Subtle Suppression

I have been reading a novel titled "The Iron Heel," which you've probably never heard of, though you may have heard of its author. If you don't recognize the name Jack London, I'm sure you do recognize his other novels, "White Fang," and "The Call of the Wild," and while those books have remained classics, this one has slipped into obscurity. You also may not know that Jack London was an ardent socialist, some might say militant, and that during the very early 20th century he was a key figure in the socialist movement, he espoused a social revolution and was even arrested for his activism. "The Iron Heel" was a kind of culmination of those feelings.

Today the book would be called speculative fiction, but then it was probably billed as propaganda, and this is not be totally unjustified. The form of the book is an account by the wife of a key figure in the labor movement who dies in an insurrection that is brutally suppressed by what is called "The Oligarchy," which is basically the capitalist trust/government of the time. The book is depicted as a manuscript which has been found centuries after the eventual success of a social revolution and the creation of a kind of utopian “brotherhood of man.”

I do not suggest that you go out and attempt to find this book, as unless you have an avid interest in American socialism or the early 20th century, as I do, you will not likely find it compelling. The reason I mention it though, is because of certain thoughts it has given rise to. Thoughts about suppression of literature, and ideas. In the book itself there is a book that is brutally suppressed because it shows hypocrisies in the social order of the time, but the kind of suppression I have in mind is more subtle.

I am not implying that "The Iron Heel" has been intentionally forgotten in lieu of "White Fang" for political reasons. Undoubtedly any book which deals so much with the societal situations of the time is sure to be forgotten, where as books which are more timeless, and appeal to our emotions, are more likely to be remembered. Surely this is the reason why no one remembered "Das Kapital" 100 years after its publication.

It is often said that the winners write the history books, and there is much truth in that phrase, but it is also true that the winners (and those in power are definitely winners) influence what literature we read as well. Since the "oligarchy" or upper classes, or government, or whatever we wish to call those in power, control the school systems and forms of mass media, they also control what literature we ascribe value to. What is thought to be classic, and what is not. What books are remembered, and which are forgotten.

This brings to mind a man named Walter Duranty. Doubtless you've never heard of him, but he won a small thing called the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for articles he had written the previous year about the then relatively new Soviet Union and its people. He was bureau chief of The New York Times’ Moscow branch for 14 years and highly regarded as an expert on the soviet people. Later though, he was discredited for the sometimes positive slant that he put on Stalin's programs, and was actually lambasted for not being critical of what was later called Stalin's "show trials," that is trials of his political opponents which were later shown to be pre-determined. Bear in mind that Duranty was a reporter, and that, theoretically, depicting things unbiased is a virtue in that field.

Of course, none of this criticism came until after World War II and the beginning of The Cold War. The trials were not even shown as frauds until Khrushchev came to power, but this was conveniently unmentioned, and Duranty was derided for other reasons as well. It was put forward that he glossed over the famines of the year of his Pulitzer, 1932, which were caused through what is now depicted as direct government action. The fact that the articles the prize was awarded for were written before the famine was conveniently overshadowed. My point is that when there was a need for public animosity towards Soviet Russia, a formerly highly esteemed literary figure was stripped of all credibility on flimsy evidence, and left forgotten in the annals of history.

I myself own a book by him titled "One Life, One Kopeck," which is derived from a Russian saying meaning roughly, "life isn't worth one red cent," implying that this was the way the establishment of the time viewed human life. The book was a novel used as an account of the Russian Revolution which was admittedly pro-Russia, and pro-socialism, but it was written in 1937, before the Cold War, and like Duranty’s other works, is largely forgotten.

Another example of how works which defy the establishment are remembered is "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, written in 1906. A book that can only be described as a persuasive novel leading the reader towards socialism. Today though, that book is remembered for what served as its background, which was the horrendous conditions of the meat packing industry of Chicago. Conditions which were used in the book to illustrate the hellish conditions of the working class, but which instead brought the middle class's attention to the lack of food regulation. For instance the modern book "Fast Food Nation," by Eric Schlosser is often compared to "The Jungle," but Schlosser's book is a non-fiction documentation of food processing and marketing, while Sinclair's is a novel following the terrible conditions forced upon the family of immigrant Jurgis Rudkis by the capitalist system, and his eventual path to socialism.

One might also mention Jonathan Swift, who wrote scathing satires of 18th century English culture and government, but in modern interpretations is know for the Lilliputians from his novel, "Gulliver's Travels," which are deprived of all context and meaning.

John Steinbeck too could fall among these authors, having written strongly socialist books such as "In Dubious Battle," and subtly anti-capitalist books such as "The Grapes of Wrath." Today the books of his which are read in school though, are "The Pearl," and "Of Mice and Men." Simple, but emotionally wrenching books with none of the social import contained in his other novels, which are swept aside by conventional education. A prime example of how when an author becomes prominent enough that he cannot be discredited, he can at least be circumvented.

A kind of caricature of this would be George Orwell, a man who is well known today for his books "Animal Farm," a thinly veiled satire of the Russian Revolution, and "1984," an only slightly more oblique look at the post war Soviet state, as opposed to other, more Socialist friendly books such as "Homage to Catalonia." What is not as well remembered is that George Orwell was employed by the British Government in its "Information Research Department," an organization whose sole purpose was to disseminate anti-communist propaganda. "Animal Farm" was actually subsidized by the British government and distributed as a tool against the Soviet Union in its neighboring countries. Orwell also was engaged in the writing of the "Orwell Lists," which were commissioned to be lists of literary and entertainment figures who were not to be published, including Walter Duranty, and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell is however, not remember as a propaganda tool, but as a great author.

A more modern look might be placed upon figures such as Hunter S. Thompson, the Gonzo journalist, who was a harsh critic of the establishment and wrote biting commentary on the United States’ government and society as a whole, but is remembered for "Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas," a book dealing mostly with drug related experiences.

Another might be Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta," a graphic novel depicting a terrorist who attempts to demolish federal government and bring about an anarchistic state. The key theme of the novel is especially illustrated in the protagonist’s trademark symbol, a take on the anarchy symbol of a red A in a circle. When the book was made into a big-budget action oriented motion picture in 2005 though, while including gratuitous martial arts scenes, it never once included the word "anarchy."

All these examples may seem unrelated or may lead one to believe I am implying that some secret order decides what we read, but this is not the case. I am merely trying to illustrate that the books we esteem as classic are determined by those parts of our society controlled by those in power, specifically the primary schools and universities, and the major news organizations. The majority of my evidence being based around the suppression of pro-socialist work is only because this is the easiest example.

I have attempted to point out here how books which work against the established order are subtly circumvented, rather than suppressed, often by the simple act of holding up other works by those same authors as great, drawing attention from their more controversial books. I hope that this has provoked your own thoughts on the subject.

Your Lawn Mower Will Kill You

Do you have a lawn? Do you use a lawn mower, a leaf blower, a chainsaw? What powers it? Is it gasoline?

Over five million gas-powered lawn mowers are sold in the United States every year with the designs largely unregulated. The emissions standards which small displacement engines are required to meet are inconsequential compared to those of larger automobile engines, and as a result small displacement engines, mowers, etc. produce MORE pollution than automobiles.

How much more?

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says a traditional gas powered lawn mower in a year's use produces as much air pollution as 43 new cars each being driven 12,000 miles. Another source says that one mower running for an hour emits the same amount of pollutants as eight new cars driving 55 mph for the same amount of time. This means that if the exhaust from your mower was used in your car engine, it would actually exit the tailpipe cleaner than when it came in.

In all the EPA concludes that lawn mowers produce 5% of the nations total annual pollution.

Further, some chemicals found in lawn mower emissions are classified as probable carcinogens by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Emissions which are unfiltered from lack of regulation.

Electric mowers are available, but are usually more expensive than their gas-driven counterparts, while a "human powered" hand reel mower can be had for around 70-80 dollars online, with free shipping.

Sustainability

This word gets a lot of press lately. It’s become a political platform, a raison de’tere for books, magazines, television shows, etc. But what does it mean?

Generally it implies the idea of modifying our current culture in such a way that it might not depend on fast depleting natural resources, might not produce such gratuitous waste, and might not destroy the environment in ever increasing ways. But generally, it also means to modify our culture as little as possible to reach these goals, to keep the status quo as much as possible.

As of July 1, 2008 the world human population was 6,706,993,000, with every sign indicating its steady rise will continue.

Can this number of human beings be sustainable with the status quo that we currently live by? Under any circumstances, can this population, and its continued rise, be sustainable?

When we speak of building factories which produce one third the waste, or cars which produce one tenth the pollution, or products which last twice as long, are we not just indulging our own egos? Soothing our own consciences?

If we truly mean to embrace the idea of sustainability, we must recognize that its biggest stumbling block is our tremendous population. The only numbers, the only fractional decreases, we should be concerned with are those concerning the number of living, breathing, consuming, waste creating human beings.

Imagine a world with one tenth, one twentieth, one hundredth the current population, and imagine how easy it would be to sustain this current “standard of living,” and to increase it.

Mark Twain and War

Mark Twain said in 1905, on the subject of war,

"There has never been a just one, never an honorable one — on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful — as usual — will shout for the war. The pulpit will — warily and cautiously — object — at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers — as earlier — but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation — pulpit and all — will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception"

Is change an illusion?

Book Review: Into the Wild

Into the wild is a strange book in many ways, and one is in that the first things it tells you is that the main character will die at the end of his journey. That it will be a sad and inglorious death, and will cause him disrespect and contempt.

It is also strange in the sense that it is hard to classify. Is it fact or fiction, novel or biography? As a novel it is poorly written, as a biography it's light on facts, heavy on speculation. It leaves itself somewhere in the middle, and strangely, this doesn't seem to hurt it.

I think it’s good of the author to start with the death of the protagonist, to help dissuade those who might become wrapped up in the romanticism of the character, and pursue the path he did. It is good to confront the reader quickly and harshly with the folly of the man. Not that his path was a contemptible one, but the book helps show where blind romanticism leads.

The man the book follows, Chris McCandless, is portrayed as a very intelligent, well read, and charismatic child of an upper class family, the father of which was a high government official. He played the good little student and went to college at Emory University to and graduated with honors, then disappeared off the map. From his college graduation and through the next two years to his death, he never once communicated with his family, pursuing a life of freedom.

When he left his family behind he also left his car, gave all of his savings (somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000) to charity, and began a life on the road and off, but never with more than, in his words, "he could carry on his back at a dead run."

A romanticist and an existentialist, he was a lover of Tolstoy and Thoreau, and he always longed for the Alaska of Jack London, the uncivilized wild, and eventually set out there, where he lived in the wilderness for several months before succumbing to starvation. He died scared, alone, malnourished, and possibly delusional. His body was not found until several weeks later in a state of rancid decay.

What you might call the tragedy, or the folly, depending on your view, of Chris's death was that he was in fact only a handful of miles from civilization, only barely off the map. That there were numerous means of escape at hand, cached food and supplies, a government testing station, and a road nearby, but Chris knew of none of them because he went straight into the wild with no preparation but the clothes on his back, a bag of rice, and a rifle. No maps, compasses, knowledge of the area, or means of rescue. No one even knew where he would be. And so he died alone, and it might be said, for no reason but the fulfillment of a longing to remove himself from humanity and experience life un-fettered by the hindrances of society.

If this all sounds interesting to you, I suggest you read the book, Into the Wild. Even if it doesn't I suggest you still do. The character of Chris McCandless is a highly interesting and engrossing one, and you’ll likely have a strong opinion of him by the end, either contemptuous, admiring, or accepting. I personally am not sure how I feel about the man, but the book about his life definitely does kindle a wanderlust in me, as it likely will in you.

Anyway, Into the Wild, by Jon Krakaur, is a book I suggest, if for no other reason as a warning to those who might try to go "off the map” unprepared.

Tree Farms and Forests

I am pro-forests. . .at least the naturally occurring kind.

In my part of the United States lumber is a big industry and as a result there are many "tree farms." Tree farms are just another form of totalitarian agriculture, but receive lots and lots of credit as being "green," and good, and wonderful, because hey, they're trees!

If you've never been to one, this is what they consist of:

The owner of a large portion of land will use bulldozers to obliterate the forest and vegetation from the allotted land, and burn all the detritus. Then the farmer will plant pine seedlings, all identical, in long, long, very straight rows a short distance apart. Then fire trenches will be dug around the "tree farm" so that the underbrush can be burned off every so often. The trees grow until they're tall enough to harvest, and then the process starts over.

The end result is a forest consisting solely of canopy. No undergrowth, just pine needles, and sometimes those are harvested too, so sometimes just bare dirt. Not a very welcoming forest environment. Especially compared to the plethora of life it replaced--the variety of oak trees, pine trees, cottonwood trees, shrubs, etc. The local animal population is severely stunted as well, by the initial loss of their forest, and the continuing lack of hospitality given by the trees maintenance. A few species flourish in this new "forest," but no where near the abundance of variety that existed before. It is a sad and boring forest, a depressing sight, and while better than concrete, it is not something I am for.

The tress may be producing oxygen, which I'm all for, but I'd much rather have a natural southeastern rain-forest. Unfortunately, these tree farms are going up daily where I live, and will continue with our unceasing consumerism. I seriously doubt that 50 years from now any natural forest will exist in the southeastern U.S. except for those in parks.

I am against this type of forest.

I am for natural forests, diverse forests, inhabited forests. I grew up exploring them, forests where bears, bobcats, deer, turkeys, coyotes, owls, woodpeckers, tortoises, alligators, snakes, and many other species lived.

They're disappearing, and it is one of the most depressing things in my life. Most of the forest I spent my childhood in has been plowed under for a subdivision, the rest for cattle fields. The swamp behind my parents house where I once went fishing is choked with refuse from a local farm, and no one cares.

I love forests. I seem to be the only one.

Indian and European Ideas of Land Ownership

The argument I am about to make regarding Indigenous Americans and Europeans settlers runs a high likelihood of being dismissed as juvenile, or romantic. Of being called a glorification of a long gone lifestyle stemming from a dissatisfaction with current society. I say that is partly true, that my argument comes from a dissatisfaction with current society, and if it is called romantic, or distanced from the fact of the disappeared cultures, well, that is part of my point. There is no way now for either I, or the reader to view that culture, in action and determine what is fact or fiction. That culture is gone. Forever.

Edmund Morgan, in reference to the failures and starvation of very early English colonies in America as compared to these American Indian cultures, writes in his book "American Slavery, American Freedom":

"If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians'. You knew that you were civilized, and that they were savages . . . But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did. . . . And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much. . . . So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority, in spite of your failures And you gave similar treatment to any of your own people who succumbed to their savage ways of life. But you still did not grow much corn. . . . "

This is quoted from A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, on page 25. In this book, he mentions how many years after those colonies eventually began to thrive, in the mid eighteenth century, large tracts of land which were occupied by poor farmers, sometimes by families which had been upon that land since it was vacated by Indians a hundred years before, were arbitrarily divided amongst the wealthy of the English colonies. The new "owners" of the land then began to charge rent to the farmers which had previously inhabited the land, and were ignored. As a result, the local government stepped in with arrests, and revolts followed. Revolts followed because people then still understood that terms of ownership of land are arbitrary and imaginary. That to say "I own this land, which I have never seen, and have no intention to inhabit," is to say nothing.

Unless backed by enough other individuals who believe your authority to make such arbitrary decisions. As eventually became the case. As is still the case, though today broad land acquisitions are not made so arbitrarily. Land is still held by the wealthy who do not inhabit it, though it is inherited, bought, or sold. The principles are the same--it is still an imaginary idea which only exists because of people's allowing it to.

In Native American culture there was no such thing as ownership of land, inasmuch as we know it today. One might be said to have rights to land if one inhabited it and lived from it, but to say "I own that land over there, and you must increase my wealth in order to inhabit it," would be to utter insanity. Such ideas were completely foreign. Might this be part of why, in colonial America,

". . . Whites would run off to join Indian tribes, or would be captured in battle and brought up among the Indians, and when this happened the whites, given a chance to leave, chose to stay in the Indian culture. Indians, having the choice, almost never decided to join whites."

Hector S. Jean Crevecoeur, the Author of Letters from an American Farmer in the 1700's, wrote, "There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted among us, for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans."

Of course, the Native American cultures were decimated, completely destroyed, and so there is no way to verify these statements completely, no studies to conduct on preference of Indian to European culture. The Indians were wiped out in order to continue to propagate this idea of land ownership, yes, but might this act of genocide also have been conducted to remove all alternatives to that system.? To remove the close and available proof of the inferiority of the system?

Or was it, as indicated by the statement from Edmund Morgan, an act of contempt? Perpetuated in hatred of the success of "inferior" people, not in sustaining their food supply, but in sustaining their psychological well-being? Retaining the right of each individual to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and at least the capability to support himself?

I think these are all the causes, and I think they deserve more thought.