Friday, October 10, 2014

Goodbye Columbus


Christopher Columbus noted in his log:
They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. . . . They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Bartolomé de las Casas, as critic of Spanish cruelty wrote:
large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time . . . made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves. . . . They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality. . . .

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a “vacuum.” The Indians, he said, had not “subdued” the land, and therefore had only a “natural” right to it, but not a “civil right.” A “natural right” did not have legal standing.
The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”
The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want also to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area. The murder of a white trader, Indian-kidnaper, and troublemaker became an excuse to make war on the Pequots in 1636.

Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them, the English decided to exterminate them. Edmund Morgan writes, in his history of early Virginia, American Slavery, American Freedom:
Since the Indians were better woodsmen than the English and virtually impossible to track down, the method was to feign peaceful intentions, let them settle down and plant their corn wherever they chose, and then, just before harvest, fall upon them, killing as many as possible and burning the corn. . . . Within two or three years of the massacre the English had avenged the deaths of that day many times over.

A punitive expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island, who were lumped with the Pequots. As Governor Winthrop wrote:
They had commission to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children, and to bring them away, and to take possession of the island; and from thence to go to the Pequods to demand the murderers of Captain Stone and other English, and one thousand fathom of wampom for damages, etc. and some of their children as hostages, which if they should refuse, they were to obtain it by force.
The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again. One of the officers of that expedition, in his account, gives some insight into the Pequots they encountered: “The Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, What cheer, Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for? They not thinking we intended war, went on cheerfully. . . .”
So, the war with the Pequots began. Massacres took place on both sides. The English developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortés and later, in the twentieth century, even more systematically: deliberate attacks on noncombatants for the purpose of terrorizing the enemy. This is ethnohistorian Francis Jennings’s interpretation of Captain John Mason’s attack on a Pequot village on the Mystic River near Long Island Sound: “Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors, which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective.”
So the English set fire to the wigwams of the village. By their own account: “The Captain also said, We must Burn Them; and immediately stepping into the Wigwam . . . brought out a Fire Brand, and putting it into the Matts with which they were covered, set the Wigwams on Fire.” William Bradford, in his History of the Plymouth Plantation written at the time, describes John Mason’s raid on the Pequot village:
Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.
As Dr. Cotton Mather, Puritan theologian, put it: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”

From the Adirondacks to the Great Lakes, in what is now Pennsylvania and upper New York, lived the most powerful of the northeastern tribes, the League of the Iroquois, which included the Mohawks (People of the Flint), Oneidas (People of the Stone), Onondagas (People of the Mountain), Cayugas (People at the Landing), and Senecas (Great Hill People), thousands of people bound together by a common Iroquois language.
In the vision of the Mohawk chief Hiawatha, the legendary Dekaniwidah spoke to the Iroquois: “We bind ourselves together by taking hold of each other’s hands so firmly and forming a circle so strong that if a tree should fall upon it, it could not shake nor break it, so that our people and grandchildren shall remain in the circle in security, peace and happiness.”
In the villages of the Iroquois, land was owned in common and worked in common. Hunting was done together, and the catch was divided among the members of the village. Houses were considered common property and were shared by several families. The concept of private ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest who encountered them in the 1650s wrote: ?No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither mendicants nor paupers. . . . Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common.?
Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal. That is, the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons who married then joined their wives? families. Each extended family lived in a ?long house.? When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband?s things outside the door.
Families were grouped in clans, and a dozen or more clans might make up a village. The senior women in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois. The women attended clan meetings, stood behind the circle of men who spoke and voted, and removed the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women.
The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or fishing. And since they supplied the moccasins and food for warring expeditions, they had some control over military matters. As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of early America, Red, White, and Black: ?Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.?
Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritage of their people and solidarity with the tribe, were also taught to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. They were taught equality in status and the sharing of possessions. The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children; they did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn self-care.
All of this was in sharp contrast to European values as brought over by the first colonists, a society of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families. For example, the pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners how to deal with their children: ?And surely there is in all children . . . a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon.?
Gary Nash describes Iroquois culture: No laws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or courts or jails—the apparatus of authority in European societies—were to be found in the northeast woodlands prior to European arrival. Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly set. Though priding themselves on the autonomous individual, the Iroquois maintained a strict sense of right and wrong. . . . He who stole another’s food or acted invalourously in war was “shamed” by his people and ostracized from their company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himself.
Not only the Iroquois but other Indian tribes behaved the same way. In 1635, Maryland Indians responded to the governor’s demand that if any of them killed an Englishman, the guilty one should be delivered up for punishment according to English law. The Indians said:
It is the manner amongst us Indians, that if any such accident happen, wee doe redeeme the life of a man that is so slaine, with a 100 armes length of Beades and since that you are heere strangers, and come into our Countrey, you should rather conform yourselves to the Customes of our Countrey, than impose yours upon us. . . .
So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.
They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature.
John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians in the 1920s and 1930s in the American Southwest, said of their spirit: “Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.”
Perhaps there is some romantic mythology in that. But the evidence from European travelers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, put together recently by an American specialist on Indian life, William Brandon, is overwhelmingly supportive of much of that “myth.” Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.


Saturday, May 10, 2014


Stephanie McMillan was a guest on a local radio talk show the other night, discussing  her newest work, “Capitalism Must Die”    http://stephaniemcmillan.org/shop/capitalism-must-die/ . As I heard her speak my heart went out to her.  She has written:
“About Minimum Security
A group of friends vow to do whatever it takes to stop evil corporate overlords from destroying the Earth. How? They aren’t sure. They explore various strategies, but so far nothing has worked. As they build a resistance movement, those who love them the most can be their biggest obstacles.”

I am one of those obstacles. I called in and asked her to address the premise that by resisting, and opposing, “them”, she was in fact empowering them. Why didn’t she just walk away. I avoided the psycho, philio arguments that couldn’t be addressed in this little format but went on to suggest that no one was holding a gun to her head, forcing her to shop at Walmart for example. She responded with an argument that indeed they were holding a gun to our collective heads and they will seek us out if we walk away and kill us. The host pushed her further and suggested that the implications of resistance were violent and many listeners are violence adverse. She itemized many small actions people might take to support the movement without violence. What she didn’t say, what Fanon and others have said and demonstrated, that “they” use extreme violence (Occupy) and there is no way to unseat them peacefully. 

Slavoj Zizek argues in “Mapping Ideology” that the state is withering from the dominance of “mafias” that are supplanting so-called legitimate regimes at the top, and ethno-populist  aggregations are rejecting suppression from federalist authorities at the bottom. When the de-racinated us, that so smugly believe we are some how part of the great middle class, an entitled minority, come to the realization that we are no more than fodder for the consumption maw, the necessity of an alternative will be even more obvious. Disaster; eco, nuclear, will generate the the kind of crisis that will demand change. The issue for us, in the here and now, is what to do in the meantime? 

Elina St-Onge is another neo-Marxist that cleverly embraces the ideology of the left while never mentioning it head on. Her new book “How to Change the World” free here http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/01/15/how-to-change-the-world-limited-free-ebook-release/  is an inspiring thoughtful discussion of the possibilities of how to imagine a post consumption world without actually incorporating the kind of specificity that any reader needs to construct how she will manage to sustain herself in an evolutionary environment.

All of the above, and the complement of new publications like Capital, by Thomas Piketty are read and discussed within the context of business as usual. The left argues for higher wages, not the alternative to wage slavery. Advocates argue for safer cars (robotic), not the alternative public transportation. The sharing economy morphs into capitalist ventures, Uber, or become platforms for ever more marketing campaigns for ever more stuff. Piketty argues for increased taxation, not the redistribution of public wealth. (The alternative to the bank bailout was a mortgage bailout. Either solution involved the creation of public debt).

You can join a movement, elect what you imagine are informed alternatives to business as usual, and suffer the agony when it is revealed that your alternative, wasn’t. Or, you can join the outlaw band, and roll your own. Of course that will require a rigorous self examination of what you are willing to sacrifice in the process. In the run-up to a new program we are developing on a college campus I asked the principals to ask students to put their i-phones , and other Apple made gee-gaws in the trash as an example of good faith if they are indeed willing to change their ethics in the search for a common good. I mean if we are going to invoke the workers struggle we have to acknowledge that this is one of the most conspicuous exploitations of workers on the planet. They are committing suicide, leaping from the factory roofs. No takers. I can’t wait for them. Never have. 

This blog has intended to suggest, often in detail, the ways and means to secure your survival. I don’t believe that They will hunt you down. If you pull this off, they can’t recognize you. Not because you are wearing a  balaclava, but because you  are a chameleon and dress for success. Whatever that requires at the time. You have the capacity now to establish a sustainable plan that will work at least until they burn the planet. Your first move is to reimagine yourself in terms of what really counts. The next move is to take the target off your back. You cannot fashion a revolution, or stylize yourself in such a way as to be at once cool, and at the same time hope to escape the notice of the forces you oppose. You have to form meaningful alliances. Not affinity groups, or communes of like minded individuals. You have to supplant your competency with whatever else you need in a mutual alliance. This pragmatism transcends politics, religion, or sexual orientation. You have to re-establish links with the members of your immediate circle and shake off the lies of individualism and the nonsense of shame associated with staying connected with those who have your back. You have to pool your resources, private and public, and cut as many ties to stuff as you can imagine. 

Walk away. Roll your own. Don’t for a minute believe anyone cares more about you, than the ones you love.