correction, oops sorry.
PS Ed. wouldn't it be better if we could consider the past to be a wonderful treasure trove of knowledge that we could all participate in. That we would guarantee intellectual property rights to processes and products just as (we) frown upon modern composers stealing without giving attribution (to the original source. Without know what the priors are in any process we are all liable to enter a world that never existed and lose the connections to the psycho-physical well springs and processes that seem almost ghostlike as we explore our own personal human instrument. What does it gain you if you own the world but lose your connection to your beginnings? REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 6:35 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Futurework] Where are we taking ourselves? Yep! Thanks Ed. What I've been saying is now "generic." Hedge's comment below was considered "over the top" as recently as Jerod Diamond's book which is the most disturbing piece of regression I've read in some time. Chief Oren Lyons, John Mohawk and eight other chiefs wrote the book "Exiled in the Land of the Free" that has the information that Hedges references. The book was written long before Diamond's book and has the advantage of a more holistic historical knowledge and not just making it up from a limited set of facts found in the library. Chris Hedges writes: "The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. "The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx" is a series of observations derived from Marx's reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that "lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants." He wrote of the Aztecs, "Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families." He went on, ". reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household. " Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel's vision of communism." Now that the "winning ethic" has run out of gas and morality (if Hedges is correct), it would serve people to confess their sins, seek redemption and sit down to learning another way. But the problem is always insensitivity and bais. Here is a quote from Diamond's book that illustrates both his insensitivity and his bias: FARMER POWER Chapter four As a teenager, I spent the summer of 1956 in Montana, working for an elderly farmer named Fred Hirschy. Born in Switzerland, Fred had come to southwestern Montana as a teenager in the 1890s and proceeded to develop one of the first farms in the area. At the time of his arrival, much of the original Native American population of hunter-gatherers was still living there. My fellow farmhands were, for the most part, tough whites whose nor-mal speech featured strings of curses, and who spent their weekdays work-ing so that they could devote their weekends to squandering their week's wages in the local saloon. Among the farmhands, though, was a member of the Blackfoot Indian tribe named Levi, who behaved very differently from the coarse miners-being polite, gentle, responsible, sober, and well spoken. He was the first Indian with whom I had spent much time, and I came to admire him. It was therefore a shocking disappointment to me when, one Sunday morning, Levi too staggered in drunk and cursing after a Saturday-night binge. Among his curses, one has stood out in my memory: "Damn you, Fred Hirschy, and damn the ship that brought you from Switzerland!" It poignantly brought home to me the Indians' perspective on what I, like other white schoolchildren, had been taught to view as the heroic conquest of the American West. Fred Hirschy's family was proud of him as a pioneer farmer who had succeeded under difficult conditions. But Levi's tribe of hunters and famous warriors had been robbed of its lands by the immigrant white farmers. How did the farmers win out over the famous warriors? Diamond slanders not only the Kainai People (Blackfoot) but the Cherokee, the Aztec, the Inka and the Polynesians as well. The answer to his question about "winning farmers" is gifting "Smallpox Blankets" and the discovery of gold in Montana. Aliens are highly motivated by that yellow stuff that Indian people call the God's shit. Ocemoglu and Robinson in "Why Nations Fail" make the point even more graphically about the English and Gold at Jamestown than we did in the Disney Pocahontas. Of course we caught hell from the press for being "over the top" but now fifteen years later a book by two Ivy academics goes further than we did. Go figure! "Farmers are naturally stronger than Hunter Gatherers" as Diamond makes clear in his story about the two Maori groups. But was the Chatham group really Hunter/Gatherers? Or were they fisherman foresters cultivating the island and living on fish protein? More important is what happened to the environment after the war? Did the farmers become fisherman foresters or did they give up and go home? There are many histories of farmers giving up the farm and moving out into a more active life that is more healthy with no sewer and disease problems associated with dense populations. The Lakota and the Kainai are just two of many groups who changed professions once the horse arrived. Nothing is said about the active trade in finished goods that sustained these people in their cowboy phase of buffalo ranching. (I've always wondered whether fishermen were Hunter/Gatherers according the local mythology. Does that make Japanese, English and American whalers hunter/gatherers? Was Captain Ahab a Hunter/Gatherer? How about Jesus? ["Fisher's of men."] How about Nantucket or Newfoundland fishermen?) The problem is that capitalism has difficulty handling mega structures like Aspen forests with millions of trees that are one living being or buffalo herds of hundreds of thousands managed by the Kainai, the Osage or the Lakota. In fact Capitalism has trouble with mega technology as well. Solar power, Chip-Fab laboratories etc. They need government help to make these things work for profit. Much as the current Obama Care rescues the Medical Insurance companies from the problem of Insurance versus healthcare. They demean government but are bloody beggars. Capitalists choose to see only the remnant Indians populations as indicative of the past and know nothing about the great spiritual and intellectual fragments left behind from the American Indian Nations. Diamond is a capitalist apologist, like the Peter Farb's earlier book "Man's Rise to Civilization The Cultural Ascent of the Indians of North America" a piece of insulting fantasy based upon the facts and sources he chooses to use. Most of which seem not to be original but academic (from his own library). Diamond ignores what the Kainai in Montana had to say for themselves. (Just like a good conservative librarian who doesn't want to be bothered with knowing the people being written about. Francis Parkman for example. ) The Kainai had one of the largest horse herds in the America of its day. The only thing that allowed the Yonegas (Euro-Americans) entrance into Kainai territory was smallpox which reduced their army and opened the borders. The Kainai (formerly known as the Blood confederacy) have insisted all along that the plague came upriver in blankets handed out by the Yonegas as gifts. For a history of the method, here is an excellent article in Jstor: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/MayorSmallpox.pdf Again and again in history as American Indians became successful at some version of integrating the Yonega viewpoints and processes, it would be the competing Yonega farmers who would bring in the U.S. Army and put the Indians "In their place" until today you have disillusioned remnant populations mad as hell but clever at the art of survival in a living hell. If you wonder what the Yonega wanted from the Cherokees other than their 18,000 peach orchards and farms I will be happy to send you pictures of Cherokee Manor Houses that can only be described as mansions in contemporary terms. Ultimately it was the Cherokee written language that set the Yonegas on the rampage. They refused to learn a "heathen language that was inferior" and that Cherokees used in their newspapers "to hide (what they believed to be) Cherokee duplicity." Cherokees with information systems that were unreadable to the average Yonega meant that they were equal to and better businessmen than their non-Indian neighbors. An intolerable situation for the damaged souls booted out of Europe's over population to the "New World." It would be Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War, Lewis Cass who would scientifically name the alleged inferior cultures "Hunter/gatherers" once Phrenology was out of the question. "Hunter/gatherer" was the ultimate ethnological put down. It also made the removal of all Indian nations, cultures and religions from their sacred homelands acceptable. Cass claimed that Indian languages were incapable of modern physics because they had no direct object noun sentence structure. They would have to become Yonegas. They would also have to give up their religion, culture and language and become good Newtonians. Then physics changed and the inventors of Quantum Mechanics found that native languages were more correct at quantum realities than the Indo-European. What "stuck" of course was the "Hunter/Gatherer" put down. You have to have something to feel superior with. REH PS Ed. wouldn't it be better if we could consider the past to be a wonderful treasure trove of knowledge that we could all participate in. That we would guarantee intellectual property rights to processes and products just as like frown upon modern composers stealing without giving attribution. Without know what the priors were in any process we are all liable to enter a world that never existed and lose the connections to the psycho-physical well springs and processes that seem almost ghostlike as we explore our own personal human instrument. What does it gain you if you own the world but lose your connection to your beginnings? REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 7:19 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Where are we taking ourselves? Interesting and scary piece by Chris Hedges on the state and future of modern capitalist society. <http://www.alternet.org/story/155213/hedges%3A_how_our_demented_capitalist_ system_made_america_insane?page=entire> http://www.alternet.org/story/155213/hedges%3A_how_our_demented_capitalist_s ystem_made_america_insane?page=entire Examples: "The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering." and: "All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, "as a looking glass does his face." And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush." Ed
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