Another from the vaults . . .

[This is something I wrote in March 2016, and I publish it now simply because it has, in part, a certain current relevance with regards to the American economic blockade of Iran, though you will have to go down a fair piece in what is a rather long article to find the relevant bit.]

Cormac Lucey, a lecturer in finance at UCD, a former special advisor to Michael McDowell during the latter’s time in government, and a regular Irish columnist in the Business Section of the Sunday Times, wrote on the 28^th February 2016.

‘Consider recent remarks from Peter Sutherland, a former attorney-general, EU commissioner and chairman of AIB and Goldman Sachs International.  He has stated, regarding the current refugee crisis: “The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others.  And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.”

‘Sutherland suggests the EU should undermine nationality and any sense of nationality.  No wonder the Brits think about leaving.  The wonder is that more aren’t considering joining them.  And the wonder is that we don’t harbour greater resentments against the EU for its authoritarian rejection of democratic referendum results here—see the treaties of Nice and Lisbon.’

There is nothing surprising in this.  One would need to be blind not to see the way things have been heading over many years, certainly since the European Charter on Human Rights was made legally binding in the EU in 2009 under the Treaty of Lisbon, and indeed much earlier.  The Treaty of Lisbon, as noted above, was one of those treaties that the EU insisted on bringing back before the electorate until they got the ‘yes’ that they wanted.

I have been intending for a while now to write something on this, especially as there is a very interesting historical precedent, as it were, to what is going on now.  I have been reading around the issue, purely by accident, these past two years, and it really just a matter of collating the different notes that I’ve made, whenever I get around to it.

The point I am trying to deal with here is somewhat different, though related.  Part of my reading over the past two years has involved rereading The Iliad, in the course of which one particular sentence pulled me up short.  It is where Priam, the king of Troy, comes in secret to beg the body of his dead son Hector from Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors.

Achilles was the only son of Peleus.  And Priam says to him of his father back in Greece: ‘No doubt the countrymen roundabout plague him, with no one there to defend him, beat away disaster’.  And it immediately fills in a picture of the Heroic Age in Greece, where one’s power and one’s possessions depended purely on one’s ability to hang on to them, to the extent that even the father of the great Achilles, in his son’s absence, and in the absence of any other sons, wasn’t likely to be safe.

Francis Parkman, in The Oregon Trail, the story of his life among the Indians in the 1840s, tells an analogous story.  He lived among the Oglala Sioux, and writes that ‘Courage, address [stature, appearance] and enterprise may raise any warrior to the highest honour, especially if he be the son of a former chief, or a member of a numerous family, to support and avenge his quarrels . . . Very seldom does it happen, at least among these western tribes, that a chief attains to much power, unless he is the head of a numerous family.’

Parkman recounts the career of one chief, who had thirty sons, and who ruled the village like a tyrant.  ‘His will was law . . . When he had resolved on any course of conduct, he would pay to the warriors the compliment of calling them together to deliberate upon it, and when their debates were over, quietly state his own opinion, which no one ever disputed.  It fared hard with those who incurred his displeasure.  He would strike them or stab them on the spot; and this act, which if attempted by any other chief would have cost him his life, the awe inspired by his name [and by the number of his sons] enabled him to repeat again and again with impunity.’

He was succeeded by his son, the possessor now of twenty-nine brothers, not to mention other close kinsmen, who acted with much the same impunity.  ‘Out of several dozen squaws he had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for one, but snapping his fingers in the face of the injured husband, had defied the extremity of his indignation, and no one had yet dared to lay the finger of violence upon him . . . His enemies did not forget that he was one of thirty warlike brethren, all growing up to manhood.  Should they wreak their anger upon him, many keen eyes would be ever upon them, and many fierce hearts thirst for their blood.  The avenger would dog their footsteps everywhere.  To kill Mahto-Tatonka would be an act of suicide.’

I quote this not so much to show the power of the large family as to show the inherent weakness and potential humiliation of the small one.
And so it would appear was the case also among the Greeks of the Heroic Age, the difference being that the Greeks had advanced to the stage of the ownership of farms and estates.  But equally so, the securing and the possession of such estates became, it seems, dependent on sexual fertility and the weight of numbers.  The idea of title or deed or right, even if such things existed, seems to have carried little weight.

Arguably the redress for this situation came with democracy and the development of law and of the state.  Now the possibility existed of people being confirmed in the title to their property.  And the state provided the muscle to make its rulings stick.

But still, one must imagine, the old hunger for mastery and possession, no matter how constrained, continued to exist within the human heart.   Indeed, it seems innate to humanity.

I remember when we were in Turkey, talking to an old doctor who had retired home from America, and asking him about the farmlands of the Anatolian plain.  You could see it from the train.  Miles after miles of flat land, as far as the eye could see, without fence or ditch or marker, and here and there, in the dawn light, some old fellow in a djellaba, tending a herd of goats.  And I asked the doctor how one knew his land from the other.  And his reply was, ‘They know, they know!’

And the secret struggle for mastery continues on in a subdued form even under our noses.  The fellow who strings a fence impinging a couple of inches into his neighbours land.  The amount of land is negligible, but what is important is the gaining of the psychological upper hand.  If you get away with it this time, then you might get away with a bit more the next.  Especially in the legal context of precedence, where if you get away with a thing unchallenged on one occasion, you can often claim it as a justification for the next.

And this brings us to the nub of the matter.  The desire for mastery and possession and putting one’s foot on the other’s neck hasn’t disappeared.  It has just changed its form—and all the more so it seems these past few years.  Kavanagh wrote in Tarry Flynn about Tarry going into a bookshop, and while he bought a book of poems, his companion Eusebius bought an ordinance survey map, and the result of it is that Tarry’s family ends up losing a field.  Now it doesn’t make sense—but that’s the way Kavanagh chose to tell it.  But it is indicative of what it is that I’m trying to say.

The very thing that helped curb predatoriness in ancient times has now become the vehicle of a new breed of predator.  Not guys fit for violence and with big families backing them up, but generally more wimpy types of characters backed up by an adventurous knowledge of the law.  As the law has exponentially swelled and grown ever more complex, the more so it has allowed the clever and the greedy and the unscrupulous to use it as a weapon of aggrandisement.  As Woody Guthrie wrote in The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd, ‘Some will rob you with a six-gun/Some with a fountain pen.’

Armed with an intricate knowledge of the law, whether their own or expensively bought, there is a whole cohort of people out there intent on using it without conscience as a way of getting even richer than they already are.

There are what are called ‘activist shareholders’ who force themselves onto the boards of public companies with the sole intention of maximising the share of profits going to shareholders, no matter what otherwise the consequences may be.

When the Argentinian economy collapsed in the early 2000s, the government did a deal with bondholders that involved them taking a haircut of up to 70%.  American vulture funds which had bought up some of this debt cheaply used American law to force the Argentinian state to pay full dollar on the bonds, on pain of the country being effectively shut out of world financial markets.

It is clear too that the American state has been milking the European banks for alleged breaches of American law with swingeing fines, which the banks have no option but to pay or else lose their licence to trade in US dollars and effectively go out of business.

Jeremy Warner, writing in the Daily Telegraph in 2015:  ‘America, land of the free and all that, is at heart a deeply protectionist nation, which as UK banks have discovered to their cost operates a rotten, asphyxiating legal system that often practises little short of outright extortion.  Certainly, it is hard to call it justice.  If you want to do business in the US, expect to get whacked at some stage, and if you are fool enough not to take your punishment with a smile and fawning thanks for the privilege, they will simply close you down.’

Of course, it is hard to have sympathy for banks, yet it is nonetheless the case that the slurry-tank nozzle reaches down via them into the most ordinary of pockets.  Indeed, the activity of the predators exists at all levels of the pond—from the rarified level of high finance down to the bottom-feeding process of extorting directly from mortgage holders and people who have found themselves in hock to the banks and whose debts have been sold on.

And it stretches to more than just the financial system.  Modern financial imperialism—especially, it seems, American financial imperialism—hides in the guise of a new definition of democracy—what Hilary Clinton calls the ‘new decency’—as its preferred mode of dress.  It is something that it seems to find, for whatever reason, particularly appropriate.  This is a democracy that is no longer primarily about gaining a majority of votes, but instead about delivering the liberal agenda and the cosmopolitan lifestyle.

A sort of: ‘One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them/One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them’.  You can have all the votes you want, but if you do not go along with the legal and lifestyle changes required then you will not be accounted a democracy.  You may not as yet be bombed, but you will certainly be subject to economic and financial pressures sufficient to make you yield.

Marx wrote of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto of 1848: ‘The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.  It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves.  In one word, it creates a world in its own image.’

It would be possible to adapt this for the modern age: ‘The global financial stranglehold is the heavy artillery with which it batters down the Chinese and other walls, with which it forces the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.  It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the liberal Western cosmopolitan way of life; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become liberal and cosmopolitan themselves.  In other words, it creates a world in its own image.’