The toll of a bad idea

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

Bad ideas never die. They just get repackaged and resold as new.

Like the Aztec gods, the bad idea that rules our times, the Market deity, requires periodic human sacrifices. At certain moments, the high priests demand that the blood of innocents be spilled for the world’s order to be restored and divine wrath avoided. And so it is done.

In the United States, in Europe, in most of the world, this is bloodletting time. The stone knife went out of style centuries ago; today sharper knives do the grisly work. These smother instruments are working away to satisfy the iron laws of Market, bleeding people the world over.

First they came for Greece. But we are not Greece, we said, and anyway the Greeks are lazy, they like to live above their means and they enjoy living more than toiling. Then they came for Spain, for Portugal, for Ireland, for Italy, for Britain and, neither last nor least, for the United States. What now? Has a pandemic of sloth and profligacy suddenly struck almost the whole Western world? Is the Greek virus the twenty-first century avatar of HIV?

Hardly; jobs vanishing, pensions shrinking, incomes dropping, people starving, families evicted: these are merely the sacrifices offered by our leading priests – politicians and plutocrats – to assuage the ire of Market and reestablish balance to a chaotic world.

Is there no limit to the punishment the zealous followers of Market are willing to inflict on their fellow humans in the name of their god? Ask the Greeks. Or better yet, ask the Irish. The Celtic tiger of a just few years ago has been transformed into a bleeding, neutered kitten sure enough, but that’s not what I am referring to. For, to really gauge the extent the followers of the dogmas of Market will go, one can do no better than to look at Irish history.

In 1845, a devastating plague struck the staple food of the Irish masses – the potato – even more unexpectedly than the financial implosion that hit the West in 2008. At the time, the Emerald Isle, wholly colonized by Great Britain, was largely a land of landless peasants ruled over by few English landlords who made huge profits from rents, agriculture and livestock. That left only the humble potato for the sustenance of their Irish tenants.

The potato blight ruined virtually the entire potato crop for six years. During this Great Famine, about a million of the common people of the country starved and even more emigrated. Those who stayed and survived hunger and the wholesale eviction from and destruction of their homes by British authorities ended up looking like the survivors of the genocides of the next century.

But this human catastrophe was no natural disaster. It was the product of the actions, or more often the inaction, of men guided by the same beliefs that predominate in 2012.

As Terry Golway writes (“The Irish in America”), “When the potato failed, the poor of Ireland starved. And from 1845 to 1851, the crop failed repeatedly, disastrously, and fatally.” Yet, as Golway notes, there was no shortage of food in Ireland: “Meanwhile, the bounty of Ireland – the barley and the oats and the wheat and the livestock – was transported on the same roads that brought the starving poor to Ireland’s seaports.” Indeed, a British writer recorded the items exported from the Irish port of Cork during a single day at the height of the famine as including “147 bales of bacon, 135 barrels of pork, 5 casks of ham, 300 bags of flour, 300 head of cattle, 234 sheep, and 542 boxes of eggs.” This was at time when hundreds of thousands of the Irish were literally eating grass in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to survive.

How did the Irish’s British overlords justify perpetrating upon their Irish subjects this enormity – a word, incidentally, often confused with enormous but which in English means “a monstrous or outrageous act, a very wicked crime? Golway: “In accordance with the belief, held with religious fervor among Ireland’s rulers in Great Britain, that there could be no interference with the workings of free trade and the free market, the food grown in Ireland’s fields was designated for export.”

Like our own twenty-first century plutocrats who proclaim their animosity for government while lobbying fiercely for government subsidies for everything from sugar to stadiums, the free-market-loving British landlords made a killing from the trade barriers enshrined in the Corn Laws, by which “land-owning aristocrats profited immensely from [government] protection against foreign competition, allowing them to charge artificially high prices for their grain.” The shibboleths of God-Market did not allow the government to aid the starving but the deity made an exception for the truly greedy.

A callous disregard for the lives of the Irish was aided and abetted by a heavy dose of ethnic bigotry. Charles Trevelyan, the British official in charge of Irish relief wrote: “The great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the people.” Words like these flow ever so easily from the mouths of the well-fed.

Flash forward to 2012 and update the names and the terms, Mitt Romney for Charles Trevelyan, the Palestinians for the Irish, culture for character. Did Romney deviate one bit from Trevelyan’s script when he blamed culture – not forced displacement, dispossession, economic strangulation, occupation and oppression by Israel – for Palestinian misery?

The deadly logic of Charles Trevelyan finds an echo in the United States today in the actions of the ample roster of Republican governors who refuse free federal money earmarked meant to provide health care for the uninsured poor. This seems to make no sense, except to the true believers in Market like Trevelyan, Scott, Brown, Haley and their brethren. In 1846, when there was a faint glimmer of hope for a good potato crop in Ireland, Charles Trevelyan wasted no time in shutting down the miserly British relief operation under his command. It was, he explained, the “only way to prevent people from becoming habitually dependent on government.” During the next five years, much of Ireland became a graveyard; coffins became scarcer than potatoes. 
    
Bad ideas – mean-spirited, wrongheaded, evil, and false ideas – never die. They don’t even fade away. Like a virus, they hide, awaiting the next opportunity to afflict humanity.