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5. National socialist empire, through late 1800s, 1900s, 2006. The roots of Angloid proto-fascism run very, very deep. They traverse the globe, from Antipodes to North America, back through Ireland, Scotland and Wales, to England, Palestine, and Jerusalem itself. The principle of 'I want what you have, I am taking it by force' has served this variegated economic empire well for three thousand years, on and off. Justified by 'it says I'm entitled to claim your territory in my holy book', colonised peoples have been subordinated and dispossessed of their lands in favour of settler agriculture, steadily and consistently, all that time. Yet because war's victors get to write most of the historical record, airing this story honestly has never been encouraged. But 'the truth will out', and the Internet is now here to help. American hegemony has many bases. The most significant one in the first half of the twentieth century - during which the United States rose to world industrial preeminence - and ever since, is violence. Violence on an industrial scale. Born of the shocking cultural and human dismemberments of the Civil and Indian Wars, the US was born in bloodshed, brooking no opposition to market unity for bourgeois exploitation. The ready supply of arms and violence was sufficient to quell workers' organisations and politics before they could really get started. This gave US industry its international edge versus older, more traditionally democratic Europe, on the basis of cheaper labour. This connects with the deeply layered racism upon which the nation, and every colony, was built. Each state had its militia and goon squads to ensure strikes were defeated, and mobster corruption bought the remnant trade union movement off. The militarised nature of the federal state traces right back to the War of Independence. So 'USA' is synonymous with 'great martial art', as everyone knows. The US still has the highest rates of civil violence, and the most liberal gun laws, in the developed world. The militarisation of New Zealand was slower, though also accelerated through 1860s land wars, and was integral to that of the British Empire. Land theft from Maaori satisfied Auckland commercial pressure for tradeable resource. Like the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, planned settlement eclipsed other European powers, so racist dispossession of indigenous peoples linked into extra-anglo prejudice and social filtering. Whereas exploration and safety in early NZ relied heavily on German science and experts like von Haast, Hochstetter, von Tempsky and the like, after Vogel's migration window this 'race' were systematically denied further advancement. A 'Little England in the South Pacific', a 'better Britain', was being created at the expense of multiculturalism. The 1899-1902 2nd Boer War gave the NZ Volunteer Force an outlet for their parade and scouting exertions, soon joined by provincial Rough Riders (mounted rifles). Britain had stepped in to seize diamond and gold producing regions of southern Africa from the resident Dutch, Germans, and French, and created concentration camps on the American pattern for displaced families. The seeds of inter-imperial rivalry were now well sown, but before their gory bloom came the reason to put so much of colonial and Western society into uniform for burial. The West's industrial revolution shifted up a gear from the early 1900s, with reticulation of new urban services like electricity, telephone, and motor transport, public and private, making critical mass. Major social upheaval was underway, with age-old manufacturing and transportation crafts and infrastructures rapidly displaced. Mechanisation was labour saving, and therefore cost saving. As production methods changed, so too did their right of control. Where mechanics and spinsters previously paced their work in accord with their own safety and satisfaction, placed in factories they became synchronised in line. The new owner-organisers were then able to redetermine that pace and its duration, optimising profit. 'Speed-up' became the formal issue of 'Taylorism' from 1911, and the fight for workplace control was on. |
Green Future offers a practical programme for connecting the Green politics of today with a salvaged, surviveable ecosystem of the near Future. Never before had a proletariat been so large, with such even experiences, suffered so much loss of craft prestige, understood their separate interests within society so clearly, and been so focussed, organised and militant through trade unions and formative labour parties, to advance those interests as a unified class. This wave reached its zenith in 1917 via Bolshevik Russia. But when 'Massey's Cossacks' - mounted farmer deputies of a farmer Prime Minister - rode in to physically break the Wellington waterfront strike in 1913, reactionary technique was foreshadowed in NZ. War with Germany the following year succeeded in shifting the militant focus onto relative national status, processing the great bulk of male workers quickly through military discipline, and shipping them overseas on a high proportion of one-way journeys. The West's working classes were being politically disassembled and systematically slaughtered. Anglo-fascism was fully blooded; round one. Mechanisation leapt forward from the trenches and the reinvigorated 1920s. Depression and war cycles followed, deeper and harder-hitting again. To Nationalist anglo-administrations was added the special adaptation afforded by imperial success - Social Democracy: the Weimar Republic failed to reform German capitalism, so the German workers were physically tamed by emergent National Socialism instead, whereas worker demands were more affordable and therefore an incentive met in the English-speaking world through grand state projects. Next followed mortal contest between the competing national socialisms, over those imperial privileges. But the Italian, German, and Japanese fascisms failed to overcome the more dynamic and culturally inclusive UK-US version, which retains power to this day. In 1951 another waterfront confrontation showed that dictatorial, military capitalism retained full control of a Nationalist NZ. A century of capitalist industrial development has shown, however, that the only politics available for managing an advanced proletariat is national socialism, parliamentary or otherwise. Welfare in some measure, by some means, is the price of social stability. So the key perspective orientating Greens today senses the national socialist atmosphere pervading 21st-century life. We know too that as world economic conditions continue to tighten, due to shrinking resources, then the overall direction will once again be towards deadly competition between the varieties of national socialism, or fascism, that survive. This knowledge should be the overarching guide as to which policies, strategies and tactics we need to adopt. One bulwark only can withstand the resurgence of virulent national socialism, and that is international socialism. Further breakdown of the present anarchy, and extraordinary despoliation of natural resources, is our future without this esteemed unitary goal. The inherent anti-Semitism of Western democracy ultimately proves its fascist nature. The great tragedy of this predominantly European set of cultures, so self-esteeming for intellectual enlightenment, is the self-inflicted ignorance of its own history. The Islam-villifying 'cartoon' caricatures igniting jingoist passions in February 2006 are the same tactic used in the 1930s by Nazis against Juadaism, motivated equivalently: the marginalisation, dispossession, and steady annihilation of Semitic asset-holders, amongst other Muslims. Pogroms take years of accumulated hatred to gain vent steam, and the Western media are now actively fuelling just such a fire. Western ownership of the entire Middle East is the undeclared agenda of this expansionist storm. 'Western democracy' is an exclusivist sham, cradling its next fully fascist outburst, of capitalist destruction and reconstruction. Capitalism's ability to reach the end phase of this cycle, however, engenders no confidence whatsoever at the present technical juncture. |