolves were both 'beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape.' In the Declaration of Independence, one of the indictments against King George was that he had inflicted on the colonists 'the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions' - a rather accurate characterization of the rules of warfare employed against the Native Americans. Repeatedly, in the Indian wars that raged across the continent, U.S. soldiers would proclaim as they massacred infants, 'Kill the nits, and you'll have no lice.' 'We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux,' wrote General Sherman in 1866, 'even to their extermination, men, women and children.' [...] How did this jibe with everyone being created equal? As Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell explained, Jefferson's doctrine applied 'only to our own race, and to those people whom we can assimilate rapidly.' Indians 'are not men, within the meaning of the theory' that all men are created equal.
Racism against Africans was another fundamental building block of American ideology. Deemed to be sub-human, they were subjected to a barbaric and brutal system of slavery. Lincoln was willing to accept slavery so long as the union could be preserved; and when the Civil War drove him to abolish slavery he did not change his belief in black inferiority. When the South introduced Jim Crow laws to maintain the descendants of slaves as second-class citizens, the northern elite went along. Even after World War II, President Harry Truman was referring to blacks as 'niggers.' Derogatory references to blacks were standard fare for President Nixon and the senior officials of his administration. 'I wonder what your dining room is going to smell like,' Kissinger chortled to Senator Fulbright, regarding a dinner for African diplomats.
With racist views deeply embedded in the minds of U. S. policy-makers and rooted in domestic structures of domination and subordination, it is not surprising that these views have influenced the way in which Washington looked at and acted in the world outside.
The presence of a few non-whites in policymaking circles is not likely to change the nature of U.S. foreign policy very much; to attain positions of power, these individuals would have to have shown substantial conformity to the prevailing values of the elite. A substantial racial diversity among policy-makers, on the other hand, would likely make racism a less significant factor in the way Washington deals with the world. But such an occurrence is by no means imminent, and will not come to pass as long as racial inequality remains a fundamental characteristic of the U.S. domestic - landscape. Until this time, racism will continue to be an important factor in U.S. foreign policy.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Foreign_Policy/Sources_IA.html
Yet we, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize our collective madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward economic, political and environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess.The ecosystem is at the same time disintegrating. Scientists from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, a few days ago, issued a new report that warned that the oceans are changing faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life. The oceans, of course, have absorbed much of the excess CO2 and heat from the atmosphere. This absorption is rapidly warming and acidifying ocean waters. This is compounded, the report noted, by increased levels of deoxygenation from nutrient runoffs from farming and climate change. The scientists called these effects a “deadly trio” that when combined is creating changes in the seas that are unprecedented in the planet’s history. This is their language, not mine. The scientists wrote that each of the earth’s five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one [part] of the “deadly trio”—acidification, warming and deoxygenation. They warned that “the next mass extinction” of sea life is already under way, the first in some 55 million years. Or look at the recent research from the University of Hawaii that says global warming is now inevitable, it cannot be stopped but at best slowed, and that over the next 50 years the earth will heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens of millions of people will be displaced and millions of species will be threatened with extinction. The report casts doubt that [cities on or near a coast] such as New York or London will endure.
The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies (VIDEO)
EMAIL 
PRINT
SHAREPosted on Apr 13, 2014
By Chris Hedges
Editor’s note: The following is the transcript of a speech that Chris Hedges gave in Santa Monica, Calif., on Oct. 13, 2013. To purchase a DVD of Hedges’ address and the Q-and-A session afterward, click here. Video clips from the Q-and-A session can be found here,here and here. Follow this link to become a Bedrock Supporter (a yearlong membership includes the DVD from this event).
The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.
Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s 30-man crew—there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which in a previous encounter maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by dismembering one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod’s destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.
“If I had been downright honest with myself,” Ishmael admits, “I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.”
Our financial system—like our participatory democracy—is a mirage. The Federal Reserve purchases $85 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds—much of it worthless subprime mortgages—each month. It has been artificially propping up the government and Wall Street like this for five years. It has loaned trillions of dollars at virtually no interest to banks and firms that make money—because wages are kept low—by lending it to us at staggering interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent. ... Or our corporate oligarchs hoard the money or gamble with it in an overinflated stock market. Estimates put the looting by banks and investment firms of the U.S. Treasury at between $15 trillion and $20 trillion. But none of us know. The figures are not public. And the reason this systematic looting will continue until collapse is that our economy [would] go into a tailspin without this giddy infusion of free cash.
Yet we, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize our collective madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward economic, political and environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess.The ecosystem is at the same time disintegrating. Scientists from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, a few days ago, issued a new report that warned that the oceans are changing faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life. The oceans, of course, have absorbed much of the excess CO2 and heat from the atmosphere. This absorption is rapidly warming and acidifying ocean waters. This is compounded, the report noted, by increased levels of deoxygenation from nutrient runoffs from farming and climate change. The scientists called these effects a “deadly trio” that when combined is creating changes in the seas that are unprecedented in the planet’s history. This is their language, not mine. The scientists wrote that each of the earth’s five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one [part] of the “deadly trio”—acidification, warming and deoxygenation. They warned that “the next mass extinction” of sea life is already under way, the first in some 55 million years. Or look at the recent research from the University of Hawaii that says global warming is now inevitable, it cannot be stopped but at best slowed, and that over the next 50 years the earth will heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens of millions of people will be displaced and millions of species will be threatened with extinction. The report casts doubt that [cities on or near a coast] such as New York or London will endure.
The corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored, frantic Cassandras who are viewed as slightly unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. We are consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil” holds that only a few people have the fortitude to look in times of distress into what he calls the molten pit of human reality. Most studiously ignore the pit. Artists and philosophers, for Nietzsche, are consumed, however, by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth and desire for meaning. They venture down into the bowels of the molten pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of reality become “burnt children,” he wrote, eternal orphans in empires of illusion.
Decayed civilizations always make war on independent intellectual inquiry, art and culture for this reason. They do not want the masses to look into the pit. They condemn and vilify the “burnt people”—Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Cornel West. They feed the human addiction for illusion, happiness and hope. They peddle the fantasy of eternal material progress. They urge us to build images of ourselves to worship. They insist—and this is the argument of globalization ¬¬—that our voyage is, after all, decreed by natural law. We have surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death. We ignore and belittle the cries of the burnt people. And, if we do not swiftly and radically reconfigure our relationship to each other and the ecosystem, microbes look set to inherit the earth.
Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and rise up to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite—are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year [2012] in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward.
1 2 3 4 5 NEXT PAGE >>>
Monday, 14 April 2014 09:26
Slavery Has Had Four Eras in the United States, And Its Abominable Impact Continues Today
PAUL BUCHHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: derpunk)
David Horowitz, right-wing founder of an organization called the "Freedom Center," argued that blacks should not be paid reparations for the enslavement of their ancestors. Among his reasons are that:
-- There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery
-- Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery
-- Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid
But slavery, in its various forms of physical and mental torment, has been a part of US history from the beginnings of our country to the present day. There are numerous modern-day corporations who profited immensely - themselves or their predecessors - from slave labor. Only token amounts have been paid back, along with a few scattered apologies.
-- Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery
-- Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid
But slavery, in its various forms of physical and mental torment, has been a part of US history from the beginnings of our country to the present day. There are numerous modern-day corporations who profited immensely - themselves or their predecessors - from slave labor. Only token amounts have been paid back, along with a few scattered apologies.
Four eras of abominable abuse can clearly be identified.
First Era: Before Emancipation
Prior to the Civil War, King Cotton was the rallying cry for the South. With cotton accounting for 60 percent of all US exports, and 75 percent of all the cotton purchased by Great Britain, slaves were needed more than ever. African-Americans in tens of thousands were herded to the deep south, chained neck to neck as they became the hapless tools of industry.
First Era: Before Emancipation
Prior to the Civil War, King Cotton was the rallying cry for the South. With cotton accounting for 60 percent of all US exports, and 75 percent of all the cotton purchased by Great Britain, slaves were needed more than ever. African-Americans in tens of thousands were herded to the deep south, chained neck to neck as they became the hapless tools of industry.
By 1840, there were more millionaires along the Mississippi River than throughout the rest of the nation. Cotton was more valuable than all other US commodities combined. In this "great laboratory of American capitalism" slaves were the most valuable property, and that meant big business for the slave traders, even in the North, as the Fugitive Slave Act legitimatized capture and transport to the South.
Cotton drove the textile industry in the Northern states. In 1860, New England had over half of the manufacturing operations, and consumed two-thirds of all the cotton used in U.S. mills. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts called it "a conspiracy of the lords of the loom and the lords of the lash."
Before the start of the Civil War, the mayor of New York City sought independence from the Union in order to continue its lucrative trading with the South.
Other industries flourished as well, through the predecessors of companies that still exist and thrive today. The Norfolk Southern Railroad leased slaves for one-year terms of hard labor. The parent company of USA Today had links to the slave trade. Insurance companies such as Aetna issued policies protecting slaves as property. Many Wall Street firms, who held slave auctions outside their doors, had their beginnings in the cotton trade. Lehman Brothers, which began investing in 1850, founded the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870. The predecessors of JP Morgan/Chase got their start with loans to slave owners, at times with enslaved Africans as collateral. In 2005 JP Morgan apologized for its predecessors' slave trading activities in Louisiana, and Bank of America and Wachovia also apologized for their early involvement with slave trading.
Second Era: Slavery by Another Name
Slavery was abolished after the Civil War, but in name only. The great hope of Reconstruction lasted just ten years. Now, as Douglas Blackmon documents, a new version of slavery had begun, with arrests for petty 'offenses' such as talking too loud or looking at a white woman. A man committing an actual offense such as stealing a pig could be sentenced to five years of hard labor. These were the "Pig Laws." For many blacks, incarceration meant death, as convict leasing programs allowed companies to work prisoners until they could no longer stand on their feet.
The predecessors of U.S. Steel were complicit in this second era of slavery. One of the tens of thousands of victims was 22-year-old Green Cottenham, arrested in Alabama in March, 1908 for "vagrancy." That means he couldn't prove, at the moment of his arrest, that he was employed. It was a tactic used by local sheriffs and judges to put black men in jail. Ironically, Green's arrest was on the anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote in 1870.
Cottenham was found guilty and sentenced to thirty days of hard labor. When he was unable to pay court and jailhouse fees, his sentence was extended to a full year, and he was sold to Tennessee Coal, a subsidiary of US Steel. The company forced him to live and work in a mineshaft deep in the black earth, where he worked every day from 3 AM to 8 PM digging and loading tons of coal. If he slowed down he was whipped. He drank the water he was standing in. He was surrounded by caverns filled with poison gas and walls that often collapsed, crushing or suffocating miners. At night he was chained to a wooden barracks. Crazed men were always nearby, filthy and sweaty, some homicidal, some sexual predators. A boy from the Alabama countryside had been deposited in the middle of hell.
Third Era: World War II Slave Labor
Slave labor in the Nazi years generated massive profits for many of our most prominent corporations, starting with Ford and General Motors. Henry Ford, who hadpublished "The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem," was a dear friend of Nazi Germany. His company used prison labor to produce a third of the military trucks for the German army. Ford's Dearborn, MI factory was called an "arsenal of Nazism." In Germany, Ford's worker-inmates were said to have labored for twelve hours a day with six ounces of bread for breakfast and a dinner of turnips and potatoes.
General Motors worked with the German company that built Auschwitz. General Electric partnered with a German company that used slave labor, and invested in the builder of gas chambers. Kodak used prison labor for the manufacture of German arms. Nestle admitted acquiring a company that used forced labor during the war.
Finally, IBM was responsible for the punch card machines that allowed the Nazis to tabulate train shipments to the death camps.
Fourth Era: The Present Day
The 13th Amendment bans slavery "except as punishment for crime." The 14th Amendment bans debt servitude. But each inmate in a modern-day private prison, according to Chris Hedges, "can generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year." Prisoners accused of minor drug crimes have replaced the vagrants. And private probation companies are keeping them in debt. The system seems little different from the corrupt local governments in the deep South a century ago.
The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S are two of the prison privatizers who sell inmate labor to corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM. Nearly a million prisoners work in factories and call centers for as little as 93 cents an hour.
More corporate profits come from the probation business, which, in direct opposition to the 14th Amendment, keeps people in prison for being too poor to pay their court costs and probation fees. It's called 'peonage,' or debt slavery.
Examples are more than disturbing. In Louisiana, Gregory White, a homeless man, was arrested for stealing $39 worth of food and ended up spending 198 days in jail because he was unable to pay his fines. In Ohio, Howard Webb, who makes $7 an hour as a dishwasher, accumulated almost $3,000 in court costs and probation fees. In Georgia, Thomas Barrett stole a can of beer from a convenience store, was fined $200, and before long owed his probation company $1000, more than a month's pay.
Reparations? One of the arguments against it is that the sheer number of African Americans - 42 million - makes the whole concept unfeasible.
Second Era: Slavery by Another Name
Slavery was abolished after the Civil War, but in name only. The great hope of Reconstruction lasted just ten years. Now, as Douglas Blackmon documents, a new version of slavery had begun, with arrests for petty 'offenses' such as talking too loud or looking at a white woman. A man committing an actual offense such as stealing a pig could be sentenced to five years of hard labor. These were the "Pig Laws." For many blacks, incarceration meant death, as convict leasing programs allowed companies to work prisoners until they could no longer stand on their feet.
The predecessors of U.S. Steel were complicit in this second era of slavery. One of the tens of thousands of victims was 22-year-old Green Cottenham, arrested in Alabama in March, 1908 for "vagrancy." That means he couldn't prove, at the moment of his arrest, that he was employed. It was a tactic used by local sheriffs and judges to put black men in jail. Ironically, Green's arrest was on the anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote in 1870.
Cottenham was found guilty and sentenced to thirty days of hard labor. When he was unable to pay court and jailhouse fees, his sentence was extended to a full year, and he was sold to Tennessee Coal, a subsidiary of US Steel. The company forced him to live and work in a mineshaft deep in the black earth, where he worked every day from 3 AM to 8 PM digging and loading tons of coal. If he slowed down he was whipped. He drank the water he was standing in. He was surrounded by caverns filled with poison gas and walls that often collapsed, crushing or suffocating miners. At night he was chained to a wooden barracks. Crazed men were always nearby, filthy and sweaty, some homicidal, some sexual predators. A boy from the Alabama countryside had been deposited in the middle of hell.
Third Era: World War II Slave Labor
Slave labor in the Nazi years generated massive profits for many of our most prominent corporations, starting with Ford and General Motors. Henry Ford, who hadpublished "The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem," was a dear friend of Nazi Germany. His company used prison labor to produce a third of the military trucks for the German army. Ford's Dearborn, MI factory was called an "arsenal of Nazism." In Germany, Ford's worker-inmates were said to have labored for twelve hours a day with six ounces of bread for breakfast and a dinner of turnips and potatoes.
General Motors worked with the German company that built Auschwitz. General Electric partnered with a German company that used slave labor, and invested in the builder of gas chambers. Kodak used prison labor for the manufacture of German arms. Nestle admitted acquiring a company that used forced labor during the war.
Finally, IBM was responsible for the punch card machines that allowed the Nazis to tabulate train shipments to the death camps.
Fourth Era: The Present Day
The 13th Amendment bans slavery "except as punishment for crime." The 14th Amendment bans debt servitude. But each inmate in a modern-day private prison, according to Chris Hedges, "can generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year." Prisoners accused of minor drug crimes have replaced the vagrants. And private probation companies are keeping them in debt. The system seems little different from the corrupt local governments in the deep South a century ago.
The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S are two of the prison privatizers who sell inmate labor to corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM. Nearly a million prisoners work in factories and call centers for as little as 93 cents an hour.
More corporate profits come from the probation business, which, in direct opposition to the 14th Amendment, keeps people in prison for being too poor to pay their court costs and probation fees. It's called 'peonage,' or debt slavery.
Examples are more than disturbing. In Louisiana, Gregory White, a homeless man, was arrested for stealing $39 worth of food and ended up spending 198 days in jail because he was unable to pay his fines. In Ohio, Howard Webb, who makes $7 an hour as a dishwasher, accumulated almost $3,000 in court costs and probation fees. In Georgia, Thomas Barrett stole a can of beer from a convenience store, was fined $200, and before long owed his probation company $1000, more than a month's pay.
Reparations? One of the arguments against it is that the sheer number of African Americans - 42 million - makes the whole concept unfeasible.
But a financial transaction tax is feasible. It would come to us from the Wall Street firms that used to hold slave auctions outside their doors.
Paul Buchheit is a writer for progressive publications, and the founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org). Contact him at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten