29 June 2013

View from the Conquered Islands


It's odd to juxtapose Obama's imperial saunter through Africa, prattling about trade and development, standing bleary eyed at the Point of No Return, Wall Street investors in tow, while I still adjust to my life here in colonial Hawaii, a group of conquered islands. I imagine it must have been just like this over one hundred years ago, some agent-provocateur, like Obama, cloaked as do-gooder hid his forked tongue and bad character to coax just enough out of the indigenous Hawaiians to be able to snare them completely.

I feel guilty for being a living witness to conquest, not only seeing Obama in Africa, which because of the distance feels less intimate, but more with these islands in the here and now, which is as in my face as the selling of the hula for tourist consumption.

Development by the Yankee terrorists seems universally to bring a new kind of hell to the indigenous and poor peoples, from Kailua Kona to Sao Paulo to South Los Angeles to Cape Town. Wherever the Yankee foot steps, RoundUp follows in spray, decimating any real signs of life.

The Yankee promises development as a means to improve life and lifestyles of the locals and yet the locals end up suffering less access to land, hungering with limited access to food, homeless with precarious access to housing, stifled by lower wages, dispatched with a lower life expectancy, industrial diseases, family disintegration, and oh, yes: Christian tomfoolery nonsense bullshit. We cannot forget the Christian missionaries! Too bad there weren't any lions on the islands to feed these mischievous people to.

Part of this development Ponzi scheme is, of course, the paradise commodity that brings so many tourists, seekers of new fortunes, and idealists like me to the islands. This paradise commodification is a direct outgrowth of the Hawaii marketed by the developers.

How different are those who transplant themselves here from the mainland from the born-and-bred Brooklyn Jew who transplants himself to what the Israeli government markets as his "homeland"? We come filled with dreams manufactured, images of friendly docile natives eager to perform for us, and we take a little or a lot of what should belong to the native Hawaiian.

The development racket is also a cover for white supremacy: many "haoles" would say if it weren't for the Yankee takeover, development would not have come - as if the world's indigenous people were waiting at the Point of No Return to be civilized, waiting for the Wall Street pirates Obama works for, because we all know the way indigenous people had been living was not civilized.

I call Hawaii conquered islands because I take the conquest one step further than many sovereignty activists, who lament the overthrow of Hawaii's monarchy, of Liliuokalani,  by the same type of Bernie Madoff characters that wrote the Declaration of Independence and who care so much about development they will make the locals into fertilizer to green the grass of their tourist resorts, like Queen Victoria did to the Irish.

Hawaii had been a chain of autonomous islands, each run by local chiefs, until King Kamehameha got nation-state-itis in his brain and waged wars to conquer and unify the sprawling archipelago.

Nation-states are Western European inventions, which means prima facie, they are creations that are unsustainable. Remember, Europe had to look outward for its own development. The Industrial Revolution could not have happened without slavery and theft of the global South. Wherever the West has imposed itself, the nation-state is the model that follows - viz., the so-called "Middle East."

The nation-state does not, by definition, live in harmony with its environment: it lives on the harmony of others.

Some Hawaiian nationalists may be offended by my lack of honor for their "king." But kings and queens are just more perverse ways to keep power from people and from communities than our current, more elaborate failed state models are. John Jay wrote, "the people who own the country ought to govern the country," and this is what the US system is. The British restored its monarchy after Cromwell because popular forces agitated to be governed by themselves, not king or Parliament, and this worried the elite classes enough to bring back the one institution immune from popular influence.

Hawaiians who confuse their own Restoration with sovereignty and popular control, democratic control, from the community to the work place to the environment, must still believe that gifts come from above. This is a kind of superstition taught by the best and worst schools to ensure compliance by the best and worst.

Like the royals, the nation-state is an inbred, insular system: those sober voices who like to say "change takes time" or to quote liberal apologists like the idiot who said, "don't get involved in social issues unless you have 30 years" are bowing to the failed state. No elite want power to the people: the people are the enemy. No elite want work-place councils who own and self-manage because these councils make decisions anathema to Wall Street. So if "knowing your place" or "for Queen and Country" don't work, riot control and the militarization of our police forces - indistinguishable from our military - will do just fine.

Sovereignty will not more come with the restoration of a monarchy here in Hawaii than it will at the hands of Wall Street, brought to you by Obama, to Africa.