CapitalistImperialistPig

The extent to which Nazi racial theories derived from US law and literature was not mentioned in my high school history courses, nor does it come up much in polite conversation.  Hitler, though, was quite open about the extent to which his racial laws and practice were borrowed from Jim Crow laws in the US.  There are clear parallels between the so-called Nuremberg Laws and the laws that were systematically used to restrict Negro voting, property ownership, employment and education.  He also liked US immigration laws designed to restrict non-Nordics from entering the US, sterilization laws for those deemed unfit, and the US genocide of the American Indians. It wasn't just laws.  The first half of the Twentieth Century was the high water mark of so-called scientific racism, and the US was its epicenter.  Two books in particular got a special place on Hitler's bookshelf: Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, and Henry H. Goddard's The Kallikaks . The...

When I was an archaeology student 600 or so moons ago, it was a bit of a standing joke that if one unearthed an artifact of no obvious utilitarian purpose it was classified as "of religious significance." Of course that really only meant that nobody had figured out what it was good for, since generally the excavated didn't leave any clues as to their actual religious views, if any. A more subtle point is that it's not generally possible to clearly fence off any part of culture cleanly and call it religion, so that even if the artifact in question did turn out to be used for scrambling quail eggs or something, it might still be an item of religious and mythical consequence. Perhaps that point has something to do with the (to me largely incomprehensible) protestations that the Hindu have no religion. Our present culture goes a long way towards making that separation. The separation has fairly deep roots in Christianity ("render therefore onto Caesar..."), bu...

Nietzsche's philological researches led him to a theory that associated good with a conquering aristocratic class, and evil with the downtrodden masses.  It was good to be a Superman - Clark Kent, not so much. David Graeber reports more recent philology.  In all Indo-European languages, it seems, debt is synonymous with sin.  The earliest known literature on the subject seems to be certain Vedic scriptures which posit a central moral role for debt in our relations with Gods, man, and scripture. So, Nietzsche revised goes more like this:  Good = moneylender, Evil = debtor.  I wonder how the old rascal would have liked that?

In his book Debt: The First 5000 Years , David Graeber sets out shatter a bunch of the icons of classical liberal economics.  Hardly any of these is more hoary than the notion that the state and market are fundamentally at odds.  The anthropological and historical record is not very kind to this idea, says Graeber.  In fact, stateless societies almost never have markets.  Markets themselves were usually created by the state. How does a king go about creating a market?  It might often be a byproduct of a more pressing concern: feeding a standing army.  How does one go about the logistics of supplying an army with all its manifold needs?  One clever solution was discovered in ancient times.  The king takes possession of the mines - he does have an army, after all - and mints a bunch of coins.  He pays his soldiers with them.  He also institutes a tax on the people, payable in coin.  Now they are forced to scramble for coins to pay t...

I have been reading David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years .  Among other interesting arguments, he maintains that economists usual idea of money and its history - that it evolved from barter - is utterly bogus, a just so story made up by Adam Smith and swallowed whole to this day in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Fun fact: in Henry II time in England a sort of currency was made of notched tally sticks.  They were IOUs: ....both parties to a transaction would take a hazelwood twig, notch it to indicate the amount held, and then split in half. The creditor's half was called the "stock", from which the term "stock holder" was derived.  The debtor kept the "stub."