CAPITALISM UNLEASHED

Caption: King Leopold II of Belgium, who claimed the Congo as his personal property, courtesy of Wikipedia.

A recent Business Week cover story asks the question, "Can Greed Save Africa?"

Far be it from me to deny that investments and enterprise have a role in development, but the snarky response that occurred to me was, didn't they try that before?

I'm thinking about the horrible atrocities perpetuated upon Africans by more economically developed countries over several centuries, and particularly about the Belgian plundering of the Congo in the 19th and 20th centuries. This vast area was the personal property of King Leopold II (1835-1909).

As the BBC put it awhile back,

While the Great Powers competed for territory elsewhere, the king of one of Europe's smallest countries carved his own private colony out of 100km2 of Central African rainforest.

He claimed he was doing it to protect the "natives" from Arab slavers, and to open the heart of Africa to Christian missionaries, and Western capitalists.

The result was a massive forced labor system for the extraction of things like ivory and rubber. The BBC estimates the death toll at 10 million, although some estimates are higher. Torture and mutilation were common. It was a human, epidemiological, and ecological disaster.

The atrocities committed there were so over the top that they were condemned by other imperialist powers, much as was the case with Spanish cruelties in the heyday of its empire centuries before.

One missionary was so horrified that he wrote the following to Leopold's agent:

I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit.

The murder and mutilation in there revved up the ire of Mark Twain, who wrote the scathing King Leopold's Soliloquy in 1905.

This was also the setting for Joseph Conrad's short novel, Heart of Darkness, about which more tomorrow.

HEALTH CARE. Here's a good item from a medical journal about universal health care.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. It looks like out of state groups plan another event related to this case. The Logan County prosecutor has expressed concerns about the impact of such events in the case against those police say kidnapped and abused the young African-American Woman.

WORKER FREEDOM BILL. If we're ever going to try to expand the ranks of the middle class in this country, restoring the right to organize is an obvious step. Here's an op-ed by one of El Cabrero's buddies, WV AFLCIO secretary-treasurer Larry Matheney about a bill that will be introduced in the 2008 legislative session. Dubbed the Worker Freedom Bill, it would prohibit employers from requiring workers to attend mandatory meetings in which their bosses rant on politics, religion, or the evils of a free labor movement.

CHAMBER OF YOU-FILL-IN-THE-BLANK-CAUSE-MINE'S-UNPRINTABLE. Here's a link from Wired Science about the US Chamber of Commerce's commercial about the evils of doing something about global warming. Tell us another story!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FEAR AND TREMBLING

Caption: This man has been overcome with it.

This is Haint Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

(For the un-hillbilly, haint is Appalachian for that which haunts.)

Whatever haints may or may not be, one reason many people have believed in them over the ages is no doubt the feeling of fear or awe that sometimes strikes us in the apparent absence of an ordinary cause.

The 20th century German theologian Rudolph Otto referred to this feeling as the "mysterium tremendum." In his classic book The Idea of the Holy, he suggests that this feeling of awe lies at the basis of both religion and many superstitions:

The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at least it dies away and the soul resumes its 'profane', non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy.

This feeling can take many forms:

It has wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of--whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.

The biblical Book of Job has a great description of this unbidden feeling of awe or dread:

“Now a word was brought to me stealthily, And my ear received a whisper of it. Amid disquieting thoughts from the visions of the night, When deep sleep falls on men, Dread came upon me, and trembling, And made all my bones shake." (4:12-14)

Otto believed that earlier, more "primitive" manifestations of this feeling had a dark side and generated belief in ghosts and demons:

Its antecedent stage is 'daemonic dread' (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive offshoot, the 'dread of ghosts'. It first begins to stir in the feeling of 'something uncanny', 'eerie', or 'weird'. It is the feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the start-point for the entire religious development of history. 'Daemons' and 'gods' alike spring from this root, and all the products of 'mythological apperception' or 'fantasy' are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified.

From a purely psychological point of view, these unbidden feelings of awe and dread are the stuff of which haints are made.

POVERTY AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT is the theme of the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. One item of interest deals with the possibilities of micro-loan programs to alleviate poverty and improve health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa.

CHANGE TO WHAT? It's been two years or so since some unions split from the AFLCIO to form Change to Win. Here's an item from In These Times about what's changed, what hasn't and what might.

DEATH PENALTY. Yesterday's Supreme Court decision could mean a temporary moratorium on executions.

LATEST PRESS ON MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH includes this item from the Daily Mail about Malik Shabazz,one of the march's organizers, and this item from the Charleston Gazette about the decision of the Charleston NAACP not to support the march, a decision shared by several other predominantly African American groups in WV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED