uh oh! now we've got a whole other thing to consider. what is a genocide? I don't know if that should be the characteristic that divides these formula. After all, is it necessary for a genocide to be carefully planned to be called a genocide? Rwanda wasn't carefully planned--just a deeply ingrained hatred along with careful stoking by propaganda (radio) and hunger. The same could be said of other more sporadic forays into ethnic cleansing, many of which rely far less on a central apparatus organizing either the army or the dispossession of the "Other:" all that is necessary is a state that generally agrees not to prosecute those who kill its hated minority (does this make early 20th century US genocidal for not stopping informal lynching or was that to small scale?) or to simply allow that hated minority to die (as in Ethiopia of Live Aid era, or as Mike Davis argues in the text below, as the British did in India during the famines of the late 19th century)?
I was actually thinking earlier today that there was something fishy about making classical European liberals one end of this spectrum and the fascists the other. As Richard Seymour (/The Liberal Defense of Murder/) and Mike Davis (/Late Victorian Holocausts/) might remind us (along with Mr. Green [Joseph, no T. H.]) the Liberals might have been somewhat to the left of the conservatives at home on matters of trade, but they were pretty similar to fascist in their totalitarian promotion of that doctrine abroad--often with the effect that they had to kill (or let die) the people they were saving. It was unfortunate, but mother market demands her pound of (colored) flesh. This recalls a couple of good essays in the Economic History Review amongst other journals where authors discussed the rather checkered history of liberalism in terms of it actually being liberal--the John Gallagher nd Ronald Robinson 1953 essay on Free Trade Imperialism being the most famous, but there is also another one written by J. Bartlett Brebner around the same time about the way Bentham fit into the domestic tradition. A good quote from that: "It is difficult to summarize justly the interplay of laissez faire and state intervention in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. Much of the difficulty stems from the fact that it was interplay in terms of political power and therefore involved two other forces, the landed interest and the masses, evoking the most curious and impermanent alignments of the four figures in the political dance. Up to 1848 industry and the Philosophical Radicals repeatedly succeeded in using the masses against the land, but the land got its revenge by committing the state to positive intervention in nearly every economic activity, usually on humanitarian, anti-industrial grounds, but practically always keeping as close as possible to Bentham's model of the artificial identification of interests by central authority and local inspectability. The land had both motivation and votes; the pure Benthamites mustered few votes, but they dominated royal commissions and Parliamentary committees by their superb confidence that they knew exactly and scientifically what was to be done. <snip> Looking back across the nineteenth century in Great Britain, it is possible to tabulate the parallel developments of laissez faire and state intervention almost year by year. What must be kept in mind in spite of our tendency to polarize opposites is that both were exercises of political power, that is, instrumentalities of several kinds of interest. These interests strove to be the state, to use the state for economic and social ends. Occasionally one or the other triumphed with considerable purity, but never for long, and usually the political enactments represented compromise among them. In the large, power passed from the land to other forms of wealth and from them to the people, but as it did so, and as these three politico-economical elements moved in and out of the possible combinations of two against one, there was an astonishingly consistent inclination to resort to the Benthamite formula for state intervention." s On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 18:11, Marv Gandall <[email protected]> wrote: > We needed reminding of that. But all imperialists are invariably racists, > though not all are fascist. It's possible in this case, too, the savage > assault on a people of colour was was a consequence of the regime's > imperialist pretensions , rather than a cause of it, as was the planned > genocide of the Nazis against the Jews. > > ----- Original Message ----- From: <[email protected]> > To: "Progressive Economics" <[email protected]> > Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 6:32 PM > Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Racism & Reaction Must be Confronted > > >> Not so fast. Anyone remember Ethiopia? >> The Italian fascists were fiercely racist against the Ethiopians. >> Their savagery, use of poison gas, annihilation of villages, slaughter of >> a good part of the educated population, racial segregation against the >> Ethiopians, etc. were notorious. >> >> -- Joseph Green >> >> >> From: Marv Gandall <[email protected]> >> To: Progressive Economics <[email protected]> >> Subject: Re: Re: [Pen-l] Racism & Reaction Must be Confronted >> Date sent: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:33:16 -0400 >> Send reply to: Progressive Economics <[email protected]> >> <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> >> <mailto:[email protected]?subject=subscribe> >> >>> You're right. I stand corrected. The Italian fascists only bowed to >>> German >>> pressure by passing racial laws, but resisted deportations. Likewise, the >>> Franco regime banned Jewish organizations, but accepted Jewish refugees >>> until they closed the border during the war, again under German pressure. >>> >>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "raghu" <[email protected]> >>> To: "Progressive Economics" <[email protected]> >>> Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 4:15 PM >>> Subject: Re: Re: [Pen-l] Racism & Reaction Must be Confronted >>> >>> >>> > On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Marv Gandall > >>> > <[email protected]> >>> > wrote: >>> >> MG: I don't know who would argue that nationalism is equivalent to >>> >> fascism. >>> >> I certainly didn't suggest it. Race was not as important to the >> >>> >> Italian >>> >> and >>> >> Spanish fascists as was the second pillar on which the fascist >> >>> >> movement >>> >> rested: the war against the rising trade unions and socialist parties >>> >> >> in >>> >> Europe. However, the Italian fascists - mostly opportunistically >> >>> >> because >>> >> of >>> >> their alliance with Hitler - did turn to racism during the war and >>> >> assisted >>> >> in the deportation of the Jews. >>> > >>> > >>> > >>> > I have to contradict you on this. The Italian fascists never >>> > cooperated in the deportation of Jews. Until Mussolini was deposed and >>> > Northern Italy was occupied by the Wehrmacht in 1944, Italy was, >>> > ironically enough, the safest place to be for Jews in Europe - far >>> > safer than Vichy France or Holland. >>> > >>> > This doesn't mean of course that the fascists were not racist. They >>> > were just less viciously so than the Nazis; to their credit, they were >>> > perhaps a little squeamish when it came to actual genocide. >>> > >>> > (Maybe we should speak of a spectrum of fascism, the moderate fascism >>> > represented by Franco and Mussolini and the extreme fascisms being >>> > represented by Hitler). >>> > -raghu. >>> > >>> > >>> > -- > "Really ?? What a coincidence, I'm shallow too!!" >>> > _______________________________________________ >>> > pen-l mailing list >>> > [email protected] >>> > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> pen-l mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> pen-l mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
