History and Savagery

I have been reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States 1492 – Present. Magnificent. It should be required reading for everyone in the United States. And while it is true that things nowadays are nowhere near as dismal as they were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there are some parallels that are worth thinking about. Primarily, the overwhelming corporate control of the United States, and indeed, the World. A corporate control that is interested in profit rather than people, just as it has always been. A corporate control that has no long-range interest in the environment or the well-being of the world’s citizens. The profit motive gone mad, just as it was a hundred years ago. It is strange, as some say, that however things change they stay the same. When will people realize that big is not necessarily better and that there is more to life than profit and loss. When will citizens of the United States come to the realization that they are getting the short end of things, they are working longer than most people, having shorter vacations, and being exploited shamelessly by corporate interests. There is nothing surprising about the outsourcing of American jobs – it’s called capitalism, and in the current situation we see the same battle between capital and labor that has waged endlessly since the Industrial Revolution. As Karl Polanyi told us so brilliantly, land and labor are not commodities to be traded on the marketplace like fish and potatoes, beets and lettuce. Land is just another word for the environment and labor is just another word for human behavior. They cannot be traded as commodities without disrupting the environment and human behavior. But they still are.

I have also just read Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide. While I don’t automatically believe everything I read, I believe enough of this to be profoundly disturbed. Although I am sure that I knew pretty much how bad things were in the history of the United States, I was unprepared for how much worse it was than I had imagined. Although this book is primarily about the genocide of American Indians it is also about genocide in general. It is not a pleasant thing to read about.

As I am also attempting to write a book on Savages and Savagery, and thus reviewing the history of contact between so-called savages and those who so labeled them, I find myself in an unbelievable pit of depression. In spite of all I know about the human condition, human nature, history, and behavior, I still hope that someday, somehow, in some way, somewhere, human beings might actually come to their senses and behave like we like to think human beings ought to behave. Look around the world at the moment and don’t bank on it.