Category: Leftist theory

Who is winning the propaganda war? Billionaires are planning to pump some serious money into the narrative battle. Good luck to them, I guess, but perhaps the US – and satellites in UK, Canada, France & Germany – overemphasize narrative and information and underemphasize the material world. Vaclav Smil has pointed out that “recently fashionable claims about the dematerialization of modern economies dominated by services and miniaturized electronic devices” are misleading. The global food system and the entire industrial economy depends on fossil fuels. In his book How the World Really Works, Smil identifies the “four pillars of modern civilization”. They aren’t facebook, twitter, google, and amazon: they are ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics. 

This isn’t the main point of what I want to talk about tonight so I will give you this long quote about why these four pillars and move on:

“…only an impossibly complete recycling of all wastes voided by grazing animals could, together with near-perfect recycling of all other sources of organic nitrogen, provide the amount of nitrogen annually applied to crops in ammonia-based fertilizers. Meanwhile, there are no other materials that can rival the combination of malleability, durability, and light weight offered by many kinds of plastics. Similarly, even if we were able to produce identical masses of construction lumber or quarried stone, they could not equal the strength, versatility, and durability of reinforced concrete. We would be able to build pyramids and cathedrals but not elegant long spans of arched bridges, giant hydroelectric dams, multilane roads, or long airport runways. And steel has become so ubiquitous that its irreplaceable deployment determines our ability to extract energies, produce food, and shelter populations, as well as ensuring the extent and quality of all essential infrastructures: no metal could, even remotely, become its substitute.”

The material world also cannot be neglected in the question of war. States (or armed groups) go to war to try to change a status quo. They apply military pressure on their enemy to try to get that enemy to comply with something. I’ve talked about the different strategies at play in a previous post.

Israel has destroyed most of Gaza’s hospitals and is trying to close in and destroy the big hospital in Gaza City. They claim (a claim no one but diehard pro-Israel people believe) that the hospital is the “Hamas command center”. Since everybody knows the hospital isn’t a command center, we have to look for Israel’s real objective in applying so much military pressure to hospitals and gathering sites specifically, targeting the already wounded and children sheltering for safety. The idea is probably to try to show that Israel (and its western backers) have no limits (as Israelis have declared many times – see this compilation by Norman Finkelstein) in the hope that this will create enough terror to psychologically break the Palestinian Resistance (which Westerners call “Hamas”). If the Palestinians aren’t broken psychologically, the strategy fails.

This is a dynamic of warfare between settler states and Indigenous populations, guerrilla warfare, politics and strategy – topics we have covered before, including in the book Siegebreakers, and will cover again. 

Tonight though I want to talk about another aspect of modern warfare, which is that it involves the production of composite objects of plastic and metal run on fossil fuels (missiles, shells, bullets) and then blasted into people from other machines (planes, artillery pieces, various kinds of guns) to kill them. The production of these objects is a global effort of Western states and corporations that involves exploiting and destroying Indigenous lands, employing workers from many countries, passing through many logistical bottlenecks. 

Consider a metal, well below the four pillars in overall importance, but of central importance to warfare: aluminum. In their 2010 book Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel, Felix Padel and Samarendra Das reveal the entire web of connections from the destruction of the means of Indigenous survival at the point of extraction to the physical destruction of Indigenous people when the bombs are dropped. They cite Dewey Anderson’s 1951 pamphlet Aluminum for Defence and Prosperity, published by the US Public Affairs Institute. Anderson wrote that “Aluminum has become the most important single bulk material of modern warfare. No fighting is possible, and no war can be carried to a successful conclusion today, without using and destroying vast quantities of aluminum.” Aluminum “makes fighter and transport planes possible”, it is “needed in atomic weapons”… “yet aluminum is a scarce metal… government steps in for prolonged periods of time, determines how much aluminum there should be, expands production at government expense, and decides what part of the supply will be available for civilians.” 

Aluminum is an interesting metal because its production requires the raw material bauxite and copious amounts of electricity. Out of this Earth describes it in terms analogous to a mathematical equation: aluminum = bauxite + electricity. Bauxite is generally found in the Global South and on aboriginal lands: the biggest bauxite deposits in 2001 were 1 – Guinea, 2 -Australia, 3 – Brazil, 4 – India, 5 – Jamaica, 6 – China and in tonnage mined per year in 2007 the top 5 were Australia, China, Brazil, Guinea, India, and Jamaica.

But that’s bauxite – just one of the two inputs. When you look at production of aluminum, it’s a different story: the top 5 in 2008 were China, Russia, the US, Canada, and Australia. By 2022 it was China, India, Russia, Canada and the UAE (the US was 9th). Canadian production was once owned by Alcan, which was the Canadian subsidiary of the US Alcoa. Alcan was purchased by the British-Australian mining company Rio Tinto in 2007. Of course, the bauxite-producing countries get fleeced, with their bauxite selling at a fraction of the price of the finished aluminum – that’s the first increment of imperialist value transfer at work.

Why is Canada in the top 5 at all, if it doesn’t have bauxite? Canada found its way into this crucial network of the Western military-industrial complex because of its hydroelectric capacity (you guessed it – located on Indigenous land, “hydroelectric capacity” being another word for life-giving river ecosystems where First Nations civilizations thrived for centuries). 

BC and Quebec’s hydroelectricity is supplied cheaply to Rio Tinto and to Alcoa, one of numerous subsidies to the mining and military industries that keeps them profitable and that enables them to beautify the environment like this:

The electricity subsidy is another increment of value transfer, this time from Indigenous land to Global North corporations. 

The final increment is when the shiny aluminum is used to make warplanes and missiles. At that final step, we see another huge increment in private profits and an equally complete integration between Canada and US military industries. 

A 2016 article on Open Canada interviewing the peace institute Project Ploughshares described the “murky world of Canada’s arms manufacturing” and the Defence Production Sharing Agreement between Canada and the US, which “set up a special arrangement where military goods shipped between the U.S. and Canada are not required to go through the same system as everything else exported by the U.S. and do not require export permits by the Canadian government.” That’s why many of the top military producers in Canada on the Canadian Defence Review site are the same big US names: Lockheed Martin [Canada], Raytheon, General Dynamics [Canada], why you’ll see the same names on the Invest Ontario website. 

Industry Ontario: 

In the past month, organized by groups like World Beyond War, activists have done direct actions at companies like INKAS and L3 Harris. The organization has created a map of companies and their locations.

Once the global logistical chains of these murderous objects are revealed, it becomes almost overwhelming to decide on where to campaign. The above analysis for aluminum could be repeated for other basic materials, like white phosphorus – a particularly nasty chemical Israel’s army uses to burn kids in Gaza. Some quick research suggests that most of the phosphate used by the US is mined in Florida:

The environmental implications of phosphate mining are problematic, at least so the Washington Post found in 2021. 

Mines, manufacturing facilities, and administrative offices are spread all over the West. The materials are trucked, railed, and shipped all over the place before they reach their final sites of death and destruction. 

When majorities are organized, the whole murderous machinery could be halted by people simply putting their tools down in a general strike. Short of that, though, the leaders of direct actions in the West, Palestine Action, have argued for a sharp focus – theirs has been on Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons supplier.

I’ll leave it there, but just with a little step back to the idea of building toward strike actions – let me quote Boots Riley, who apparently has a show called I’m a Virgo. 

If stopping the genocide were entirely up to us, we would have to build up to this kind of people power. A movement that could take labor action and mass direct action to stop a genocide and then direct our labor to helping Palestinians rebuild every hospital, mosque, school, and house in Gaza more beautiful than before. 

To stop a genocide it’s worth being a voice in the wilderness, but with large and growing numbers come greater opportunities. 

Israel’s genocide is fully supported by the US, Canada, UK, France, and Germany – all mainstream political parties and major media endorse it and have publicly stated there are no red lines, no numbers of dead children, no amount of starvation or dehydration that would stop them from supporting Israel.

Florida State Representative Angie Nixon asked in Congress how many dead children would be enough. Republican Congresswoman Michelle Salzman shouted, “all of them.”

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is publishing editorial cartoons like this:

Combining racist caricature with genocidal incitement in an extraordinarily succinct piece of art. If there is a cartoon that summarizes the Western understanding of the world, this is it.

Tonight’s question is, what have these Western countries in the genocide bloc given up to support this open massacre?

For several centuries prior to the major decolonizations after WW2, the West offered one thing to the Global South: naked colonialism. The 2003 book Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races 1800-1930 shows how Western elites filled their literature with solemn warnings, sometimes sad, sometimes exultant, that Indigenous peoples around the world were destined to go extinct to make way for their white racial superiors.

This was a period when:

• White people would have picnics and watch lynchings in the US;

• Canada was using starvation to push the First Nations of what would become the country’s Western provinces on to tiny fractions of their land;

• Britain and France were conducting scorched-earth “punitive raids” all over Africa and the Middle East.

• Germany drove the people of Namibia into the desert to die of thirst, got them to surrender by promising them food aid, then shipping them to death camps, a genocide openly declared ahead of time.

When it became clear that the colonized were nonetheless not going to go extinct, were going to win their independence, and likely go communist or socialist, the West revised their offer – from naked colonialism to neocolonialism. The new offer was this:

1. Economic aid and loans for “development”, to enmesh the new governments into economic dependency on the West while keeping their all-important commodities and the products of their labor flowing to the rich countries. 

2. Weapons and training programs for the militaries (and police) of these newly independent countries, to ensure that the militaries would have direct, subordinate relationships with Western sponsors (and were not loyal to their own populations). 

3. A package of international law, human rights, nongovernmental organizations, elections claimed to be free and fair, free speech, and support for nonviolent struggle. 

Unlike the “authoritarian” communist bloc, the West promised peaceful avenues for change. Multiculturalism promised equality under the law regardless of where you were from or what you believed – you could leave your country and become Western, enjoying all the privileges of Westerners. Dissenters would be protected by law from state reprisal. Elections gave the people power over elites: the bastards could be voted out. If the bastards were particularly disrespectful of democracy (if they ignored elections and set up a dictatorship), they could be defeated through nonviolent struggle, with methods and manuals taught by US institutes and later, using US social media corporations to spread the word. There was always the United Nations to appeal to as well – to give succour to the refugees, to pass Security Council resolutions that were binding on all UN members, to “Unite for Peace” in the General Assembly if the Security Council failed. 

If, as a leader of a Global South country, you didn’t like the new Western offer, you could get overthrown in a coup (see, e.g., William Blum’s Killing Hope, or the more scholarly version Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change). 

As for the liberal package of law and rights – it was always an illusion, especially for Palestine But since Oct 7, 2023, the West has abandoned it wholly. Let’s look at each piece in turn.  

International law? It may always have been a fantasy but Israel and the US are explicit that it doesn’t apply. Israelis who kill Palestinians are not charged with crimes. ICJ judgments are ignored; the ICC delays investigation – not that it would be respected if it made any judgments. The US has passed what is sometimes called the Hague Invasion Act, which states that the US would use military force against the court rather than allow its personnel to be judged for war crimes. Israel’s partners like Canada have pressured the International Court of Justice to drop the stances it has taken in the past. Israel had once signed the Rome statute, but then ‘unsigned’ it; the US has never been subject to it. Israel kills UN personnel and then trolls them, official account to official account, on twitter. The US vetoes resolutions at the UN Security Council and the General Assembly resolution is simply ignored. 

Human rights? The mighty human rights organizations merely beg Israel to murder civilians in a way that respects human rights, and receive a contemptuous response for their trouble. 

Elections? All Western political parties are disciplined in their support for Israel. In Ontario and in the US Congress (so far), parliaments have formally censured elected representatives (Sarah Jama in Ontario and Rashida Tlaib in the US) calling for ceasefire (or even short of ceasefire). For her trouble, Jama was also thrown out of her party, the left-wing NDP. Until there are anti-genocide political parties in the West, elections or the threat of elections are meaningless since there are no anti-genocide alternatives to vote for. There is no voting these bastards out. Not in the West.

Protected speech? On wonderful American social media platforms? Using the power of free expression and dissent to change genocidal policy? Besides direct censorship of Palestine and Palestine solidarity groups on the platforms, the pro-genocide bloc scours social media to try to get anti-genocide people fired from their jobs. They routinely lie and libel Palestine supporters, libel tens of thousands of protesters for peace at a time as “supporters of violence”, ignore Jewish pro-Palestine voices, and punish speech wherever they can. 

Pro-genocide media figures have been advocating mass deportation (population transfer) as an answer to the large pro-Palestine rallies – calling for the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people for waving Palestine flags and chanting “from the river to the sea”. People in Canada have already been arrested for using the phrase. Germany, France, and the UK banned and criminalized the rallies before they happened; Canadian legislators called them “hate rallies”. More repression is planned, if they can get away with it. 

You can say that these wonderful tenets of liberalism were always honored in the breach, applied with double standards, etc. But no matter how you argue it, we are in a major “mask off” moment and at least two questions follow from the dropping of these masks.  

First, if it was so easy for them to drop these masks, what was the value of these masks in the first place? And second, what consequences are there, if any, to the dropping of these masks?

To the first question: the masks were very valuable and the cost of dropping them is still unknown – it will play out over years. The liberal package of ideas from free expression, to international law and the UN through to elections and nonviolent struggle as legitimate forms of popular struggle, was very important in several ways:

• Winning a portion of the Global South and its elite to the Western agenda. Multiculturalism and equality under the law (getting rid of apartheid in the US and in South Africa, settlers leaving Kenya, etc.) were instrumental in the West being able to get people from the Global South to work for them (including in Western countries).

• Dissipating rebellious energy. Appeals to international justice dissipate rebellious energies internationally just as appeals to electoralism dissipate them within the West. 

Can the medical profession in a country work properly if doctors are petitioning for hospitals to be bombed? Can social media companies claim everyone’s attention if they are hunting grounds for libelers, doxxers, and people trying to get you fired? Can politicians displaying such public heartlessness expect the ear of those they wish to lead? Can schools and universities claim to educate students for the world if they punish them for speaking against genocide? Maybe this is just how the West works. The US seems to be able to run without a universal health care system and with frequent mass shootings, but other Western countries may not be so resilient. There may be lasting damage to the social order being done here.

Dropping these pretences could have major repercussions for the whole world order and for the functioning of these democracies.

But perhaps not. At the moment, Global South countries that are subordinate to the US are so far unyielding to the pressure of their own anti-genocide majorities. Some regimes have made rhetorical anti-genocide gestures while helping the US and Israel militarily. Egypt could unilaterally open Rafah crossing and end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza at any time, but does not. Jordan snubbed Blinken in a meeting but helps the occupation. Turkey accuses Israel of genocide but ships tomatoes and says interrupting business is infeasible. Saudi Arabia said they hold Israel responsible but shield Israel from Yemen’s missiles using US missile defense platforms operating from Arabian soil. India declared support for Netanyahu immediately and is apparently going to send 100,000 workers to replace the Palestinian labour force Israel had been exploiting (and is now murdering). The West is betting that this genocide won’t cause a crisis in the Global South. 

And in the Global North? Western political parties have maintained solid pro-genocide discipline. Even if the rallies have shown that Western majorities are anti-genocide, they have nowhere, electorally speaking, to go. They mostly watch unreality and inverted reality on their screens, and are made to feel afraid of repression. Some tactical firings, suspensions of Muslim students, arrests of organizers, a bit of Islamophobic violence here and there – perhaps it need not reach crisis levels. The bet is that the genocide won’t cause a crisis in the Global North either. 

Which raises the next question. If the Bidens and Trudeaus and von der Leyens are betting that everyone is going to go back to their normal lives after this genocide, was it really necessary to drop the masks? Why not let people demonstrate in London and Toronto and Berlin and Paris and ignore their demands like Western elites did in 2003, when the millions of demonstrators around the world were praised as a “second superpower” by the New York Times and then casually ignored by the US, who invaded Iraq anyway? Why label them as “hate rallies” and threaten mass deportation? 

What is it about Palestine that moves them to such hatred to take bigger risks?

The simplest answer is that Israel is the West. It is Canada, it is the US, it is Australia and New Zealand. It is a settler colony. Western elites’ identification with it is total; for them to contemplate abandoning stolen lands to Indigenous people is inconceivable.

Aggressive wars like the ones in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have led to humiliating defeats – but for a settler colony to take even one step back is impossible to contemplate. A prisoner exchange, letting Gaza have an airport, letting people come and go from Gaza freely… and now even utterances about freedom or the colors of the Palestine flag have become intolerable to the Western mind. In Israel this brain freeze has led to the adoption of a pseudo-strategy of saturation bombing followed by an open-ended ground invasion with no achievable political goal besides genocide. Among Israel’s supporters, it has led to the maniacal repetition of phrases like “Israel has the right to defend itself” even as Israeli officials talk about dropping nuclear bombs on Gaza or exterminating them all, and are killing, now, 1500 people a day, 140 children a day, and climbing. 

But, like I said in my last piece, we can’t affect what is happening on the ground in Gaza or the air above it and we can’t wait for the ripple effects of the abandonment of liberalism. There are, however, things that the anti-genocide majority can do even against such a committed elite consensus. 

The most successful actions have been:

• Direct Action against the intertwined Western military-industrial complex that is supplying the weapons for this genocide (see, e.g., Palestine Action – https://twitter.com/Pal_action). 

• The legal and political defense of those targeted for their anti-genocide activities and views (see, e.g., Palestine Legal https://twitter.com/pal_legal or Legal Profession Against Retaliation https://twitter.com/canlawforpal). 

• The huge and growing rallies organized by, e.g., the Palestinian Youth Movement (https://twitter.com/palyouthmvmt) 

If these continue to grow, so will repression and violence in the West. 

The next step would be preparing to survive that and grow in spite of it. 

In 1915, when Lenin lamented the fragmentation of the socialist movement in the face of World War I, he argued that antiwar work had to be done in spite of the difficulties posed by what appeared to be the unstoppable march to war. 

He said such work “is not easy, to be sure. It will demand arduous preparatory activities and heavy sacrifices. This is a new form of organisation and struggle that also has to be learnt, and knowledge is not acquired without errors and setbacks.” As examples of what had to be done, he suggested “setting up an international apparatus for the purpose of carrying on propaganda… organise the publication of illegal literature on the necessity of starting revolutionary activities, etc.”

He continued: “We cannot tell whether a powerful revolutionary movement will develop immediately after this war, or during it, etc., but at all events, it is only work in this direction that deserves the name of socialist work.”

So as to not end yet another piece with Lenin, I’ll mention Michael Albert’s book The Trajectory of Change. Michael was an antiwar student activist during the US war on Vietnam in the 1960s. The trajectory he describes in the title is one where demonstrations are not only building in numbers but also in commitment, radicalism, militancy. To roughly paraphrase him, a weekly rally with 250,000 people each week for a series of weeks is less likely to get elites to back off of a genocide than rallies that grow in number each week and where small but growing numbers are, instead of calling for, e.g., “ceasefire now”, are abandoning electoral lesser evilism altogether, calling for the end of apartheid, taking direct actions against the military industrial complex, etc.

Western elites have announced a willingness to transform their societies to make them more genocide-friendly. Dangerous times are ahead.

Review of: Conspirituality by Julian Walker, Matthew Remski, and Derek Beres. Penguin Random House. June 2023.  

“Conspirituality” refers to a mix of spirituality, New Age thinking, yoga and wellness (I would add martial arts), and political conspiracy theorizing. The book has a focus on anti-vaccination campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it goes beyond health and explains something important about how politics have evolved in both Canada and the US in recent years. 

The book is a valuable resource to explain to people how their families and social groups have divided during COVID-19. Despite politics being a generally taboo topic in mainstream North American society, during long crises, like wars, big political changes, or the pandemic, political conversations are inevitable. People discover the politics of their friends and loved ones. Friendships break up, family ties are strained, and you begin a search for answers about how your friends went down these rabbit holes.  

As you try forensically to find out what happened, know that your friend’s rants are not really about them believing ever more esoteric beliefs. Other people’s beliefs always appear exotic, after all, especially when they’re unverified or unverifiable, as spiritual and religious beliefs are. Your friend’s rants are the rhetorical gestures of someone who is leaving one group, one social ecosystem (yours), for another. Conspirituality beliefs, like Kevin Simler wrote about advertising, are about social signaling more than they are about brainwashing. 

The politics of conspirituality run deep

I mentioned that in North America, political conversations are mostly taboo and that could be because people figure it’s better not to know, the better to get along. Avoidance usually is politely accomplished by saying something like, “I’m not really a political person.”  But conspiritualists are not merely beyond politics: they claim to be beyond earthly concerns altogether. 

Don’t believe it. Conspirituality is hyper-political and the politics of conspirituality, as the authors use the term, run far deeper than they appear. The movement against vaccine mandates didn’t stand down after the mandates were repealed – that movement is bigger now than it was when there were vaccine mandates. It is a movement that has a special hatred for public health measures, yes, but it also has: 

• its own philosophy of knowledge

• Its own media network

• A political economy including a durable source of revenue and livelihood for its leaders 

• Politicians and business leaders in high places

• Social groups and organizations meeting in person and on the web day in, day out, 365 days a year. 

It is a major social and political phenomenon, with deep roots: at least a movement, it is perhaps better understood as a religion whose many adherents are willing to make major sacrifices – to their social, financial, and health lives – in the name of what they believe. In the name of their own freedom, they are also willing to impose the consequences of their beliefs on others. 

It’s necessary to understand these core beliefs, beyond the wide array of details. Its leaders use a well-established right-wing trick of using language co-opted from the left, emptied of its original content, then redeployed. From the women’s movement for abortion rights, they call for “bodily autonomy” and “the right to choose”. But though they claim to despise liberals, they assert above all the liberal politics of individual property asserted against state control and of individual rights asserted against the collective. 

What makes their movement distinctive and gives it a religious character is that it goes beyond individual rights and assigns non-materialist, super-powers to the individual will – to heal, to acquire wealth, to change the course of history. In the same breath, the movement assigns non-materialist blame to the individual – for being poor, sick, or powerless. In their world, everybody gets what they deserve. It’s allocated by the universe. All that states, collectives, or public action can do is engage in immoral redistribution – from the undeserving to the deserving. 

Reading the description above, listeners of the Civilizations Series (e.g. our episode about Nietzsche) will start to discern patterns in today’s conspirituality movement that look a lot like the belief systems circulating in England, its colony, India, its former colony, the US, and its greatest admirer, Germany, at the end of the 19th century. The triumph of the will. Contempt for the collective. Fear and loathing of state action. The belief that the majority are sheep, natural slaves. The belief that there is a non-material power to the individual will. That the unfairness we see around us is actually fair, indeed optimal. You can call it many things. A hundred years ago it would have been Nietzschean or Theosophical. Today, as the book documents, it’s conspirituality and QAnon. Another word that sums it up? Anticommunist. 

Because what is communism? A system that values not individual will and intention for individual reward, but collective work for social benefit. A system that is willing to seize private wealth to allocate resources to public goods (yes, including health care and education). A system where there are no masters and slaves, natural or otherwise. A belief system that is materialist and scientific, that seeks to understand the relationship between human volition and the historical and physical realities in which we make our choices. 

After WWII, the US violently took up the leadership of the struggle against communism in all its forms (even modest social democratic reforms in remote parts of the world and pre-1917 forms of Indigenous, “primitive communism”). But before WWII, the great anticommunists were Nazis and Fascists, and before them, the great anticommunists were various kinds of Nietzscheans. 

Understanding conspirituality as a flavor of anticommunism makes possible some quick sorting. Suddenly the dense jumble of talking points changes from an incomprehensible muddle to simply one of a few possible variations on a few key themes. 

The actual book

The authors of Conspirituality, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker, were  members (victims? survivors?) participants in yoga-based or other similar cult-like conspirituality organizations, have researched cults, and currently run a podcast talking to people who have been in and out of these kinds of organizations. The book includes both journalistic and historical investigation, and skillfully weaves the experiences of the authors and their guests through the narrative. Through their critique of the right-wing and their defense of science and of public health care specifically, the authors identify themselves as being on the left: to me they read like social democrats with interests in both electoral work and grassroots activism. 

I worried as I read the beginning of the book: when liberals write about conspirituality and related movements, they often end up defending the indefensible. In the liberal world view, deportations, assassinations, police worship and corporate giveaways are bad when Trump does them but fine when Obama/Biden does; liberals have an imperialist focus on the crimes of official enemies, etc. But there was very little of that in this book. 

There are real conspiracies

I was perhaps even a bit defensive in Chapter 2 when the authors outlined “three pillars of conspiratorial thinking, as laid out by the political scientist Michael Barkun.” These pillars are: “Nothing happens by accident. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is connected.” 

Reading this critique of conspiracism I remembered Michael Parenti’s lecture on “Conspiracy and Class Power”, Lance deHaven Smith’s book, Conspiracy Theory in America, or comedian Ron Funches, who asks: “You don’t believe in any conspiracy theories? I understand not all of them, not most of them, but you don’t believe in any conspiracy theories? You think the government’s just batting a thousand and telling us the whole truth? That’s a strong stance to take.” 

Because there are conspiracies, and dismissing all conspiracy theorizing is a gift to imperialists, who, after all, spend enormous amounts of money and resources on covert operations. But the authors of Conspirituality acknowledge that there are real conspiracies: “real conspiracies”, they write, “are discovered through evidence”. From Chapter 1 they note that there are real-world conspiracies – and that conspiritualists actually blur the lines between real conspiracies (like Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring) and spurious ones (which they discuss and refute in their book). 

Their analysis is brutally honest, going well beyond a simplistic defense of the liberal establishment. In Chapter 6, “Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong”, they discuss the vacuum created by privatized health care, into which the alternative health & wellness community seeps in. Conspiritualists, they write, “are attuned to systemic problems. They have felt their existential angst insulted by lifestyle marketing, and their humanity reduced to consumer data. They have felt the cold neglect of the state, the vacant stare of the medical gaze, and the brutal rise of rents…”

They continue: “Conspirituality does not create its followers’ nausea at the state, modernity, or the poisoned chalice of techno-capitalism. It does not create real-world disasters such as the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking network (a reality that makes QAnon reasonable on a symbolic, if not factual, level). It does not create histories of genocide, nor does it create histories of governmental cover-up.” 

No indeed, these are all real things that the conspiritualists take political advantage of. 

The political economy of wellness and conspiracy

In Canada, the public system is under attack and has been brought to the point of collapse, with privatization being incrementally brought in as a “solution” to the engineered crisis. In the US, which has no public system, getting sick means facing bankruptcy. Even Americans who thought they had good private insurance find themselves with surprise, ruinous bills after routine procedures or emergencies. At every stage people who need care are faced with actors who have incentives to stop them from getting that care. What is available through the privatized (or semi-privatized) health system is expensive, bureaucratized, frightening, and humiliating. For anyone who can promise an alternative path to good health that does not lead through this system, there are opportunities. 

Because scientific and evidence-based medicine is only accessible through financialized insurers and plans, the alternative paths work on everything else. Many of these are good practices: exercise, breathing, going outside, eating healthy, and of course, nutritional supplements. Some, like yoga, include exercise and breathing but also get people together for social activity, another healthful practice in itself. Some are big business, multi-level-marketing schemes and corporate behemoths in their own right. 

The capture of US health care by private insurers is one side of the political economy of conspirituality; the business of selling online and in-person yoga, lifestyle, spirituality and train-the-trainer courses and nutritional supplements is the other side. 

The number of actors in the conspirituality space that sell supplements came as a shock to me. Alex Jones sells supplements. Jordan Peterson’s daughter sells supplements. The book exposes many other figures – people who have sexually abused their yoga students, ran cults, defrauded clients, and enriched themselves while making unscientific claims. And all of them sell supplements! I remember reading some Big Tech executive lamenting that “we’ve made the world a dystopia so that we could get people to click ads.” If you read Conspirituality, you’ll be horrified at what’s been done to sell nutritional supplements. 

Combine the drive to sell supplements and online courses with the marketing of these products in an attention economy where more extreme claims outcompete less extreme ones and you get an incentive structure for ever-more outrageous theories. These are outlined in gory detail in the book.

By diving into the history of yoga, the authors also pull out links to eugenics. Yoga is less an ancient practice of wisdom and more an amalgam of 19th-century physical culture. Europeans certainly got much of their culture, including physical culture, from Asia (I am convinced that catch wrestling, for example, developed in Lancashire around the same time as British colonialism in India’s most rapid advance, and from which other wrestling traditions followed, was a cross-pollination of local wrestling tradition with Indo-Persian pehlwani / kusti) but the borrowing went the other way too. Yoga was an outgrowth of a Swedish gymnastics movement and heavily influenced by a genocidal German eugenicist bodybuilder who changed his first name to Eugen to reflect his interest in human perfection.

Purity of breath, purity of movement, purity of exercise, and purity of diet: these were all eugenicist beliefs that are also woven inevitably into the fabric of today’s multi-billion dollar wellness industry / movement. In the gospel of prosperity, in the law of attraction, everyone gets what they deserve. In the eugenics movement, that includes genocide for the racially inferior or impure. As India goes fascist, yoga is its standard bearer in North America. 

The authors map every major star in the conspiritual constellation: Joe Rogan, while he doesn’t get his own chapter, is described as

“the Walmart Supercenter that opens up on the access road to a midsized town. It’s enormous. It’s open late. It dries up the mom-and-pop shops in town. Parking is easy. You can buy anything there in a low-cost, frictionless consumer experience. But usually, you can’t tell where the product comes from, and you won’t know its quality until you get it home and use it.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s anti-vax campaigns get their own chapter, as they describe how RFK pivoted from a “big-picture environmentalist fluent in geopolitical intrigue and corporate malfeasance” whose anti-vax moves collapse the big picture into

“a single medical-sized issue. His expertise on the imperiled global environment shoehorns down to an obsession with the individual body—especially the child’s body—as its symbolic victim.” 

For a leftist, such figures really are always the same. They are pushed onto our screens by the algorithm with some kind of reputation for speaking hard truths and being uncontrollable mavericks. We investigate. Before long, every single one of these mavericks kiss the ring of the pro-Israel lobby and reveal that their loyalty is first to colonialism and only secondarily to any other maverick cause they might have or hard truth they might want to speak. 

[And before you tell me, yes I know that Rogan’s had Abby Martin on to talk Palestine. I also find him likeable, ok? As the authors write, Rogan’s “sheer volume of content resists any final word on Rogan’s personal political values or worldview on reality”. But over time, the authors continue, “his guest list has trended… into parroting right-wing talking points about quarantine, Biden, guns, and culture war moral panics. He emphasized his values shift in an interview about moving his business from California to Austin. “I moved to Texas because I want fucking freedom.”]

The simple “triumph of the will” pattern beneath the bewildering details

The authors lampoon conspiracy theorists for believing everything is connected. But their very book provides a framework for simplifying the bewildering details that present as an incredible diversity of beliefs and systems: life coaching, yoga, the law of attraction, aliens, lizards, crystals, vegan diets, buddhism, theosophy, QAnon, antivax. The authors very effectively point out the connections between these. 

And I can add that these are all just different flavors of Nietzscheanism, of anticommunism. They are belief systems that can find ample financial and political support on a continent where health care and science have been almost fully subordinated to profit and corporate power. They are ideologies and organizations appropriate to struggle against the main demands of socialists: health and education for all. Didn’t the Nazis, the most extreme anti-communists, build out a science of racial hygeine to “cleanse” science of socialist baggage? Didn’t they build out their own Nazi version of environmentalism, to keep the earth unpolluted of inferior chemicals and inferior races, even as they poisoned and destroyed everything in their path?

Liberal and right-wing politics are complementary anti-socialist strategies. Liberal anti-socialists show up with professional charts and hyper-educated agents of austerity to explain why such demands are infeasible. When socialism is shown to be feasible, there are movements of the right who are willing to fight, kill and even die, out of the belief that science-based measures are the real killers. 

As I mentioned in my last post, before I learned (from Losurdo, Horne, and some others) what liberalism really was, I used to believe that there was some kind of possibility of reconciliation between liberalism and leftism. I’ve come to the conclusion that the core beliefs of liberalism in private property, constraints on state powers of redistribution and public action, and in-group democracy were designed as ideologies of colonialism and imperialism. They’re not compatible with anti-imperialism. 

Conspirituality and me

What about spiritual beliefs? Can they be reconciled with leftist aspirations? As a teenager, I actually had my own fascination with spirituality. On a page of Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do, I found the name “J Krishnamurti” on a list under the heading “Mental Training”. I became an avid reader of Krishnamurti’s books, dialogues, and lectures. His dialogues with (rogue) physicist David Bohm influenced my decision to make one of my majors physics (the other was history, as listeners know). 

Krishnamurti counsels detachment of the ego, of not projecting one’s own ideas on to other people or situations, of experiencing the moment fully, of not carrying baggage from the past or expectations for the future into the moment. As I started to read more political writing (starting with Gandhi, who met Krishnamurti and they didn’t get along), I wondered if this kind of “mental training” could help in political work. I don’t think it can. Indeed, Krishnamurti’s notebook of dialogues with visitors to one of his retreats contains a dialogue with a communist that goes nowhere – there is an unbridgeable gulf between them as they talk past one another. 

Many years later, I read a book about Krishnamurti by the daughter of his business partner (also the daughter of the woman with whom Krishnamurti had a lifelong affair, known to her husband the business partner – and yes I read the Krishnamurti foundation’s reply to the book too). Learning a bit about how Krishnamurti actually lived, I realized how poorly these lessons translate for anyone who has to actually live in the world, even someone who’s life was deliberately sheltered the way Krishnamurti’s was. Krishnamurti, who was waited on by people who believed in his saintly status, could not live the life he preached. How could his preaching help someone who has to figure out a livelihood, relationships, how to work ethically and try to contribute to making the world a better place? 

As tools for specific situations, focusing on the present and letting go of the ego are useful. As an approach to living? Much less so. Detachment from daily life and from the material world isn’t desirable or possible. Disconnection from the future and past ends up meaning you can’t understand what happened or plan what to do next. With apologies to Bruce Lee, this is the opposite of “mental training”.  

And this is true when you look at the sayings of Krishnamurti, who is among the most benign of these figures. As with liberalism, so with conspirituality: there’s no reconciling it with a leftist world view. 

Indeed, while I think I understand North America a bit better after reading it, the book has given me new worries. It seems there is a grassroots insurgent movement with deep roots, plenty of resources, friends in high places and in the police, that is opposed to public health and to science. In the unlikely scenario that a government comes to power in North America that wants to improve those things, it will have to contend with that movement. 

I’m still going to exercise, pay attention to nutrition, go outside, breathe, and be an environmentalist, and so should you. If Lenin could learn weightlifting, so can I, dammit.

Leftists can’t afford to concede wellness to the right. We can’t concede conspiracy theorizing to the right either. 

We need our own versions of both!  

I know not all of you who read the newsletter listen to the podcast, but we just did a 3-hour epic on the Balkan Wars 1912-1913 that led directly to WWI. Researching it, I came across the dispatches of a war correspondent named Leon Trotsky, who wrote long profiles of all the players, talked to wounded soldiers, traveled all over the region while the wars raged and in their aftermath. Trotsky was no impassive observer, but an advocate for a specific solution to the raging Balkan conflicts of the time: a socialist Balkan Federation dedicated to the economic development of the whole region for the benefit of all its peoples, free from imperial intervention. Trotsky would live to see something like this implemented in the form of Yugoslavia, but Yugoslavia was dismembered decades later by nationalist wars and imperial intervention.

In the podcast I also quoted from Richard C. Hall, an academic who wrote about the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars and came to a similar conclusion as Trotsky:

“The large nationalist state as exemplified by Italy and Germany proved a poor model for the Balkan peoples. No such states were possible, because the nationalist claims of each Balkan state overlapped with those of its neighbors. Every attempt in the twentieth century to realize this goal has led to war and foreign intervention. Only the adoption of a post-nationalist perspective by the Balkan peoples can break the pattern of war and intervention.”

Writing just after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Hall found himself arguing for the necessity of something like it!

I was a teenager during Iraq War 1990/1. I was critical but not in any position to be aware of any anti-war sentiment in my city much less to, e.g., go to an antiwar protest. The first such protests I did attend were during the NATO war for the final dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1999. A lot of people I knew, including fellow students from the Croatian diaspora in Toronto, actually celebrated when the NATO bombing began. Eastern Europe is not a context where I have a lot of background references in long-term memory and everything I have come to understand about it has been done analytically. Unlike some other parts of the world where I find I have some intuition that I can work from, in this context all I have is reading. As far as my feelings went, I simply felt a lot of horror and tragedy, and could not believe any of the arguments coming from NATO about the necessity of bombing.

I wrote one of my first letters to the editor when a Globe and Mail columnist took the occasion of the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade to talk about Chinese xenophobia.

I would have written it a bit differently today but you probably recognize the tone.

At the time I thought of the destruction of Yugoslavia as a tragedy of self-destruction. The narrative structure, which I was reading in liberal authors like Michael Ignatieff (who wrote a travelogue of the Balkans as a theory of nationalism in his pre-Empire-Lite and pre-Canadian prime ministerial candidate years), was that these communist states suppressed nationalism which exploded all the worse for having been suppressed, and as the biggest nation in Yugoslavia, Serbia (or, the preferred term, “the Serbs”), had entrapped the others who naturally wanted to break away at the first opportunity. They broke away, “the Serbs” fought back to keep them in, committing so much war and genocide that NATO was forced to bomb them.

It was a compelling enough framework, since it’s impossible to understand any of the belligerents without an analysis of nationalism. What the framework could never explain was what the US was doing in there. The idea that Balkan nationalisms had become so disruptive to the world order that the US was forced to intervene – that was the best available explanation and it was simply preposterous. But it was not until much later that I got a sense of the full role of the US in the breakup of Yugoslavia, and why the US wanted Yugoslavia broken up. To understand all that, I had to go beyond the liberal analysis of rival nationalisms and get into economic analysis.

In search of an alternate, anti-war view of the Yugoslavia wars, I read Diana Johnstone’s Fool’s Crusade and Michael Parenti’s To Kill a Nation. But I found the economic arguments put together most effectively (including by these two authors) in a 2010 documentary by Boris Malagurski called The Weight of Chains.

Malagurski grew up in Yugoslavia and links his economic analysis with the experiences his father had working in an industry that was ultimately dismantled along with Yugoslavia – which gives a clue to what was going on.

While it existed, Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country (indeed a founding member of the movement), with an economic model characterized as “market socialist”, trying to combine various elements of economic planning and welfare state protections with market competition. In various ways, it was very successful! Malagurski’s parents, like all Yugoslavs well into the 1980s, had free medical care and education, one month paid vacation, and the country had a 91% literacy rate. With state support and investment, Yugoslavia developed a considerable industrial base, including heavy industries (Malagurski’s film includes considerable detail about a motor plant – which I’ll return to below).

Because Yugoslavia was part of the nonaligned bloc, its leaders sought to maintain good relations with both the Soviet bloc and the West. For the West’s part, the idea of collapsing a socialist state and carving it up never lost its appeal. The collapse of the USSR (which will occupy future newsletters) made it possible. Yugoslavia, like the USSR, tried to reform to taking Western finance. Once indebted to Western banks, Yugoslavia was ready to be carved up.

Malagurski cites a National Security Council memorandum (#133, if you want to look it up), which, under president Reagan, stated a US policy of supporting a “market-oriented” Yugoslavia. In 1988, the National Endowment for Democracy sent advisors to the country, funding another group called the Center for Private Enterprise, which in turn funded the G17 – a group of 17 Yugoslavian free market economists including IMF and World Bank staffers. This Group of 17 ran the government bankruptcy program of 1989-90, forcing cuts to the social sector and forcing public and private enterprises into bankruptcy. About 1,100 enterprises were wiped out between January 1989 and September 1990; the standard of living declined by 18% and unemployment went up to 20% by the end of the decade.

Yugoslavia’s financial crisis was America’s opportunity. When Yugoslavia went to president Bush I in 1989, the US response was to declare that any republic in Yugoslavia could get aid — only if they broke away from the federal republic. Elections would be held only in the constituent republics and aid would only go through them. The US, in other words, used financial aid to begin the breakup of Yugoslavia already in 1990.

The aid worked as intended, and made the financial crisis worse: with inflation at 200%, Yugoslavia couldn’t pay interest on the debt or pay for the raw materials to run its heavy industries. Economic cooperation between republics failed, the communist parties lost elections to the nationalists, and unilateral declarations of independence followed – all of which were quickly recognized by the US. So quickly it was as if the US was waiting for them. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s followed, and the US sanctioned the federal state.

I’ll leave the military questions, which Malagurski covers from his point of view, for another time. Let’s keep following the economic story and US policy.

By 1993, 90% of domestic pharmaceutical production had stopped. Average caloric income was down 28% from 1990 levels, with 1.5 million considered undernourished. Unemployment was up to 60%. Monthly income dropped from $500 to $15. The inflation rate went to its highest in history.

The international financial institutions collected the external debts for each of the constituent republics – they were each saddled with debts, carefully partitioned from the central debt held by the federal republic of Yugoslavia. In 1995, Bosnia unveiled that it would be occupied by NATO and administered directly by the West (which was also Kosovo’s fate). Before the 1999 NATO campaign, the World Bank analyzed the likely effects of a Kosovo war, including plans for occupation.

NATO’s bombing campaign targeted Yugoslavia’s industrial base. A cigarette factory was bombed, later acquired by Philip Morris. The Yugo car factory was bombed, getting rid of competition for Western auto firms. Cement, oil industry, telecom facilities were all bombed.

There is, perhaps, one military note from this period worth making. That is, that while the US successfully bombed various industrial, civilian, and diplomatic targets (including the Chinese Embassy, as mentioned above), militarily the campaign was stalemated in 1999. NATO’s ultimate victory came from the imposition of a diplomatic settlement on Yugoslavia’s president Milosevic, who they later arrested and who conveniently died in in a NATO prison. The settlement was imposed not through victory on the battlefield, but through the threat of a genocidal bombing of civilians. The most detailed account of this is quoted by author Gregory Elich, who cites another source about a meeting between Finnish diplomat and Nobel Prize Winner Martti Ahtisaari and Milosevic:

Milošević took the papers and asked, “What will happen if I do not sign?” In answer, “Ahtisaari made a gesture on the table,” and then moved aside the flower centerpiece. Ahtisaari said, “Belgrade will be like this table. We will immediately begin carpet-bombing Belgrade.” Repeating the gesture of sweeping the table, Ahtisaari threatened, “This is what we will do to Belgrade.” A moment of silence passed, and then he added, “There will be half a million dead within a week.” Chernomyrdin’s silence confirmed that the Russian government would do nothing to discourage carpet-bombing. [6] – June 7, 1999, Il Giornale Milan, Ristic interviewed by Renato Farina. 

The meaning was clear. To refuse the ultimatum would lead to the widespread death and destruction. President Milošević summoned the leaders of the parties in the governing coalition and explained the situation to them. “A few things are not logical, but the main thing is, we have no choice. I personally think we should accept… To reject the document means the destruction of our state and nation.” [7]

Once Milosevic signed, Kosovo was put under direct “internationalized” control and the next round of dismemberment of Yugoslavia followed. A German bank took over the banking sector the province. Telecom was sold to German Telecom. A Western consortium took control of the immense Trepca Mining Complex. A local company made butter for 200; Germany subsidized its 300 butter to sell at 150, making Serbia an importer of goods. A steel factory set up with a $600M loan was sold to a US company for $23M. In Croatia, the hotels are owned by German and Austrian companies, the fishing zone was given to the EU/Italy, and the entire island of Brijuni was sold. Bosnia’s new constitution included the Governing Board of the Central Bank being an IMF appointee, and stipulated not to be a citizen of of Bosnia or any neighbouring country. Central Bank independence taken to the extreme: these central banks are so independent that they are totally dependent – on the West.

As for the debt that got Yugoslavia into trouble in the first place: when united Yugoslavia went with its hat in hand to the West in 1988, the country was in serious trouble with $13.5B in debt. By 2010, the West had completely destroyed the country and split it into many republics, whose total debt was… $184B.

Health insurance was privatized, the education system was crashed, health insurance lost, pensions were cut. By the 2010s, close to 40% couldn’t pay their bills and 56% were hungry.

So, returning to the question in the title: before Yugoslavia was dismembered, it had: an industrial base, health care, education (including some of the highest standards in the world), subsidized transportation, and vacations.

Plagiarism is when you take credit for someone else’s work. Powerful individuals do it all the time. The powerless, when caught, are usually punished for it. Like bullying, there is a social norm against it and a stigma attached. But also like bullying, it is hard to teach that it is bad when it is one of the structures that underlie the international order. Around here, imperialism is fundamentally about the drain of wealth from poor countries to rich countries and from Indigenous peoples to colonizers. But imperialism is about more than just wealth: knowledge is stolen too. When imperialists steal knowledge without attribution, it’s not just plagiarism: it’s imperialist plagiarism.

And like I said, it is so pervasive as to be almost invisible. So much so that it appears in books about completely unrelated topics. Imagine my surprise when I was just trying to relax and read a nice book about how to survive the apocalypse, namely Lewis Dartnell’s 2014 book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm, when I came across this passage (on pg. 11 if you’re looking):

“One of the major catalysts for the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries was the trickle of ancient learning back into Western Europe. Much of this knowledge, lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, was preserved and propagated by Arab scholars carefully translating and copying texts; other manuscripts were rediscovered by European scholars.”

What’s wrong with this, you ask?

There seems to be a model of global knowledge distribution that looks something like this:

A few questions arise.

1. Did the West’s ancient learning come from Greece & Rome?

2. Was the role of Islamic civilizations to copy & translate texts?

3. Did Asia have any learning worth talking about?

4. Did Indigenous civilizations?

Let’s take each one in turn.

1. When it comes to Ancient Greece and Rome and where they got their knowledge, there are a number of readings that are of interest, and some striking points that are made by, for example, George G.M. James in his 1954 book Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy was the Offspring of the Egyptian Mystery System.

When it comes to Ancient Greece, the fount of knowledge is Aristotle, who wrote 400-1000 books on every topic from physics to medicine to poetics and biology. These books were written in a remarkable period of productivity that Aristotle experienced very shortly after Alexander the Great conquered and looted the great library at the city he then named Alexandria. Did Aristotle really write FOUR HUNDRED books on EVERY TOPIC then known to humanity? George James: “Throughout the intellectual advancement of man, the world has witnessed many a genius; but those have always been specialists in particular fields, not specialists in every branch of science.”

Maybe Aristotle just copied the Egyptian library? In which case Ancient Greek knowledge, which was the fountain of Ancient Roman knowledge, came from Africa (and we haven’t even talked about all the knowledge Greece acquired from its long interactions with Persia and points east of there…). Others who have made this case include Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization, Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, and of course Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.

2. Next, we have the idea that the Islamic scholars’ role was to copy and translate texts! Is that what they did?

In his 2015 book, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, Frederick Starr talks about the original and extraordinary contributions to knowledge from medieval Islamic scholars like Al Biruni (973-1050) who separated astronomy from astrology; discovered elliptical orbits and earth’s rotation; calculated the radius of the earth and hypothesized that the American continent existed. Al Khwarazmi (780-850) solved the quadratic equation, treated algebra as an independent discipline, added sine and cosine tables and the first table of tangents. It goes a little bit beyond the copying and translating of texts!

3. Let’s go a bit farther east, shall we? Because luckily for the advancement of science, these Muslim scientists were not merely reading Greek and Roman texts. They were reading Hindu mathematicians like Aryabhata (476-550) from Nalanda University, who got us the zero, approximated pi, solved the summation of series of squares and cubes, and Varahamihira (505-587) whose astronomical work was used by al-Biruni. Among other discoveries, Varahamihira found that reflection is caused by the back-scattering of particles.

I haven’t even mentioned China, which would require, rather than a newsletter, an immense multivolume over years — how do I know it would require this? Because that is what Joseph Needham produced…

Some of the advancements made in China that are now adopted everywhere are outlined in John M. Hobson’s 2004 book, the Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Here’s a partial list.

Education – exams – economic analysis – paper money – markets – urbanization – publishing industry – block printing

Manufacturing of: metals, tea, paper, silk, porcelain, dyes, glass, steel (cast iron, coke, steam power), petrol and natural gas for fuel

Agriculture: mouldboard plough, rotary winnowing machine, seed drill, crop rotation

Sailing: compass, square hull, sternpost rudder, fore and aft sails, watertight compartments, gunpowder, cannons, muskets

4. Our survey is now nearly complete, in that we have shown the origins of human knowledge in both Africa and Asia. But as vast as those knowledges are, humanity in 2023 would be suffering incredible ignorance without the contributions of the Indigenous civilizations of the Americas (and of Oceania).

Some surveys of the contributions of Indigenous civilizations include Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Some concepts that come from Indigenous civilizations: Democracy, deliberation, political debate, freedom, diplomacy, and ecological sustainability. Graeber and Wengrow write the following summary:

“Let’s pause for a moment to take stock. In the years between 1703 and 1751, as we’ve seen, the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought. What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom. As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values – organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves – they reacted in a variety of different ways.

“Some, like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright. Others – settlers, intellectuals and members of the reading public back home – came to see it as a provocative and appealing social proposition.”

There are books – libraries – filled with knowledge that was built on these plagiarized foundations. In many cases, the knowledge was taken out of its context and alienated from its source. Not just plagiarized, but corrupted as well. There is a lot more material out there about this (JM Blaut, Gunder Frank, Bagchi…) and in fact I would love to hear if you know of other sources along these lines.

My point in this little survey has been to refute the pillar of racist ideology that knowledge comes from the West and is diffused to the world through semi benign colonial processes. In fact, the West has no special claim to have developed knowledge. Some things came from the West: most things did not. Much that is claimed as Western knowledge comes from elsewhere.

Now here we are, and humanity has the stock of knowledge that it has. We have to make the most of it and maybe it doesn’t matter all that much where it came from, but that everybody gets it and what we can do with it.

But I still don’t think Aristotle wrote all those books…

[I first presented these readings at a conference at York U on May 16, 2023]