Part 2: Cancer at the Heart of Empire: the seeds of a revolution
When the powerful, and even just the so-called regular folks hinder, fail to help, or actively scheme to maintain their positions and leverage over and above the level required to comfortably take care of themselves and theirs, systemic effects take root. Examples abound throughout history, not just in the very public cases of naked and violent racism in the US in the last few weeks. Everyone knows this is a centuries old problem. Systemic racism, coming out of the need to justify the ‘economic necessity of slavery’ is the foundation on which Britain, Spain, France and other European countries were able to modernize and obviously is even more so at the core of the founding of the United States. Anyone who seeks to fudge that one only need look into who built and was buried under the US Capitol or even the New York subway system.Many of us need to be better students of history, not because it’s cool to recite long forgotten dates, but because we will gain a better understanding of the world we inhabit, our place in it and the consequence of our current and future actions. The appalling extent to which the full history of all the peoples making up the United States, is not taught here, especially not reflecting many hard realities, speaks volumes to current perceptions and behavior. But I digress. Power is the ability to have others do what they would otherwise not, and history is replete with those with power abusing those without. Almost all cultures have witnessed this and are guilty of exerting power on others within or outside their group, so this is not to cast any one group as angelic over the course of all human history. Men still actively garner, deploy and abuse power over women in many situations daily, as another obvious case. As with all things though, when we know better, our efforts should go into doing better.
We know it is wrong to brutalize other human beings. No one has to inform us of this, as it’s a crime in many forms in every country. All major religions agree on this point and we all feel wired to protect those we hold dear. We also know that when power is harnessed to uplift all persons within a space, we all benefit, exponentially. When power is used to oppress, it makes things worse, not just because humans are hurt (which is enough of a justification) but because those who abuse, set in motion their own demise at a time not of their choosing. Whether we look at the French revolution, the Haitian revolution (the ONLY successful slave rebellion in known history, still with no movie made; the racist indemnities and international sabotage deserve their own article) or the fall of any number of more modern tyrants, empires or drug lords, it is a truism that what goes around does indeed come around.
Indicators and precursors of these events are plentiful but we tend to ignore them in real time. Here we are. I of course don’t know if the current happenings are simply the recurring outburst characteristic of the American polity every 25 years or so, or the real thing. I do know however, that as Thomas Piketty (Capital in the 21st Century)and others have made very clear, the levels of inequality evident in the US, some western European countries and other places around the world, is unsustainable. Every other time in the last 200 years that we have approached this absurd level of inequality (felt usually most acutely by those most disparaged by the powerful) the result has been war- the kind of war that ends empires. Rising inequality throughout the late 19th century and into the early 20th Century famously coalesced with absurd old military alliances being hastily called upon and the increasing competition of powerful states just needing a minor fuse. A generation later, an incredibly unremarkable man with many insecurities, used the rallying cry of making the fatherland great again. Both those times ‘regular people’ and their governments dithered, trusting in the power of the system they no longer chose to enforce or the ‘shared values’ and decency of leaders. All throughout those times black bodies were brutalized, histories obliterated, and bright spots snuffed out mercilessly. The only mild reprieve was when countries needed armies, and black people put aside their grievances to fight alongside their brutalizers and enduring daily indignities…for the ‘higher cause.’ Is that cause the supposed sanctity of the free world or western civilization? Is it that all lives matter? Is it to save the form of capitalism which has enabled white supremacy and denied gender equality? One thing I am clear about is that Marcus Garvey was on to something about the link between respect before the law and people, and economic power. More anon.