From: Paul Zarembka (zarembka@BUFFALO.EDU)
Date: Thu Oct 14 2004 - 23:12:27 EDT
[Imagine a world in which many more countries got to this point! Maybe
this essay is exaggerated, but, hey, maybe not...! Paul]
Venezuela: The Transition from Columbus Day to Indian Resistance Day...
By Franz J.T. Lee,
Posted on Thu Oct 7th, 2004, Narco News
The oligarchic "opposition" and its national mass media have no respect for
anything: currently, Radio Caracas TV (RCTV) is preparing commercials for
its mind-controlled adherents to celebrate "Día de la Raza" (Colombus Day)
next Tuesday -- October 12, 2004.
This big lie, this hoax ... about the 'discovery' of America by Christopher
Columbus, still infects the minds of millions in Latin America.
Although the name of this public holiday has officially been changed to the
'Dia de la Resistencia Indigena' by the Bolivarian Government, the mass
media continues their mind control, indoctrination and manipulation -- with
a trans-historic European Mental Holocaust launched against the peoples of
the Americas and elsewhere.
Columbus was not among the first to know that the earth was round ... the
ancient Mediterranean peoples already had this knowledge. He did not
'discover' America ... already centuries before, the Africans had fleets
that crossed the Atlantic and they had a vivid, healthy, trans-cultural
intercourse with the American indigenous peoples. Their artefacts and
traces of their ancient cultures can be found all over Central America.
* Based on their maritime knowledge and astronomic maps, Columbus
organized his own infamous travels ... and he knew exactly where he was
sailing. In fact, in his own diary he confirmed the African presence in
America.
What the oligarchic Latin American ruling classes are still celebrating
these days is the beginning of the Conquest ... of the pillage and
genocide, that their forefathers had disseminated in the 'New World.'
Columbus himself confirmed the capitalist aims of his voyages: "to sum up
the great profits of this voyage, I am able to promise, for a trifling
assistance from your Majesties, any quantity of gold, drugs, cotton,
mastic, aloe, and as many slaves for maritime service as your Majesties may
stand in need of."
In this way, he launched the "Bermuda Triangle" of the World Market, the
international division of labor, that would eventually blood-suck the whole
continent ... especially Central and South America.
In reality, Governor Columbus had discovered nothing ... on the contrary,
he was the first to introduce a European, feudalist, absolutist
'government' in the Western Hemisphere, accompanied by brutal institutions
of slavery.
Fray Bartolome de las Casas documented the horrors perpetrated by him ...
for example, gambling to see who had the remarkable quality of perfectly
cutting a slave in half with one stroke of the sword. This is the kind of
atrocity, that the Venezuelan opposition is still celebrating till this
day. In this way, Columbus' government was the first to institute an active
onslaught of brutality against the native peoples.
Now, what are the masters of this world really celebrating on Columbus Day
... in fact, on the first Labor Day of the Americas?
* On a world scale, have over 5 billion obsolete manual labor slaves
really something to be joyful about?
* Are we celebrating our discovery by Europeans to be massacred
thereafter?
* To be told that we are inferior races?
* Are we celebrating the victories of alienated labor and capital in
the Americas?
At least, here in Venezuela, the Bolivarians will be celebrating their
victories over golpism, sabotage, racism and fascism, generated by Big
Brother and his local lackeys on a global scale.
However, what are slave labor, wage slavery and exploited labor forces all
about? Are they really things to celebrate?
Precisely these are the things that Columbus brought to America.
For those who have studied capitalism and imperialism in the Americas, it
is no secret at all that the source of metropolitan wealth, of power and of
so-called progress is simply exploited physical and/or intellectual human
labor-force. It is also amply known that it is labor-force, and not labor
in itself, which is the generator of capital, wealth, power and
giga-Profits ... but at the same time, also of the production of arms of
mass destruction, of most horrible and abominable misery and poverty.
Like elsewhere, ever since the days of the 'Discovery' here in the
Americas, all social problems revolve around the phenomenon of labor ...
exploited labor force.
Not to take this universal fact into account in Venezuela, Latin America,
Africa and the Caribbean is equivalent to not to understand that precisely
by means of ruthless economic exploitation of fundamentally physical labor
forces, millions of pauperized and dehumanized peoples ... also in the
diaspora ... have already for centuries been heinously plundered, murdered
by ruthless, oligarchic elites.
And they will still be pillaged mercilessly for many decades to come; that
is, if we do not urgently change this current world order. Many of our
indigenous peoples are already rooted out; in Africa, only a handful of
BaThwa or San ... the so-called 'Bushmen' ... survived colonial and
apartheid conquest.
In Europe, ever since the XII century until today, the process of labor,
production, transformed itself progressively into industrial labor and
eventually into corporate capital that dominates and determines all current
global events, including Bush' Economic World War.
Today, as a result of the profound crisis of corporate capitalism, the
matter is even more grave, grave-like. Consequently, the only way to
annihilate the quintessence of current labor production is to transcend its
economic exploitation, political domination, social discrimination
(racism), fascist militarization and terrorist dehumanization (alienation).
This can only be accomplished by global resistance, by world revolution,
that transcends toward global emancipation, not of slaves, but of humanity
itself.
What happened on the first "Day of the Race" in America ... what occurs
on earth, in the universe, in the Clouds of Magellan ... have nothing
whatsoever to do with bourgeois ethics, with religious norms, metaphysical
formal-logic, fake human rights, racist absolute evil, fascist infinite
justice etc.
Excluding all our authentic, sacred, indigenous beliefs and values, all of
them are fantastic inventions of ruling class, megalomaniac, kleptocratic
man, that were forcefully implanted into the very soil and soul of the
Americas, to serve European colonial and imperialist interests.
We have to nurture our own Science, to cultivate our own Philosophy, and to
make our own History.
* However, if we just look around, we'll notice historic, emancipatory
relations all around us. Seek and ye shall find!
Concerning the current transition, the transmutation towards the galactic
unseen, beyond the Milky Way ... at this very moment, knowingly or
unknowingly, the Bolivarian Revolution, objectively, subjectively and
transjectively, finds itself in the ALBA, in the Aurora of revolutionary
emancipation.
Next Tuesday ... October 12 ... thanks to Chavez' revolutionary government,
indigenous emancipatory efforts are really something worthwhile to
wholeheartedly celebrate!
***********************************************************************
RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, Paul Zarembka, editor, Elsevier Science
******************** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka
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