I will never again allow it to be said that reading the Guardian is a depressing experience. Not after reading the most eye-wateringly hilarious column in the entire history of British print journalism.
The alleged author (because there is a fair chance that he was invented for comic effect) is someone called ‘Subcomandante Marcos’. No, I kid you not. Go and check the link yourselves if you don’t believe me. Apparently he is the ‘is the leading voice of the Zapatista movement’ and not a character from a Woody Allen film at all.
Anyway, ‘El Subcomandante’ has a tub-thumping message for all us globalista gringos:
Brothers and sisters of Mexico and the world, who are gathered in Cancun in a mobilisation against neo-liberalism, greetings from the men, women, children and elderly of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.
Hey, what about the transgendered?
It is an honour for us that, amid your meetings, agreements and mobilisations, you have found time and place to hear our words.
They must have told him this was going to be read out at a student sit-in.
The world movement against the globalisation of death and destruction is experiencing one of its brightest moments in Cancun today. Not far from where you are meeting, a handful of slaves to money are negotiating the ways and means of continuing the crime of globalisation.
Nuanced. Balanced. Sophisticated. Definitely food for thought.
The difference between them and all of us is not in the pockets of one or the other, although their pockets overflow with money while ours overflow with hope.
Mixed in with a dash of neurosis, a dollop of resentment and liberal sprinkling of schtoopidity.
No, the difference is not in the wallet, but in the heart. You and we have in our hearts a future to build. They only have the past which they want to repeat eternally. We have hope. They have death. We have liberty. They want to enslave us.
Dead slaves are no good to us. We want live ones.
That is what this is all about. It is war. A war against humanity. The globalisation of those who are above us is nothing more than a global machine that feeds on blood and defecates in dollars.
Stop laughing! I’ll have you know that the Guardian is a serious and highly-respected journal of record.
In the complex equation that turns death into money…
No, it’s very simple. You die and a gravedigger gets paid to bury you. What’s so complex about that?
…there is a group of humans who command a very low price in the global slaughterhouse.
Yes, Guardian journalists mostly.
We are the indigenous, the young, the women, the children, the elderly, the homosexuals, the migrants, all those who are different. That is to say, the immense majority of humanity.
But what about the rights of the monolithic minority? And you still haven’t included the transgendered. El Subcomandante is just a hate-speech spewing bigot.
This is a world war of the powerful who want to turn the planet into a private club that reserves the right to refuse admission. The exclusive luxury zone where they meet is a microcosm of their project for the planet, a complex of hotels, restaurants, and recreation zones protected by armies and police forces.
I’m booking myself a fortnight in Cancun right now. This isn’t a political statement, it’s a travel guide.
Brothers and sisters, there is dissent over the projects of globalisation all over the world. Those above, who globalise conformism, cynicism, stupidity, war, destruction and death. And those below who globalise rebellion, hope, creativity, intelligence, imagination, life, memory and the construction of a world that we can all fit in, a world with democracy, liberty and justice.
Question for El Subcomandante: if you have all the creativity, intelligence and imagination then how come ‘they’ are above and you are below? Comprendez?
Okay, I’ll admit it. I’ve been took, I’ve been had. This is actually a parody cooked up by some impish scribblers in the sub-editors department to catch the unwary and take some of their less regular readers for a ride. All I can say is, guys, well done. The trip was worth it.
Hm. I see big, glittery épaulettes. And spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle.
Actually…
Worth reading the whole Wikipedia entry on the EZLN, if you’re at all interested.
Or not.
Hi David,
I used to have similar feelings about our friends on the Today program. They used to infuriate me. But now I’m trying to reframe everything negative I encounter, after spending a week in the company of hypnotic genius Richard Bandler, I love listening to their stuff. It’s the funniest radio comedy out there! 🙂
I think I might start buying the Grauniad, again! 😉
Rgds,
AndyD
I think there has been speculation that the subcomandante is actually sending up the whole thing, you know, deconstructing the revolution. Even that he is some kind of plant to discredit the antiglobos
I don’t precisely know what and who the subcomandante is. But I think I agree with David that regarding him as a character from a Woody Allen film is perhaps best. (Seriously, how do you earn the title ‘subcomandante’, anyway. I worked hard for the simple ‘doctor’, but this is so much cooler sounding).
Subcomandante Marcos (over 30 000 Google hits) has been around for at least 6 years if not a lot longer. His repulsive cogitations regularly grace the pages of the diehard (but rarely boring) leftist monthly ‘Le Monde Diplomatique’ in its various language versions.
But that said, libertarians should perhaps occasionally reflect on just why so many third world people support the likes of Subcomandante Marcos and believe that globalisation or, more precisely, thatcherisation, is bad for them. As Amy Chua has put it in her must-read book ‘World on Fire – How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability’, some ethnic groups benefit from globalisation more than others and the relative losers envy and detest the relative winners. Chua criticises the prevailing view that “markets and democracy are a kind of universal prescription for the multiple ills of underdevelopment”. Her main point is that you can either have free markets or democracy but that it’s difficult to combine both.
The problem with markets is that in relative terms they specifically benefit cognitively talented ethnic groups (such as Jews, Chinese, Brahmin Indians, etc.) residing as minorities in multiethnic societies (and many third world countries are multiethnic). Of course, the less talented majority groups in such countries also benefit from globalisation in absolute terms, but despite earning somewhat more than before they may be worse off relative to the talented groups than they were prior to ‘globalisation’. To plagiarise what I wrote some days ago elsewhere in Samizdata: the global markets benefit the ethnic elites and although the ‘rising tide lifts all boats’, it lifts the elite boats so much higher than the non-elite boats that the non-elites often feel the tide has been retreating rather than rising. And if you feel you are worse off, even if only in relative terms, then you are worse off.
Outcome: irregular, ‘democratically approved’ pogroms on the part of the losers eager to take revenge against the winners. Brawn power (coercion) versus brain power. Or at any rate ‘affirmative action’ a la Nazi Germany in favour of the less talented groups who constitute the majority.
Libertarians should think these matters over instead of rehashing the same old mantras about the joys of globalisation until the cows come home.
An excellent review of Chua’s book can be found at Salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/01/13/democracy/
What’s to think over, Charles? All systems are inherently unfair, in that they benefit some more than others based on individual characteristics. The only differences are the talents needed to succeed in each system.
That’s not an economic or political problem, it’s a universe problem.
The advantage of free markets are that all other things being equal we all have an equal shot. The fact that all other things are never equal doesn’t diminish the inherent rightness of the doctrine.
Charles why don’t you tell us why we should spend time reflecting on the unequal distribution of spoils of globalisation. Do you expect us to become believers in an alternative system? As the Weasel points out all are systems unfair, in the sense that they produce losers as well as winners which I don’t necessarily think is unfair, but democracy plus trade i.e. globalisation are definitely the best option open to us.
Charles seem to be a fan of the IQ vs Wealth of Nations kind of theories that are completely unscientific since they conclude a cause to effect relation from a simple correlation that can be the result of one or many others causes.
Here in the States we have a “holiday”, for lack of a better word, on April 1 called April Fool’s Day. I was under the impression that this day originated in our English roots. Either this is not so or the English version falls, weirdly enough, on this black anniversary in U.S. history.
Being a nit-picker, I’d love to know why subcomandante.
Is it the real comandante is the ghost of Zapata?
Is he one of David Icke’s lizards?
Or is it something much more spiritual. Say the “sub” shows he’s a servant of the poor and dispossessed, rather than dominating them like a white, male, middle-aged leader might? Sorry… like a conventional white, male, middle-aged leader might…
***
Charles Copeland says:
The problem with markets is that in relative terms they specifically benefit cognitively talented ethnic groups[…]
To which I must say: rot. If it were true it would be a fact of life rather than a problem. If you have anything to do with business, however, you soon realise that markets reward persistence, self-confidence and energy vastly more than they do brains or originality.
re Weasel, Lorenzo:
Perhaps my wording was a bit too provocative. And yes, Weasel is perfectly right: life is unfair and there is no such thing as cosmic justice. Some folks have brains in their ass, with some it’s the other way round. Some chicks look like Sandra Bullock; others look like Andrea Dworkin. No ‘racial justice’ and no ‘facial justice’ either in this valley of tears. Etcetera.
My point is simply that globalisation makes a lot of dullard people pretty unhappy and envious and gullible to the likes of Subcomandante Marcos and the advocates of ethnic hatred. Perhaps the only solution is to deprive such people of political rights until they learn how to behave themselves, i.e. stop initiating genocidal pogroms and similar policies. Or to repeat the title of Hans Hermann Hoppe’s classic: democracy – the God that failed.
“If you have anything to do with business, however, you soon realise that markets reward persistence, self-confidence and energy vastly more than they do brains or originality”
And some cultures teach persistence, self-confidence and energy vastly more than others. Hence Charles outcome. You have a choice whether to force people to learn succesful ways.
I you have the Brains to protect your originality then you will make a killing if you are persistent.
Guy Herbert claims that it’s bullshit to argue (as I did) that the problem with markets is that in relative terms they specifically benefit gifted ethnic groups. He writes:
If it were true it would be a fact of life rather than a problem. If you have anything to do with business, however, you soon realise that markets reward persistence, self-confidence and energy vastly more than they do brains or originality.
Firstly, lots of things — such as cancer — can be both (a) a fact of life and (b) a problem.
Secondly, even if it’s true than energy is more important than intelligence as a determinant of success, the fact remains that some ethnic groups are far more successful than others in terms of income, social status etc.
How come the Chinese, Koreans and Jews are so successful (both in markets and elsewhere) wherever they go? These are groups that are normally victims of discrimination in their host countries.
How come Africans tend (on average) to fail, wherever they go?
Or do some groups benefit from discrimination and others suffer from it?
The fact remains that globalisation is perceived as something that sucks by many ethnic groups who are intellectually disadvantaged.
To quote W.B. Yeats:
Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.
Ditto for globalisation — the wretched of the earth may get their market freedom, but they will still be pretty wretched (at least in relative terms).
Of course, I see absolutely no solution ….
The mushrooms in Cancun are wonderful this year, so I hear.
Charles Copeland,
I’d suggest that inherited culture is more important than inherited brains. If you drop the colour-and-religion coding for a moment, you can see the phenomenon at work in the vanilla population: children of professionals are more likely to pursue professional careers than those of manual workers regardless of intelligence, and vice versa. If you are brought up by hardworking business people who do 15-hour days, you will more naturally learn the habits that make you successful in business than if your parents’ idea of a long day is one where football on the telly goes into extra-time.
“The globalisation of those who are above us is nothing more than a global machine that feeds on blood and defecates in dollars.”
Man, as an Imperialist Yankee, I need to see more of this defecation into my bank account. (Still waiting for my share of the stolen Iraqi oil. What gives?)
If you are brought up by hardworking business people who do 15-hour days, you will more naturally learn the habits that make you successful in business than if your parents’ idea of a long day is one where football on the telly goes into extra-time.
Wouldn’t necessarily be cultural, though. Take the kid of the telly-watching parents, give him to the 15-hour-day people to raise, and if he turns out to be a whizz-bang businessman, you’ve scored a point.
You might as well say being a carnivore is learned, because tiger cubs grow up in an environment of hunting and meat-eating.
Subcommandante Marcos has indeed been around a while. He led a Marxist insurgency made up mostly of Mexican peasants against the government in one of the southern provinces.
To a large degree, he is correct – Mexico’s farmers are indeed in a pretty awful spot.
Of course, that has as much – or probably more – to do with Mexico’s long history of state-sponsored ownership of major industries, political and literal brutality, and rich tradition of bribery and other official corruption.
S. Weasel – even among domestic cats, some hunting behavior is learned. A kitten properly trained by its mother learns to bite its prey in the neck in a way which severs the spine and kills the prey very quickly. Most kittens who grow up motherless, or whose mothers don’t have access to small vertebrate prey for teaching demos, don’t figure that out, and kill either by biting and scratching enough that the prey bleeds to death, or the way dogs kill – by shaking the prey hard enough to break its neck. The kitten has the instinct to chase small vertebrates and insects for food, but it *learns* how to do so efficiently.
Chua’s thesis does seem to explain the political failure of moves towards a market economy, with the caveat that even when there is no ethnic dimension involved, the people who gain least will be able to identify, and outvote, the people who gain most. A culture which does not have a strong respect for property rights and a strong work ethic across the board will most likely vote itself into some sort of socialist morass. This mechanism is at work in the US and UK; is it any surprise that it’s much more powerful in nations whose political culture encourages envy and doesn’t value property? (Vargas Llosa and others have identified another factor at work – the tendency of market-oriented reforms and legal systems to not give equal weight to the property rights of poor people. Where even the poor can and do own their homes or businesses without fear of losing them due to some arbitrary decree, they’re much more likely to be willing to respect rich people’s property rights.)
S. Weasel – even among domestic cats, some hunting behavior is learned.
Utterly irrelevant.
A cat raised by mice does not grow up to be a vegetarian. She grows up to be a parricide. Even if she doesn’t bite mom and pop in the most efficient killing spot.
Charles Copeland:
It seems you are deeply impressed by Amy Chua’s book, and are convinced that capitalism isn’t perfect.
(Don’t be fooled by the word “Globalization” – what it means, and what everybody means when using it is “capitalism”, and I don’t know why people are afrain of this word).
So maybe you think that if corrupt and murderous tyrants rob the producers and traders by imposing taxes and tariffs – the poor will be better off ?
Pointing out that under capitalism poverty doesn’t dissapear instantly and completely isn’t a valid critique of capitalism.
About the poor beeing brainwashed into rebellion and robbery of the rich – that certainly is a problem but it will not be solved by adopting policies that make them poorer still.
re Jacob’s last comment:
No, I marginally prefer globalisation to the alternatives. It’s just that it does give rise to certain problems (such as fostering ethnic hatred), and we shouldn’t simply ignore them and claim that everybody who has reservations about globalisation is necessarily a pinko subversive or a clueless know-nothing who hasn’t read enough of Ayn Rand.
Charlse Copeland,
“… does give rise to certain problems (such as fostering ethnic hatred)” ??
Is “fostering ethnic hatred” done by globalization ? How ? I thought that globalization was about cooperation and mutually beneficient trade between ethnic groups that hated each other before, so globalization is rather a force for peace and harmony.
Ethinc hatred abounds and is as old as man, blaming it on globalization is a dirty trick of anti globalization hatemonger propagandists. It is they, not globalization, who are “fostering ethnic hatred” .
Jacob,
Globalization is a problem in multiracial societies in which a talented minority group gains more from free trade than does a relatively untalented majority group. Globalisation does in fact ‘foster’ ethnic hatred when the majority group are so dumb that they do not even understand that without globalisation and without the assistance of the talented minority they would probably starve to death. That’s my point. Witness Zimbabwe. Witness South Africa in a few years time.
Basket cases.
Weasel,
“Wouldn’t necessarily be cultural, though. Take the kid of the telly-watching parents, give him to the 15-hour-day people to raise, and if he turns out to be a whizz-bang businessman, you’ve scored a point.”
Of course that’s right. However my point was–despite my self-denying ordinance–aimed undermining Charles Copeland’s group-IQ arguments, not talking about individual heredity. If a group marked out by distinctive culture does well, then my bet is on the culture as the cause, not an average IQ-point or two.
Example: There’s a massive disproportion in the numbers of pharmacists of Indian descent in Britain. As far as I’m aware it takes no very special intellectual or genetic gift to become a pharmacist, just a bit of a slog in training. (Pharmacists who wish to complain about this bigoted slur, just remove NOSPAM from my email below.) So I’d be extremely surprised if it weren’t merely a social quirk: that Indian families regard pharmacy as a good job.
Likewise first-generation African immigrants as civil servants. The only decent jobs in some parts of Africa are in the government, so I’m not much suprised that every second educated African I meet is an official of some sort.
I don’t need to presume that Africans are genetically predisposed to bureaucracy, and Indians to pharmacy to explain the effect.
David,
subcomandante Marcos certainly exists, in fact he has a reasonable claim to be the first terrorist leader to use the internet as a tool for issuing press releases in the very early 1990s. You could say that he was the pioneer of pundit blogging…
When I was working as a researcher into terrorism and organised crime (1992-1994) his name would pop up.
I couldn’t say for sure that the Guardian’s column was genuine, as I haven’t kept track of the subcomandante’s career since then.
I looked up Sub-Marcos on the net and to my surprise they have good philosopy, “Everything for evryone and nothing for ourselves.” its hard to imagine a world like that, but it sound like a dream. The more poverty their is the more im going to protect myself by sorrounding my home with a bigger fence. to tell you the truth, I living in this world because it dosent make sense that we only have two options. for example. your either good or bad, a winner or a loser,poor or rich is really mind banging. ive read marcos’s writting and there very well put. But like evrything else in history we see that the first americans (not native americans) but the 13 colonies rebel against the british, and first they were 1st. ridicule,2nd. violently oppose. & 3rd. accepted
so i dont think we will ever understand these uprising unless we stop and look at the bigger picture and not stop asking why.
O SO THIS IS A RED-NECK SITE RIGHT? OR R U A KKK MEMBER? YOU RACIST ASS
Subcomandante is not a terrorist. He is a revolutionary.