Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

[Joseph Tracy]

On Jan 7, 2012, at 2:31 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> Itz neither an excuse nor a denial.
> 
> 
> Wherever man is, there is war, slavery, genocide.
Is there war, slavery and genocide in your neighborhood? None where I am . Most humans for most of history have not killed or made slaves of other humans. This is accomplished by coercion and criminal plots to steal others wealth. There will always be a minority of criminally inclined people, but they don't need to be the organizing force of our human existence. 
> 
> 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.
what you are saying seems pretty silly considering the inherent nature of human discourse. Are you really saying that meaning can only be derived from differences, never similarities?
> 
> Those who lump them together,
> with absurd comparison,
How do we learn from evil patterns if we refuse to compare what we do to  such patterns?  I think it would be better to show the exact location of the absurdity of what I said than to merely label it.
> deny the facts,
what fact was denied?
> excuse themselves or their group,
???? who is being excused?
> make victims of their guilt.
?????
> The USA
> is not Nazi Germany.
 i don't remember ever thinking or sayng I was living in Nazi Germany
> To conflate them is not good scholarship.
 Of course differences are important and I could go into a long list of differences. A list that you fail to provide. If you are saying I proposed an exact historic, cultural, pragmatic, or political set of parallels  between Nazi Germany and the US you are misrepresenting what I said. I am being  provocative because I think it far too easy to excuse the crimes of the group that is central to our identity with denial or hollow excuses. In my opinion this does nobody any good. Every culture, person, and nation must face the dark aspects of their  own history  fully and without denial and actively  seek to avoid repeating those mistakes and choices. 
> 
> 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.
First you say only the differences are important and now you say  were all the same. Which is it?
> 
> But to lump the middle passage with the Holocuast, with Rawanda, with
> the Herero, Armenians....is a denial of history. 
I really don't think in "lumps", and find it to be a very loaded phrase. If the point is that there are many places where genocidal actions  took place which are morally and historically comparable to the holocaust I think that is an important point of agreement.  It is also true that a precise historic comparison of Rwanda with Nazi germany would quickly fall apart as would the Armenian genocide  though it would be closer than Rwanda, because of the expansion of borders  and the militarized state.   What happens when we look at these events closely is the emergence of powerful similarities that must be examined and compared to the words and actions of the our own nation. 
 As far as slavey in  North America, well I have to admit that in many ways the slave trade was worse, because the Africans were not competing successfully in the same economic or cultural arena, so there was even less reason  for their abuse, but there are several other components of my list  of  historic mass crimes by the US, which you conveniently ignored. Are you really saying that American soldiers went to Iraq, because their human nature made them want to go kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? This was an organized criminal enterprise involving lies, bribery, profit motives, investors, and Fucked up Nazi shitheads( this is colorful language and not precise historic conflation in case you might miss that important difference)like Cheney, the Bush clan, the CIA, Rumsfeld, Wolfowittz, Pearle etc.  One could go on for about 50 books to fully document what I am saying and that has been done in case you didn't notice. I know ithis body of literature is post Melville, but so is holocaust literature. 
> 
> 
> 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.
If you can only see contrast and no similarity it would be a poor discussion. The Nazis' attacks on Jews was founded in several things that are fundamentally similar to the enslavement of Africans: 1) that it is appropriate  for superior 'races' to use or dispose of inferior peoples . 2) there is a fear of otherness to be tapped into as  a convenient justification 3) they victims are unprepared to defend themselves aggressively enough to pose a threat 4) There is opportunity for instant high profit and long term labor profit. 5) they are a group with few allies willing to risk life to defend them
The differences are also important : 1)The Nazis saw the Jews as a resource to be used but also a problem to be eliminated by extermination. ( Though there  was a move in the US for decades to move all Black people back to Africa which has similar overtones) 2) Jews were culturally integrated in Europe and Germany and for those focused with distrust on their otherness,  competitive in every area of human enterprise.  3) The wealth of European Jews  was fungible by theft of their property 4) There was a history of hatred and violence toward Jewish communities throughout much of Europe, but particularly In Germany and Spain and the Catholic nations.5) Sadly, the majority of  Jews of Germany thought the violence was only temporary and was not a genocide. They were unwilling to tell themselves or their children the truth, a very human response which is really what I am talking about in my attempt to show the dangers of denying comparisons.  I'm sure my list is incomplete, but it is honest and reasonably informed.

I have spent time with the veterans of American Wars, with Native Americans who have been beaten and abused by the FBI because of their association with AIM, with survivors of the holocaust, and they all bear deeply and probably permanently, the scars that are the inevitable result of  amoral denial of the humanity and value of all peoples and a belief in the superiority of some people. The crimes in Iraq were real crimes  on a massive scale, facilitated by denial and covered by lies about deliverance and freedom.  
> 
> The common truth, that man is a beast who kills members of his own
> species, is a given,
This is like saying all the Indians in South America walk single file because you saw a couple groups who did.  It isn't a given. Crimes of violence are relatively uncommon and usually the result of intense stress and pressure and enormous differences in power. 
> 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,
rubbish
> but still
> a good complement to the work of historians.
You seem to have a bit of a conflation problem here yourself. What you wrote here was not an argument with something that Howard Zinn said , but something that Joseph Tracy said.  I have been  an anti-war activist since I was about 16. Part of that break from my family and culture was the result of a friendship with Edith Lapowski, the Jewish mother of my closest friend. Mostly we had an odd affinity: she found my weird sense of humor amusing and I needed a relaxed and secure and confident adult to relate to who wasn't an authority figure. We only rarely talked about serious topics , but I wanted to understand more about Jewishness because I loved Bob and her and and their family friends. She turned me on to Jazz musicians and Bob Dylan, and directed me to some books . Potok, and Uris, and interestingly All quiet on the Western Front are the ones I remember . Between those things and things like the Sermon on the Mount and enduring some personal cruelty and reading Kurt Vonnegut  I came to feel the war in Vietnam was wrong and that war was only justified in true defense of oneself or another.   I never knew  much about Zinn apart from his open letter on the Vietnam war till 15 years ago. 

from previous post
>  As Simon discovers in Lord
> of the Flies, the beast is us.
This is a novel more reflective of the nastiness of English boarding school culture than scholarship about human nature or normal social behavior.  It proposes a theory which has  some  evidence and which also has  some counter arguments and contradictory evidence.