Techno-Financial Capital & Genocide of the
Poorest of the Poor
Dr James Petras
| May 4, 2015 3
Comments
Total war from above
and the outside breeds total war from the inside and below
Today, the ‘poorest
of the poor’ are superfluous to empire and thus the policy of genocide. The
current world war between the classes has become a war between exterminators
and those who would fight to survive!
‘The
war and its results have turned Yemen back a hundred years, due to the
destruction of infrastructure . . . especially in the provinces of Oden, Dhalea
and Taiz.’- Izzedine
al-Asbali, Yemeni Human Rights Minister
‘Yemen
is devastated. There are no roads, water or electricity. Nobody’s left but
thieves.’-
A resident of Sana (Yemen)
The Euro-American and Japanese ruling
classes, as well as their collaborators in the Afro-Asian and Latin American
countries, have accumulated vast profit. This has occurred through a complex
stratified system re-concentrating the world’s wealth through: 1. The
exploitation of labor in the First World (North America and Western Europe); 2.
super-exploitation of labor in the Second World (China, ex-USSR); 3.
dispossession of peasants, native communities and urban dwellers to grab
resources, land and real estate in the Third World; and 4. wars of genocide
against the poorest of the poor in the ‘Fourth World’. Besides all the forms of
brutal exploitation and dispossession, which enrich the Euro-US ruling classes,
by far the most sinister and threatening to humanity is the concerted worldwide
effort to literally exterminate the poorest-of-the poor, the hundreds of
millions of people no longer essential for the accumulation and concentration
of imperial capital today.
This essay will begin by mapping the
genocidal wars against ‘the wretched of the earth’, identifying the geography
of genocide, the countries and subjects under attack, and the trajectory, which
has been chosen and executed by the leaders of the Euro-American regimes.
Then we will examine the reason for
genocide within the dynamics and forms of contemporary capitalism. In
particular, we will develop the genocide hypothesis: that imperial genocide of
the poorest of the poor is a deliberate policy to reduce the growing surplus
labor, which is no longer needed or wanted for wealth accumulation but is
increasingly feared as a potential political threat.
In the last section, we will discuss
how the ‘wretched of the earth’ are responding to this policy of imperial
genocide and what is to be done.
Mapping Genocide Against the
Poorest of the Poor
It is no coincidence that the most
violent assaults and invasions by the Euro-American powers have taken place
against the poorest countries in each region of the world. In the Western
hemisphere, the Euro-US regimes have repeatedly invaded the absolutely poorest
country, Haiti, overthrowing the popularly elected Aristide government,
decimating the population via a cholera epidemic spread by UN mercenary
‘peace-keepers’, killing tens of thousands of poor Haitians and rounding up
thousands of protestors. The occupation continues. Honduras, the second poorest
country in the region, experienced a US-backed coup d’état deposed their
recently elected president and imposed a terrorist puppet regime, which
regularly assassinates dissidents and landless rural workers. Peasants are
dispossessed; the economy and society are in shambles with tens of thousands of
Hondurans (especially children) fleeing the violence.
Today, the Euro-American powers
actively support the absolutist regime of Saudi Arabia as it bombS and
slaughters thousands of Yemeni civilians and resistance fighters. Yemen is the
poorest country in the Gulf region.
In South Asia, the US invaded and
occupied Afghanistan; its coalition of puppets and NATO allies have massacred
and displaced millions of poor farmers and civilians. Afghanistan is the
poorest of the poor countries in the region.
In Africa, the Euro-American powers and
their local collaborators have invaded, bombed and occupied Somalia, Chad and
Mali - among the poorest of sub-Sahara countries.
After the US-NATO campaign of
destruction against Libya, 1.5 million sub-Saharan Africans and black citizens
of Libya lost their stable employment and became the victims of ethnic
slaughter. Their attempts to escape the violence and starvation by fleeing to
Europe are blocked by the leading powers (the same powers that destroyed the
Libyan economy and society). Those, who do not drown in their flight, are
detained and returned to their devastated countries and early deaths.
In Western Europe, millions of Greeks,
Spaniards and Portuguese, inhabiting the poorest countries in the region, have
faced massive job losses, widespread impoverishment and spiraling suicides -
all induced by austerity programs designed to pillage their economies and
enrich their Euro-US creditors.
In the United States, 1.5 million black
(mostly male) Americans, are ‘missing’ – products of early death,
industrial-scale incarceration and police assassinations. American Indian
communities are subject to depredations and early death from the policies of
the Federal and State governments. Their lands have been handed over to mining
(and now fracking) to serve the interests of the mining and agro-business
elite. Throughout the US Latino agricultural workers are increasingly viewed as
‘expendable’ with technology and the effects of global climate change (such as
the severe drought in California) depriving them of livelihood.
In the Levant, Palestinians, now the
poorest of the poor and the most disenfranchised, face continued Israeli land
grabs, pillage and violence in the West Bank and genocidal attacks in Gaza.
Iraq and Syria have experienced millions of deaths and displacements, reducing
previously prosperous, educated and sophisticated multi-ethnic populations into
impoverished, uprooted and desperate people deliberately driven backwards to
tribal loyalties.
Why Imperialism ‘Genocides the
Poorest of the Poor’
With the exception of Iraq and Syria,
all of the violated countries have been poor in resources and markets, and
possess large unskilled labor. The people are targeted and savaged because they
no longer serve as ‘labor reserves’ – they are now excess-surplus labor – in
Nazi racial hygiene terminology, they have become ‘useless mouths to feed’.
This has intensified as crisis engulfs the West and the least productive
sectors of capitalism, finance, real estate and insurance (FIRE), have become
the leading sectors of capital. ‘Cheap labor’ is less needed, least of all
overseas labor from conflictual regions.
The ‘poorest of the poor’ countries
under attack lack rich resources ripe for plunder; their populations do not
exist among the priorities of the multi-national bankers – except when seen as
‘obstacles’. In the colonial past, sectors of these populations would have been
recruited by imperial countries to submit, obey and serve as imperial
mercenaries or coolie labor. They would have been transported and employed by
empire for ‘dirty’, dangerous and poorly paid jobs in other colonized countries
– like the millions of Indians scattered throughout the former British Empire.
Today, such coolies have no value.
The genocidal nature of the wars
against the ‘poorest of the poor’ is best demonstrated by the actual targets
and primary victims of these wars: Millions of civilians, families, women,
children and heads of households have suffered the worst. These ‘targets’
represent the most stable and essential elements responsible for family
reproduction and security. The ‘poorest of the poor’ communities are being destroyed.
Genocidal bombing has overwhelmingly targeted the essential factors for
survival: cohesive households, communal settings, subsistence food growing
regions and access to clean water. Therefore, it should come as no surprise
that marriage ceremonies and traditional social gatherings have been ‘mistaken
targets’ of missiles and drone strikes. Despite the denials from the White
House, the geographic extent and nauseating number of such attacks demonstrate
that according to the ‘genocide hypothesis’ there is ‘nowhere to hide’: The
targeted populations will have no marriage celebrations, no social life, no
increase in children among the poorest of the poor, no protection for the
elders, no social fabric and no communal organizations – there will be no survival
networks left for the superfluous of empire.
The ‘genocide hypothesis’ underlies the
practice of ‘total war’. The practice includes massive attacks on non-military
targets (‘Shock and Awe’) and the use of high tech weaponry to target
collectives of the poorest of the poor – repeatedly, over long periods of time
and wide geographic regions.
If, as the apologists of genocidal wars
claim, the bombings of weddings and slaughter of school children are
‘collateral’ in the ‘Global War on Terror’ why are they happening everywhere in
the fourth world and virtually everyday?
The genocide hypothesis best explains
the data. Even the terminology and claims made by imperialist experts regarding
their weapons systems support the genocide hypothesis. These weapons, we are
told, are ‘intelligent, precise and highly accurate’ in targeting and
destroying ‘the enemy’. By their own admission, then, the poorest of the poor
have become ‘the enemy’, as imperial weapons makers support ‘intelligent’
genocide with ‘precision’.
When liberals and leftists criticize
how imperial drone strikes kill civilians, instead of ‘armed terrorists’, they
are missing the essential point of the policy. The prime purpose of the wars
and the imperial weapons of mass destruction is to kill the largest number of
the very poorest in the shortest time.
No member of the financial-high tech
capitalist class has ever complained about the mass killing of the ‘poorest of
the poor’ anywhere or at any time because the victims are, for the purpose of
accumulating imperial profit and concentrating wealth superfluous. The poorest
don’t figure into the formulae of profit and productivity; they don’t ‘make or
take’ markets. On the other hand, their continued existence is a potential
liability. They are aesthetically unappealing on the outskirts of luxury
resorts. To the rich, they represent a desperate criminal element and they may
pose a real or imagined ‘terrorist’ threat. For these reasons, the rich would
‘prefer’ that they would quietly cease to exist, or if the warlords have to
dispose of them, the world will be a safer and more attractive place to
accumulate wealth. ‘Let them kill each other, as they have done for millennia’,
the empire piously opines and the bankers and their high tech allies can use
their military and mercenaries without soiling their own hands. The elite
ignore the mass immiseration while the militarists bomb ‘the problem’ out of
existence.
Today genocide occurs in once vibrant
living and working communities, not hidden in ‘concentration camps’. The secret
ovens and gas chambers have been replaced by an ‘open range’ of incendiary
weapons that end lives, burn neighborhoods and workshops, devastate livestock
and crops. Those who survive the bombing are starved, enclosed, malnourished
and inflicted with disease. Eminent doctors tell us that the misery is
‘self-inflicted’ and that the poorest of the poor are ignorant and lack healthy
habits. Recurrent epidemics from HIV to cholera to Ebola are quintessential
‘4th world diseases’. Even though the Caribbean had not seen cholera for over a
century, its introduction into Haiti via the bowels of imperial mercenary
troops (UN peacekeepers from Nepal) was blamed on the Haitians’ lack of access
to clean water! Not since the small pox blankets passed out by the US Army to
freezing Native Americans in their concentration camps of the 19th century have
we heard such apologists for genocide!
The truth about genocide is that all
this is known, repeatedly documented and forgotten. White workers in the First
World cannot even register these ‘facts’ under their own noses, let alone
express any form of solidarity. Imperial genocide, committed by proactive
militarists and ‘passive’ rich elites, are no secret even if they deny their
complicity. The key word here is ‘mission’. ‘Mission Accomplished’ was the
celebratory banner over the total destruction of Iraq. The warlords claim
rewards for successfully completing ‘the mission’. Yemenis are dying under
US-supplied Saudi bombs; Somalis are scattered in tens of thousands of tents to
the four corners of the earth; Haitians continue to enjoy the ‘gift of cholera’
from UN ‘peacekeepers’ and rot in massive open air prison-slums – their leaders
imprisoned or assassinated.
The Poorest of the Poor Respond
In the face of genocide and their
irrelevance to the profit motive of modern high tech and finance capital, the
poorest of the poor have chosen multiple responses: (1) Mass out-migration,
preferable to the First World, where they won’t be bombed, raped or starved as
they had been at ‘home’; (2) Internal migration to the cities, under the
illusion of an ‘urban safe haven’ when in fact their concentration in slums
makes it easier for the bombers; (3) return to the countryside and subsistence
farming or the mountains and subsistence herding, but the missiles and drones
relentlessly follow them; (4) mass flight to a neighboring country where the
local gendarmes will ‘herd’ them into camps to rot and (5) finally resistance.
Resistance takes various forms: There are spontaneous upheavals when the scope
of abuse exceeds all endurance. This form involves attacking the local
collaborators and gendarmes and authorities and sacking food warehouses. Such
action burns briefly and dies (many times literally). Some choose to join armed
resistance bands, including gangs of brigands, political ethno-religious rivals
and terrorists who retaliate against authors of their genocide and its
collaborators with their own version of justice and material and celestial
rewards.
Total war from above and the outside
breeds total war from the inside and below. The rebellion of the ‘wretched of
the earth’ in the 21st century is far different from that portrayed by Franz
Fanon in the middle of the last century. Fanon described a revolt against
colonialism and neo-colonialism. Today the revolt is against deracination and
genocide. During colonialism, the ‘wretched’ needed to be subdued to better
exploit their labor and resources. Today, the ‘poorest of the poor’ are
superfluous to empire and thus the policy of genocide. The current world war
between the classes has become a war between exterminators and those who would
fight to survive!
# # # #
Professor
James Petras, Boiling Frogs Post contributing analyst, is the author of more
than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional
journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of
Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has a long
history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the
Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. He writes a monthly column
for the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily,
El Mundo. Dr. Petras received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from
the University of California at Berkeley. You can visit his website here.
Filed
Under: James
Petras Tagged With: Boiling Frogs
Post, Euro-American
Regimes, Imperial
Genocide, Imperial
Pursuits, James
Petras, Techno-Financial
Capital, Yemen
This site depends exclusively on
readers’ support. Please help us continue by SUBSCRIBING, and by
ordering our EXCLUSIVE
BFP DVDs.
- See more
at:
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2015/05/04/techno-financial-capital-genocide-of-the-poorest-of-the-poor/#sthash.ZtP5jiZz.dpuf
No comments:
Post a Comment