Instead of seeking lessons from twentieth-century Germany, we should
look back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the
Anglo-American complex. That will remind us that most of the phenomena
we label fascist—nationalist fictions of ethnic supremacy, mass
disenfranchisement, censorship—are fully compatible with free-market
capitalism.
In the seventeenth century, England was an emerging superpower.
Supremacy would come from its invention of a/world//principle of
property./This principle was developed following contact with the
Americas, where it became possible to conjure vast new English
properties “out of nothing”—in a way that was impracticable, for
instance, in the militarized, mercantile societies of India. Such
properties were created by a legal definition of ownership designed so
that it could be applied only to the invaders. “As much land as a man
tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of,” John
Locke wrote in 1689, “so much is his property.” When combined with other
new legal categories such as “the savage” and “the state of nature,”
this principle of property engendered societies such as Carolina, where
Locke’s patron, the first earl of Shaftesbury, was a lord proprietor.
Shaftesbury was an aggressive investor, with shareholdings in the Royal
Africa Company, the East India Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company,
and he owned a slave ship and a plantation in Barbados. In Carolina, he
set about creating a “traditional and virtuous English society”
consisting of “balanced government, societal harmony, sustainable
prosperity, impartial justice, and religious tolerance.” Intended as a
utopia, this society was worked by indentured servants and transported
slaves: Africans were for a long time the largest social group.
“Freedom” was the slogan, but it applied only to some; the purpose of
government was to protect property, not people.
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/the-silenced-majority/
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