Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street
290 Responses
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Well, the history of the planet seems to be tightly woven with struggles between factions that to the outside eye are indistingushable, for causes that are incomprehensible. Civil wars are generally the most vicious.
For all of human history but the twentieth century – excluding colonisation, because that usually wasn’t about deliberately making war on people, making profits was preferable – going to war meant, pretty exclusively, going to war with your neighbours. C.f. every area of the world. The closer you were to people, the more time you had to find excuses to fight with them. The whole idea of war being a thing where you go and fight people a long way away with whom you have little cultural contact would have baffled everyone right up to, oooh, Napoleon. There just wasn’t any point to it. (Not much point now, come to that.)
I reckon we should think of ourselves as an essentially Maori society. Look at Te Kooti. He took what the Pakeha had to offer and used it. Just as the Pakeha took what the Maori had to offer and used it. We end our sentences with ‘eh’, we take food and drink round to the barbie, we raise our eyebrows when passing people on the street. We’re still pretty violent.
…because we all know pre-European Maori culture consisted of food-sharing, a particular verbal tic, and killing each other. Right.
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Paul Campbell, in reply to
We end our sentences with 'eh',
well you do - the rest of us hear that and think "Aucklander" ....
(or "Aussie")
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Lilith __, in reply to
The whole idea of war being a thing where you go and fight people a long way away with whom you have little cultural contact would have baffled everyone right up to, oooh, Napoleon.
Gengis Khan? Ancient Romans? Alexander the Great? The Spanish Conquistadors? I disagree that colonisation doesn't count as war. "Colonisation" generally means a war against peoples who can't hope to win.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
One thing I became very aware of when I lived in London was that British people had a very different attitude to home, visitors and the sharing of food and drink than the one I’d grown up with.
Both my parents were born in England and came here. One by boat when she was 4, the other by plane when he was 25 or so. I grew up thinking I was English, until I actually met some English people.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
…because we all know pre-European Maori culture consisted of food-sharing, a particular verbal tic, and killing each other. Right.
Pre-European Maori culture was an extremely highly sophisticated stone-age culture, an off-shoot of the culture that explored and colonised the Pacific, from Taiwan to Hawai'i to Easter Island to New Zealand. All by knowing how to use flax and stone, the sea and the stars.
It wasn't just people in grass skirts eating each other. We have a lot to learn from the people who know how to live in this land.
(My point is that that wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list of examples.)
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Russell Brown, in reply to
…because we all know pre-European Maori culture consisted of food-sharing, a particular verbal tic, and killing each other. Right.
That's a bit unfair. No one's going to sum it all up in a couple of sentences, but I understood what David was saying.
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Ask Dr Bruce McFadgen how pre-European Maori coped with a devastating series of tsunami in the 15th century.
The short answer is pretty bloody well, all things considered.
(And there's nothing wrong with being a bit unfair!)
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Ask Dr Bruce McFadgen how pre-European Maori coped with a devastating series of tsunami in the 15th century.
I've heard a little about that. It's an extraordinary historical story.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Gengis Khan? Ancient Romans? Alexander the Great? The Spanish Conquistadors? I disagree that colonisation doesn’t count as war. “Colonisation” generally means a war against peoples who can’t hope to win.
All of those people started out with their neighbours. The Conquistadors cut their teeth in the Reconquista. Alexander started with Greece. Genghis started with the other Mongol tribes (and the Mongols were basically the last Central Asian migratory wave, of the domino type that started with the Indo-European language group, rather than a purely military expedition.). By world standards Rome's conquests largely were local wars - and they started with Carthage.
Most colonisers, as long as they could control trade, did not pursue a policy of waging war on locals - expensive and terrible for the labour market. Did coloniers mistreat, abuse, infect, and otherwise inflict massive damage upon native populations? Hell yes. But it was very rarely through direct military action. The Americas were a special case mediated by the biological exchange of disease environments. Everywhere else, things were more gunship diplomacy than invasions per se.
Sending large military forces to places far away - the way war is waged by first-world countries in the modern age - is not the historical pattern of warfare. Beating up on your neighbours with large military forces very much is.
(My point is that that wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of examples.)
Evidently, but it came across as a tad facile. NZ culture is undoubtedly hugely Maori-influenced, but the colonisation of Maori culture by Pakeha is a much more significant factor for those involved than the relatively mild intrusion of Maori culture into Pakeha culture. And the violence thing...really, c'mon.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
I’ve heard a little about that. It’s an extraordinary historical story.
He's handily written a book all about it! After walking what must be the entire coastline of the country, closely looking at stuff and talking to people. For many years.
Bruce is an old family friend. He's a stand up guy.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
I grew up thinking I was English, until I actually met some English people.
I grew up thinking I wasn't very English, until I lived somewhere else...
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
but it came across as a tad facile
Heh.
I dispute your allocation of proportions. Maori influence on Pakeha culture is all-pervasive, subtle, and deep. Right from the get-go to the present day.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
I grew up thinking I wasn’t very English, until I lived somewhere else…
Mum was extremely surprised I never bothered living anywhere else. But why would I? Everything I need and want is right here.
We’ve made a very nice home for ourselves. Few tweaks, and it could be great.
(I need one of those picture things.)
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
“Colonisation” generally means a war against peoples who can’t hope to win.
One of the most intriguing things about the history of colonialism is how cheaply it was achieved in its early stages, with so little resources. For example, there's no way that the British could have taken India without exploiting the rivalries between squabbling states. Local factions could always be brought on side to advance their interests by facilitating the eventual foreign takeover.
Like so many postcolonial despots the Suharto family pillaged their own people while playing to the myth of the morally pure indigenous. Despite having overseen the murder and imprisonment of his own people on a scale that rivalled anything in his country's colonial past, the old horror had the gall to claim a shared history of victimhood from Dutch colonialism when attempting to buddy up to Nelson Mandela.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
I dispute your allocation of proportions. Maori influence on Pakeha culture is all-pervasive, subtle, and deep. Right from the get-go to the present day.
I agree, it's there, and it's hugely important to how mainstream NZ society operates. Being overseas I certainly notice how different NZ culture is to other Anglo-Saxon colonial nations in the sheer scale of influence of the native culture on the mainstream. I just think it's important to not downplay how much European/British mores and culture were forced on Maori whether they liked it or not. It's two simultaneous but very different dynamics.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
rather than a purely military expedition
I think your definition of ‘war’ is a little too narrow and formal. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of very many ‘purely military’ expeditions over the scope of history which didn’t go hand in hand with conquest or trade protection/expansion.
There just wasn’t any point to it. (Not much point now, come to that.)
A thought that’s been forming in my head for a while, and which is currently around the half-baked stage is that over the last 5000 years or so of recorded history, the amount of time where there hasn’t been a war on somewhere is pretty much zero.
It might be pointless, but as a species, we do an awful lot of it, nearly all the time. To delude ourselves that violence is the exception in our make-up rather than the norm might not be helping us deal with it.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
It’s two simultaneous but very different dynamics.
I totally agree. All I have to add that it’s the simultaneous interaction of those two dynamics that’s so amazingly productive.
Just look at what Te Kooti did. He arrived at the Chathams a prisoner at the start of winter and was told ‘here, grow your own food and build your own shelter. We provide virtually nothing.’
He decided he was having none of this, took a ship, went back home, and sorted some shit out. Set up some structures.
Let’s not chop off anyone’s heads while we finish the job this time round eh?
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
A thought that’s been forming in my head for a while, and which is currently around the half-baked stage is that over the last 5000 years or so of recorded history, the amount of time where there hasn’t been a war on somewhere is pretty much zero.
It might be pointless, but as a species, we do an awful lot of it, nearly all the time. To delude ourselves that violence is the exception in our make-up rather than the norm might not be helping us deal with it.
That's a oft-made observation. Obviously records get patchier the further back you go, but I believe the best estimate is that there's something like 60 years out of 2000 that we don't have records of a war for, and probably in those 60 there was a war somewhere, we just don't have a record for it. Humans are a bit special that way.
I can’t, off the top of my head, think of very many ‘purely military’ expeditions over the scope of history which didn’t go hand in hand with conquest or trade protection/expansion.
But it's still true that in terms of a nation's overall military force - not sending a couple of battalions or a few ships along - the idea of war as a thing where you pack up your military and go way overseas is modern. The World Wars, Vietnam, Iraq; that model does not compare to anything pre-Napoleon. Most violence was (and still is) local. It's far easier to hate and kill your neighbours than some guy half a world away. And, as you say, humanity is historically very, very good at it.
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Napoleon was an innovator, the precursor to mechanised total war, the prototype. We got canned food and tampons from Napoleon's innovations, among other things.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Napoleon was an innovator, the precursor to mechanised total war, the prototype. We got canned food and tampons from Napoleon’s innovations, among other things.
Hardly just Napoleon; the whole machinery of Revolutionary France and their need to defend themselves from their neighbours led to military innovation (the draft, for instance, has its roots in the post-revolutionary European conflict.) Napoleon was significant, sure, but he was building upon changes that were already occurring.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
But it’s still true that in terms of a nation’s overall military force – not sending a couple of battalions or a few ships along – the idea of war as a thing where you pack up your military and go way overseas is modern. The World Wars, Vietnam, Iraq; that model does not compare to anything pre-Napoleon. Most violence was (and still is) local. It’s far easier to hate and kill your neighbours than some guy half a world away. And, as you say, humanity is historically very, very good at it.
Only because the tech enables the logistics to let us go half a world away. It was only around the time of Napoleon that troopships were able to quickly transport an army to another continent.
One of Alexander’s biggest setbacks was losing half his fleet (and thus food for his army) in a storm – the fleet was suppsed to meet the army on the coast along it’s route of march. When only half the ships arrived, he was pretty screwed.
The Romans built an awful lot of roads to move their troops around internally quickly. That was one of their tech aces, and it wasn’t replicated for quite a few hundred years after their empire fell.
The Crusades went on for a few hundred years, and created their own pan-European micro economy to move troops down to the med and back. Half the castles in southern Europe were built as waypoints or to protect supply routes. And, not incidentally, the med/eastern europe and the middle east is one of the most fought over areas in history. Where ‘east’ meets ‘west’.
Logistics is what wins or loses wars, usually.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
Napoleon was significant, sure, but he was building upon changes that were already occurring.
Damn straight. No Napoleon without his context. It's not nature vs nurture or the thing vs its context or any other similar binary opposition but the interaction of the two that matters.
However, the equation also needs Napoleon in it to function.
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On regulation, the Democratic party response in the USA was the Dodd-Frank law, 2100 pages that enact ~400 new rules that each need further work. After a year it seems that the regulators are running way behind on implementing these. There is a massive cost involved too, both on the state and those subject to the regulation. Will the country be better off for this effort? Who knows! I guess a lot of lawyers, accountants and lobbyists will be better off though.
I haven't done a detailed examination of this but the concept of "lets just regulate - it's easy and it will make everything right!" is fatally flawed.
Best comment I have seen on the OWS is "Be careful of what you wish for"
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Logistics is what wins or loses wars, usually.
Pretty much. Some of the best innovations of military technology, for civilians caught in the middle, were the ones that meant the soldiers camped on your land weren't also eating all your food. Easy to forget that conflicts where one side had an overwhelming military advantage are also historical anomalies; slow, grinding wrestling matches were far more common, and far more vulnerable to problems in lines of supply.
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To delude ourselves that violence is the exception in our make-up rather than the norm might not be helping us deal with it.
There are 7 billion or so of us and only about 5-6% of us live in places which could be described as war zones. Peace is the norm.
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