Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Exile & Austerity, Montreal, Night 86
July 18, 2012
A [Paul] Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)
One must have a home in order not to need it.
— Jean Améry, “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” (1966)
* * *
I’ve been thinking a lot lately of home, history, and exile, and the intertwining legacies between them. Of the wreckage.
I’m in voluntary exile this summer. In so many small ways, though, my exile can be traced to my own brokenness, a “personal” narrative that is also constructed by the contemporary social conditions, which in turn are shaped by the “catastrophe” of history. Thus I experience a twist on another Améry essay, ”The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew”: the necessity and impossibility of being at home in this world.
His essay speaks volumes to me, a godless Jew, in the wreckage of the Holocaust (which Améry survived and didn’t survive) and the state of Israel. As an assimilated Jew prior to the Shoah, Améry had no relationship to Judaism and didn’t identify with being Jewish; with the onset of National Socialism, he couldn’t avoid being Jewish, or rather, it picked him out, tortured him, and put him in a concentration camp; after the Holocaust, he conjectures, it’s both necessary to embrace our histories and impossible to do so. “With Jews as Jews I share practically nothing: no language and no cultural tradition . . . for me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than . . . the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information.” Hence his further query, in another essay in his collection At the Mind’s Limits, “How much home does a person need?” after he and millions of othered Others — Jews, Roma, queers, those considered mentally or physically impaired, and more — were forcibly exiled, and if not annihilated physically, then annihilated culturally, emotionally, materially. Their communities and worlds, often even a memory of them, were forever gone.
This necessity-impossibility paradox seems to mark the human condition at this juncture in the twenty-first century. Most of us have been exiled from all that we’ve produced, reproduced, created, dreamed of, cared for, and loved — our sense of being at home in our own world — reduced to pressing our noses against the glass houses of the few who’ve stolen nearly everything from us and yet cruelly flaunt their abundance (a situation that’s captured, even if poorly, in the 1% language of Occupy). We, the vast “pile of debris,” can only look forward to austerity, which daily gets more austere.
I’m one of the relatively lucky ones in this present-day exilic existence, since it’s more parts existential than, say, geographic or material, although at times — like this past week, when I experienced a minor health issue — it viscerally hits me how much most of us are increasingly being forced outside the human community in terms of basic needs like health care. For too many, the necessity-impossibility paradox has already heaped “wreckage upon wreckage” on them for decades or even centuries.
Like the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, five hours north of Montreal, who are presently trying to fend off Resolute Forest Products, which began active clear-cut logging of the Algonquins’ traditional territories last week, and the riot squad, sent in by the government to enforce the logging (there’s a solidarity casseroles at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, July 18 at 111 rue Duke, Montreal, http://www.facebook.com/events/413763868670087/). Like a family from Ville St-Laurent that due to racial profiling and the criminalization of immigrants, faces the deportation of the father this August, after thirty years in Canada, to a country he hasn’t seen since he was nine, separating him from his partner, mother, and kids for years and perhaps forever (Solidarity across Borders is holding a “Beat the Borders” reggae music fund-raiser at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 19 at 2009 Decarie, #108, Montreal, http://www.facebook.com/events/267149120057721/).
So many peoples, so many names, over so many catastrophes. Like in the now-tourist-attraction Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, where between 1954 and 1959, two painters took it on themselves to inscribe the names of 77,297 Bohemian and Moravian Jews murdered in the Holocaust on the walls of the main nave and adjoining areas. They included each person’s birth and death dates, but in most cases, a deportation date to a concentration camp was the last known moment of each individual’s life, and all that the artists (or perhaps these angels of history, battling in vain to “awaken the dead” with their act of remembrance) could record.
It’s hard indeed to feel at home in this world, because this world offers little comfort and shelter to most of humanity. I come from a country that, for instance, spends three to five times more per year on incarcerating someone than educating them. Where it’s normal not to have health insurance (forget health care), and just a routine part of life in a big city to see lots of people sleeping on the streets. Where’s it’s someone’s own fault if they go hungry, can’t pay their bills, or lose a job, or get depressed because of this. All this is reason enough for exile, and reason, even more, to stay and resist with others. A necessity and impossibility, bound up in the recent paradox of the name “Occupy,” signaling an awakening for some and a further erasure and pain for others.
Many nations of the third world are described as ‘underdeveloped’. These less wealthy nations are generally those that suffered under colonialism and neo-colonialism. The ‘developed’ nations are those that exploited their resources and wealth. Therefore, rather than referring to these countries as ‘underdeveloped’, a more appropriate and meaningful designation might be ‘over exploited’. Again, transpose this term next time you read about the ‘underdeveloped nations’ and note the different meaning that results.
—Robert B. Moore, “Racist Stereotyping in the English Language”
Romney, Obama, and the Darwinism That Substitutes Culture for Genes
August 05, 2012
By Paul Street
Many Democrats clucked disapprovingly after it was reported that Mitt Romney recently told 50 or so rich campaign donors at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that Israelis had higher average incomes than Palestinians because of the cultural superiority. “Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things. As you come here and you see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.”[1]
This statement naturally brought no protest from the many wealthy Americans in attendance, including the super-billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.[2]
It was a misinformed and vicious comment. To begin, Romney badly understated the income differences in question. According to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, in 2009 Israel’s per capita income was nearly $30,000 per year, while in 2008 (the last year for which the C.I.A. had Palestinian figures) the per capita G.D.P. of the West Bank and Gaza was $2,900. So the average income disparity is more like 10 to 1, not 2 to 1, according to the C.I.A., hardly known for trumpeting justice for the Palestinians.[3] No wonder that a quarter of the people living in the West Bank and more than half of those stuck in the open-air prison called Gaza are food insecure.[4]
Israel-Imposed Misery
Beyond his gross factual inaccuracy, Romney completely ignored the critical role of Israel’s military conquest, repression, and apartheid in creating destitution across the Palestinian territories. Besides the devastating historical impact of displacement and division, the strongly pro-Israel New York Times[5] reports that:
“The Palestinians live under deep trade restrictions put in place by the Israeli government: After the militant group Hamas in 2007 took control of Gaza – home to about 1.7 million Palestinians – the Israelis imposed a near-total blockade on people and goods in Gaza. The blockade has been eased…But aid organizations say the restrictions still cripple Gaza’s economy. The West Bank, where 2.5 million Palestinians reside, is also subject to trade restrictions imposed by the Israelis.”[6]
We can also consult that leading Israel supporter the C.I.A. It reports that “Israeli-imposed border closures, which became more restrictive after Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007, have resulted in high unemployment, elevated poverty rates, and the near collapse of the private sector that had relied on export markets.” In the West Bank, “Israeli closure policies continue to disrupt labor and trade flows, industrial capacity, and basic commerce, eroding the productive capacity” of the economy.[7]
Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, understandably called Romney’s remarks “racist….This man, Erakat added, “doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation.”[8] Cannot reach its potential seems like an understatement. The misery imposed on the Palestinian people by Israeli polices is deep and extensive. As Islamic Relief USA reports:
“The vast majority of Palestinians, living inside the territories, and living as refugees in neighboring regions, depend on international aid for survival. Foreign investment in the region has dropped, further hindering the ability for Palestinians to move toward a more stable economy. In Palestine, where a majority of the population relies on foreign assistance for survival, insecurities in food, water and electricity, as well as crippled health care services and educational facilities, make living conditions some of the worst in the world. [emphasis added]” [9]
One of the Most Unequal Countries in the OECD
Permit me a not-so-tiny quibble on something that has not been mentioned in the official media discussion of the fallout from Romney’s comment. Beneath the deceptive and insufficient statistical category of average (mean) per capita income/G.D.P., moreover, there’s the problem of economic disparity within Israel. It is unthinkable that Romney or any other money-hungry U.S. politician speaking to wealthy campaign bankrollers there would dare to mention that Israel’s heavily militarized and U.S.-subsidized economic system creates one of the most savagely unequal societies in the “developed” world. According to no less of a capitalist authority than the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last April, “Israel has one of the highest levels of inequality in the OECD…This is reflected in very low market incomes of the lowest income decile which are 1/15th that of the highest income decile. While the size of redistribution from the tax transfer system (the difference between market and disposable incomes) is around average in Israel, the high starting point leaves Israel one of the most unequal countries in the OECD, after only the US, Mexico and Chile." [10]
In the summer of 2011 tens of thousands of Israelis joined nationwide protests against high costs of living and growing income inequality. More than two months before the Occupy Wall Street encampment was launched in lower Manhattan, Israeli protestors “set up more than 40 tent encampments scattered across Israel, with as many as 120,000 people turning out to demand lower taxes and increased access to education and housing.”[11]
The “Culture” of White Supremacy as American as Apple Pie
Disgusted as they might claim to be at Romney’s “insensitive” comment, Democratic Obama supporters might want to reflect on the unpleasant fact that Romney’s racist “cultural” explanation of inequality is as American as apple pie. Romney’s great sin for establishment white liberals and Democrats is to be so foolishly over-explicit in voicing what white Americans in both of the dominant U.S. political organizations have long felt on the reasons for such black white-inequality as Caucasians are willing to acknowledge in the U.S. As the estimable black left political commentator Glen Ford recently noted on Black Agenda Report:
“White South Africa regarded its wealth as prima facie evidence of cultural superiority. The fact that the land, minerals and labor on which that wealth was built belonged to Black people simply proved that Blacks lacked a “culture” adequate to manage those resources….[In a similar vein] White U.S. southerners also insisted, during slavery and Jim Crow, that “their” Negroes were the best off in the world because of their exposure to white folks’ religion and way of life. Left to their own devices, however, Black folks’ innate cultural inferiority – depravity! – would do them in. Blacks’ freedom of movement and expression must be contained, for their own good.”
“White liberals also believed in the Culture Demon. In the 1950s and early 60s, it was considered politically correct to describe African Americans as “culturally deprived” – meaning, Blacks are disadvantaged by lack of exposure to white culture. Power has nothing to do with it.”
“The 20 to 1 disparity between Israeli and Palestinian per capita income matches the wealth gap between American Blacks and whites (app. $5,000 vs. $100,000 for median Black and white households). The fact that such numbers do not provoke general shock and calls for reparations is proof enough that most whites view the disparity as more a natural phenomenon than evidence of cumulative injustice. [The “liberal” sociologist and future Democratic U.S. Senator] Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke for white folks of the past, present and future when he posited, in 1965, that a Black “culture of poverty” is what keeps Black people poor – not pervasive white racism. [emphasis added].”[12]
The “New Darwinism”
With all due respect to antiquarian cranks like Charles Murray and Richard Herenstein (authors of the infamous sociobiological/Social Darwinian volume The Bell Curve), it’s been a long time since the dominant white-American explanation for the disproportionate poverty experienced by blacks and other non-Caucasians relied on notions of genetic inferiority. Still, white America did not so much transcend as reconfigure Social Darwinism in the middle of the last century. “All too often,” Stephen Steinberg noted more than thirty years ago:
“notions of biological superiority and inferiority have been replaced with a new set of ideas that amount to claims of cultural superiority and inferiority. According to this perspective, differences in social class position among ethnic groups in America are a product of cultural attributes that are endemic to the groups themselves. In a sense, nineteenth century Social Darwinism has been replaced with a ‘New Darwinism’ that has simply substituted culture for genes.”[13]
This “new” Darwinian explanation of disproportionate black poverty and black-white inequality in the U.S. today has nothing to do with endemic persistent practices and policies of institutional racism: savage housing and school segregation, rampant employment discrimination, ubiquitous racially biased arrest, conviction and incarceration, racially biased patterns of private and public investment, viciously under-funded black schools, racially biased media coverage and culture, and more.[14] All this and the crippling legacy of 250 years of black North American chattel slavery goes out the window – like the Israeli occupation in Romney’s account of Palestinian poverty – in the dominant white (mis)understanding of blacks’ position in the U.S.
Women of all ages are swooning over this guy and misreading his obsessive, cruel behavior as evidence of love and romance. Part of the reason for this is that his wealth acts as a kind of up-market cleansing cream for his abuse, and his pathological attachment to Anastasia is reframed as devotion, since he showers luxury items on her. This is a very retrograde and dangerous world for our daughters to buy into, and speaks to the appalling lack of any public consciousness as to the reality of violence against women.
Why are Women Devouring Fifty Shades of Grey? - Gail Dines, professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston.
"In this country, Black women traditionally have had compassion for everybody else except ourselves. We have cared for whites because we had to for pay or survival; we have cared for our children and our fathers and our brothers and our lovers. History and popular culture, as well as our personal lives, are full of tales of Black women who had ‘compassion for misguided black men.’ Our scarred, broken, battered, and dead daughters and sisters are a mute testament to that reality. We need to learn to have care and compassion for ourselves, also."
Audre Lorde
"To be poor in the United States today is to be always at risk, the object of scorn and shame. Without mass-based empathy for the poor, it is possible for ruling class groups to mask class terrorism and genocidal acts. Creating and maintaining social conditions where individuals of all ages daily suffer malnutrition and starvation is a form of class warfare that increasingly goes unnoticed in this society. When huge housing projects in urban cities are torn down and the folks who dwell therein are not relocated, no one raises questions or protests."
bell hooks
One of the dead, Prakash Singh, was a priest who recently immigrated to the United States with his wife and two young children, said Justice Singh Khalsa, a temple member since the 1990s.
Relatives of Kaleka, the president of the temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, said Monday that he was killed fighting the attacker.
“From what we understand, he basically fought to the very end and suffered gunshot wounds while trying to take down the gunman,” said Kanwardeep Singh Kaleka, his nephew.
“He was a protector of his own people, just an incredible individual who showed his love and passion for our people, our faith, to the end,” the nephew said, near tears. “He was definitely one of the most dedicated individuals I have ever seen, one of the happiest people in the world.
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