Ferocious Goats!"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." (Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 51)
Today is Columbus Day in America:
http://www.zmag.org/crisescurevts/columbus_western.html
It isn’t uncommon to hear an Italian say that Mussolini deserves credit for building roads, bridges and other infrastructure. Yesterday a young Ugandan said something similar to me about Idi Amin. “Amin tried to put more power in the peasants’ hands…so long as they made no attempt to take any from him.” Can Amin’s eviction of the nation’s Indian-Ugandan population - an effort to put control of the economy into black Ugandans’ hands – be seen as an effort to reduce structural violence?
Structural violence , a term coined by Johan Galtung and by liberation theologians during the 1960s, describes social structures—economic, political, legal, religious, and cultural—that stop individuals, groups, and societies from reaching their full potential. In its general usage, the word violence often conveys a physical image; however, according to Galtung, it is the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or…the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible”. Structural violence is often embedded in longstanding “ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience” [59]. Because they seem so ordinary in our ways of understanding the world, they appear almost invisible. Disparate access to resources, political power, education, health care, and legal standing are just a few examples. The idea of structural violence is linked very closely to social injustice and the social machinery of oppression. – Farmer et al “Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine” 2006
Watch your back!!! J. Sachs has beef with Farmer’s depiction of the global economy as a zero-sum game:
…[Farmer] goes on to suggest, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that structural violence is the key barrier to the escape from poverty. In essence, he occasionally comes close to espousing a neo-Marxist theory, according to which extreme poverty persists mainly because of exploitation by the rich and powerful. For example, he favorably quotes two liberation theologians who argue that poverty today "is mainly the result of a contradictory development, in which the rich become steadily richer, and the poor become steadily poorer."
That is not correct for two reasons. First, Haiti aside, the rich are not, in general, getting richer and the poor, poorer. The Haitian experience does not shed much light on the massive reduction of poverty in Asia in the past quarter century, particularly in China and India. Nor does it properly apply even to Haiti's next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic, which underwent notable declines in child mortality and illiteracy in the past generation, and a similar decline in the proportion of households with incomes too low to meet basic needs.
Second, and just as important, there are many structural causes of extreme poverty that are not related to "contradictory development" or to "structural violence." A number of other factors can present steep barriers to economic development: an ecology that readily spreads disease (for example, the presence of particular mosquito vectors and climate conditions conducive to high rates of malaria transmission); physical isolation (communities living in mountains or rainforests); adverse biophysical conditions for food production (such as vulnerability to drought and poor soils). But Farmer's overriding message--that the poor are not to blame for their poverty--is emphatically correct, even though his specific diagnosis of "structural violence" appears too limited to offer a truly global perspective on poverty.
Have you read "Pastwatch" by Orson Scott Card. It's one book, not multiple ones like his Ender's Game or Alvin Maker's series. Oh yeah, the subtitle is "The Redemption of Christopher Columbus".
ReplyDeleteThe latest version of Civilization has a "National Epic" wonder. That is the type of story that is now told about Christopher Columbus. And the holiday is a celebration of Italian-American heritage--their version of St. Patrick's day with parades, etc. (and yes, he drove the snake fossils from Ireland too).
The 400th anniversary of Jamestown was celebrated this past year. National Geographic did have an interesting analysis of the interplay between the local Indians and the settlers. Of course, by then, small pox had decimated much of the native population--and probably significantly altered their culture.
The true story is much like the all the stories of colonization--subjugate the local people and milk them for all they are worth. The English left a code of laws, the French left cafe's and the Americans left sewage systems, and the Soviets left ???--and maintained power by keeping local groups fighting each other. Hence the mess we are still trying to clean up today. Slavery, indentured servitude, caste system, etc., along with current "civil" wars have all left their mark.
What you'll actually see, on an individual level, is that people want to be safe and secure. Have enough food to eat, and see that their children do well in life. Having a tyrant in charge is fine, as long as you or your children are unaffected--or you think they are unaffected. Religion is there--sometimes to oppress, sometimes to provide comfort and hope, sometimes even to lead to revolutions.
Hey, it's a blog. Much easier to speak definitively outside one's area of expertise.