Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

[alice wellintown]

Itz neither an excuse nor a denial.


Wherever man is, there is war, slavery, genocide.

Those who study the primate we call man and the violence he/she is
prone to, do better when they contrast these horrific events.

Because the devil, we might say, the human, is in the details / differences.


Those who lump them together, with absurd comparison, deny the facts,
excuse themselves or their group, make victims of their guilt. The USA
is not Nazi Germany. To conflate them is not good scholarship.

But the heart of darkness is not Africa or America or Europe, but the
beasty, as Simon sez, it is us.   Every genocide is is committed by
humans. This, of course if a given common element.

But to lump the middle passage with the Holocuast, with Rawanda, with
the Herero, Armenians....is a denial of history. .


The contrast, to name but one obvious one between the extermination of
Jews by Nazis and the Middle Passage, is where we can begin to do
history.

The common truth, that man is a beast who kills members of his own
species, is a given, but what is different about these events is where
we begin to make sense, to do history.

But it is hard work. And, it requires a more objective stance than the
revisionists, like Zinn, are willing to accept. Zinn is essentailly a
propagandist, his books are slogans and slants not history, but still
a good complement to the work of historians.