The most recent developments in Greece should not surprise anyone familiar with the historical record. The elites and the management class have always responded in proportion and to excess against any popular, democratic movement. These movements have always been a direct threat to the existence of elite culture and the so-called profit motive. And the historical record is clear that the elites, its managers - the little Eichmanns - and their police powers are forever on the watch to stamp out the menace of popular will and participation.
So Greece is not only bearing severe austerity measures, which even the official press acknowledge will prevent it from making any advances in social development for many years to come, but also the EU and banking elites have successfully imposed a pliable government on the Greek people. What devastating effect this has on the Greek people is not open for serious discussion, no more than the consequence of Western pioneer culture had on indigenous communities in the Western hemisphere.
The rabble do not matter.
But even EU machinations has proven difficult to pacify that ancient country.
Just as the elites of the 17th century found they could not trust even Parliament against popular insurgencies in Great Britain, and so had to re-establish the monarchy as the one institution "above politics" [meaning: outside popular control], the EU and its little Eichmanns have planted a virtual viceroy over the Greek economy, and imposed measures some have compared with the vicious measures imposed on Germany after World War I.
We have to pay attention to this. We cannot be docile to these machinations.
True enough, our brothers and sisters in the global South have endured this sort of disrespect for democratic institutions for as long as the imperial boot pressed on the neck of the real producers of the colonies - the indigenous, the African slaves, the wage-slaves reduced to sweat-shop labor for the "Metropolis" - Madrid, Paris, London, New York, ad hitlerium.
Haitian popular organizations under Lavalas had to be ignored, vilified, or crushed so the US elites could dare go and "teach" that island nation a different kind of democracy - the democracy for the elites.
This perpetuation of failed states - states without any democratic institutions, because those are dangerous - is a practice well developed by elites. It's policy. We could learn a lot from the global South: what they endured and tactics to resist.
Well, me must learn. Greece represents the sort of assault long imposed on our colonies but now imposed on the so-called global North, the West.
It's odd: Reagan haunted us with images of Nicaraguan Sandinista revolutionaries marching up the peninsula to invade Texas, when really it was our own masters who are the threat.
If they came for them at night, they will come for you in the morning.
Austerity measures have been hitting sectors of the global North for more than a generation. Those sectors include racial and ethnic minorities, women (especially single mothers), whites educated for nothing more than to be be factory workers, which means they weren't educated at all.
It is interesting to be hearing this recent angst about our failed public education system, since it was one of the first institutions attacked by the elites in the late 1970s, with such taxpayer-rights initiatives, like Proposition 13. This decimated California public schools for those most needing them; but there was scarcely any talk among official media about the side effects of taking vast sums of money from public education and what this would logically do to the poor.
Now, under Republican and Democratic regimes, we see what was an attack on various sectors of the global North expand to include things like middle-class suburban housing, white-collar service jobs, and university education costs.
Only now, the movement - Occupy this or that - gets a bit of attention.
Well, Greece proves that worse is to come for us.
Our elites and their managers will not impose a monarchy on us - that's very old school. What they have been imposing on us for the last generation are institutions similarly immune from any popular scrutiny or control, like the monarchy. And the rationale for these things is not much different: the rabble can't be trusted to do the right thing.
It's not just Apple Computers, lauded as a Silicon Valley giant when it basically exports its workforce to areas where the US labor, health, and safety standards cannot touch it: to sweat-shops in China that our forbears would recognize as what sparked militant trades-union movements [which of course were responded to with utter brutality and extermination].
It's not just these US-based corporations, with headquarters in our infamous metropolises, outsourcing work beyond the reach of US law and popular will; it is also the creation of global financial institutions, like NAFTA, which impose from beyond "trade" laws to enrich the elites and impoverish wider sectors of the global North.
The jobs we are left with are Target and Starbucks jobs, jobs to sell the products of slave labor.
The only good response to this is to respond at all, first. Like learning to ride a bike, some things can be learned from books, from our forbears, from previous insurrections; but we have to set out in practice and be ready to fall down, re-examine, reflect, and pick up our proverbial or actual weapons and move on in a sustained, organized insurrection of our own, disciplined or not - whatever that means ultimately.
There is no petition to bring about a social and economic revolution, so we can't wait around for it.
If they screw with Greece tonight, drones will come for you at dawn.
So Greece is not only bearing severe austerity measures, which even the official press acknowledge will prevent it from making any advances in social development for many years to come, but also the EU and banking elites have successfully imposed a pliable government on the Greek people. What devastating effect this has on the Greek people is not open for serious discussion, no more than the consequence of Western pioneer culture had on indigenous communities in the Western hemisphere.
The rabble do not matter.
But even EU machinations has proven difficult to pacify that ancient country.
Just as the elites of the 17th century found they could not trust even Parliament against popular insurgencies in Great Britain, and so had to re-establish the monarchy as the one institution "above politics" [meaning: outside popular control], the EU and its little Eichmanns have planted a virtual viceroy over the Greek economy, and imposed measures some have compared with the vicious measures imposed on Germany after World War I.
We have to pay attention to this. We cannot be docile to these machinations.
True enough, our brothers and sisters in the global South have endured this sort of disrespect for democratic institutions for as long as the imperial boot pressed on the neck of the real producers of the colonies - the indigenous, the African slaves, the wage-slaves reduced to sweat-shop labor for the "Metropolis" - Madrid, Paris, London, New York, ad hitlerium.
Haitian popular organizations under Lavalas had to be ignored, vilified, or crushed so the US elites could dare go and "teach" that island nation a different kind of democracy - the democracy for the elites.
This perpetuation of failed states - states without any democratic institutions, because those are dangerous - is a practice well developed by elites. It's policy. We could learn a lot from the global South: what they endured and tactics to resist.
Well, me must learn. Greece represents the sort of assault long imposed on our colonies but now imposed on the so-called global North, the West.
It's odd: Reagan haunted us with images of Nicaraguan Sandinista revolutionaries marching up the peninsula to invade Texas, when really it was our own masters who are the threat.
If they came for them at night, they will come for you in the morning.
Austerity measures have been hitting sectors of the global North for more than a generation. Those sectors include racial and ethnic minorities, women (especially single mothers), whites educated for nothing more than to be be factory workers, which means they weren't educated at all.
It is interesting to be hearing this recent angst about our failed public education system, since it was one of the first institutions attacked by the elites in the late 1970s, with such taxpayer-rights initiatives, like Proposition 13. This decimated California public schools for those most needing them; but there was scarcely any talk among official media about the side effects of taking vast sums of money from public education and what this would logically do to the poor.
Now, under Republican and Democratic regimes, we see what was an attack on various sectors of the global North expand to include things like middle-class suburban housing, white-collar service jobs, and university education costs.
Only now, the movement - Occupy this or that - gets a bit of attention.
Well, Greece proves that worse is to come for us.
Our elites and their managers will not impose a monarchy on us - that's very old school. What they have been imposing on us for the last generation are institutions similarly immune from any popular scrutiny or control, like the monarchy. And the rationale for these things is not much different: the rabble can't be trusted to do the right thing.
It's not just Apple Computers, lauded as a Silicon Valley giant when it basically exports its workforce to areas where the US labor, health, and safety standards cannot touch it: to sweat-shops in China that our forbears would recognize as what sparked militant trades-union movements [which of course were responded to with utter brutality and extermination].
It's not just these US-based corporations, with headquarters in our infamous metropolises, outsourcing work beyond the reach of US law and popular will; it is also the creation of global financial institutions, like NAFTA, which impose from beyond "trade" laws to enrich the elites and impoverish wider sectors of the global North.
The jobs we are left with are Target and Starbucks jobs, jobs to sell the products of slave labor.
The only good response to this is to respond at all, first. Like learning to ride a bike, some things can be learned from books, from our forbears, from previous insurrections; but we have to set out in practice and be ready to fall down, re-examine, reflect, and pick up our proverbial or actual weapons and move on in a sustained, organized insurrection of our own, disciplined or not - whatever that means ultimately.
There is no petition to bring about a social and economic revolution, so we can't wait around for it.
If they screw with Greece tonight, drones will come for you at dawn.
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