If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again . . . there need be no unemployment. . . . It would indeed be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.(p.129)

History provides the lesson that spending government resources on socially useful projects was not an activity that would guarantee ruling class power and privilege. Unlike investment spending, government spending must not add to the capital stock, which would diminish the wealth and the power of the rulers.

Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of many by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages build cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.(p.131)

What has the American government substituted for the pyramids of Egypt and the cathedrals of the Middle Ages? American economist Robert Heilbroner answered this question in his book, The Future as History (1960) :

A central aspect of our growth experience of the past two decades is one which few spokesmen for the future candidly discuss. This is the fact that our great boom did not begin until the onset of World War II, and that its continuance since then has constantly been tied to a military rather than to a purely civilian economic demand.(p.133)

Military production, including war, is the tested and true method in modern times to mobilize non-productive labor with massive government spending in a way that political order can be preserved in the capitalist economic cycle of "bust-and-boom," without restricting investment opportunities for the owners of capital, whose religious commitment, as we know, is attached to the PRIVATE PROFIT MOTIVE.


Colonization and the spoils of war.

In his book, Man and Woman, War and Peace (1987), Anthony Wilden writes about diverse strategies for human liberation and the different tactics they require.

We know from the experience of millions upon millions of subjugated peoples –untouchables, Africans, blacks, Hispanics, Jamaicans, Filipinos, Catholic Irish, Indians, Chicanos, and others­- that colonization cannot exist without the active (if only partly conscious) support of most of the colonized who suffer under it. Similarly, male supremacy cannot exist without the active (if only partly conscious) support of most of the women it oppresses.

Although the role of armed force and physical fear in colonization is not to be neglected, the secret of colonization does not lie simply in the physical power of the colonizer to force the colonized to accept the pain, humiliation, and degradation of their inferior position. Force alone is not enough; it must be supported by an ideology that proclaims the superiority of the colonizer over the colonized.

But again, it is not enough for the colonizers alone to believe the myth of their God-given, “natural,” innate, and hereditary superiority; the colonized must be taught to believe it too, and just as fervently, if nor more so.

The reason is that if the colonized were not taught from birth to death to collaborate in their open oppression, physical force alone could not be guaranteed to quell the mutinies, revolts, and rebellions that would result.

The colonizer must control and conceal the strategy of colonization. The colonized must be taught to respond to this strategy, not by a countervailing strategy, but by a variety of tactical behavior that serves to maintain and reinforce it.

The colonized must come to believe that they are with few exceptions exactly what their colonizers say they are: stupid, lazy, inferior, deceitful, promiscuous, unfaithful, selfish, ignorant, greedy, dirty, “uncivilized,” savage, barbaric, violent, “primitive,” “animalistic,” and even the essence of evil itself.

In this way the colonizer not only controls the economic, social, and political life of the colonized, but he also controls their sense of identity as well –and with that, their self-esteem, the most important of personal values. The colonizer so convinces the colonized of their inferiority that they come to think, act, and live out their lives as if they really were inferior.

In Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (1975, p.247), Anne Summers writes:

Divide and rule is the technique employed by the colonizing powers
to ensure the allegiance of a strategic majority of the colonized, to
convince them that colonization is beneficial to them, and to persuade
them to collaborate in the task of pacifying or punishing the more
recalcitrant of their sex who refuse to accede to the demands of the
invaders.

By encouraging divisions among the colonized, and by allowing privileges to the favoured group of hated collaborators,

The colonizing power is able to prevent the colonized from forming
a united opposition and from refusing to perform the labor required
of them by the invaders.

The respective roles of the Damned Whores and God’s Police in Australian history are summed up in two quotations at the beginning of Summers’ book.

On sighting the Lady Juliana coming into Sydney Harbor in June 1790 with over two hundred female convicts aboard, Lt Ralph Clark exclaimed:

No, no –surely not! My God –not more of those damned whores!
Never have I known worse women.

In 1847, in Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered, Caroline Chisholm wrote:

If Her Majesty’s Government be really desirous of seeing a well-
conducted community spring up in these Colonies, the social
wants of the people must be considered. . . . For all the clergy you
can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches
you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much
good, without what a gentleman in that Colony very appropriately
called “God’s police” –wives, and little children­good and virtuous
women.

Once again the women’s choice is either wickedness or virtue.

I argued in The Imaginary Canadian in 1980 that colonization is the common principle underlying most if not all kinds of oppression, and especially oppression by class, race, and sex. Summers, whose book I came across more recently, shows why colonization is such a useful explanatory principle in the case of the oppression and exploitation of women. She summarizes the “classic colonial situation” (p.198) as follow:

1.       the invasion and conquest of a territory
2.       the cultural domination of its inhabitants
3.       the control of the territory’s inhabitants by setting them at each others’
             throats (divide and rule)
4.       the extraction of profits from the colonized territory

Colonization also requires the more or less violent destruction of the original inhabitants’ culture and way of life, damping potential revolt and forcing or persuading them to believe that their culture is inferior and that they should adopt that of the colonizing power. Every ideological weapon is brought into play, whether it be associated with religion, health care, philanthropy, treaties, commercial exchanges, or the “civilizing mission” of the invaders as they seek to pacify the colonized and convince them that their colonization is for their own good.

Using the term “colonization” to describe the situation of women ceases to be a metaphor, says Summers (p. 200), once it is recognized that in the case of women the conquered colonial territory is the body:
 
Women are colonized by being denied control over their own bodies.
 
We have already seen from Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975) that over and over again in cases of rape –notably in the rape, mutilation, and murder of captured enemy women, but also in the assault and humiliation of women by the typical police blotter rapist­the woman’s body is being used as a message in the discourse of the Other.

We saw also from the young paratrooper’s account in St Michael and the Dragon (1961) that eclectic torture by the French in Algeria became the ultimate invasion of the body, the universal act of rape, the forcible entry of agony at every bodily orifice, at every nerve.

Looking now at Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 268 of the Grove Press translation by Constance Farrington, where Fanon (1925-1961), the black psychoanalyst and radical political philosopher from Martinique, recounts his obligation as a therapist to treat not only Algerians surviving torture during the war of independence (1954-62) he supported, but also the mental and emotional problems of the Frenchmen doing the torturing, we find the following account by a 30-year-old European police inspector who had begun to threaten people who crossed him and cruelly assaulted his wife and children in “fits of madness”:

The fact is that nowadays we have to work like troopers. . . . The thing that
kills me most is the torture. You don't know what that is, do you? Sometimes
I torture people for ten hours as a stretch. . . . You may not realize, but it’s
very tiring.

It is true, continues the inspector, that he and others take turns, but the question is to know when to let the next man have a go. No one wants to go to all the trouble of softening up a subject and ten have him “come” in the hands of someone else, who would then get all the glory.

Our problem is as follows: are you able to make this fellow talk? It’s a question
of personal success. You see, we’re competing with the others. In the end your
fists are ruined. So you call in the Senegalese. But either they hit too hard and
destroy the creature or else they don't hit hard enough and it’s no good (p.269)

Torture is gang rape taken to its pathological conclusion. The torturers are competing with each other over who has control of the victims’ bodies and what they do with them. Here again someone’s body is being used as a medium of communication between men, as a channel of the discourse of the Other.

 You have to be “intelligent” to make a success of this kind of work, explains the inspector, you have to have a flair for it. Above all, he explains,

what you mustn't do is to give a chap the impression that he won't get away
alive from you. Because then he wonders what’s the use of talking if it won't
save his life. . . . He must go on hoping; hope’s the thing that'll make him talk.

Once he talks, however, the French have no more use for him and usually kill him anyway.

The inspector could not see his way to stop torturing people –he would have to resign. So he asked Fanon straight out “to help him go on torturing Algerian patriots without any prickings of conscience, without any behavior problems, and with complete equanimity” (pp.269-70).

It suddenly dawns on me, long after the event, that the theme of the body as the discourse of the Other is the theme of Franz Kafka’s parable In the Penal Colony, written in 1914 and published in 1919. Prisoners in the colony are slowly put to death by an apparatus whose vibrating needles write their sentence in the flesh over and over again and ever deeper: “Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow. This prisoner, for instance” –the officer indicated the man­ “will have written on his body: HONOR THY SUPERIORS!”(pp.207-214)

Some 40 years ago, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published their classic work, Monopoy Capital (1968). In this important synthesis of radical critiques of modern capitalist formations, they described the function of racism and sexism in supporting capitalist political control of American society. They asked their readers to

consider first the private interests which benefit from the existence of a Negro [and Female] subproletariat. (a) Employers benefit from divisions in the labor force which enable them to play one group off against another, thus weakening all . . . . (b) Owners of ghetto real estate are able to overcrowd and overcharge. (c) Middle and upper income groups benefit from having at their disposal a large supply of cheap domestic labor. (d) Many small marginal businesses, especially in the service of trades, can operate profitably only if cheap labor is available to them. (e) White workers benefit by being protected from Negro competition for the more desirable and higher paying jobs.(pp.263-264)

In addition to increased profits, the authors pointed out that discrimination increases social stability in a capitalist economy. Social class structure is edified by the dynamics of stratification, in which

each social group has a deep-rooted psychological need to compensate for feelings of inferiority and envy toward those above by feelings of superiority and contempt for those below. It thus happens that a special pariah group at the bottom acts as a kind of lightning rod for the frustrations and hostilities of all the higher groups, the more so the nearer they are to the bottom. It may even be said that the very existence of the pariah group is a kind of harmonizer and stabilizer of the social structure.(pp. 265-266)

Capitalism may not be the cause of racism, and sexism, but this mental colonization is perpetuated and intensified by capitalism because it serves a very valuable function. Capitalists may not be the principle perpetrators of these prejudices, but they are the main beneficiaries. The received ideas of inferior races and gender keep wages low, thereby increasing capitalist profits; but more importantly it strengthens the capitalist political control of institutions by weakening workers' strength when bargaining with employers.


The 7 items below offer CEIMSA readers a glimpse at the underside of capitalist growth today, where employment is connected to the spoils of war, and where ordinary people in all parts of the world find themselves colonized, living increasingly restricted lives, effectively dominated and objectified by the logic of their imperialist masters.

Item A., is a article sent to us by a retired Grenoble school teacher, on "The 50-Year War Plan" and more on Afghanistan that was recently published by The Nation magazine.

Item B., sent to us by Information Clearing House, is a short video on the realities of U.S. imperialist invasion of Afghanistan and its entirely predictable nationalist political consequences.

Item C. is an article covering the arrest and detention of Mohammad Othman, "Inside Israeli Jails," written by Jesse Rosenfeld, a Canadian freelance journalist working in Israel and the Occupied Territories since 2007, and currently based in Jaffa.

Item D., is an article on U.S.-Israeli relations --past, present and future-- wriiten by BBC reporter on the Middle East, Alan Hart.

Item E., is an article by John Pilger, who recently received the Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s international human rights award, and has written extensively on the genocidal politics still practiced in Australia today.

Item F. is an article by Uri Avnery which envisions future life in a post-nationalist Palestine, populated by Palestinians able to forgive the backward Israeli imperialists.

Item G. is a GRITtv broadcast of the October 2009 debate between Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights activist and founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), and George Fletcher, Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School author of Rethinking Criminal Law, at Columbia University on the question : Boycott Israel?


And finally, we conclude this CEIMSA Bulletin by offering readers a look at Paul Jay's remarkable news broadcast outlet,The Real News, and its coverage of . . .

Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research
Université Stendhal Grenoble 3
http://www.ceimsa.org/


___________________
A.
from Anonymous :
Date: 20 November 2009
Subject: The Nation magazine's coverage of the U.S.-led invation of Afghanistan.
http://www.thenation.com/

Francis,
The nov 30 issue of The Nation which I have just received today has an 
investigation "How the US funds the Taliban" by Aram Roston about 
military contractors bribing insurgents not to attack supply lies for 
US troops, which is the same story as the ne on Moveon which I read 
yesterday in the message you sent me. The Nation has an another 
article The fifty year war which recalls another article, "Kilcullen's 
Long War (an influential Pentagon strategist plans a 50 year 
counterinsurgency campaign) by Tom Hayden.