MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 29 August 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I heard a most interesting discussion on the BBC in a programme called Outlook, on the role of small states in the world. It was good at least that Antigua and Barbuda’s High Commissioner to London, Mr. Ron Sanders, was the only progressive voice on the programme.
It was equally true too, that Antigua and Barbuda was presented on the programme as a let down to all small states, be they in the Caribbean or in the Pacific.
Mark you, it was an Antiguan official of state the Drug and Off-shore Banking Czar, Wrenford Ferrance, who admitted on the BBC, before the world, that Antigua and Barbuda had loose laws, which allowed for a loose off-shore financial sector, and which, said Mr. Ferrance “unscrupulous persons” could make use of at will. In short and in sum, an Antiguan State official, had to admit and did admit that Antigua and Barbuda was crooks’ haven for any and all the unsavoury characters of the world.
Even Ron Sanders, himself an official of state, had to openly disagree with another official of state, Wrenford Ferrance, in public, and so to speak, before the entire world. Ron Sanders had to remind his BBC World Service listeners that the biggest scandal in money-laundering had taken place not in the Caribbean, but if you please, in the USA, and Miami to be exact. No one was saying that American laws were lax and loose.
But they presenter on the programme did imply that because we were small, that is why we were lax and loose, and it was better for small states to attach themselves to some larger power. Colonialism writ larger.
The opposite is the truth. Because we are small, our very smallness allows us to become models of probity for the larger and mightier. It is, after all, axiomatic that the larger, the more there is difficulty in administration. Small is not only beautiful, but better.
Can Antigua become a model of probity, an example to far larger states, that while we have clean air, so too do we have a clean society, not the physical and abusive mess we have now from Cabinet at the top, down to the streets loaded with refuse.
Let me answer the question first with humour. It is not commonly known that the Mulberry Garden in England was once a centre of prostitution in England. That same Mulberry Garden is now Buckingham Palace! But some may argue that there is no real transformation there, for the succession of scandals in Buckingham today make it resemble Mulberry Garden of yore!
Be that as it may, small states have an immense contribution to make in the world. Not by remaining mini-minor nation-states, but by becoming regional city-states, going beyond the nation-state. It is well to remember, that the democracy we have, in many ways does not approach even now, the democracy of the Greek City States. If slavery undermined the ancient Greek city-states, and it did, we, in the Caribbean, can now prove that coming out of the worst slavery known to man, we can forge a new society, which the production of wealth is not the good life. That is, a person, like a society, can never be measured by the amount of goods he or she owns, banks or consumes, but by the many-sided development of the human personality, with wealth only a means towards that end. Let me elaborate.
Out of Europe in the glorious French Revolution of 1789 there came the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity, as the be-all and end-all of the good life. Europe today acknowledges its abject failure in this regard, as having fallen far short of its very own ideals of Liberté, Equalité, and Fraternité. Pope John Paul II recently in France felt compelled to note that Europe’s migrants are by no means treated with equality, far less fraternity, and by no means liberty. The chronic disease affects and poisons more than its migrants, but all European civilisation. So indeed.
The New World, it is said, was peopled by the Old. Europeans running from tyranny in their homelands found refuge in America.
And so the United States proudly declared that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are the Rights of Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. This idea, simply does not correspond to the facts of American social existence. It never has. The divergence between goal and reality is perhaps now more acute than ever before.
Let me substantiate this. The top 1 per cent of U.S. households – persons with total assets of more than US$2.3 million – now control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, compared with 30 per cent in 1980!
The wealth of this group, the top 1 per cent in the U.S., has more than doubled since 1982. In that year the richest 1 per cent owned US$2.7 trillion in personal assets. In 1992 the richest 1 percent owned US$5.3 trillion in assets. Today, 1997 according to Professor Edward Wolff in his book Top Heavy, the top 1 per cent, their worth is US$6.9 trillion. Thus the top 1 percent of Americans has increased its wealth by some US$4.2 trillion in thirteen years! An increase greater than the total national debt of the USA over the same period.
The hard facts here cannot be gainsaid, cannot be shunted aside. It tells a stark truth. That in the USA today despite its triumphalism, inequality among the races and the classes is deepening, more rapidly than ever before. Its own ideal of equality is more and more trampled underfoot each day.
So deep-seated has inequality become in so-called western civilisation, that for decades now Europe and America’s best minds have been seeking to provide a scientific theory to justify inequality.
They have been trying to prove, Ecclesiastes notwithstanding, the race indeed belongs to the swift, the battle to the strong, bread to the rich, and riches to the man who already has.
Indeed, the claim that inequalities of wealth and power between nations and races are a consequence of natural and intrinsic qualities, which in turn are the result of different anatomical and physiological properties, has been the dominant explanation offered for the prevailing social structure, riddled through and through with inequality, for the last two centuries.
Biological explanations of social power and success, why one group or one race should dominate society, were the unchallenged consensus of the 19th century, not only in zoology, anthropology, and statistics, but in English and French literature from Dickens to Zola. All literary critics agree, that Emile Zola’s Rougon Marquart novels dramatise the dominance of inner nature over external circumstance and were consciously constructed to prove the point. Namely, that it was innate characteristics which allowed for triumph over external circumstances. In sum, ‘Success’ was inherent in the nature and race of the successful. And of course, vice versa for the unsuccessful.
During and immediately after the Second World War, and as a consequence of the revelations of the German Nazi programme of genocide, which was based on claims of the biological, that is, innate inferiority of Jews, Gypsies, Africans, gays and other “degenerate groups” there was a revulsion against theories of innate inferiority. For a while, science sought to show that intellectual and temperamental differences were largely the consequence of different family environments and of the experience of social or racial discrimination.
But the revulsion against biological theories of inferiority lasted only as long as so long. By 1967 these theories were back with a vengeance, as justification for the growing and deepening inequality in so-called western civilisation.
For instance, Professors Vernon Mark, William Sweet and Frank Ervin enlarged on the Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban Violence and their explanation led them back to the once unthinkable, that the only way to secure social peace was by cutting out the brains of the low-born offenders! Such offenders being born, not made by social and economic circumstances.
The propaganda about biological or genetic inferiority kept and keeps on pouring out as propaganda, scientific propaganda, to shore up the old, unequal, socially and racially oppressive world order.
In 1969 Arthur Jensen’s How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement gave renewed potency to the theory that differences in social and economic power between blacks and whites were ineradicable. Because, and this is a crucial ‘because’ the differences were genetic. Jensen was hailed as a scientific celebrity.
You see, he appeared to distance himself from the pre-war and Nazi propagandistic scientific literature of race and class inferiority by using the scientific cover of quantitative genetics and modern statistics to establish the innate intellectual superiority of whites over blacks.
Old nineteenth century theories of the innate inferiority of some races were dusted off and given modern credence. For example, Harvard’s Louis Agassiz claimed that the skull sutures of black babies closed earlier than those of white babies so that black brains could not expand to accumulate or accommodate great knowledge! The best were giving scientific credence to the worst.
I could go on and on citing the literature down to the Bell Curve to show how science has been distorted, by eminent scientists, to prove that the poor are poor, because of our inherited and innate characteristics. And so, no social or political programmes, could alter these “scientifically” determined and genetic factors. Not only the poor we have always with us, but black inferiors as well, the world over. We were genetically ordained to be poor, black and exploited.
It reached absurd proportions when Professor Rushton, a Guggenheim Fellow, I think, came up with a notorious theory in 1991, supported in part by tantalising data, that the angle and length of penises, was a determinant of racial inferiority or superiority! The shorter the penis the more superior the race, and even if big and white, the angle was different. No doubt Rushton suffered from a bad case of penis envy.
The point I am trying to make is simple. These theories will continue having various impacts, until and as long as we in the Caribbean, who have mastered the tools of western civilisation, in terms of language, in terms of a more homogeneous society than Africa, continue to produce these corrupt, pointless, islands in the sun, offering sun, sea and sex as our principal export.
The theories of race and class inferiority will last until we in the Caribbean set about to create educational systems which eliminate family environment as the crucial factor in educational, or if you prefer, academic success. Our very smallness best equips us for this all-important historical role.
The theories of race and class superiority and inferiority will continue, no matter how science itself shows that race is not a determining scientific factor, until we remove all traces of racial supremacy in our economic life. White economic supremacy is not a part of the Divine Order of things. It was historically created, it has to be historically redressed and demolished.
We in the Caribbean, in these small states, which if they were to become a Regional Federation of City-states could end the fiction that the few manipulating the many is the last word in democratic development.
It is by constructing such a Regional society of city-states, that we can prove that all men are equal, not just at birth, but in life, since a person will be judged not by the colour of his skin, but by the content of his many-sided participation in society. Where a person will be judged not by the many credit cards he or she has, but by the many talents he or she has developed, based on society’s wealth, and in the service of society.
Were the Caribbean to venture forth on this path, they would have put behind them the image of happy-go-lucky blacks, and instead become representatives of the New Person. The New Person for whom wealth and consumption is not an end itself, but a means to the end, the development of the many-sided human personality.
In other words, we can give world society, a new lease on life, by constructing or re-constructing our small states not by confining ownership and control to the few, but by a new system of social ownership and control. And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty and intelligence, as a great poet, Aimé Césaire, wrote.
Above all, in these small states we can prove that humankind does not exist for the production of wealth, but that the wealth of society is for the production of a many-sided human personality, which manifests itself in the variety of social functions he or she performs.
The New World will then be New.
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