Not Your Father's Marxism . . .
The Diplomad
The Don of International Marxism, the USSR, is dead -- killed by Ronald "Elliot Ness" Reagan. For roughly the past fifteen years, we, thankfully, have lived without the threat of global nuclear annihilation that the USSR's Marxist vision posed. With the Soviet demise, international Marxism as we knew it for nearly the entire 20th century also died. Unfortunately, however, the forces that fathered and nurtured Marxism did not die: envy, resentment, and fear of competition and failure remain with us, alive and well.
The envious, resentful, and fearful of the world found in Marxism's pseudo-scientific analysis and language an "explanation" for any event. If it did nothing else, Marxism "explained" why nothing was the fault of the envious, resentful, and fearful: the rich were rich, because they made the poor, poor; the successful succeeded because they made the failed, fail. Old Marxism also fed the egos and provided a way for otherwise frustrated and failed "intellectuals" to pursue Napoleonic dreams. Vast conspiratorial forces oppressed mankind; these forces could be exposed and defeated only by and with the leadership of an enlightened Marxist elite who would lead the wretched of the earth to the socialist promised land.
The USSR's end forced the envious, resentful, and fearful and their leaders to adapt, transform, fracture and downgrade a belief system that had "explained" everything into less-satisfying sub-sets, each focused on a particular topic: most prominently, feminism, environmentalism and the rapidly growing one of "international law." Despite their seemingly different concerns, all these sub-sets shared much in common, to wit, at their core lay anti-capitalist, anti-American and increasingly anti-Semitic emotions disguised as analytical constructs. Over the past fifteen or so years, we have seen these different strands re-meld into what we now call the Anti-Globalization Movement (AGM). While it doesn't have the military force behind it of the old Marxism, nor has it yet formulated a clear vision of the world with which it seeks to replace the current world (there is no AGM Das Kapital), it shares with old-time Marxism a reliance on pseudo-science and a vanguard elite. Also from Marxism come much of its language and tactics, as well as the goals of disrupting economic development of the capitalist kind and bringing down the United States and the global order it dominates.
This is just a minor weblog; please do not expect a PhD dissertation on the AGM. I want, however, to focus on one particularly interesting sub-set of the AGM with which I have had some personal experience, and which has not received as much attention as the others. I refer to "movements" for the "rights of the indigenous."
Having served and visited extensively in Central and South American countries with large "indigenous" populations, I can freely state that the region's "indigenous" cultures largely ceased to exist hundreds of years ago; "indigenous" culture today means rural poverty. As the saying goes, "I was born at night, but not last night," so even I understand, therefore, that calling to protect "indigenous culture" really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to half lives consumed with superstition, disease, and of watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five. It's a call to keep certain people as either an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as exploitable pawns for the use of political activists.
When I hear these calls, I think, "We don't protect rural poverty in the USA. Western man no longer lives in caves or trees, terrorized by solar eclipses and at the mercy of an unforgiving environment. Why should these people? Why should humans live little better than animals in disease-infested jungles, or exposed on wind-swept plains?" I am struck, for example, by how much effort "pro-indigenous activists," often themselves urban upper-class types or foreigners, expend on "land reform." Instead of working to develop an economy where land ownership does not determine whether one lives or dies, the activists seek to chain the "indigenous" to, at best, a brutal life of scratching out a living on postage stamp-size plots of land. Often land reform involves "giving" the rural poor these plots but without the right to sell or use them to secure loans from banks. The poverty and hopelessness increase.
This segues to one of the great and evil myths promulgated by activists, i.e., the Native Americans' love for the land. As one activist (from Minnesota) told me, "they would rather die than give up their contact with Mother Earth." Really? You can believe that if you want, but everywhere I've gone in Latin America, rural people seek to head for the city, or, even better, the USA. They want medicine, Coca-Cola, TVs, cars, motorcycles, corn flakes, and indoor plumbing -- they want to live like the activists do in Minnesota. Those who stay on the land, in particular the men, do not radiate any particular love for the land, the flora, the fauna, or for each other. They fish with dynamite and mercury; burn or cut huge tracts of forest; treat their "sacred lakes" as sewers; drink themselves stupid; and engage in often lethal fights and horrendous cruelty towards women, children and animals. In other words, they behave as uneducated, poor people have throughout all history and in all cultures. Note to activists: the "indigenous" are human.
The foreign activists are particularly loathsome; they invent and distort history, introducing distinctly 20th and 21st century concepts into the study of pre-Colombian cultures and their remnants. Worse, these activists seek to manipulate poor people for their own political agenda, and often get them killed in pursuit of "liberation theology" or some other fashionable cliche. They overwhelm and corrupt legitimate "indigenous" activists with money, trips, attention, and promises of fame. In exchange, the once-legitimate local activist becomes a servant of Americas Watch, Amnesty International, etc, required to produce ever more dire stories and accusations. Or they merely make up a leader for the "indigenous"; the most famous being Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu Tum -- virtually unknown inside Guatemala (having lived most of her life abroad); a creation of European Marxists; a tool of Guatemala's Communist URNG insurgency; a pro-Castro hater of the USA; an author of a major hoax; and, as you would expect in such cases, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The foreign activists appear like a modern version of the ancient Jewish legend of the Golem to save their people, end up creating havoc . . . and then, went it all comes crashing down, as, for example, when some Neanderthal military lashes out, they run to their Embassies flashing US or European passports, gaining safety and fame as modern Joans of Arc, leaving the "indigenous" to take the hit.
Please look at links such as this, this, this, and most notably this. You will see how the activists seek to exploit the indigenous in the cause of the AGM. The last link in particular, which contains the "Kito Declaration" of last July, provides an exceptionally clear example of the effort to deform the push for "indigenous" rights: the bogus history, the fantasy of the noble savage, and then the kicker: opposition to foreign investment, free trade, and modern agriculture; and the call to support well-known "indigenous" rights champions, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro,
To express our solidarity with the Venezuelan people and President Hugo Chávez who have defended their national sovereignty in the face of a strong push from the United States government, and we call on them to take action against the referendum scheduled for August 15, 2004.
To express our solidarity with the Cuban people for its continuing anti-imperialist struggle.
Sorry for the length of this posting. Let me end with two thoughts. The first is encapsulated in the words of a fellow Diplomad, who after years of listening to the pronouncements and viewing the activities of the "indigenous" rights crowd in Central America, said, "Well, it all comes down to the right to wear funny clothes." And that's just about all they have achieved.
The second is really more a hope than a thought. It seems that for now the Anti-Globalization Movement draws inspiration from Karl Marx and his words. At The Diplomad we all hope that in the near future the Anti-globalization Movement will draw inspiration from a different Marx . . . Harpo and his silence. |
