Marxism Mutates

An earlier version of this was posted on March 21, 2011, at the now quasi-defunct BonfireJournal.Com

With the demise of the Soviet Union, international Marxism died--or, so many thought. Unfortunately, the emotions that nurture Marxism did not die with the Soviet empire: envy, resentment, and fear of competition and failure remained and remain alive and well.

The envious, resentful, and fearful of the world found in Marxism’s pseudo-scientific analysis and language an “explanation” for any event. Marxism “explained” why nothing was the fault of the envious, resentful, and fearful: the rich were rich, because they made the poor, poor; the successful succeeded because they made the failed, fail. Old Marxism also fed the egos and provided a way for otherwise frustrated “intellectuals” to pursue Napoleonic dreams. Vast conspiratorial forces oppressed mankind; these forces could be exposed and defeated only by and with the leadership of an enlightened Marxist vanguard elite who would lead the wretched of the earth to the socialist promised land.

The USSR’s end forced the envious, resentful, and fearful and their leaders to adapt a belief system that had “explained” everything into less-satisfying sub-sets, each focused on a particular topic, e.g., feminism, environmentalism–especially the global warming hoax–and “international human rights law,” especially rights of the indigenous. Despite their seemingly different concerns, all these sub-sets shared much in common. At their core lay anti-capitalist, anti-American and increasingly anti-Semitic emotions disguised as analytical constructs. Over the past twenty or so years, these different strands rewove themselves into an umbrella movement we can call the Anti-Globalization Movement (AGM).

While the AGM doesn’t have the military force behind it of the old Marxism, nor yet have a clear vision of the world with which it seeks to replace the current one, it shares with old-time Marxism a reliance on pseudo-science and a vanguard elite. Also from old Marxism come much of its language and tactics, as well as the goals of disrupting capitalist economic development and liberal democracy and bringing down the United States.

Today, I want refer to “movements” for the “rights of the indigenous.” Having served and visited extensively in Central and South American countries with large “indigenous” populations, I can freely state that the region’s “indigenous” cultures largely ceased to exist hundreds of years ago thanks largely to European brutality and diseases. “Indigenous” culture now means rural poverty. Calling to protect “indigenous culture” really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to half lives consumed with superstition, disease, and watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five. It’s a call to keep certain people as either an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as exploitable pawns for the use of political activists, such as the reprehensible pseudo-indigenous President of Bolivia, the old drug trafficker, and Chavez toady, Evo Morales.

When I hear these calls, I think, “We don’t protect rural poverty in the USA. Western man no longer lives in caves or trees, terrorized by solar eclipses and at the mercy of an unforgiving environment. Why should these people? Why should humans live little better than animals in disease-infested jungles, or exposed on wind-swept plains?” I am struck, for example, by how much effort “pro-indigenous activists,” often themselves urban upper-class types or foreigners, expend on “land reform.” Instead of working to develop an economy where land ownership does not determine whether one lives or dies, the activists seek to chain the “indigenous” to, at best, a brutal life of scratching out a living on postage stamp-size lots of land. Often land reform involves “giving” the rural poor these plots but without the right to sell or to use them to secure loans from banks. The poverty and hopelessness increase.

This segues to one of the great evil myths promulgated by activists, i.e., the Native Americans’ love for the land. As one activist told me in Central America, “They would rather die than give up their contact with Mother Earth.” Really? You can believe that if you want to, but everywhere I went in Latin America, rural people head for the city, or, even better, Canada, Spain, or top prize, the USA. They want medicine, Coca-Cola, TVs, cars, motorcycles, corn flakes, and indoor plumbing — they want to live like the activists do in Vancouver, San Francisco, and Madrid. Those who stay on the land, in particular the men, do not radiate any particular love for the land, the flora, the fauna, or for each other. They fish with dynamite and mercury; burn or cut huge tracts of forest; treat their “sacred lakes” as sewers; drink themselves stupid; and engage in often lethal fights with each other and commit horrendous acts of cruelty on women, children, and animals. In other words, they behave as uneducated, oppressed, poor people have throughout all history and in all cultures. Note to activists: the “indigenous” are human. A shocking revelation for many.

These foreign activists invent and distort history, introducing distinctly 20th and 21st century concepts into the study of pre-Colombian cultures and their remnants. Worse, these activists seek to manipulate poor people for their own political agenda, and often get them killed in pursuit of “liberation theology” or some other fashionable cliche. They overwhelm and corrupt legitimate “indigenous” activists with money, trips, attention, and promises of fame. In exchange, the once-legitimate local activist becomes a servant of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, etc, required to produce ever more dire stories and accusations. Or they merely make up a leader for the “indigenous” as well as a bogus history, including the fantasy of the noble savage, and then the kicker: opposition to foreign investment, free trade, and modern agriculture; and the call to support well-known “indigenous” rights champions, such as the late Hugo Chavez and the execrable Fidel Castro.

A prime example of an “indigenous leader,” one whom I met several times, is Guatemala’s Rigoberta Menchu virtually unknown inside Guatemala (having lived most of her life abroad); a creation of European Marxists; a tool of Guatemala’s old Communist URNG insurgency; a pro-Castro hater of the USA; an author of a major autobiographical hoax; and, as you would expect, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The foreign activists appear like a modern version of the ancient Jewish legend of the Golem called up to save the people, and who ends up creating havoc. When it all comes crashing down, they run to their Embassies flashing US or European passports, gaining safety and fame leaving the “indigenous” to take the hit. As a friend and fellow skeptical diplomat once told me, the call of rights for the indigenous, “all comes down to the right to wear funny clothes.”