Re: violence, revolution & clairvoyance

>If you, or we, or someone could come up with a great alternative, that
>would be one thing.  Needless to say, I don't hear one yet.
>
>I don't think the networking of the cyberelites or the comfy
>peregrinations of the NGOs are really doing much good for the wretched of
>the earth.  And I don't think they a) will or b) should ask us when they
>decide to organize a concerted assault on the system where they can -- at
>the level of the local state, which they could seize and make some
>dramatic improvements.


I've been trying to follow some of this, but must confess that I find much
of it floating in cyberspace.  What interests me is not so much how the
system can be changed -- perhaps it can and perhaps it can't -- but how the
wretched of the earth accommodate to the system and enable themselves and
their families to survive from day to day.  Jamaica, along with fancy
resorts and beaches, has an abundance of wretched.  I was there with an NGO
recently and had some opportunity to develop a further understanding of how
the wretched survive.  Here is an excerpt from my journal:

[begin]

"Article in today's Observer, about the best newspaper around here, about
'garrison towns'.  It was written by Raymond Grant, editor of a black
news-sheet in Ottawa.  He talks about his experience in living in one of
those towns in Kingston, just off the Spanish Town Road.

"The garrison towns are well organized around self-protection.  They are run
by local "dons" who head up private gang-type armies.  Everyone who runs a
business and everyone who works has to pay a tax to the don.  Gang members
collect the tax regularly on, for example, pay-day.  In return, the resident
is not molested and is protected from criminal or other abuse.  As long as
you don't cross the don, you are safe in the town.

"All of the street lights have been disabled so that the town is completely
dark at night.  This permits the easy surveillance of anyone who is trying
to enter the town, especially the police, and gives residents warning so
that they can "make arrangements", that is, dispose of anything the police
might want to see.  Grant describes the humiliation of a police raid that
succeeded in getting in on a very hot night.  Everyone was sleeping without
any clothing, or with very little.  People were herded out on the street
naked.  In the houses, things were turned upside down and left in an helluva
mess.  Given such instances, there is a tremendous feeling of 'us versus
them' alienation among garrison town residents.

"The don's provide various forms of 'employment' for local youth.  One is to
rent guns to them so that they can pull robberies.  However, the rule is
that they cannot pull robberies within the town; it must be done beyond its
boundaries.

"Though Grant says nothing about this, it is certain that at least some of
the dons and their gangs have higher connections of the kind I suggested
earlier --  i.e., they connect with the political parties and could well be
the factory floor of the drug transshipment business.

[end]

In Kingston, garrison towns form a very large, very visible part of the
overall urban scene.  They are huge shanty town slums with narrow little
roads and corrugated tin fences.  The official unemployment rate is very
high.  Lots of young men just hanging around.  I encountered much the same
kind of thing in the slums of Sao Paulo when I spent a month there a couple
of years ago.

What this suggests in general is a world in which the wretched live without
ideology, with no thought of overturning the system, without much hope of
betterment, but with omnipresent need to organize themselves around the most
basic of things, their personal security and survival.  It also suggests
that if they belong to the right group and follow the rules, many of them
may not be quite as wretched as we tend to believe.

Ed Weick