Entries with tag "homo homini lupus"

The French Atlantic

"Could it be that freedom is only maintained through the support of servitude? Perhaps. The two extremes meet." [Rousseau]

Enticement for early French settlement in the Antilles came from Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, a missionary priest in the mid-seventeenth century, who deplored the sale of young white men "as slaves" (his characterization of indentured labor) on the islands, which he called a "detestable" and a "shameful commerce." Du Tertre, however, optimistically reported that a settler owning "two good Negroes" can live "well at ease and honorably" because the slaves can produce "1700 or 1800 pounds of tobacco, not counting the food they grow."

For the European slave traders the transformation of value by displacement was almost a miracle. At the height of the trade the businessmen of Nantes could hardly believe their good fortune: "We have in our State no ... commerce as precious as the commerce with Guinea [Africa], and one can hardly do enough to protect it. What other commerce could be compared to this one, which results in obtaining men in exchange for merchandise?" [...]

In the upper echelons of society colonial products were not only found to be delicious and stimulating; they also connoted imperial power. Blackburn points out the symbolic value at Versailles of colonial accessories and elaborate confections made of sugar. The rising craving for sweetness and stimulation in Europe [...] played a large role in the enslavement and forced migration of Africans, through the workings of the Atlantic triangle.

[...]

It seems clear that under the regime of slavery from the time of the Code Noir until abolition, "instruction" was seen as instruction in religion only, as catechism; that it was oral, with no attempt to impart literacy; and that very little of it took place. [...] Fenelon, the governor of Martinique in 1764, wrote, "Education... is a duty for the principles of holy religion, but wise policy [la saine politique] and human considerations are against it. ... The safety of the Whites demands that we keep the Negroes in the profoundest ignorance."

[...]

The problem of silence about the slave trade touches all points of the triangle and constitutes a veritable complex. The slave-trading ports of Europe (Liverpool excepted) have shown little inclination to acknowledge this part of their past: the elites of the slave-trading cities prefer to keep their "little green boxes" of family secrets secret; [...]

In a recent novel Edouard Glissant evokes the condition that underpins France's forgetfulness: the absence of slaves on French soil, a fact of the triangular trade. "The former slave-trading cities of Europe [...] did not know the crowds of piled-up and festering slaves, nor the shouting markets nor the shitholes, the din and the public whippings, which haunt the atmosphere of the port cities of the Americas, of the Caribbean or of Brazil.... We look in vain for the stigmata of the Trade: the odor has not remained in the air; there was never any odor; no noise left a trace."

Posted on:

2010.04.21 -0500

Tags:

homo homini lupus , texts

The contemporary structure of dispossession

El FMI [Fondo Monetario Internacional] proporciona préstamos o da la imprescindible luz verde para que otros los proporcionen. Nacido en Estados Unidos, con sede en Estados Unidos y al servicio de Estados Unidos, el Fondo opera, en efecto, como un inspector internacional, sin cuyo visto bueno la banca norteamericana no afloja los cordones de la bolsa; el Banco Mundial, la Agencia para el Desarrollo Internacional y otros organismos filantrópicos de alcance universal también condicionan sus créditos a la firma y el cumplimiento de las *Cartas de intenciones* de los gobiernos ante el omnipotente organismo. Todos los países latinoamericanos reunidos no alcanzan a sumar la mitad de los votos de que disponen los Estados Unidos para orientar la política de este supremo hacedor del equilibrio monetario en el mundo; el FMI fue creado para institucionalizar el predominio financiero de Wall Street sobre el planeta entero, cuando a fines de la segunda guerra el dólar inauguró su hegemonía como moneda internacional.

[...] Al chantaje financiero y tecnológico se suma la competencia desleal y libre del fuerte frente al débil. Como las filiales de las grandes corporaciones multinacionales integran una estructura mundial, pueden darse el lujo de perder dinero durante un año, o dos, o el tiempo que fuere necesario. Bajan, pues, los precios, y se sientan a esperar la rendición del acosado. Los bancos colaboran con el sitio: la empresa nacional no es tan solvente como parecía: se le niegan víveres. Acorralada, la empresa no tarda en levantar la bandera blanca. El capitalista local se convierte en socio menor o en funcionario de sus vencedores. [p.288]

[...] La canalización de los recursos nacionales en dirección a las filiales imperialistas se explica en gran medida por la proliferación de las sucursales bancarias norteamericanas que han brotado, como los hongos después de la lluvia, durante estos últimos años, a lo largo y a lo ancho de América Latina. [...]. Toda esta invasión bancaria sirve para desviar el ahorro latinoamericano hacia las empresas norteamericanas que operan en la región, mientras las empresas nacionales caen estranguladas por la falta de crédito. Los departamentos de relaciones públicas de varios bancos norteamericanos que operan en el exterior pregonan, sin rubores, que su propósito más importante consiste en canalizar el ahorro interno de los países donde operan, para el uso de las corporaciones multinacionales que son clientes de sus casas matrices. Echemos al vuelo la imaginación: ¿podría un banco latinoamericano instalarse en Nueva York para captar el ahorro nacional de los Estados Unidos? La burbuja estalla en el aire: esta insólita aventura está expresamente prohibida. [p. 290]

Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1970)
Eduardo Galeano

Posted on:

2009.09.02 -0500

Tags:

homo homini lupus , texts

The native under control

[...] And what follow are schemes for separating the natives [...] from the white man on racial and religious grounds, then for reconstituting them as people requiring a European presence, whether a colonial implantation or a master discourse in which they could be fitted and put to work. Thus, on the one hand, one has Kipling's fiction positing the Indian as a creature clearly needing British tutelage, one aspect of which is a narrative that encircles and then assimilates India, since without Britain, India would disappear into its own corruption and underdevelopment [...]. Or, on the other hand, one has the shadowy discourse of colonial capitalism, with its roots in liberal free-trade policies (also derived from evangelical literature), in which, for instance, the indolent native again figures as someone whose natural depravity and loose character necessitates a European overlord. We see this in the observations of colonial rulers like Galieni, Hubert Lyautey, Lord Cromer, Hugh Clifford, and John Bowring: [...]. And we see it in the monographic rigors of scholarly colonial social scientists like the economic historian Clive Day, who in 1904, wrote, "In practice it has been found impossible to secure the services of the native [Javanese] population by any appeal to an ambition to better themselves and raise their standard. Nothing less than immediate material enjoyment will stir them from their indolent routine." These descriptions commodified the natives and their labor and glossed over the actual historical conditions, spiriting away the facts of drudgery and resistance.

[...]

At the apex of high imperialism early in this century, then, we have a conjunctural fusion between, on the one hand, the historicizing codes of discursive writing in Europe, positing a world universally available to transnational impersonal scrutiny, and, on the other hand, a massively colonized world. The object of this consolidated vision is always either a victim or a highly constrained character, permanently threatened with severe punishment, despite his or her many virtues, services, or achievements, excluded ontologically for having few of the merits of the conquering, surveying, and civilizing outsider. For the colonizer the incorporative apparatus requires unremitting effort to maintain. For the victim, imperialism offers these alternatives: serve or be destroyed. [p.168]

Posted on:

2008.11.01 -0500

Tags:

homo homini lupus , texts

Imperialisit rhetoric

Much of the rhetoric of the "New World Order" promulgated by the American government since the end of the Cold War--with its redolent self-congratulation, its unconcealed triumphalism, its grave proclamantions of responsibility--might have been scripted by Conrad's Holroyd: we are number one, we are bound to lead, we stand for freedom and order, and so on. No American has been immune from this structure of feeling, and yet the implicit warning contained in Conrad's portraits of Holroyd and Gould is rarely reflected on since the rhetoric of power all too easily produces an illusion of benevolence when deployed in an imperial setting. Yet it is a rhetoric whose most damning characteristic is that it has been used before, not just once (by Spain and Portugal) but with deafeningly repetitive frequency in the modern period, by the British, the French, the Belgians, the Japanese, the Russians, and now the Americans.

[...]

First is a depressing sense that one has seen and read about current American policy formulations before. Each great metropolitan center that aspires to global dominance has said, and alas done, many of the same things. There is always the appeal to power and national interest in running the affairs of lesser peoples; there is the same destructive zeal when the going gets a little rough, or when natives rise up and reject a compliant and unpopular ruler who was ensnared and kept in place by the imperial power; there is the horrifically predictable disclaimer that "we" are exceptional, not imperial, not about to repeat the mistake of earlier powers, a dispcaimer that has been routinely followed by making the mistake, as witness the Vietnam and Gulf wars. Worse yet has been the amazing, if often passive, collaboration with these practices on the part of intellectuals, artists, journalists whose positions at home are progressive and full of admirable sentiments, but the opposite when it comes to what is done abroad in their name.

Posted on:

2008.09.29 -0500

Tags:

homo homini lupus , texts