Had US Marines not invaded Haiti, Charlemagne Peralte might have become a politician instead of a revolutionary. His father, General Remi Massena Peralte, was a big landowner in Hinche who had served as a Member of Parliament during the Hypollite administration, known for public works like the Marché Hypollite (Marché-en-Fer, or Iron Market). Charlemagne had become a career army officer after completing his studies at Port-au-Prince’s well-reputed St. Louis de Gonzague college. At 29-years old, he was the Military Commander in Leogane when a group of Marines arrived on Monday August 30, 1915 to disarm that post as part of their project to replace Haiti’s Revolutionary Army with a US-controlled Gendarmerie (FAd’H). Peralte refused to surrender his weapons and national flag and told the Marines he would obey only his President’s orders.

Roosevelt’s “pretty good little constitution”

Peralte returned to a life of farming in Hinche after his dismissal from the Army, and for a while it looked as though his refusal to relinquish his flag would be his only act of resistance to the foreign invasion. Meanwhile, the US labored to legitimize the Occupation. Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) would later boast that, as Woodrow Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy,“I wrote Haiti’s Constitution myself, and if I do say it, it was a pretty good little Constitution.” Among many measures favorable to the US, this constitution permitted foreign ownership of Haitian lands for the first time since the country’s independence.

The Haitian legislature countered FDR by drafting a stronger document that, not only preserved all protections from the previous Constitution, but also invalidated Dartiguenave’s 1915 treaty with the US and called for his impeachment. As the legislators prepared to ratify this new constitution in early 1917, Dartiguenave and Major General Smedley Butler declared the Parliament dissolved because of “the spirit of anarchy which animates it.” Thus began a 13-year period with no legislature, continuous martial law, and siphoning off of 40 percent of Haiti’s gross domestic product by US financiers. The Gendarmerie collected the taxes to service the foreign debt, dispensed all central government funds, and even served as judges in criminal and civil cases. In addition, they supplied the US with intelligence and got rich from extortion and kickbacks.

Our Charlemagne

On the night of October 11, 1917, on the pretext that Charlemagne and Saul Peralte had attacked their local headquarters, a group of Gendarmes torched Charlemagne’s house, looted Saul’s residence and arrested the two brothers. After a summary court martial, Saul was executed, and Charlemagne was sentenced to five years of hard labor. By then, chain gangs had become commonplace in Haiti, where the US had introduced them as the main source of labor for road building and other public works. Peralte spent nearly a year in menial, physically-wearing jobs, in prison clothes and shaven head, in the city of Cap Haitien where many of his family members lived, before a friend helped him to escape by giving him refuge and supplying him with a disguise.

Within a month Peralte recruited over 200 rebels from the ranks of laboring and escaped convicts, who swore to “drive the Americans back into the sea.” They became known as the “Cacos.” Initially, they fought with vintage guns and swords from the Haitian Revolution, plus hunting rifles, machetes, and knives, but they quickly acquired modern weapons and ammunition by raiding the remote outposts of the Gendarmerie. As a rule, they attacked the enemy in surprise commando operations and used guerilla tactics that favored their mastery of the difficult terrain, particularly along the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Their numbers grew to include many Dominicans, won over to the anti-imperialist cause by Peralte. Soon Mirebalais schoolteacher Benoît Batraville joined the command. After a few months of battle, Battraville controlled the Artibonite region, and Peralte declared a provisional government in northern Haiti.

A revolution was clearly under way that the corrupt Gendarmerie could not hold off. But even as new tanks, seaplanes, airplanes, airports, and Marines reinforced the campaign against Cacos, they were called “bandits” and “highwaymen.” To demolish all pretext of banditry, in 1918 Charlemagne Péralte issued a public call to arms to the people of Haiti; he additionally wrote a letter to the French Minister in Haiti, signed by himself and 100 others, that was a formal declaration of war against the US. The Haitian elite, to whom the most serious insult of the occupation was its exclusion from White society due to racial prejudice, berated the Cacos for threatening the public safety by drawing fire on all Blacks from undiscerning Marines. By contrast, so many peasants joined the Cacos that, by 1919, the force became more than 40,000-men strong and engaged the Marines over 60 times a month.

Popping off Cacos

Flying missions from the new airports became more frequent. Cacos were bombed if they could be found. And if they could not, villages were razed. During military engagements with the Cacos, the custom was to administer a bullet to the head of any wounded Haitian. Those caught uninjured were usually tortured and lynched. Such practices are consistent with official “anti-banditry” campaign documents, which are rife with reports of high Haitian casualties without prisoners, along with few or no American deaths. Stories of Marine atrocities became so widespread that James Weldon Johnson and others traveled to Haiti to check their veracity. Johnson’s NAACP delegation confirmed: “it has now become the duty and sport of American marines to hunt these ‘cacos’ with rifles and machine guns.” For the most part, these assaults were not on Cacos but random civilians. The Cacos territories in Haiti’s North and Artibonite regions could not be taken without major casualties to the Marines.

In Summer 1919, US authorities secretly launched a project to kill Peralte, whom they called “the Supreme Bandit.” This mission was headed by Marine Sergeant Herman H. Hanneken, an expert at cultivating spies among Haiti’s elite. He found Jean Baptiste Conzé: a vain Caco lieutenant who could be bought for $2,000 in cash and the promise of the rank of officer (exclusively the domain of White Americans) in the Gendarmerie. On the evening of October 31, 1919, Conzé smuggled Hanneken and Corporal William R. Button, both in black face, together with 18 Gendarmes into a Cacos camp near Grande Riviere du Nord, where Peralte sat by a fire. Hanneken shot two bullets at close range into Peralte’s back, instantly killing him. The rest of the camp — about 1,200 men — was machine gunned in the surprise operation. The next day, before burying Peralte’s body in an unmarked grave, US authorities photographed the corpse tied to a door, with the Haitian flag draped around its head, and then dropped thousands of copies of the photo over the entire country. The reaction was not terror, but revulsion. The majority of Haitians came to view the Occupation as a project of “savages” and Peralte as a martyr for Haiti’s sovereignty.

Return of the flag

With Battraville’s death the following May, the Cacos’ strength greatly diminished, but student strikes and worker’s revolts became common. One notorious peasant protest in Les Cayes, in December 1929, which left 12 killed and 23 wounded by US Marines, provoked outrage from nearly all Haitian society. Loud calls for US departure were echoed by organizations like the suffragettes and NAACP. In addition, a shortage of investors, due to the stock market crash and Great Depression, made Haiti more difficult to colonize. Finally US President Herbert Hoover agreed to send his own fact-finding commissions to Haiti, which confirmed yet more atrocities, including widespread torture, a system of preventive detention, and the routine theft of Haitian property by US Marines. Hoover accepted the commissions’ recommendations to withdraw. Legislative and presidential elections were organized so as to return Haiti to political autonomy. On July 5, 1934, FDR returned to Haiti as US President to recognize Haitian independence, and by mid-August the national flag was flying again. Around the same period, Péralte’s remains were discovered with the help of a former Gendarme who had participated in his burial. Peralte was honored in Cap Haitien on November 26, 1934, with a state funeral attended by his mother, a large national corps, and a massive crowd.

Haiti’s endless revolution

Haiti cannot return to a quiet agricultural life any more than Peralte could. There is no such thing as a quiet life of farming. It is a life of back-breaking, unappreciated work that must be earned by a continuous fight against weeds, pests, and predators. After the first US Occupation, Haiti’s financial subservience to US banks persisted until 1945 when Dumarsais Estimé, possibly Haiti’s greatest President since the men who fought the Slave Revolution, concluded the repayment of the debt, reformed the education system to teach history and other subjects from a Haitian viewpoint, and helped to develop the Artibonite Valley into a major area for rice cultivation. But Estimé tried to dodge the most important fight of all: that against the FAd’H, and ultimately he was forced into exile by a US-backed army coup. Francois Duvalier is the only president to have successfully defeated the FAd’H. He did so by assembling his own parallel peasant army of the Tontons Macoutes. His administration is rightly vilified for having tolerated no dissent (from the communist left or the US-backed right), but it should also be acknowledged for having returned Haiti to independence and self sufficiency. All subsequent administrations, starting with Jean-Claude Duvalier, have welcomed aid and plunged the country back into debt, even as the agricultural sector, which had always repaid for Haiti’s follies, was dismantled by USAID. Jean-Bertrand Aristide did disband the FAd’H in 1995, but the absence of even an armed militia left Haiti defenseless against another foreign invasion.

The current Occupation of Haiti is cruder than the last. The US has learned not to molest the symbols of sovereignty as it dismantles the real thing. For example, the 1987 Constitution has not formally been changed, but the letter of a series of amendments proposed by Bill Clinton is being systematically followed. Hillary Clinton sends her congratulations on Flag Day to her hand-picked Haitian president. Unbeknownst to most Haitians, the July 28 “Carnaval des Fleurs” celebrates the anniversary of the first US invasion. A relatively prosperous and seemingly patriotic Haitian diaspora has grown, but like the mulatto class of colonial times and Jean-Baptiste Conzé, it appears to be more interested in acquiring an equal status to White colonists than in partnering with Haiti’s peasants. But as Haiti’s peasants go, so too does the country. Haitians must unite, not through providential men and charlatans, but with respect for each other across class lines. All that has been dismantled must be rebuilt, including employment for Haitians, by Haitians, in education, public works, public health, finance, and, most importantly, agriculture. To honor our history and flag, we must break the bondage of debt, shed parasitic aid organizations and stop being a nation of beggars.

Editor’s Note: Photographs one and two by Bio Diversity Library. Photographs ten, eleven and twelve by U.S. Air Force.

After more than a century sailing along as an independent black nation, Haiti collided with the Monroe Doctrine in the form of the National City Bank of New York. Together with the US State Department, Citibank pressured Haiti’s government to sell it 40 percent of the Banque National d’Haïti (BNH): Haiti’s treasury. Thus the US acquired a financial interest in Haiti’s $32 million public debt and the pretext for an invasion.

Roger L. Farnham: US kingmaker, Monroe doctrinaire

The architect behind the US scheme to control Haiti’s treasury was wealthy American kingmaker and Woodrow Wilson personal friend Roger Farnham, who became the BNH’s vice president after the takeover. Mr. Farnham was also Citibank’s vice president and president of the National Railway of Haiti: two companies that had swindled Haiti out of more $5 million for a national railroad that was never completed. Citibank and W.R. Grace had financed the project, which the Haitian government had guaranteed at an interest of six percent on $32,500 per mile.

When the Haitian government balked at continuing to support the railroad project, Farnham determined to get Haiti into a customs receivership. He alternately threatened the country’s politicians with a direct US intervention or personal punishments, like withholding of their salaries. Haiti’s lawmakers refused to pay. Six different presidents between 1908-1915 (a politically tumultuous period) also refused to allow the US to collect customs duties to pay the debt owed to Citibank, despite threats that the US would not recognize their administrations.

In 1914, Farnham whisked away to New York, aboard the USS Machias, two strongboxes with roughly 24,000 ounces of Haiti’s gold, valued at $40 million today, and he deposited them into the Citibank vaults. This theft of hard currency rendered Haiti completely dependent on the US for its operating budget. Protests by the Haitian government were to no avail. Farnham did not stop there. With the outbreak of World War I, he changed his rhetoric to a call for neutralization of the “threat” posed to the US by Haiti’s French and Germans residents: in reality a small group of well-assimilated business people.

The opportunity for an invasion came on July 27, 1915 when Haiti’s president was dragged out from the French embassy by an angry mob and dismembered in the streets for having ordered 167 of his imprisoned political opponents assassinated. US President Wilson simultaneously dispatched 330 Marines to the island, who arrived in Port-au-Prince the next day. After declaring martial law, “the first thing [the Marines] did was take the customs and tax collection office. The occupation army retained the Haitian president’s salary until he resigned himself to sign the liquidation of the Banque Nationale d’Haiti, which became a branch of Citibank in New York.”

Irksome shackles of civilization

United States news writers merely repeated Wilson’s command to the Marines “to re-establish peace and order” and the government’s view that a Black nation could not govern itself and had degenerated into chaos. Wilson’s own Secretary of State Robert Lansing said: “The African races are devoid of any capacity for political organization [and possess] an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature.”

Such ideas persist today in the narrative about the first US occupation of Haiti because they have so often been repeated. By contrast, there is scant mention of the US invasions, not only Haiti, but also of Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba, and Panama during Wilson’s 1912-1920 presidency. Mr. Wilson would receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1920 for his pacifism during WWI, despite his declaration of war on Germany in April 1917 and pressures on Haiti to join the US in this war declaration. Again, the Haitian government had refused.

Ultimately the US found a pliant, cowardly Haitian in the person of Sudre Dartiguenave. The order to select him for president came to Admiral Caperton on August 9, 1915 in a US Navy Department telegram: “Allow election of President to take place whenever Haitians wish. The United States prefers election of Dartiguenave….” The legislature’s intimidation was enforced by Smedley Butler who later wrote: “When the National Assembly met, the Marines stood in the aisles with their bayonets until the man selected by the American Minister was made President.”

Dartiguenave signed a treaty on November 11, 1915 to:

• Allow the appointment of a US High Commissioner of Haiti (General John H. Russell) to run the country alongside the Haitian President.
• Create a financial advisers’ office, plus public works and public health services headed by Wilson-designated US nationals.
• Permit customs receivership for 20 years, with Roger Farnham as the receiver for the National Railroad of Haiti. Thus Farnham took over all of Haiti’s railway system and territorial concessions.
• Not transfer Haitian territory to any country other than the US.
• Disband Haiti’s army and create the Gendarmerie d’Haiti (later, the Forces Armees d’Haiti, FAd’H): a US-led force of 3,000 Haitian men who would answer to the US Secretary of State.

William J. Clinton: US High Commissioner of Haiti

Today the US plan for Haiti is unchanged. It is still justified by the notion that Blacks cannot govern themselves but couched in inoffensive expressions like “humanitarian aid” and “peacekeeping force.” Former US President Bill Clinton has assumed the role of US High Commissioner of Haiti, and Michel Martelly is the new Sudre Dartiguenave. Haiti’s control of its finances, public works, and public health services has effectively been removed from the hands of its nationals and transferred to non-governmental organizations (NGO) of largely US-origin, under the aegis of USAID. All of the country’s mayors have been dismissed so that its territory might be more easily transferred, under control of the US, to multinational corporations for gold mining, road works, hydroelectricity, tourism, and other projects. Although the US Marines did kill numerous Fanmi Lavalas partisans in the aftermath of the 2004 coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the occupying military force is no longer the Marines but a US-controlled UN force that is gradually being replaced by US mercenaries and a renewed FAd’H.

Will Haiti relinquish its sovereignty without a fight this time? The story of Haitian resistance to the first US occupation is hardly ever told, but as early as Summer 1915, well before Haiti’s politicians had capitulated to the US, a new Haitian revolution had started. It began on Monday, August 30, 1915, when a group of US marines went to the District of Leogane to try to collect Military Commander Charlemagne Peralte’s weapons and national flag.

The housing divide

Who knows, perhaps Thatcher naively and seriously thought that everybody, by following the capitalist dream, could become rich. Anybody can see, die-hard bankers especially, that such a society could never exist under a capitalist system. Robert Tressell clearly shows how this system functions in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, in a chapter called “The Great Money Trick.” There need to be factors of production to make the capitalist system work. This is why there is a one percent super-rich sector and the other 99 percent are destined to make their way through life as best they can. Many working-class people bought into the dream, buying their council houses below market value and quite probably thinking this was great when they came to sell these houses at a more realistic market value. This conjurer’s trick can only be worked once. It left in its wake a vast shortage of social housing and a populace of young people unable to afford a house, together with councils that are in debt because they have been robbed of their assets.

The financial divide

Likewise a dream of Thatcher’s — nightmare might be a better word — was to privatize pensions. People were bribed with £200 (paid from the state pension scheme) to contract out and invest in private pensions, because capitalists know better how to make your money grow. Most of the private schemes failed. So those without a proper pension came back into the state pension scheme. They did not pay £200 plus interest to get back in. The state pension scheme had remained solvent. It was not run by shady capitalists whose main motivation was how much profit they could screw you for.  Contributions paid into private pension schemes lined the pockets of the capitalists. The state pension scheme saw none of this; however, pensions paid to those who returned because they would otherwise have been without a pension, are today paid out of the state pension scheme, although they are entitled to some pension for the contributions they made. Similarly when banks go bust, taxpayers, who all economists know, provide most of the liquidity that enables banks to operate, are forced to bail them out. That is, unless there is a chance they might recover and provide profit to the rich. Even when banks continue to fail, bankers are paid disgusting bonuses at taxpayers expense.

The military divide

Thatcher was the first post second world-war prime minister to take us into war. It was an unnecessary war. A peace deal was on the table, but she chose to have Argentinian and British troops killed to bolster her flagging popularity. Because collectively the electorate is stupid — there can be no other word for it — she sailed back into power on the tidal wave created by the loss of these young lives. Every single prime minister since, of both main parties, and the coalitionist Nick Clegg, have taken us into unnecessary wars. Thatcher showed them the way. None of them has been big enough to say “No.” The electorate continues to support these wars. The world is in debt. The wars, which enrich capitalists, have caused this debt, which the rest of us will have to pay.

A fitting epitaph

Margaret Thatcher is dead. I shall not be dancing on the day of her funeral, another pompous affair aimed at brainwashing those sheep who have never read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I shall not be having a street party in remembrance of her divisive policies. Instead I have combined the two mottoes from the introductory paragraph into a fitting epitaph to the old lady who did so much harm to my country.

Editor’s Note: Photograph one by BBC Radio 4. Photographs two and three by Duncan C. Photograph four by Noaz and photograph five by R. Barraez D’ Lucca.

A decade on, and Blair claims to have discovered a conscience. Could he sell his plausibility to an unwitting public yet again? Kirsty Wark reminded him of how he wrote in his memoirs that every day of his life he thinks about those who died in Iraq. “What do you think about?” she asked. His answer was that he thought about the loss of life, the terrible consequences for the families of those who died, but — and with Blair there is always a “but” — he was “elected as prime minister to take these decisions.” Wark also reminded him that the removal of Saddam Hussein was not the reason he went to war, but Blair, in the way only Blair can, twisted his weasel words so as to make them sound like Hussein was the real reason, and there was a mandate to prosecute the war on those grounds.[4] Although the former prime minister has already lost a lot of credibility, he further added to his untrustworthiness by stating that every day of his life he thinks of those who died in Iraq. Such a statement would be ludicrous were this not so serious an issue.

There are other things on Tony Blair’s mind to distract him from never letting a day pass without remorse for the Iraqi dead. There is, for example, the £3 million per annum he reputedly gets from JP Morgan, the US investment Bank and Zurich International.[5] It all helps top up the reputed annual £20 million his consultancy company gets. This means he can console himself from daily contemplations of Iraqi losses by calling to mind that he is receiving, every year of his life, something in the region of £140 for each victim of his illegal war, based on a conservative death toll. Then there are the Blair family houses – or rather estates – which must be another distraction from his altruistic ponderings. His three children have had bought for them properties worth over £1 million. On top of this, the Blair property portfolio includes a mansion in Buckinghamshire, a family home in Connaught Square, plus several others.[6] This makes ordinary mortals ponder which of his many properties he uses for contemplating Iraqi losses. At his Buckinghamshire retreat, he is visited by a yoga teacher. Perhaps he uses the meditation session after his limb stretches and breathing exercises to assuage his guilt over those who can no longer stretch and breathe.

Blair likes to think of himself as a peacemaker. Others might have a different perspective on his character and even question his motivation for pretending to be a peacemaker. Greed might come high on the list of some. He takes credit for having brokered the peace deal in Northern Ireland in 1998. Taking credit for success is Blair’s way. “I won an election after Iraq in 2005,” he reminded Kirsty Wark. Those who are cynical about Blair’s peaceful intentions might be inclined to think it was Mo Mowlam who did the groundwork for brokering peace in Northern Ireland rather than Blair, but it was Blair who got all the glory. Making an illegal warmonger the Peace Envoy to the Middle East is almost as laughable as the incredulity of believing that he spares a thought every day for the loss of life in Iraq. Peace Envoy is another post for which he is paid for achieving nothing peaceful. The only kind of peace Blair could achieve in the Middle East is one based on what his Zionist masters tell him is an acceptable deal. His office in Israel gives him convenient access to Mr Netanyahu, and as Peter Oborne writes “This has meant the provision of cast-iron, copper-bottomed diplomatic cover for Mr Netanyahu’s settlement programme” which is illegal under international law.[7]

While the voice of BBC foreign affairs, John Simpson, informed an invited audience that the underlying tensions and conflict between Sunnis and Shi’as had always been there, even before the war, and these tensions were likely to erupt again at any time into another civil war, Professor Nadje al-Ali brought a little realism to the program. She described how women’s rights had grossly deteriorated, giving examples such as the fall in the number of girls who finish their school education, the rise in gender-based and domestic violence, the increase in forced marriages, and other abominations and mistreatments of women. Her findings are borne out by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal of May 2012.[8] As well as discussions of increases in childhood cancer, birth defects, deaths from clusters and landmines, and increases in drugs’ misuse, there have been disclosures about increases in child prostitution and sales of children into slavery.[9] Unite runs a campaign to put an end to the trade in Iraqi women and girls.[10] All this misery is the real legacy of George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s war in Iraq.

Keen observers will have been watching the large letter W which God, in his wisdom, has etched into Tony Blair’s forehead. It is becoming more evident as the years progress. For all his money there is little that can be done short of a “forehead job” to hide this branding. But in fairness, when you are a warmonger your forehead ought to be etched with the letter “W” so that everyone knows how you made your riches on earth. George W. Bush’s branding is in his name. Well, this is my interpretation of what the “W” stands for, although I am aware that others might have different ideas about its meaning.

Editor’s Note: Photograph one by XPGomes12 , and photograph two by Mike Creighton.

References

[1] http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2012/

[2] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq14sep14,1,3979621.story

[3] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-children-of-iraq-was-the-price-worth-it/30760

[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21576509

[5] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/8999847/Blair-Inc-How-Tony-Blair-makes-his-fortune.html

[6] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2204154/Tony-Blair-takes-4-2m-loan-central-London-des-res-U-S-bank-advises.html

[7] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/9806139/Tony-Blairs-record-in-the-Middle-East-is-a-sorry-one-its-time-he-quit.html

[8] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-children-of-iraq-was-the-price-worth-it/30760

[9] http://www.revolve-magazine.com/home/2011/11/13/karamatuna-women-trafficking/

[10] http://saynotoviolence.org/join-say-no/karamatuna-ou-dignity-campaign-stop-women-trafficking-middle-east

In the Middle Ages, when courtly love (romantic love) started, this notion had no correlation with material issues. Courtly love was a paradoxical experience of erotic desire and spiritual connection between lovers which today seems to be in complete opposition. Courtly love was a study in complexity and contrast, but not a futile exercise in contradiction. On one hand, on the erotic side it was often about breaking taboos, drifting into the irrational passion of lust without caring about humiliation and social stigma. On the other hand, it was pure, altruistic, of the highest moral order and almost transcendent. Romantic love was always dangerous, often secret and socially outside the norm.

Romantic love was never a meat-and-potatoes dinner; it was a feast reserved for the aristocracy. Marriage at the time, and one could argue that few things have changed, was mainly a business transaction. Within the aristocracy and amongst the European royal families, marriages were not about love but about wealth management and consolidation and political alliances between kingdoms. The same logic was applied all the way down the social food chain. In India, until very recently marriages were arranged by parents with almost no say from the future bride and groom in the matter.

In our time obsessed with money and social status, little has changed as far as marriages being essentially business arrangements where carnal lust serves as lure — at least for one of the partners — at the initiation and then as a cement with a short life span if the lust element is the primary bond to the relationship. Currently, around 50 percent of all marriages in the Western world, where women can divorce freely, end up in divorce. Typically, couples fight and part over money and intimacy issues. Since the economic crash of 2008, the ratio of marriages ending in divorces has improved slightly. This is certainly not because couples with problems are going massively for couple counseling — as they should — but rather because economically they cannot afford a separation, even less a divorce. Instead, they must often live with the enemy under the same roof.

Real love (romantic love) is rare. It is harder to find than a needle in a hay stack. It is never about money or gain in social status. It is not to be confused with physical attraction either. Both aspects, material gain and lust, have finite life spans. For real love, which is neither lust nor a material arrangement, to last the bond has to be deeper than what most people call love. It has to be based mainly on a strong connection between two individuals, as if they were spiritually tied by an invisible umbilical cord. Only this type of love, unlike ordinary love, can transcend trivial notions such as money, lust and practicality. This said, most people settle for less, a lot less, because what they call love is only a crutch against loneliness.

Editor’s Note: All photographs by Gilbert Mercier.

Obama’s first term: What would MLK have said?

A few weeks before the presidential election, News Junkie Post tried to secure interviews with different prominent African-American media figures regarded to be on the very left of the United States’ political spectrum. The interview project would have been titled: “Obama’s First Term: What Would MLK Have Said?”  The people approached for this project were, a few months before the election, highly critical of President Barack Obama’s first term in office, but as election day approached, they avoided our interview like the plague. Like many African-Americans, members of other minority groups, and so-called progressive voters, at the last minute they decided to stick by their man by muting their attacks on Obama to make sure he would be reelected, following the dubious logic of: “Obama is not as bad as the other guy.” But considering Martin Luther King Jr.’s  own words, if he had been alive today, he would likely be one of the leading voices against Mr. Obama’s policies both domestic and foreign.

“A Time to Break the Silence”

As “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most eloquent statements against social injustice, “A time to Break the Silence” was his major statement against war in general, delivered in 1967. The latter was presented in the context of expressing his staunch opposition to the Vietnam war and the escalation policy of Lyndon B. Johnson, but MLK’s words could very easily address the Obama administration’s war mongering policies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and, probably soon, Syria. As a matter of fact, it is likely that MLK would have broken his silence as soon as Mr. Obama — a war president — had ironically received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Just like today in the United States, King’s moral protest against the war was a minority position. Even people among his supporters in the black community were concerned that his anti-war position would take energy away from the civil rights movement. Dr. King also pointed out — and this remains the same in 2013 — that the poor and minorities in the US were the primary components of the US military.

“Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silence and to speak from the burning of my own heart, as I have called for radical departure from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path: ‘Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King’; ‘Why are you joining the voice of dissent?’; ‘Peace and civil rights don’t mix’, they say.’” And further: “The Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances,” said Dr. King.

Obama: The ultimate humanitarian imperialist

In his book “Humanitarian Imperialism,” published in 2006, author Jean Bricmont argued that since the end of the cold war, human rights have been used as a justification for war or foreign interventions — sometime under the auspices of the United Nations like in Haiti — by the world’s leading economic and military powers, and above all the United States. The criteria for such intervention are usually arbitrary and self serving. They can involve the muscle of global imperialism in the form of NATO, or a softer version such as USAID. President Obama, during his first term, become expert in this type of double language and hidden agenda. It was used in Libya to justify the intervention against Gaddafi, and the same discourse about protecting human rights is unfolding to deal with the Assad regime in Syria. The same rationale of humanitarian imperialism is used by Mr. Obama’s NATO ally, France’s President Hollande currently waging a war in Mali.

“US interference in the internal affairs of other states is multi-faceted, but constant and repeatedly violates the spirit and often the letter of the UN Charter. Despite claims to act on behalf of principles such as freedom and democracy, US interventions have disastrous consequences. Every aggressive action led by the US creates a reaction. Development of an anti-missile shield produces more missiles, not less. Bombing civilians — whether deliberately or by so-called ‘collateral damage’ produces more armed resistance, not less. Trying to overthrow or subvert governments produces more internal repression, not less.” wrote Jean Bricmont in February 2012.

Obama: A chameleon with a gift for public relation

In appearance, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Barack Obama share a lot in common. Both of are very intelligent individuals and excellent orators. But this analogy cultivated by Mr. Obama only holds water near the surface. The current occupant of the White House actually has more in common with Ronald Reagan than with the civil rights leader. Mr. Obama is ultimately an actor. It is by design that Obama’s public inaugural ceremony, which should have been scheduled for January 20, when he took his oath, coincides instead with the celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Day on Monday January 21. Obama wants to keep this false analogy between himself and MLK going, as well as pay tribute to the civil rights leader.

Despite superficialities, Obama’s reelection does not at all embody what MLK longed for in his famous statement: “A man should not be judged by the color of his skin but by the content of his character.” Judging by his first term in office, it is impossible to know the content of Mr. Obama’s character. George W. Bush had very few qualities, but at least he had the merit of being unapologetic and transparent about who he was:  the quintessence of the ugly American, aggressive and uncultured. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, gives the illusion of being a polished humanist despite being as imperialist as his predecessor. Obama is both a Nobel Peace Prize recipient and the United States’ hit man in chief. He is both a president who uses executive power to force a gun control law on US citizens, despite the second amendment, and the most successful salesman for the military-industrial complex in US history.

Editor’s Note: Photographs three and six by 13 Lucie.

The Pentagon released a sobering report on Monday December 10, on the war in Afghanistan. The report was ready before the United States presidential election in early November but not made available to “respect” the election cycle. The delay from the Pentagon can only be viewed as an attempt by the Obama administration to keep the bleak findings of the report from the American public before they went to the polls. During the election charade, the 11-year war in Afghanistan, like any other meaningful US foreign-policy topic, was conveniently ignored by both candidates. The war is unpopular, and it has slowly but surely become the forgotten war, even though 68,000 US troops are still involved in Afghanistan’s quagmire.

Endless war or transition to a Taliban takeover

The raw numbers are grim, as the prospect of a real withdrawal by the US  in 2014 seems increasingly unlikely, unless the Obama administration declares victory and shortly afterwards just lets the Taliban take over. According to the Pentagon, only one of the 23 brigades of the Afghan National Army would be able to operate without NATO support. According to official data from the Department of Defense, since 2001, the conflict has cost US taxpayers more than $500 billion, and 2,146 American troops have died. In this war of attrition, thousands of NATO troops have already died and will keep dying in vain.

The Pentagon report spans from April 1 to September 30, 2012. “During the reporting period, enemy initiated attacks (EIAs) were up one percent compared to the same period last year. The campaign continued to face challenges including a rise of insider attacks. The insurgency’s safe havens in Pakistan, the limited institutional capacity of the Afghan government, and endemic corruption remain the greatest risks to long-term stability and sustainable security in Afghanistan. The Taliban-led insurgency and its al-Qaeda affiliates operate from sanctuaries in Pakistan. Although the insurgency’s kinetic capabilities have declined from their peak in 2010, the insurgents remain resilient and determined, and will likely attempt to regain lost ground and influence through continued assassinations, intimidation, high-profile attacks, and the emplacement of IEDs ( improvised explosive devices). Widespread corruption continues to limit the effectiveness and legitimacy of the Afghan government,” says the 172 page Pentagon report. US taxpayers should know that, according to the Pentagon, the estimated cost of the report or study for the Department of Defense was around $161,000 for the 2012 fiscal year. This included $23,000 in “expenses” and $138,000 in “DOD labor.”

Lesson from Vietnam: Defeating a skilled and determined guerrilla army is militarily impossible

History is not America’s forte. The United States of America suffers from amnesia when it comes to the valuable lessons that the country should have learned from Vietnam. If people had done their research in Washington before impulsively invading Afghanistan in 2001, they would have reconsidered their actions after learning that nobody has ever defeated recent history’s best guerrilla force: the Pashtuns. The Taliban are mostly Pashtuns, and this fearless tribe has won the well-deserved reputation of providing a “burial ground” for empires. They did this with the British empire and, in the 1980s, with the Soviet Union. The Reagan administration played a pivotal role in arming and funding what he called Afghanistan’s “freedom fighters” when they were taking on the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. A few decades later, Reagan’s freedom-fighter friends became the Taliban. Washington never made an effort to understand the Taliban and the reasons why they are such a tough and resilient enemy.

The late French President General Charles de Gaulle once said: “You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.” De Gaulle was correct in his assessment of America’s geopolitical IQ. More than 50,000 US troops died in vain in Vietnam to maintain an illegitimate and corrupt government, all in the name of countering the danger of communism’s “domino effect.” Three million Vietnamese were killed in that conflict. The same cold-war rationale was at play when Reagan was a crucial ally of Osama Bin Laden and his friends. This absurdly short-sighted, one-train-behind, US foreign policy is now being applied to Afghanistan, Pakistan — with the drone attacks — and of course Syria, where the US is de facto supporting a Talibanization of the country.

Groups of people, either nations or cultures, just like individuals have a consciousness. And like individuals, a civilization collective consciousness records and  reacts to historical traumas. History leaves scars on people’s collective consciousness. If some individuals tend to bury personal traumatic experiences under the false assumption that ignoring the pain will heal it, some cultures tend to do the same. Bringing up the collective crimes of Germans and Japanese during World War II is a taboo subject in both Germany and Japan, as if both cultures are suffering from a collective amnesia. If you bring up in a conversation the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines or Vietnam between 1936 and 1945, the standard answer from amnesic contemporary Japanese will likely be either “We didn’t know” or “It was a long time ago”. This applies to Germany as well, even though it is a crime in this country to deny the existence of the holocaust. Regardless, both cultures, as a defense mechanism, suffer from historic amnesia.

From persecuted Jews to Zionists: Why do abused become abusers?

If Sigmund Freud was alive today, and could put Israel or more practically either PM Netanyahu or his sidekick Lieberman on his couch for a few psychoanalytical sessions, one wonders what he would find out. Most psychological studies of abusive personalities point in the same direction. It seems to be a paradox, but as individuals, most people who display abusive behaviors in relationships were abused as children.

On first thought, one would think that people who had been abused would be more sensitive, not less, to the pain inflicted on others. That they would, as individuals or a collective, show a greater sense of empathy. But more often than not, in the case of children who were abused, they grow up to be abusers. It is as if the psychological damage and trauma from early childhood turns our natural and normal sense of compassion and empathy towards each other into a vicious cycle of  borderline sociopathic behaviors, where inflicting pain become a source of pleasure. For individuals, this cycle of pain get passed on endlessly from one generation to the next. What applies to individuals is a good analysis model to a culture collective’s psyche.

For thousands of years, between the Middle East and Europe, the Jewish people have been persecuted, abused and forced to move constantly around. In Europe, Jews were not allowed to own land and could not have roots as they were fleeing bigotry — such as the Inquisition in Spain — slavery, pogroms and the despotic powers of the kingdoms of Europe and the Tzars in Russia. When tolerated, they had to live in ghettos such as the one in Warsaw. This precarious existence for Jewish communities in Europe, with the constant thread of having to leave, brought crafts, knowledge and money at an essential premium for Jewish survival. Books and money are portable, and the constant persecutions against them very likely made Jews develop special skills in both areas of knowledge and finance. Jews became “the people of the book,” and to them knowledge, not material things, was the most precious possession.

Israel: “He who struggles with God”

“He who struggles with God” is the Hebrew meaning of the word Israel. But the Jewish state, as defined by Zionist principles, is not only fighting with recognition of Palestine as a nation, but also with Judaism’s  humanist traditions. Judaism is viewed by many Jewish scholars as a civilization, not just a religion. Part of this rich Judaic cultural heritage was passed on into more recent monotheist religions such as Christianity and Islam.

This view of defining Judaism more as a civilization than just a religion is one of the main points made by Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger in their new book “Jews and Words.” For Oz, a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University and Oz-Salzberger, a writer and historian at the University of Haifa, “Judaism is not a bloodline but a text line.”

“For thousands of years, we Jews had nothing but books. We had no land, we had no holy sites, we had no magnificent architecture, we had no heroes: we had books. We had texts, and those texts were always discussed around the family table. I would add that you can never get two Jews to agree with each other on anything. It’s difficult to find one Jew who agrees with himself or herself on something, because everyone has a divided mind and soul, everyone is ambivalent. So our civilization is a civilization of dispute, of disagreement and of argument,” said Amos Oz in an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon.

Gaza: A modern-day version of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw

After the horrendous crimes committed against them during World War II by Nazi Germany, Jews rightly decided that it would never happen to them again. They will not be the sacrificial lamb of human history, and no longer be victimized. But 64 years after its creation in 1948, the Jewish state is now the one doing the victimizing: evolving from oppressed to oppressor. If Jews were treated like second-class citizens and were denied land ownership for centuries, they have now turned the table of history, and Palestinians are on the receiving end of the wrath of the abused turned abuser. Palestinians are denied land while Israeli settlers keep expanding in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Just like their ancestors in Eastern Europe, Palestinians are treated by settlers and the Jewish state as second-class citizens living in an open-sky jail surrounded by thick concrete walls. Palestinians, just like Jews during World War II in the Warsaw ghetto have become the victims, the collateral damage of history.

In the first part of the article, the author lists the austerity measures taken by the conservative Spanish government in the last months and points out their gloomy consequences on the already squeezed Spanish people. He then demonstrates how politicians are completely uninterested in the welfare of the people and how they are dominated by the cynical strategies of Capital and corporations, which are the real rulers of global economy. He explains how — through a psychological strategy called “learned helplessness” — Capital uses unemployment and low wages as a way to keep inflation low, keep the value of money high to have more purchasing power in the context of international finance and commerce, submit workers to a regime of insecurity and precariousness that makes them accept abuses in the labor context, creating a new form of slavery.

Spanish Civil War: a parallel

Between 1936 and 1939 over 500,000 people were killed in the Spanish Civil War that ended with the victory of the Fascist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The war is traditionally attributed to the following problems:

1) The gap between poor and rich, which caused a great discontent especially in a country led in a feudal way and where agriculture still represented the main branch of the economy.

2) Tensions between the new republican government and an army that was always eager to take power by force on the wave of its conservative claims.

3) Two important regions that wanted independence: Catalonia and the Basque region.

4) The Roman Catholic Church’s flirtations with the rich classes and efforts to maintain both its wealth and its control over Spanish politics and morality.

5) The economic depression of the 1930s that had hit Spain hard, making the prices for crops and prime exports such as olive oil and wine fall in a country whose economy, as we noted above, was based mainly on agriculture. Industry was also hit: iron and steel production fell, since nobody had the money to buy the products.

6) Unemployment rise in both agriculture and industry; wages suffered huge cuts.

Points three, five and six share striking similarities with the present situation. However, we might appreciate the increasing gap that the recession is reintroducing into the Spanish social structure (as in point 1). A considerable difference from the past could be individuated in the fact that the Spanish economy does not rely on agriculture so strongly now as it did in the 1930s.

The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci—in line with Marxist-Leninist positions that considered industrialization and the birth of a bourgeois industrial class as a necessity on the path to a proletarian revolution—saw agriculture as a factor of backwardness and spoke about it in particularly harsh tones:

“In countries which are still capitalistically backward such as Russia, Italy, France and Spain, there exists a sharp separation between the city and the country, between workers and peasants. In agriculture there survive genuinely feudal economic forms, and a corresponding psychology. The idea of the modern liberal-capitalistic state is still unknown; economic and political institutions are not conceived as historical categories, which have had a beginning, have undergone a process of development, and which can dissolve, after creating the conditions for superior forms of social cohabitation: they are conceived instead as natural categories, perpetual, irreducible. In reality large ownership has remained outside free competition: and the modern state has respected its feudal essence, developing juridical formulae such as holding in trust, which maintain in fact the existence and privileges of the feudal regime. The mentality of the peasant has thus remained that of the servant of the soil, who revolts violently against the ‘bosses’ on particular occasions, but is incapable of thinking himself part of a collective (the nation for the owners and the class for the proletarians) and of developing systematic action and permanent revolt to change the economic and political relations of social existence.” [1]

Even if Spain’s economy is not based mainly on agriculture anymore, Gramsci’s criticism against a “large ownership” that has remained “outside free competition” may be fairly applied to the contemporary monopoly of corporations.

Neo-liberalism introduced a naive vision of economy and finance: according to this, only a free, deregulated market could be the perfect remedy against the greediness of a corrupt, sickly bureaucratic State and allow the full expression of creativity together with the highest levels of production. However, neo-liberalism has proved to be a fake since the fair competition that it glorifies is actually replaced by the market’s domination by a plutocracy of corporations. The gap between unemployed workers and the corporate power that exploits them reminds us exactly of the “feudal” system condemned by Gramsci.

Furthermore, even if his analysis seems to be too severe towards peasants, there is another aspect of it that is worth pointing out: the idea that “natural categories” superpose themselves to economic and political institutions.

However, in an article published by New Politics in 1986, Murray Bookchin insists on the same idea: [2]

“Above all, Spain was a land in which cultures were in dramatic transition between town and country, feudalism and capitalism—a nostalgic world that looked back to a past of aristocratic supremacy and forward to a future of plebeian egalitarianism that found its most radical form in a huge anarchosyndicalist movement. What made the Spanish working class so uniquely revolutionary, in my view, was its well-rooted ancestry in the countryside—in a relatively slow-paced, organic agrarian world that clashed sharply with the highly rationalized, mechanized industrial world of the cities. [...]

“The intensity of this force-field was heightened by a Spanish heritage of strong sociability: urban barrios were actually intimate villages within the city, knitted together by cafes, community centers and union halls and energized by a vital outdoor public life that stood at sharp variance with the aristocratic mythos of the Spanish past and the hated Church which had abdicated all claims to public service. The elite classes of the country, so completely divorced from those who worked for them, were highly protective of the privileges conferred upon them by pedigree, status, and landed wealth, which often produced fissures as bourgeois parvenus began to enter a social terrain guarded for centuries by tradition and history.

“Accordingly, one always “belonged” in a deeply social, cultural, regional, class, and economic sense—whether it was to a part of Spain, to a hierarchy, a caste, a clan, an institution (be it the army or a union), and finally, to a neighborhood, village, town, city, and province, precisely in that order of loyalty.” [3]

Has the mentality in Spain changed from this description? We doubt it. The paragraph cited above seems still terribly current, and it is maybe this very same lack of unity between classes—in a country where social differences are still strikingly marked, and people are united in clans more than in a unitary movement fighting for the common good—that obstructs the formulation of revolutionary thought that could bring to effective action.

Political castration

On May 10, the Spanish conservative government partly nationalized the country’s fourth-largest bank, Bankia, raising anger in the exploited population.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy tried to make people believe the old fairy tale according to which rescuing banks means saving economy and jobs because it is the banks that allow the flow of the money needed to finance the new (and old) enterprises that give jobs to the people.

That’s false. Unemployment can be eliminated only by planning a complete renovation of the job market, creating new jobs in sectors that are not controlled by the banks, which are prone to serve their own interests instead of those of the people and the national economy; a renovation in which national economic planning is not racketed by the international global finance anymore, forbidding at last the monopolistic power of corporations to dictate their will over the state economy and politics. This is what was done in Iceland—nothing more, nothing less (it’s not a coincidence that the mainstream media—a true Orwellian tool of propaganda—never mentions this example: it would be too easy to imitate it and dismantle the monopoly of Capital). Also, unemployment can be gotten rid of by helping little businesses to start, not fat cats to eat them.

From a Freudo-Marxist point of view, we could explain the present state of things like this: Capital has been able to stifle our courage, to deform our idea of revolution into one of endless manifestations that end up into either police repression or a self-inhibiting farce.

By setting himself as the archetypical Father of the present cultural hegemonic climate [4]—I’m borrowing Antonio Gramsci’s terminology—Capitalism generates a schizophrenia in the psyche of the dominated classes: on the one hand, it awakens in the oppressed an Oedipal drive surging from the lack of power interiorized as the Lacanian “manque” or lack of Phallus; on the other hand, it stifles the Oedipal demands forcing them into obedience and submission. But the worst aspect of this psychosocial exercise of violence is the fact that, as in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the archetypical Father has succeeded in taming our drives for freedom and dignity by making us introject the archetype itself and by making us believe that we love it, that it deserves respect, that in spite of all its defects it is the best ruler (Father) for all [5] so that we might not dare to stop it and return the violence it inflicts to us by trampling our basic rights.

The call for empowering the social Oedipal drive for justice—in order to overcome it and make justice triumph—appears insane to the present cultural hegemonic political correctness, not only because it offends the bourgeois puritanism, but because it is the only force that can blow on the embers of our claims, whose vitality is frozen by the capitalist system. Instead of living inside Orwell’s 1984, maybe we should start living inside another masterwork, Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. It would seem odd to cite such a book in an article about politics; however, in the plot of Flaubert’s masterpiece, it is right when Frédéric understands that his desperate, incestuous longing for Madame Arnoux—a maternal figure, an archetype of the Mother, the symbol of a freedom impossible to reach both because of social restrictions and because of the introjected auto-censure—leads to nothing that he suddenly gets involved in the political turmoil that surrounds him and that he refused to see: it is then that he develops a political conscience, that his private, self-centered longing becomes a political commitment, an active engagement in the fight for a better society. In this evolution lies the meaning of the “education” mentioned by the title.

Anthropologically, the horror for incest is usually explained as the need for a society to get out of its most narrow borders, to expand and not to be clustered in a clan. If Spanish people want to develop a successful, revolutionary, alternative movement that will be able to cut the tie with which the political and economic élite is strangling them, they must make their Oedipal side grow into a broader conscience that is not the one of a clan:a social, regional, class clan. If they won’t take this step, not only won’t they be able to perform a modern attempt—after the one made in the 1930s—to put an end to their unconsciously feudal mentality, [6] but also, even if they succeeded, they would be easily trampled by another pro-Capital reaction (e.g.: another military coup, maybe financed by the very same Capital) as they were once trampled by Franco’s armies thanks to the divisions between a mature anarchism and Stalinist Communism that caused the triumph of Fascism by insisting on the idea that true Communism may arise only through the tensions caused by the birth of a bourgeois class and after an initial alliance with social democratic forces.

Spain can be rescued only by a revolutionary movement—which is absent from the Spanish political scene at the moment—that will be able to kill the Oedipal collective conscience and assemble the people in an unitary reality.

There’s no revolution, there’s no drive for freedom without the drive for the liberation of the Self which engages itself in a struggle that is stifled by a patriarchal, infantilizing  bourgeois repression of the Self inherited by Capitalism from the Protestant work ethics according to which production is the fetish, and wealth is the oracle that speaks of the benevolence that another archetypal Father—a bizarre idea of God—bestows upon the sons he chooses wantonly, predestining them to salvation and giving them wealth as a material evidence of his favor.

No matter whether we work under servile conditions of exploitation, on the proletarian or middle class side, or if we make money trampling the Other, on the capitalistic side: the more we produce, the more we may expect this castrating, supernatural, imaginary Father to give us the eternal glory and free us from hell. It’s too bad that, for the majority of the work force, hell is on earth.

An objection could arise: that is, today we live in lay societies where religious freedom apparently ousted this conception of the divine. However, the shell is gone but the core is there: ancestral archetypes tend to survive inside our psyches under new unconscious shapes. So, according this former-Calvinistic Weltanschauung—that during the industrial revolution was propagated from its Anglo-Saxon cradle to the whole Western world— if you are not rich you have no rights to claim that you’re being exploited because the real reason for your misery is actually proof of the fact that the archetypal Father (here metaphysics blends into politics) doesn’t love you, because you’re unworthy—thence your learned helplessness that throws you in a descending spiral; but you might not dare to defy him, unless you want to be a Promethean Sinner and be justly trampled.

In the context of the Occupy movement in Madrid, the protesters gathered into assemblies that didn’t define a common set of values or a strategy and didn’t dare to take any decision without unanimity, quite in a Maoist fashion.

However, revolution is not unanimity. Revolution means picking up something: human dignity in the shape of the right of a people to be free and express freedom through life and work without being bound into financial slavery. Revolution is the “negative” moment in Hegelian dialectic. It has nothing to do with a fair behavior, with a sheepish obedience to oppressive forces. Revolution is not politically correct, it might not be, but Spanish people, as much as all the other European and Western peoples, are too far from understanding it since Capitalism has been able to melt class divisions into a (presently not so much) fat-bellied, emasculated, superficial quietism. Class stratification, that in Spain is more neat than in many other Western countries, doesn’t translate into class conscience and into a purifying longing for freedom arising from below. Until people have their panem et circenses, they will accept their slavery as a fair rule of the socioeconomic play.

Revolution means to have the courage of truth and pursue freedom, go for it without fears and false compromises. Paraphrasing the Hungarian writer Ferenc Karinthy, [7] revolution is inherently subversive as it subverts the traditional social relations between the exploited people and the exploiter caste. Revolution is inherently violent because it means to recognize the violence that is exerted upon us. It is as violent as love: love for social justice, love for freedom, love for human dignity. Let us kill our Oedipal introjected censures and claim ourselves for the rise and triumph of this “violence” that is so feared by bourgeois morality.

Editor’s Note: All photographs by The Global Movement.

References

[1] Antonio Gramsci, “Lo sviluppo della rivoluzione,” in Ordine Nuovo, September 13, 1919. Available online in English with the title “Workers and Peasants” at http://marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1919/08/workers-peasants.htm

[2] Who, by the way, contests the fact that Spanish economy in the 1930 was mainly based on agriculture, presenting statistics which tend to demonstrate that a solid industrial sector was already born and rapidly growing.

[3] Murray Bookchin, “The Spanish Civil War, 1936,” in New Politics, n.1, Summer 1986. Available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/bookchin/1985/12/spanish-civil-war.htm

[4] According to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, “cultural hegemony” is the dominance exerted by a ruling class over the others when its ideas appear to be universal norms perceived to benefit everyone whilst they only really benefit the hegemonic social group.

[5] We may synthesize the core message of the present capitalistic cultural hegemony with the words of Rahul Varman: “While the global economy is mired in ever-deepening crisis, there is no abatement in the propaganda rationalizing free markets and perfect competition. In the world of ‘perfect competition’ governed by the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces, no single actor (or even a combination of a few) is in a position to influence the market equilibrium, and prices are determined by the balance of demand and supply. This is a win-win world, where actors have sufficient information for arriving at their respective choices, consumers are free to make the correct decisions, and this self-governing system leads to progressively increasing welfare for all. Further, such competitive forces are expected to result in optimal allocation of investments, an equitable distribution of returns to capital and labor, and the highest levels of productive efficiency and technological development. In this mythological world, there is also a hell, whose name is monopoly or oligopoly, the exact opposite of perfect competition, where a few sellers or producers distort the markets and generate inefficiency, monopoly profits, and compromise consumer choice. In other words, in the world dominated by oligopoly, producers are not ‘price takers’ but ‘price makers.’

“The only difficulty with this mythology is that, while we are constantly told that the world is increasingly being governed by competition and market forces, the real world of business and industry is moving rapidly away from such free competition, as concentration, domination, and control of most economic activities has become common place. The public might assume that the rivalry between Coke and Pepsi or Apple and IBM means that there is market competition, but in neoclassical economic theory, the fact that these companies are ‘price makers’ means that there is monopoly and not competition. It might be that perfectly competitive markets will provide answers for all of our ills, but in the real world, there is an absence of ‘free markets,’ with market rigging and failure everywhere in the economy.” (Rahul Varman, “The Neoclassical Apology for Monopoly Capital”, Monthly Review, volume 64, issue 6, November 2012).

[6] Today it is Capital that plays the role of the landlord.

[7] “Love is inherently subversive,” wrote Karinthy in his dystopian novel Metropole, Telegram Books: 2008.

The facts

As a measure of austerity supposedly meant to rescue Spanish economy, stifled by the debt and by a deep recession, on July 10, 2012, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced a set of public spending cuts and tax increases amounting to €65 billion in two years and a half. The cuts are affecting key sectors like education and health service; the tax increase is boosting the prices of food, medicines, transport, and leisure. The retirement age will be extended as many are forced to retire earlier.

The day after the introduction of the austerity measures, an outburst of indignation shook the country. Thousands of citizens marched through the streets of its main cities: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, Pamplona, Seville, Málaga. In spite of the efforts made by a criminal police repression to label the protesters as violent criminals, actually a huge number of them were public sector workers, retired people, teachers, health workers, cultural activists, “rebel” policemen and firemen who do not stand by the side of an abusive government. The protests targeted the huge sacrifices imposed on the people who are already facing an unsustainable situation, with wages that are among the lowest in Europe and an unemployment rate that exceeds 25 percent of the total work force — over 50 percent of the youth. The unemployed also suffered the consequences of these cutbacks since even the subsidies they receive were reduced.

Many of the manifestations turned into violent riots, feeding fears about the opening of a new era of political unrest and turmoil until maybe another civil war will ensue. However, as will be pointed out in the next paragraphs, Capitalism has learned how to maintain people in a state of submission and precariousness, preventing them from falling beneath the critical level below which they would be classified as poor, as proletarians, and strive to get out from their low status and take their rights back. That would be the end since, as the Capital learned both from history and from Marx’s works, revolution is done by empty bellies. However, capitalism has been able to establish a political system in which a fake democracy gives the people the illusion of choosing between a left- and a right-wing candidate: both of them proposing impossible things during their campaigns. Once elected, independently from their faction, these politicians do nothing to boost the economy but feed the chests of those very same institution that are strangling it and benefiting from recession. They rescue the banks that triggered the crisis, profiting of the neoliberal wave of deregulation which allowed them to offer great loans at huge interest rates to people who — as they perfectly knew — would not be able to repay them. Those people are returning to the banks their properties after they paid part of the mortgage, and they still have to pay the rest of the debt.

Learned helplessness

Renowned columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times, in the May 29, 2012 issue, published a brilliant article titled “Against Learned Helplessness”. [1]

The phenomenon of learned helplessness was discovered quite by chance by the American psychologist Martin Seligman in 1967 while he was analyzing animal behavior. He repeatedly exposed some animals to painful stimuli without giving them the opportunity to avoid them. When the animals were given the opportunity to escape to a safe zone, they did nothing but stay where they were, whine and offer a passive resistance. In a similar way — Seligman found out later — when human beings are submitted for too much time to adverse situations, they tend to lose the ability to manage them: instead of reacting, they are paralyzed by the sensation that they cannot do nothing — believing themselves to be ineffective or unworthy — and develop a depressive state.

The concept of learned helplessness was recently applied to unemployed people who, after a huge number of useless efforts to find a job, get discouraged and start attributing their failure to their own faults instead of the perverse dynamics of an economic system that ignores them and their needs; an economic system — as we’re going to demonstrate — that is even capable to exploit high unemployment rates to bolster macroeconomics’ obscure mechanisms instead of offering adequate job opportunities.

The governments of the contemporary Western world, accomplices to these vile strategies, justify their inability (actually, their lack of will) to tackle the issue of unemployment by putting the blame exactly on the arcane synergies of globalized markets.

Almost 14 million Americans are jobless; more than one on four Spaniards are out of work. However, ‘on both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus has emerged among movers and shakers that nothing can or should be done about jobs. Instead of a determination to do something about the ongoing suffering and economic waste, one sees a proliferation of excuses for inaction, garbed in the language of wisdom and responsibility,’ [1] writes Krugman.

And while the governments’ learned helplessness is functional to its inactivity, people’s learned helplessness is the result of a painful situation cynically exploited by capitalism.

As Michael Perelman states in an excellent article appeared on the April 2012 issue of the Monthly Review, “A recent study […] concluded that ‘a baseless fear of full employment,’ rather than the prevention of inflation, was the guiding principal of the Federal Reserve. The conclusion of this study should come as little surprise to people familiar with the Federal Reserve’s obsession with the danger of high wages.

“Defenders of such policies justify the temporary restriction of job creation, contending that the Federal Reserve is merely trying to curb excessive growth. According to this school of thought, the Federal Reserve is simply preventing the kind of excesses that lead to severe recessions or depressions. Slowing down growth today may be necessary to provide for a higher sustainable growth rate in the future. […]

“In fact, according to a study by the Bank for International Settlements, slowdowns actually seem to diminish, rather than promote, long-term growth.” [2]

The exploitation of unemployment to weaken workers’ power of negotiation was cynically theorized by John Maynard Keynes in 1925: “the object of credit restriction […] is to withdraw from employers the financial means to employ labour at the existing level of wages and prices. The policy can only attain its end by intensifying unemployment without limit, until the workers are ready to accept the necessary reduction of money wages under the pressure of hard facts.” [3]

As we can see, indeed finance has a subtle way to induce workers to accept a worst, unjust economic treatment: it puts them in the condition of developing learned helplessness since they make useless attempts to find a job for months, even years: they will be prone to every abuse by their employers. Nobody knows it better than the Spanish people: the Capital has all the interest in maintaining “a level of unemployment high enough to keep workers fearful of losing their jobs.” [2]

Perelman’s article also offers an amazing description of learned helplessness applied to labor market: “Psychologists have found that people who have lost a limb are naturally unhappy about their condition, but, after a while, they return to their previous level of happiness. But the unemployed do not.” [2]

Richard Layard, a highly respected British economist, recently highlighted: “it hurts as much after one or two years of unemployment as it does at the beginning. In that sense you do not habituate to it […]. And even when you are back at work, you still feel its effects as a psychological scar.” [4]

Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has even introduced—exalting it!—the concept of “traumatized worker” as an employed worker who dreads the possibility of being sacked and remaining trapped in the gloomy net of unemployment.

To summarize: a high unemployment rate tames workers, who are scared of losing their jobs, never finding another one. Moreover, workers know well enough that, in the present economical downturn, if ever they find a new job after quitting the present, it will unlikely be an equally desirable one: they are exposed to a downward mobility.

This state of things offers still another advantage to the Capital: “while one might expect that lower wages would cut into consumer demand, according to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, ‘people use consumer purchases to compensate for psychological states of insecurity.’” [2]

More debt, more unemployment, more psychologically hurt people, lower wages and more consumerism, a further enrichment of the upper class — the capitalistic élite — and so on, in a maddened spiral.

This climate of learned helplessness caused by the crisis of the labor market is also evoked by Noam Chomsky in an article appeared on May 8th, 2012 in the online newspaper Salon.com. [5] The American linguist and philosopher states that, while the economy produced real “things” that people needed to use; while manufacture and industry still had high production rates, unemployed working people could reasonably anticipate that jobs would come back.

Before the 1970s, growth had been considerable and steady, and the economic system was quite egalitarian: “Banks were banks,” says Chomsky. “They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.” However, “When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: Deindustrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions. [… I]n the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy.

“The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. […]

“Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation.” [5]

So, while in America, in Spain, and in all the Western world the majority of population — the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement — strives to get by through “longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent house bubble,” [5] the wealth concentrates in the hands of the top tenth of one percent: it is this oligarchy that controls the political system.

The very same Alan Greenspan explained the success of the economy he was supervising in 1997 by telling that it was “based substantially on what he called ‘growing worker insecurity.’ If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a ‘healthy’ economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.” [5]

The madness of neo-liberalism

Unemployment and low wages also function to maintaining inflation rates low since they imply that there is less money circulating: which keeps the currency value high, favoring global corporations’ interests in the international markets. However, they also cause the withering of small and medium enterprises, that have traditionally been the main motors of Spain’s economy.

The last figures released by the government are appalling: by the month of October, 128,000 more people joined the sad army of the unemployed; the jobless rate rose above 25 percent for the first time in modern Spanish history. Youth unemployment rose above 52 percent, more than triple the average of the developed world. In five of nineteen Spanish regions, the unemployment rate exceeds 30 percent — more than that of the Gaza Strip. Ten per cent — 1.7 million — of households nationwide have all their members out of work.

There are only two safety nets that alleviate this socioeconomic distress: the black economy, that accounts for 25 per cent of the nation’s output, and family networks. The young generation often lives with the parents and from their pension. However, even these nets are tearing: every day it gets more difficult to make ends meet.

As if this were not sad enough, the economists forecast a further shrinking of the Spanish economy and more job losses in the immediate future.

Are we allowed to state that Capitalism is losing control over the situation it created? Unemployment in Spain has surpassed the “physiological” level required by the cynical capitalistic financial strategies; incomes are now below the emergency level and the people have apparently no more reasons to surrender to a system that exploits and abandons them since the safety valves that were offered are now exploding; even the above mentioned learned helplessness risks to be soon replaced by a more active and aggressive reaction since those who have been submitted to it will soon need to face not only a socioeconomic humiliation but also — may we name it? — hunger.

So, is the Spanish crisis a fertile terrain for a revolution? Are the times ripe for a new civil war? To answer this question, we must trace a parallel with the savage butchery that ravaged the Iberian country in the 1930s.

In the second part of the article, the author, A. Marcantonio draws a parallel between the present Spanish context and the events that dragged Spain into a Civil War in the 1930s. After pointing out the analogies and differences between the two historical periods, he gives a Freudo-Marxist assessment of the contemporary situation and predicts a future in which Spanish people could rally and finally opt for revolution, overcoming all the class and clan divisions that had previously permitted the triumph of Fascism.

References

[1] Paul Krugman, “Against Learned Helplessness,” New York Times, May 29, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/opinion/30krugman.html?_r=0

[2] Michael Perelman, “Sado-Monetarism. The Role of the Federal Reserve System in Keeping Wages Low,” Monthly Review, volume 63, issue 11, April 2012. http://monthlyreview.org/2012/04/01/sado-monetarism#en1

[3] John Maynard Keynes, “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill (1925),” in Essays in Persuasion, vol. 9: The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes, ed. Donald Moggridge (London: Macmillan, 1972), 218.

[4] Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 67.

[5] Noam Chomsky, “Jobs aren’t coming back,” Salon.com, May 8, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/05/08/chomsky_jobs_arent_coming_back/