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Re: How Bad it Is
Posted:
Jun 1, 2012 2:55 PM
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On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Haim <hpipik@netzero.com> wrote:
<< snip >>
> There you go. And, if anyone is outraged by the length and nature of my little essay, they should blame you :)
>
I read Haim's essay with no sense of outrage (other than the fact that
anti-semitism is outrageously dumb and silly, which doesn't mean some
rabbis aren't a source of reprehensible teachings -- some are, imams
too).
Where I think a lot of USAers come from is thinking the USA was
flirting with socialism most directly under the auspices of FDR's New
Deal, and that all those projects like WPA (Work Projects
Administration) and CCC (Civilian Conservation Core) were the
beginnings of socialism in this country.
It is partly for this reason that Wall Street capitalists colluded and
approached Gen. Smedley Butler about assuming the commander in chief
role, if something bad were to happen to FDR (could be arranged).
Gen. Bulter blew the whistle and told Congress, an embarrassment,
because these capitalists also bankrolled many a political campaign.
Lookup "Business Plot" in Wikipedia.
Likewise, the Eugenics movement, which had a specific willingness to
pick on Jews as a "race", was being bankrolled in the US big time.
Henry Ford Sr. was a signer on, having become wealthy from his car
making and wanting to make a difference. He made the newspaper in
Dearborn MI publish his rants, and before long Jews were thinking
twice before buying a Ford.
Fortunately, Ford eventually realized that he had developed garbage
views (an occupational hazard if you don't study history much, and he
hadn't had the time) and he retreated from his indefensible positions.
Hitler was nonplussed (upset) as he'd been counting on Ford as a
serious ally. But then plenty of other wealthy people were willing to
fund Eugenics and Nazi projects in particular (they seemed able to do
more human subjects experiments), ---- the leading pseudo-science of
the day (they were looking for "essence of Aryan" in bodily fluids and
other Dr. Strangelove nonsense).
So you have the New Deal and then you have what was happening in Spain
and other places, where workers were glomming together and starting to
run things more themselves. There was a large co-op movement.
Workers were thinking in terms of owning more of the tools of
production (collectively) i.e. were thinking more like shareholders.
One could say capitalism has room for all this on paper, in the form
of worker owned companies and so on, but the Spanish Civil War was
mostly cast as a fight between activist workers using democratic
processes (think of Occupy), and the fascist aerial bombers (Hitler
and Mussolini -- think weaponized drones of today), who came in and
reversed all the reforms, not wanting workers to succeed in this way.
They had other plans for more top down control.
Ernest Hemingway was watching all this, along with other Americans and
UKers, many of whom had gone to the front to support the Spanish
democrats.
Hemingway narrated a film about the vicious onslaught of fascism and
showed it in the White House to the Roosevelts.
The Roosevelts could see war with Hilter coming (as could pacifist
Bertrand Russell -- see Logicomix), but Wall Street was still thinking
of him as their ally, and Mussolini was being published in Saturday
Evening Post, with plenty of accolades.
There's something of ancient Imperial Rome in the breast of the
manifest-destiny USAer (and UKer), that wants a Fourth Reich (given
the Germans blew it) and puppets Washington DC to those ends even unto
our own time.
Another interesting character was Ho Chi Minh (also Gen. Aung San in
Burma, but for another day). Muhammad Ali was sad to not meet the
guy.
Fighting the Japanese during the WW2 chapter meant working closely
with the Vietnamese liberation movement, the nationalists, who wanted
something more like a Jeffersonian democracy, out from under the thumb
of the French. A fair number of OSS were operative in Hanoi, plus
there was "quiet American" Gen. Lansdale with a history of
psycho-guerrilla warfare in the Philippines as well (shades of Smedley
Butler). Many in the OSS (later renamed CIA) were happy enough with
Ho's planning and leadership.
When the Dulles brothers came to power and the US suddenly "switched
sides" (helping to rebuild Japan and Germany while agreeing with the
French they could keep their colony in Indochina), not all of the
intelligence community switched sides in unison. You got the
phenomenon of the "Americong" some have called them, who continued to
support the nationalist agenda of "Our Ho" (as one novel about this
period is entitled -- by a political conservative they tell me (I've
not read it yet, maybe wait for the movie)).
Making the Russians be the bad guys all of a sudden, after working
with them against fascism, also seemed like a betrayal to more than a
few people, which probably has something to do with Gary Powers
showing up on Russian television and embarrassing the heck out of
Eisenhower and his more amateur crew (read Col. F. Prouty on the U2
incident for more insights).
I give all this history because I think in the election of the Obamas
last time, there was a public yearning for more of an FDR like
Renaissance, where the government did more WPA and CCC like stuff.
The growth in military spending was seen as more hijacking by Business
Plot fascists, who just want to feather their own nests with war
contracts, USAers be damned. It's the same group that wanted Gen.
Butler to be the figurehead, except as it turned out, they got a
succession of presidents who made it easier to be "bad" (as in
greedy), with "terrorism" replacing "communism" as the new bugaboo.
Today, we have Occupy somewhat in the role of the Bonus Army of 1932,
as it includes lots of vets back from the Business Plot wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. They're doing a lot of what Viet Nam era vets did as
well, which is to call into questions the policies of the federal
government in Washington DC.
In today's multi-polar world, one of the net effects is that WDC is
demoted to "just one more town" and the various states start to
develop their own foreign policies (trade relations). They also go
their own way on the Drug Wars, with "she flies with her own wings"
Oregon (in cahoots with California and others) openly flaunting the
Feds authority to continue Prohibition, and also pushing back against
"anti-terrorism" that tends to be fascism in disguise at least some of
the time. Immigration policy is another dividing line, where the Feds
are sometimes ignored.
Here in Portland, PSU has contracts with Intel to help with the
training of personnel from Viet Nam who will be working for Intel in
Ho Chi Minh city. We have pretty good relations with China thanks to
Northwest Regional China Council (a former client -- may have changed
its name). We're economically part of Asia.
Haim says I'm not entitled to think of myself as Asian for irrelevant
"racial" (i.e. genetic) reasons, but that's where we part company. I
couldn't do coherent ethnography the way I do were I to buy into the
"race" concept most people use. It's rickety, based in
pseudo-science, and being phased out, though words like "white" and
"black" are not without meaning, even in a medical context (that
doesn't point to "races" being real, it points to demographics being
real, and statistical correlations between genetic markers (which
don't need to add up to "races" to be significant)).
Anyway, it'd be interesting to see how Haim's analysis, continuing
from where he left off, informs his History of the Education Mafia in
the USA. That might prove enlightening.
Kirby
> Haim
> Shovel ready? What shovel ready?
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