Babak Fakhamzadeh
1.
Buarque positions ‘Iberia’, the nation from which Brazil ‘received its heritage’, as a ‘bridge-territory’, through which Europe communicated with other worlds. He characterizes Iberians as 'unique in developing the cult of the personality', individualism, independence, within society. This implies that ‘lasting group agreement’ is not possible unless imposed from the outside, with a lack of social cohesion the norm, with weaker hierarchies as compared to other European nations, as a consequence.
The Iberian, says Buarque, values individual responsibility, meaning that, because of this, not natural human association, but governments were the unifying factor, with military dictatorships being particularly well suited to facilitate this.
Valued personal attributes were things like ‘integrity’, ‘honor’, and ‘seriousness’, not, specifically, a Protestant work ethic; a dignified idleness being seen as more ennobling than the struggle for daily bread. And, with a limited work ethic comes limited social solidarity, except in the personal, domestic, sphere.
2.
The Portuguese were well suited to conquering equatorial lands, particularly because their negligent and careless nature.
Buarque divides societies in ‘adventurers’ and ‘workers’. A society is one, or the other. For the former, the world is of unlimited space. For the latter, one of overcoming difficulties. They are not compatible, though neither exists in pure form. But, 'naturally', nations favoring the adventurous spirit were ideally suited for conquering South America. Spain, Portugal, but also, apparently, England.
The fertile tropical lands could not be scaled up in their exploitation through free labor, as the indigenous population couldn’t, or refused to, work under meticulously organized conditions. Slave labor was a necessity.
Buarque notices that agriculture in Brazil slid into using ‘bad’ methods. “In the agrarian economy, bad methods… have always tended to push out good methods”. To me, this seems a bold statement, but, it appears, is based on the desire for short term gains, only, supposedly connected to the adventurous spirit of the Portuguese. Then again, the destruction of the Amazon could be seen as fitting this pattern, though that could also simply be (more likely, even?) a dovetailing with the root features of capitalism.
Buarque also observes a comparative lack of racial pride in the Portuguese, comparing this with other nations of Latin origin and, more so, with African Muslims. Buarque claims Portuguese have a large proportion of African blood. Quoting 1926 research, Buarque claims that Swahili speakers differentiate between Europeans and Portuguese. But also, Buarque makes the claim that, in the 1500s, Portugal had significant numbers of slaves work the land and function as servants. Either way, ‘racial exclusivity’ was less prominent in Brazil, though Africans were very much considered inferior, even if the native population was less so.
Worker cooperatives, guilds, were not established in Brazil due to the prevalence of slave labor, home industries, and the general shortage of skilled workers. Also, with many regularly switching careers in pursuit of greater profits, craftsmanship was not established.
Buarque puts the spirit of cooperation, when it exists, not towards the achievement of material object, but to the satisfaction of providing assistance to a neighbor or friend.
Then, the Dutch occupation is discussed. The Dutch focus on urban development was significantly different from the Portuguese process. Buarque mentions that ‘the first parliament ever convened in the western hemisphere met in Recife in 1640’. Buarque positions the Dutch as destined to fail; they tried to make Brazil into a tropical Europe, whereas the Portuguese lack of true understanding of the difference between the motherland and the colony, a weakness, was their strength as a consequence. Earlier, Buarque posits that the relatively small numbers of Dutch making the journey was testament to the success of the United provinces at home. The Dutch, like other Northern Europeans, were just not suited to the tropics. The Portuguese adapted. Quoting from a German source, “they became negroes”. In addition, Buarque says, both the Portuguese language and faith found much more fertile grounds amongst Africans and indigenous populations.
3.
Brazil has primarily been a country centered around agriculture. According to Buarque, the industrialized and capitalist shift carried as a consequence the incompatibility with slave labor. Seems to me like a misunderstanding of capitalism, as we now very well understand that modern capitalism and effective slavery go hand in hand.
Interestingly, from around 1850, the import of slaves dried up. As a consequence, to channel the funds that were freed up, the bank of Brazil was founded. But, patriarchal features remained; party politics became a process of staying loyal to the party, not to principles. Buarque connects this to a central feature of Brazil’s agricultural history, where every fazenda itself functioned as a small republic, self sufficient, with the patriarch at its head, while, at the time, the country as a whole did not function as such. Interestingly, apparently, the patriarch in these rural settings had de facto jurisdiction over his family and possessions, able to condemn his family members to death, which Buarque connects to the power of the pater familias in ancient Roma. Buarque then makes a case that, historically, mental capacity, intelligence, in Brazil, has been seen as a kind of commendable feature of the human individual, but not as a source for meaningful potential advancement. Then, pointing out that as a country of slaves and masters, with trade engaged in by foreigners, there was very little base for the creation of an (urban) middle class. The result, on the whole, was a prolonged dependence on agricultural regions and practices. To the extent that cities, until the arrival of the royal court, were surprisingly quiet and run down due to the owners of the houses, landowners, would only visit cities during specific holidays, keeping their wealth in the countryside.
Buarque ends this with another comparison with the Dutch, saying that they actually favoured the city over the countryside.
4.
Buarque draws a distinction between Spanish and Portuguese colonization efforts: the Spanish 'are meticulously organized', emphasizing the role of a well organized, Roman, city as the center of control, with the intention to expand the Spanish state. The Portuguese focused on commercial exploitation, which Buarque compares to Phoenician or Greek methods. So, by the 1550s, the Spanish had already established multiple universities in the new world.
Similarly, the Spanish pursued settlements more inland, at altitudes, with less extreme climates, whereas the Portuguese stayed along the coasts, testament to the often used term ‘interior’, to describe Brazil away from its shores. It’s no coincidence, to Buarque, that the call for Brazil’s independence started in São Paulo, away from the coast, in a city less connected to the coast and, thus, less connected to Portugal. This focus on the coast only reduced after the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais.
Buarque observed that the Portuguese primarily occupied coastal regions that only recently had been taken over by Tupi, they themselves pushing other indigenous groups into the hinterland, while creating a coastal environment occupied by a fairly homogenous group, speaking one language, making it easier for the Portuguese to replace them exactly in these territories. Perhaps more interesting was the mentality of extraction, not settlement, the colonizers favoring exploitation, for they all expected to return to the motherland. The Portuguese went so far that, as late as the end of the 18th century, Brazil was forbidden to produce numerous goods that were manufactured in Portugal.
Buarque continuous to compare the Portuguese mindset with that of the Spanish, through which he explains the differences in colonial administration. The Spanish, more strict, sought control through rules. The Portuguese, with a trader mindset, allowed for more freedom. And Buarque introduces what he sees as the typical Portuguese concept of desleixo; not quite laxity but “it’s not worth the trouble”, accepting life as it is, with a disdain for efficiency and social solidarity. This is followed by a broad range of literary references that, for their obscurity, to me, confuse, as opposed to enlighten.
In the same chapter, appendices mention the lack of the printed word, by design up to the imperial period, in Brazil, and the common use of Tupi as the língua franca in the 17th century.
5.
Buarque argues that Brazilian bureaucracy has not been formal, but has been infused by ideals coming from relationships within the context of family. Interpersonal relations, intimacy, not cordiality, are essential to the Brazilian.
Buarque continues to say that this attitude extended to religion and that that desire for intimacy meant that, by necessity, the republic needed to be created by those outside of religion.
6.
The Brazilian republic was constructed top to bottom, not based on popular demand.
Buarque sprouts flowery prose, including skepticism that full literacy would not necessarily be desirable to improve the fate of the nation. Buarque then mentions an innate shame of Brazilians of being Brazilian, effecting their perception of themselves in relation to others. This recalls the 'viralata' attitude, the mixed-breed inferior dog, often ascribed to Brazilians.
7.
The end of slavery marks the switch away from a state built on agricultural and Iberianism.
Buarque points out that coffee, less intensive agriculture requiring fewer financial investments, made it more democratic, as smaller farms were sustainable, in comparison to sugar exploitation. This also lead to a less rural autonomy.
Interestingly, Buarque makes the case that the trappings of the monarchy remained after abolishing slavery and royalty, while the economic systems, and the societal layers, supporting those structures had fallen into irrelevance, creating a framework of pompous irrelevance.
Also interestingly, Buarque points to the perception of Brazil on the world stage as being full of elevated goodwill toward all nations of the world, resonating even today. However, this policy stemming from that disconnected elite also meant it was disconnected from society at large.
Buarque makes the observation that fascism flows from liberalism, similar to how, more recently, it’s understood that neoliberalism is capitalism that feels secure, while fascism is capitalism that feels threatened.
Buarque identifies victory of the revolutionary change centred on the abolishing of slavery and monarchy through the dissolution of the archaic systems that float on top of society. But, related, Buarque sees Brazil’s struggle as yet being unable to do away with politics centered around individuals, as opposed to ideas.
Radhika Subramaniam’s Footprint: Four Itineraries is less a book about feet than about the entangled histories, metaphors, and politics that follow in their wake. A hybrid, sitting between critical essay, travelogue, and cultural history, Subramaniam’s text is structured around four “itineraries”, Stride, Pace, Trudge, and Track. The book meanders across centuries and continents, from fossilized prints at Laetoli to the boot marks on the moon, from Hopi migration routes to border patrol surveillance, from urban pavements to the abstracted “carbon footprint.”
Originally posted at walklistencreate.org.
The subtitle of this book is also the shortest possible summary of the book: “The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus.” Everything else is just filling in the details.
Waxman gives a great overview of the evolution of ‘walking art' throughout the 20th century, even if she doesn't quite bring this lineage into the present. She does mention several more recent pieces that build on the work by particularly the Situationists and Fluxus, and references Parkour as a possible successor to Fluxus, but doesn't go further.
Waxman solidly puts the initiation of walking as a means of discovery with the Surrealists. A spread in the first issue of Minotaure, the Surrealist magazine published from 1933 to 1939, reveals the capacity for walking to give access to the extraordinary, and they often used the term “flânerie” to describe their practice.
Conversing when strolling was key to the rhythm of a developing Surrealism, as was the pursuit of chance encounters, and the dreamy sort of straying where the reality of the streetscape morphed into a hallucinatory landscape, with that pushing back against the regulation, logic, and efficiency of modern urban life, which they saw as deadening the spirit, while pretending to stand for progress and civilisation. The Surrealists needed lived experience and this needed the street.
The concept of the dérive took another few decades to be named as such, but its spirit was cooking in the 1920s. The poet and writer André Breton talked about “objective chance”, a term he borrowed from Hegel and used to recognise the magical power of what might otherwise seem like mere happenstance.
Moving through the city became a means of accessing the self, as the mind and body together are able to rewrite a traversed territory according to desires, histories, connections, and recollections, with each of the Surrealists walking to discover themselves.
Like the Situationists, the Surrealists were obviously anti-capitalist, identifying that capitalism can be resisted not just by exposing outmoded objects and places but by re-enchanting them.
But, the Situationists went further: Détournement, and the dérive, is a method for taking preexisting cultural products and transforming them into something superior.
But, although the Surrealists were perhaps big on self-discovery, it required the Situationists to use walking to achieve something beyond the individual.
In a way, the bridge between Surrealists and Situationists were several movements that included political action next to artistic expression. The Lettrist International theorised and practiced an updated version of the Surrealist goal, one that also sought to radically change everyday life, while not so much relying on chance, the unconscious, or the marvellous. They focused resolutely on the present, concerned less with themselves than with the city they lived in and the lives lived there.
But also CoBrA and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus were operating in the same space, at that time.
With the Situationists, it was Debord who infused the revolutionary zeal in the movement; “What alters the way we see the streets is more important than what alters the way we see painting.”
Debord realised that the average person exerts no control over his or her everyday life, living it passively and under various kinds of unquestioned, utilitarian obligations: to work and to consume foremost among them. Meanwhile life was growing increasingly atomized and privatized. So, to be aware of the inferiority and narrowness of everyday life must, the Situationists argued, lead to a critique of society and, eventually revolution.
Then, the need, and right, to change the city in which one lives, could be compared to artistic practice itself, the ability to construct life out of one's own desires, as artists have always done with art.
Walking, especially in the form of the dérive, forced one intimately into contact with the city as it was being lived and as it could be lived, and so, the dérive has two overlapping goals: “emotional disorientation” via ambulatory play, and “studying a terrain” in terms of its psychological influence.
For the Situationists, going back to Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, ‘play' was essential. But, the playfulness of drifting was of the utmost seriousness, important enough for Debord to describe the dérive as the “application of [the] will to playful creation”.
But, this was serious stuff. The Situationists saw how opportunities for uprisings or meaningful encounters were being eliminated via the combination of isolating modernist housing units, streets given over to motorized traffic, and constant surveillance, seeing the dystopian, totalizing reality that had resulted from the promise of the machine, though it wasn't motorised transport per se which the Lettrists and the Situationists revolted against, but rather its role in the streamlining and compartmentalization of urban life.
According to the Situationists, the general public needed to be nudged to realise their exploitation by the Spectacle. One way in which they tried to achieve this was through painting slogans on the city walls.
They defended their use of graffiti as “add[ing] to the intrinsic significance of those streets—when they have one to start with. These inscriptions,” they explained, “[were] meant to make a whole range of impressions, from psychogeographical insinuation to plain and simple subversion.”
Waxman identifies this need to change the world as also the reason for Lettrists and Situationists persistent production of maps, testifying to a desire to transmit their knowledge and beliefs about the city to others. The Surrealists after all, never mapped.
In Debord's famous maps, mapping only neglected sites (as psychographic centers) was to protest against their deliberate usurpation and devaluation by the urban planners of the day.
These maps, based on psychogeographic findings, drew up “maps of influence” revealing not the basic facts of the urban environment, but their effect.
Notably, both the Surrealists and the Situationists were often intoxicated. The existing accounts of dérives, in novels, artists' books, collages, maps, reports, and memoirs, are in great part records of extreme intoxication. Building on that, the writer Will Self has suggested that walking is, for him, akin to drug taking, offering, just like a drug, respite from the dullness of standard living.
For Self, this sounds like escapism, but the comparison is interesting.
The last section of Waxman's book, on Fluxus, shows a departure in the artistic practice from the previous two generations of artistic practice. It's as if, after the Situationist heyday of 1968, the movement's heritage went back to artists, like Yoko Ono, creating experiences, often through ‘walking scores', that nudged the participant into thinking more about themself, their surroundings, and the people around them, often more on a philosophical level, not so much on a revolutionary one.
Waxman does point out that Fluxus saw importance in knowledge formation, and Maciunas, the ‘big boss' of Fluxus, did argue that the kind of art practiced by Fluxus, because of its rejection of hierarchies, artificiality, and abstraction, could serve as an art for the masses in a Marxist-Leninist sense, which could hint at a kind of revolutionary angle.
Maciunas was born in what is now Lithuania, so that might have also helped with this vision of his.
Dick Higgins defined nine criteria for Fluxworks, Fluxus art, in 1982 and Ken Friedman updated them to twelve in 1989. They include globalism, unity of art and life, intermedia, experimentalism, chance, playfulness, simplicity, implicativeness, exemplativism (that is, providing, or setting, an example), specificity, presence in time, and musicality.
I can almost hear Fluxus moving into the practice of creating socially relevant sound walks, also underscored (ha!) by Fluxus heavily leaning on the work of John Cage.
However, Fluxus departure from the trajectory of the Surrealists and Situationists is also shown by a kind of inversion of the Surrealist strategy, where, instead of finding the marvellous in everyday life, they typically attempted to make it strange.
Still, Fluxus' anti-capitalist leanings are betrayed by their criticism of what we now call overtourism, taking issue with the typical touristic approach to the city, where only important monuments and beautiful places are visited, and visited by all tourists, thereby ignoring more quotidian or problematic sights, providing deeper and more complex insights. Instead of wandering the galleries and soaking up the artistic atmosphere, Fluxus tours were all about the places and perspectives otherwise ignored.
Debord must have been proud.
Published in 1955, it's baffling how relatable Philip's surreal journey, hitchhiking through Europe, is, compared to my own travels through Europe in, mostly the 1990s. So shortly after the war, it's mind boggling how that conflict doesn't play a much larger role in Philip's experiences.
“Omdat ik mij te veel aan dingen hecht is reizen geen reizen, maar afscheid nemen.”
“Because I get too attached to things, travelling is not travelling, but saying goodbye.”
Packed with gorgeous tidbits, fascinating insights, and the occasional stretch of the imagination. Written in the early 2000s, Kriwaczek's profound respect for Persian and central Asian history, as well as how these reverberate in the present, is satisfying. Kriwaczek speaks of an ancient world that bubbles beneath the surface, today, perhaps just waiting to again take its, perhaps, rightful place.The author look's to Nietzsche's [b:Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen 1366908 Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen Friedrich Nietzsche https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518983362l/1366908.SY75.jpg 196327] as a reimagining of the prophet's teachings for the 20th century; shifting the battle of good and evil from the supernatural to, in a post-religious world, the individual.Lovely tidbits:Mehrabad, the name and location of Tehran's main airport means ‘founded by Mithra', an important figure in Zoroastrianism and the subject of his own religion.The Persian word ‘mehraban', ‘kind', means ‘observant of mithra'.The common Persian image of a sun rising above the back of a lion refers to Mithra, bestowing the light of his grace on the lawful ruler.Christian halos find their origin in Mithra's solar rays being transposed on earthen just rulers.Muharram, the Shiite commemoration of the death of the grandson of Muhammad, during which participants self-flagellate, is also marked by some carrying a large cross. Not certain, but Kriwaczek speculates this to be a memory of Christian commemorations of Christ's Calvary.The original rendering of Zarathustra is slightly different, Zaratushtra, which probably means something like “rich in camels”.The Magi were the devotees of Zarathustra. From which the word magic derives. (And, so, there is a direct link between Zoroastrianism and Christianity, with the magi recognising Jesus as saviour.)The Great Heresy, referring to a sect of Cathars in southern France, active until the 14th century, and annihilated through the Albigensian crusade, had adapted Christianity to contain two duelling powers, one good and one evil, very much like how Zarathustra characterised the world's greater forces at play.It was during this conflict that Arnald Amalric, the pope's representative, when asked how to distinguish heretics from proper Christians replied “kill them all. God will recognize his own.”Also, this region and time served as inspirations for what we now consider typical Arthurian stories and imagery.Related, the word bugger, a derogatory term for homosexuals, derives from Bulgar, Bulgarian. Bulgarians, like Cathars, subscribed to a version of Christianity where good and evil were two equal and opposing powers. One feature of their practice was the existence of ‘perfects', ascetics who were vegan, only performed good deeds, and travelled in same-sex pairs. Hence the slur.Bulgars, perhaps meaning ‘mixed', of Huns and Arians, settled in eastern Europe, following the Bogomil faith, based on Zoroastrianism, which was also adopted by Bosnians. By 1867, the last Bogomil clan in Hercegovina had converted to Islam.A-mazon means ‘without a breast', the women supposedly cutting off one boob to be able to use the bow and arrow.Scythians were replaced by the similar Sarmatians, who mixed with the later Goths, which took on the styles and lifestyles of the Sarmatians. Styles that, now, we call gothic, or medieval, and served as the inspiration for the Arthurian legends.The gothic practice of herding livestock, when being pushed into Western Europe by waves of Huns, morphed into herding people by Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Alans settling in south-Western Europe. Recognisable as early feudalism.Serbs and Croats derive from Sarmatian, thus Iranian, tribes. (And I remember some Croats telling me of their Persian connection a few decades ago, when visiting the country.)Kriwaczek comes to realize that Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, a derivative of Zoroastrianism, and who for a while was based in Bamyan, in Afghanistan, was a painter, and profoundly understood the interplay between light and dark, and raised that understanding to the level of a religion, supported by acolytes in the Afghan valley who extensively painted the area's cave walls.After Mani's death by the hands of a shah of Iran, the typical greeting between his followers was ‘Mani Khai', which Christian Greeks used to label the movement, eventually bastardising it to Manichaeans.Manichaeism had a long breath; this suppressed religion escaped to the central Asian steppes, and it seems probable nomadic tribes took it to Europe, settling down with it in, amongst other places, southern France. But, certainly, Turkic tribes took it to China, where it eventually only faded out in the 17th century.Mithraism, also an offshoot of Zoroastrianism, flourished on the edges of the Roman Empire. In parts, like at Hadrian's wall, this was likely because Iranian subjects from across the Danube were transplanted to northern England to there defend the empire, bringing the Iranian cult with them.Mithraism, a mystery religion, left few traces, and little is known of it, but tentalizing leftover exists: Mithras, the mediator between God and people from Zoroastrianism, transferred divine power to his earthly representative through a handshake. If European Mithraism is indeed connected to Iranian Mithraism, which is not quite certain, and given that European Mithraism was replaced by Christianity, it's possible that shaking hands as greeting and agreement, unique to Europe, is of Iranian origin.By the time Jesus was to arrive on the scene, whether physically or metaphorically, there was not a single Jewish faith, but instead a range of sects, all with notable differences in how they practiced their religion. And, many had now been influenced by Zoroastrianism, not in the least in the acceptance of a heaven and hell, angels, and an end of times.Kriwaczek makes the case that this shifted concept of Judaism made a general acceptance of the tenets of this new Judaic offshoot, Christianity, a low hanging fruit; it's teachings fit how many Jews, and non-Jews, saw their religious, and humanity‘s future.Therefore, much of today's world, as a consequence, was shaped in the image of a Zoroastrian future, through not only Christianity, but also Islam and Judaism.The author speculates that Cyrus' capital, at Pasárgada, was a moveable tent city.Also speculation is that, perhaps, with the shift from Cyrus to Darius, both related, but not father and son, Darius' conquest of the supposed imposter of Cyrus' son, was also a religious conquest, with Darius seeking a shift to Zoroastrianism as state religion.Esther and Mordechai, of the biblical book of Esther, are supposedly buried in Iran. That book is now considered likely a novel, to explain the meaning and purpose of Purim. With Babylonian influences; Esther derived from Ishtar, mordechai from “Marduk khai!”, Marduk lives.Nowruz, pre-Islamic, is not Persian, but derived from Babylon. Here, in typical Catholic fashion, Semitics would, once a year, parade a statue of Marduk through town. And it was this symbolic coronation of God, reflected in the Jewish Rosh Hashanah, which apparently almost certainly, Cyrus imported into the Persian empire.The famed stories of the Shahnameh hark back to the lands of Turan, not quite the Persian heartland, and, meanwhile, Zoroaster himself might have originated in Central Asia, somewhere on the borders of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.Little documentation exists that is connected to the foundation of Zoroastrianism. Iranians, still today, put a lot of value in being able to recite classical texts, which might be an underlying reason, but perhaps also, Zoroaster's teaching, and his followers, were perhaps never threatened enough to resort to having to write down their teachings. Until only the third century AD, perhaps 1000 years after Zoroaster himself walked the earth. Or more, as the linguistic similarities between Zoroastrian texts and Sanskrit date the prophet to perhaps 1200BC, with some scholars going back as far as 1700BC.Fascinating, the fire cult so associated with Zoroastrianism might be a later addition by disgruntled competitors after Zoroaster ‘s death, harking back to even earlier times.Kriwaczek tries to get to the meaning of the haft sin, the table with seven items beginning with the letter s, an integral part of Iranian new year celebrations. He accidentally learns from a teacher he comes across in the town of Yazd that, before Islam, it was haft shin, the shin also being a letter s, but one that is pronounced differently, and producing a very different table, with seven objects that all had strong symbolical meaning, including hemp seeds, which Herodotus himself also linked to the nomadic Central Asian Scythians.Parsees, of which Freddy Mercury was a descendant, moved to India between the 8th and 10th century, not being about to stomach Muslim control in the Persian heartland, first changing their homes to Hormuz on the Persian gulf, before heading to India.These Parsees were then picked by the British East India company as an alternative center of power to the Muslim Mughal rulers and Hindu majority, eventually facilitating the rapid economic rise of Bombay and acting as founders as several of India's important heavy industries.Kriwaczek casts the events of Ashura, when Hussain, according to Shia Islam the rightful heir to the prophet, who was slain by the Umayyads, and followed by the Shia, and the wait for the hidden imam, after which all will be well, as a Zoroastrian narrative. The connection is quite obvious, though that doesn't also mean the connection is real.Zoroaster ‘s council: Good words, good thoughts, good deeds. A message for the ages.
Excellent biographical account from the inside of Wikileaks, set around 2010, the period when they published one of the most important leaks ever, Cablegate, both for its content, and, perhaps more so, for the way it enabled empowering masses of individuals all over the world, and forever changed how all of us consume, understand, and relate to, news reporting in general, and investigative journalism in particular.
Ferguson doesn't really pursue an analysis of destruction, written at the start of the COVID pandemic, but instead discusses many catastrophes of the past, and human responses to them.
Very readable and entertaining, this heavily researched narrative is full of interesting tidbits.
One example: 44.5% of Cameroon's people died as consequence of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
When, finally, COVID gets discussed, the level of detail, though impressive, is also, four years after the start of the pandemic, quite boring, and, when it diverts to discuss “Cold War II', between the US and China, a bit of a ramble which, now, feels a bit dated.
Only in the afterword, written in 2022, with much of the pandemic over, does Ferguson's analysis get a bit more on point.
A collection of historical essays on the role of refugees, Dutch and not Dutch, for the history of the Low Countries.
The first essay is on Dutch religious refugees during the second half of the 16th century, when religious persecution against non-Catholics was strong, and many became internal refugees, or fled to neighbouring countries, which was followed, a few years later, by another wave of refugees, when resistance to the Spanish throne was strong enough to take control of a number of cities.
From 1568, refugees who left for other countries, educated abroad by those more Calvinistic, less Catholic, radicalized, and started to pursue guerrilla tactics.
These ‘watergeuzen' started to pirate trade ships to financially become sustainable (p. 21).
On the whole, the picture that is painted of a country in civil war is impressively recognizable, compared to modern countries in similar conflicts; the death, destruction, suffering, and eventual apathy.
The second chapter follows from this, with the movement of refugees between the northern, now Protestant, Netherlands, and the southern, Catholic, occupied by the Spanish, the Habsburgs. Predominantly, refugees went from south to north, but a smaller flow also moved in the opposite direction, not putting much stock on the claims by William of Orange, disproven by the facts on the ground, that Catholics would not be touched (p. 35).
Interesting, the motives for those fleeing the south were often multi-faceted; though religious prosecution played a role, financial prospectives, and lack of them, as well as plain poverty, played an important role, too.
This story is told through a painting by Rembrandt of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, which saw a controversial sale in 2015, contested by France and the Netherlands. Painted in 1634,
Coppit's family was established in Amsterdam, but Soolmans was the son of an immigrant from Antwerp, whose father Jan, had started to make money through trade in sugar and pepper, and had started a sugar refinery for sugar from America and the Caribbean (p. 38).
This economic rise, through immigration and slave and spice trade, resulted in the expansion of Amsterdam from 30000 to 100000 inhabitants, as well as the creation of the grachtengordel (p. 40), the circular expansion of canals Amsterdam is now famous for.
Also, because of the societal stress these immigrants created, and their eventual inability to return to the south, to cement their presence and position, they, wealthy, positioned themselves as patriots, collectively pushing back against the Spanish invaders, supporting the Dutch generals, while also being essential for the economy. In fact, they were important, perhaps essential, in creating a sense of what it meant to be ‘Dutch' (p. 42); Liberal freedom with a strong support for the Oranjes.
Meanwhile, French speaking immigrants lived in their own enclaves in the larger Dutch cities, spoke their own language, and were not integrating, nor were facilitated to integrate.
These southern immigrants and their wealth were instrumental in the success of Holland in the 17th century and the founding of both VOC and WIC.
The Flemish and Walloons were encouraged to enter the service of the WIC and VOC. New Amsterdam, modern Manhattan, more resembled ‘New Walloonia'.
Also a consequence was the rise of international support for those of similar faith, struggling elsewhere. A kind of birth of humanitarianism.
Chapter three addresses the arrival of the first Jews in Amsterdam around 1600. Like the Protestants in the previous chapter, they left Antwerp for economic opportunities during the 80 year war. But, these Sephardic Jews were ‘conversos', who had been forced to convert to Catholicism when Islam had been driven out from the Iberian peninsula, and who had, consequently spread out through Europe, the Americas, and Asia. But, in secret continuing to practice their original religion.
They brought the precursor to the typical Dutch ‘oliebol', a fried piece of dough laced with exotic fruits, and connected the almighty doughnut. Other Dutch treats of Jewish origin are lekkerbekken (a fried fish) and sour herring, sour little onions, boterkoek, and more.
Out of fear of unrest, Jews were barred from lots of professions, limiting their focus to trade, finances, printing, tobacco, and sugar.
Some also brought their black slaves. Though slavery was illegal in The Netherlands, and these servants were de facto free men. They typically stayed in the service of their masters, and created the first black community of Amsterdam.
Maurits, the Dutch governor of Brazil, invited 100s of Jews to Dutch Brazil. Several had invested in the WIC, and many already had connections with the colony under Portuguese control, through their connections in Portugal.
In the colony, restrictions on what they could do were much more limited, that is, they had more freedom. Jews were 20% of the 7000 colonists in Dutch Brazil.
Because of existing connections, it was mostly Jews who were the middle men between the slave trade of the WIC and the plantation owners in the colonies.
The religious acceptance of Jews then also resulted in Jewish refugees, or migrants, coming from Eastern Europe. These were mostly very poor Ashkenazi Jews, who needed a lot of support from the existing Jewish community, who were obliged by the Amsterdam city council to look after their own.
Then, in 1654, with the Portuguese recovering Dutch Brazil, a number of Jews, sometimes with their slaves, returned to the Netherlands.
To lighten the financial burden on the Jewish community, poor Jews were encouraged to emigrate through a financial push, on the condition they moved east, beyond Poland and Italy, typically meaning taking up residence deep inside Ottoman territory.
After 1656, this also included emigration to Esequebo and Pomeroon, both in modern Guyana.
The next chapter focusses on the French Protestants, Huguenots, who came to Holland. 35000, 2% of the Dutch population, by 1700.
Very interestingly, cities were competing for the favors of these new immigrants, assuming an economic revival similar to what happened under the previous migration. And, perhaps surprisingly, immigrants were necessary to keep population levels from dwindling.
It was during this period that the term ‘refugee' was starting to be used. And, also, a nascent differentiation between ‘true' and ‘false' refugees, true refugees being those that had fled for religious reasons.
Chapter 5 deals with fleeing slaves in Suriname, marrons, who settled in the bush, outside of nominal reach of plantation owners and the state.
Conditions were tough, life expectancies low. By 1740, nine out of ten slaves were born in Africa. An estimated 300000 slaves were transported to Suriname.
Chapter 6 follows Johan Frederik Rudolph Van Hooff, who, at the end of the 18th century, ended up as the mayor of Eindhoven, while advocating against the prominent role of the Prince of Orange, descendants of William the silent.
After a conflict which saw Prussian soldiers take Utrecht and Amsterdam, the Orange counterrevolution ended up on top and van Hooff eventually fled abroad, him and many others moving to France.
Persuing their cause, they wrote a pamphlet in 1788, condemning the Dutch system of governance, focused around the stadhouder, and promoted equality between men; the document contained a first version of human rights.
Then, in 1793, shortly after the beheading of the French king, to export the Revolution, the French invaded the Netherlands with the objective to depose William V. This quickly failed and, with the French situation quickly evolving, van Hooff was imprisoned.
But, with the execution of Robespierre, fortunes changed again; the Dutch patriots, with the French, chased Willem out of the Netherlands, who moved to England. Van Hooff ended up in the newly formed parliament in 1796, and a constitution was put together which guarantees human rights and a separation of church and state.
Oddly, with the rise of napoleon I. France and, later, the creation of the Dutch monarchy, plenty of the patriots, pointedly against a royal system, survived politically, some even thriving.
Next, a short chapter on upper class migration, mostly from south to north, after the Belgian Revolution of 1830, in which Belgian gained independence, shortly after the reunification of the Netherlands after the defeat of Napoleon.
Then, some background on the estimated 1 million Belgians that fled to the Netherlands during the First World War, during which the Netherlands remained neutral.
Chapter 9 looks at Jewish refugees to The Netherlands in the run up to the second world war, who, generally, were not treated too well. Particularly Jews from to the east of Germany were, by definition, not accepted as refugees or allowed to settle.
Next, a focus on the estimated 800 Jewish refugees who, during the Second World War, managed to escape from the Netherlands to the Dutch and British Caribbean. The chapter is primarily based on personal interviews of the author with members of the actual escaped families, able to draw from personal archives.
Most did not stay in the Caribbean after the war.
The next chapter tells stories of immigrants coming from the Dutch indies after the Second World War, totaling between 300000 and 400000 individuals. The stories are based on personal interviews conducted with over 700 people at the turn of the millennium.
Chapter 12 discusses the changes to the process of accepting, or not, refugees and asylum seekers after the Second World War, up to 1989. Shortly after the war, the number of asylum seekers was small, perhaps dozens per year, while by 1989, the number had risen to about 14000 per year.
At first, very few individuals were involved in handling asylum requests, and these were typically handled on a personal basis. This evolved, and the Dutch asylum process became judicial, complex, slow, unpredictable.
In the 1990s the source of asylum seekers diversified more, with a large group arriving from what once was Yugoslavia.
Interesting: Dutch newspapers have used the term refugee at least since the beginning of the 20th century, but the term asylum seeker was not used before the mid 1980s.
The last chapter looks at the more current situation of Dutch immigration policy.
In Europe, Dutch policy is considered generous, but in practice, it does not work well. Political pushbacks also restricted acceptance and have elongated procedures.
There's a plan to designate asylum seekers who have been denied as ‘undesirable' who are required to leave the country and, if not following through with that, can be imprisoned for up to six months, and fined.
In the afterword, the editors point out that the concept of refugee, legally defined through the declaration on human rights in 1948, and the refugee convention of 1951, has always been primarily focused on Europe, has been used as a tool by the west in the Cold War, and, generally, was wrapped in an ideological political battle which, with the broadening of global politics and the resulting multipolarisation, has been shown to be inadequate and inconsistent.
It's also reiterated that, often, not the state, but socio-cultural organizations drive the desire, intention, and implementation, of receiving refugees, these organisations typically ideologically, ethnically, or religiously connected to the refugees themselves.
However, with the decline of civil society from the 1990s onward, coupled with the rise of individualism, the state has been given more control and responsibility on the reception of refugees. Not only, naturally, does this result in more dissatisfaction with the public, this also dovetailed with the rise of political extremism, and with a lack of societal outlets on a local level.
I'm working on a project that focusses on the Dutch colonial past in Brazil. Holland controlled a good part of the Brazilian North East for around 25 years during the 17th century. They were eventually kicked out by the Portuguese, and adjusted their colonial operations based on their learnings from Brazil, essentially pursuing stronger economic control over their territories, while also increasing the abuse of the slaves used for exploiting the territories.
The Hague is the seat of Dutch government, and a not-so-distant member of the Dutch royal family, Johan-Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, was in charge of Dutch Brazil for most of the Dutch tenure. Gaining wealth, through his control of the territory and a portion of the slave trade, he built a prominent residence in The Hague, a house still named after him, right next to the home of the Dutch seat of political power.
So, reading this book, on the colonial history of The Hague, was a necessity.
Not surprisingly, the book has only a limited focus on Brazil, with Dutch connections with Surinam and Indonesia being much stronger.
Nevertheless, while the VOC, the East-Indies Company, with its focus on Indonesia and related territories, was the profitable one, the woes of the WIC, with its focus on the Atlantic, provide an insight into the challenges of the Dutch attempting to manage their portion of the slave trade, and their properties in the Americas.
The shareholders of the WIC seldom received an income from the operation, as the company mostly ran at a loss. It went bankrupt in 1674, and was revived, in a more lean setup, a few years later.
The book is a collection of essays from different authors, which means the pieces are of diverse quality, and regularly overlap and repeat each other, while also often not going into the depth the material deserves.
Here's a number of observations that are interesting or striking.
+ Willem van Oranje, who fought against Spanish colonial control in the 16th century, accused Spain of ‘cruel colonialism', of the Americas and, by implication, The Netherlands, but his descendants happily partook in the same colonial process.
His descendent Willem III, who also became king of England, on his arrival in the new kingdom, was accompanied by “200 Blacks, brought from the plantations of the Netherlands in America, [with] imbroider'd caps lined with white fur, and plumes of white feathers”.
+ In 1621, Jan Pieterszoon Coen committed genocide on an Indonesian island, to serve the interests of a corporate monopoly. Of the population of 15000, only some 1000 remained. This process was instrumental in influencing the Dutch colonial, slave-based, model elsewhere, including in Suriname and Brazil.
+ Dutch Brazil was the first important colony of the WIC, from 1630 to 1654. New Netherland, later Manhattan, was a colony between 1624 and 1664. Suriname from 1667 until 1975, the Cape Colony, in South Africa, from 1652 to 1796.
+ Naval piracy was legal. In 1657 a Dutch admiral blocked the river flowing out of Lisbon, taking 15 Portuguese ships loaded with sugarcane from Brazil, the admiral receiving a 5% ‘finders fee'.
Piet Heijn took home a Spanish Armada rich in silver, from off the coast of Cuba, in 1628. This provided enough money to attempt the capturing of Recife and Olinda, in northern Brazil.
Those attempting piracy were legitimised through a ‘piracy brief' from the highest Dutch political office.
Hugo de Groot, whose writings laid the foundations for international law, also wrote a piece which justified piracy.
+ There had been a long, if inconsequential, pushback against slavery, with little influence. Economic benefits trumped the moral high ground. Profit, and geopolitics joined hands with racism and violence. In addition, the church justified the trade.
+ Of the estimated 12 million slaves that were transported to the Americas, around 550000, 6%, were transported on Dutch ships. Death rates of the voyage were around 25%.
+ The family of Oranje-Nassau (the Dutch royal family) played an essential role in Dutch colonialism (“De Oranje-Nassaus behoorden tot de steunpilaren van het kolonialisme.”) Five of the stadhouders (the most important political position in pre-monarchy Holland) were of the Oranje-Nassau family, and they held the highest position in both the WIC and VOC.
+ Slavery was not legal within the borders of The Netherlands, but black servants were seen as a status symbol.
Several Brazilian slaves were brought to The Netherlands. Seven worked for the Oranje-Nassaus.
+ White males were allowed to marry ‘wild women' (“Wilde vrouwen”) and blacks (“zwartinnen”), whom were not enslaved, on the condition they were raised in Christian fashion and were baptised.
In the colonies, free black males were not allowed to marry white women. In The Netherlands, however, this was allowed.
Children of female slaves were enslaved by default, also when the father was not a slave.
+ Dutch law made no distinction based on skin color.
+ In Indonesia, the Dutch introduced the ‘cultuurstelsel', a taxation system where the local population had to labour on 20% on their land for the production of state-owned goods, serving a European market.
+ During the Second World War, people with Indonesian connections were overrepresented in the Dutch resistance. The explanation is that many were students of a more wealthy background, disconnected from family.
So, they were young, independent of mind and body. And there had previous experience of racial segregation, its meaning and realization in practice. And they already were primed for activism.
Following up from his earlier successful work along similar lines, Tim Marshall again travels through the state of world affairs in ten maps. Though the short histories of the countries (+1) are comprehensive and decent summaries, the insights are not always quite as illuminating.
Australia is a cultural melting pot and balances US cooperation with the potential territorial threat from China, while also handling China as a huge trading partner.
In Iran, either the clergy will lose their grip, or the youth will force change.
Saudi Arabia has gone through an even larger whirlwind of changes than I thought I knew, with the near future being a balancing act between reform and control.
The UK needs to find its footing.
Greece has to balance the geographical desires of larger powers.
Turkey is on the cusp of changing its direction, but is not completely certain where it should take itself.
The Sahel is unstable with local, regional, and international powers all jostling for control and influence.
Ethiopia has the potential to become a regional powerhouse, and is on its way to become one.
Spain is doing well, despite some internal disunity, and issues around immigration.
The space race is only just beginning and can mean shared benefits, and all-out war.
Pearl perhaps wanders a bit much, but the book is a nice introduction, overview, and description of, his practice of having people learn from exploring the streets.
Not explicitly part of the Street wisdom workshops, Pearl recognizes the following steps to facilitate synchronicity:
+ Imagining, or daydreaming, being able to see possibilities.
+ Interpreting, questioning what the things, or connections, you see, mean.
+ Noticing, what is happening, or seen, around you.
+ Playing, trying out possibilities and opportunities.
+ Synchronizing, matching your pace and rhythm with things, or people, around you.
+ Recognizing (inherent connectivity)
+ Intending; to want certain types of events to happen, or to seek certain answers or connections.
+ Choosing, that synchronicity, and the ability to make connections, in the wild, exists.
Things move fast. ‘effective altruism' wasn't yet a common term when this book was published, nor was TESCREAL, but what Rushkoff calls The Mindset, a version of ‘Silicon Valley escapism', with a strong helping of libertarianism intertwined with visions of grandeur and superiority, is close, even if it is perhaps more focussed on the ‘inevitable' collapse of society.
Ruskhoff's book is helpful, but, also already a bit dated. The book's also overly long, even though it's pretty short, as Rushkoff's explanations of the shades of elitism inherent in The Mindset, as part of late stage capitalism, not in the least due to recent developments in politics and tech, are pretty obvious pretty quickly.
The book's first few chapters are the best, providing the most insight.
Plenty of service provides offer expertise to billionaires to escape the coming societal storm in out of the way locations. Yet, microplastics are everywhere, with the average American consuming one credit card of plastic per month.
Rushkoff puts the inception of the rich' escapist behaviour at before the arrival of the .com bubble in 2000; by then, digital technology was already no longer about changing the world, but about keeping the old systems in place; money was not spent on new technologies to improve society, but to make a quick buck. The actual product being the traded shares, which have to increase in value at any cost.
Rushkoff argues, echoing Timothy Leary, that MIT's Media Lab, and ‘innovative' technology, were built by immature boys seeking to recreate the security of the womb, satisfying your needs before realising you have them, shielded from the challenges of the real world.
One consequence of this shielding, video conferencing, and Uber eats, is that our physiology is no longer triggered by the physical details of our interactions, meaning we alienate from those on the other side. We believe we are all unique in our own bubble, unable to empathise with the problems of the rest of the world.
This ‘dumbwaiter effect' makes the human cost of the services we consume invisible; we do not see the Doordash driver struggling, because we never get to see the Doordash driver; we communicate by text, and find food at our door.
Similarly, these elite believe that humans can be manipulated like computers and semi-autonomous deterministic systems. Some gamification, some manipulation, the masses function just like machines.
This also feeds into the obsession with having to capture everything in code, rules, and measurable results, denying human emotion.
Rushkoff points to Silicon Valley business plans of continuous exponential growth as a euphemism for colonial conquest, domination, and extraction, externalising the cost, internalising the rewards.
Colonialism, of course, is intrinsically intertwined with the rise of capitalism, with the delusion that, with enough resources, we can separate ourselves from nature. This, now, has lead to ‘innovation' being less about products, more about evolved business and financial models.
Meanwhile, less regulation, every libertarian's wet dream, favours the wealthy.
Besides Rushkoff's excellent analysis, he offers limited solutions. Degrowth as an alternative to The Great Reset is one. Too strong a societal focus on STEM is another; technology facilitating perfect memory makes it harder for individuals to endorse progress.
Insightfully, he identifies the alt-right's reaction to The Mindset as a mirrored image of The Mindset, fetishising another great reset, but with their own leaders, or themselves, at the helm.
The recent rapid developments around late stage capitalism and exploitation, as well as political volatility mean that Rushkoff's ideas have already become common knowledge with many. His analysis is not less true because of that, but also already no longer as insightful or groundbreaking.
Near the end, in passing, Rushkoff suggests an interesting potential cause for western materialism, in that western, I suppose Indo-European, languages are noun-based, engendering a mindset that facilitates objectification.
For this book, Kaplan traveled very much off the beaten track, during the first half of the 1990s. Fukuyama had just announced we had reached the end of history, and Kaplan is looking for cultural reasons for why ‘failed states' are what they are, but, eventually, not really finding an answer.
Given the book's age, the book's at its weakest when Kaplan tries to predict the future by showing off his knowledge, reading and connections.
It's at his best as a more straightforward travelogue, the author describing his experiences, creating a time capsule of life that no longer exists.
In part as a consequence of this, as Kaplan moves further east, the narrative first starting in Sierra Leone and Liberia, ending in Cambodia, the book gets better as the story progresses.
Kaplan raises an interesting point in that a partial cause for the Iranian Revolution was not poverty, but unmet rising expectations; real income had increased immensely, under the shah, in the sixties, after which growth levelled off, while its benefits were very unevenly distributed.
Kaplan refers to a scholar who underscores this, where they predict that these unmet expectations will be a strong driver for dissatisfaction, perhaps even revolt, in the near future.
This is one of the few moments where Kaplan comes close to identifying an important driver for today's global struggles; the rise of the right, in recent years in many countries, is fuelled by dissatisfaction in unmet expectations, on the back of broken promises of golden futures.
In the end, what seems to be Kaplan's overarching conclusion is that, for humanity to save itself from overpopulation, climate destruction, and ethnic annihilation, is that solutions have to be forged at a local level. That is, they can not be superimposed by outsiders.
A few notes:
+ Kaplan visited Freetown a good ten years before I did, but his experience, and the places he visited, are almost identical to mine.
+ Kaplan makes the point that Turkey, through Ataturk, celebrated paganism over Islam in its drive to become more secular.
+ I was unaware of outbreaks of violence in Azerbaijan around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, both against autocratic control from Moscow, and through ethnic conflicts with the Armenians. At the time of his writing, Azerbaijan had not yet embarked on its autocratic future.
+ Kaplan's predictions are sometimes wildly off the mark, but, a major reason for this being the black swan of 9/11.
Not even 6 years old, written shortly after the start of Trump's presidency, and with already so much water under the bridge, the book almost feels quaint.
The book's also not so much about how democracies die, but more about what America can do to prevent a capturing of the state by Trump.
The book's infused with a sense of American exceptionalism and a lack of self criticism where it matters: that the demise of non-American democracies has regularly (often?) been the cause of American intervention. (Even if, in fairness, Levitsky, in the book's closing chapter, acknowledges that American democracy is perhaps not as exceptional as Americans used to think.)
With that, the title of the book could have also been “America kills democracies, and perhaps now it's killing its own”.
Levitsky identifies the traits that identify an authoritarian before he becomes one:
1. He rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game.
2. He denies the legitimacy of opponents.
3. He tolerates or encourages violence.
4. He indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.
For Levitsky, the solution is democratic isolation; politicians and parties need to ostracise potential autocrats.
Notwithstanding if the cause of the demise of a democracy, through autocrats or otherwise, is due to outside forces, this sounds most reasonable.
Levitsky identify three strategies by which elected authoritarians seek to consolidate power: capturing the referees, sidelining the key players, and rewriting the rules to tilt the playing field against opponents.
Citing real-world evidence, using existing democratic processes by the autocrat's opponents seems the most likely to generate success in curbing the autocrat's ambitions.
A masterpiece of story telling, where Subin shows that the esoteric, mysterious, and magical still exist but are perhaps hiding, but do occasionally come to the surface, even in today's hyperrealist world.
Early on, Subin makes two interesting points in passing. First, early Christians applied the terms ‘god', ‘son of God', etc, to Jesus, exactly to counter the terms used in the deification of those leading the empire which murdered him as a common criminal.
Second, though during early Christianity, and specifically in pagan circles, men could become gods, with the council of Nicaea, God's godliness became explicitly separate from his human condition, precluding, in the Christian tradition, from then-on forward, men from becoming godly.
The book is really three collections of related narratives.
The first on men becoming gods, the second on dead colonial administrators in India ending up with shrines, the third on how the white man became godlike in the Americas.
In the first section, the first story is the accidental modern god that amassed the largest following, Haile Selase, Ras Tafari.
Second is a bit chaotic, if fascinating, and tells of the divination of Prince Philip in the New Hebrides, Vanuatu.
Subin clearly explains that the associated term ‘cargo cult' is racist, deriving from a period when colonizers flew local leaders to Australia to show the associated production processes of ‘cargo', first used by the Japanese to placate islanders in the pacific. Cargo is not bestowed from heaven, but made by human hands.
In addition, the term shifts attention away from colonial and capitalist exploitation.
The third is on four separate narratives through which Douglas MacArthur was deified, including one in post World War 2 Japan. There, MacArthur was fired by Truman, and an eradication of the godly position of the general followed the removal of the godlike status of his predecessor, the emperor of Japan.
Some turned to Zamenhof, inventor of Esperanto.
A fourth chapter on the deification of colonial administrators in, mostly, Africa, primarily as kinds of spirits possessing their subjects temporarily, making demands of offerings, but also providing cures and solutions.
Fetishes, ‘dolls', feature prominently.
Burn: “If Africans allegedly defied objects, enlightenment theorists deified concepts, forging abstract ideas such as race, religion, politics, sovereignty, and freedom, turning them into disembodied truths that transcended place or history.” And “what philosophers derided as error and unreason was actually a disagreement between certain Europeans and Africans about the proper worth, not of things, but of people. It revealed how correct knowledge about divinity is never a matter of the best doctrine but of who possesses the more powerful army“.
More: “While fetishes made by African priests were denigrated as irrational, the core of the capitalist marketplace [of commodity fetishism, as per Marx] has long been viewed as the epitome of rationalism.”
The fifth on the accidental deification of some anthropologists, with a focus on a friend of the author, Nathanial Tarn.
The second section of the book is on the deification and veneration of British colonial administrators and officers. “Deification was not a mode of honoring them, but a way to mediate with their power, a means for worshippers to try and shift the tides of individual and collective fates.”
Subin relates how our modern understanding of ‘religion' is a fairly recent invention, only solidifying in the 19th century, and squarely rests on an interpretation of Christianity being the most ‘pure'.
She starts by describing the divination of John Nicholson, a Brit in the colonial service who was canonised by Baden Powell and deified by his local subordinates, while later analyses absolved the colonial context of his behaviour as the source of at least some of his abuse.
A piece on Indian women throwing themselves in the fire of their deceased husbands, and another on theosophy, the late 19th century notion, springing from Madame Blavatsky, stating that all religions are one. It turns out that Ghandi started his journey towards self rule, being reintroduced to his own religion via the theosophists.
The theosophical movement ended with a bit of a bang; the boy that was identified as the future vessel of God on earth, Krishnamurti, after some 20 years of grooming, actually appeared to receive God inside of him and then claimed that he is in everyone and everyone can have the same experience, then disbanding the movement around him in 1929, in Ommen, in the Netherlands, of all places.
The section on India ends with a gorgeous story of an Indian revering Trump as a god. He started fasting when Trump was diagnosed with COVID, and then died on the day Trump announced having beaten the infection.
The final section of the book, perhaps a tad convoluted, is on how the myth of white divinity was established in the Americas, first through the recognition of European explorers as gods at the discovery of the Americas, eventually flowing into notions of white supremacy in the US.
In passing, Subin states that the 60 million inhabitants that died after this conquest, and the resulting resurgence of forests were once they lived, caused the global cooling of the mini ice age in the late Middle Ages.
This section ends with more recent scholars questioning the nature of the Christian divinity. Is God a white supremacist? They essentially conclude that God either doesn't exist, is an asshole, or is powerless.