yellow Parenti intensifies
“Here I have come to meet those who take part in this gathering. Here I, a descendant of those who populated America forty thousand years ago, have come to meet those who discovered it only five hundred years ago. Here, then, we all meet. We know what we are, and that is enough. We have never intended anything else.
The European customs officer brother asks me for a written document with a visa so that I may discover those who discovered me. The European usurer brother demands payment of a debt incurred by Judas, whom I never authorized to sell me.
The European legal trickster brother explains to me that every debt is paid with goods, even if it means selling human beings and entire countries without asking for their consent. I am discovering them. I too can demand payment, and I too can demand interest.
It is recorded in the Archive of the Indies, page after page, receipt after receipt and signature after signature, that between the years 1503 and 1660 alone, 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver from America arrived in Sanlúcar de Barrameda.
Plunder? I don’t believe it! Because that would mean thinking that our Christian brothers sinned against their Seventh Commandment.
Spoliation? Heaven forbid that Europeans, like Cain, would kill and deny their brother’s blood!
Genocide? That would be to give credit to slanderers like Bartolomé de las Casas, who described the encounter as the destruction of the Indies, or to radicals like Arturo Uslar Pietri, who claims that the advance of capitalism and modern European civilization is due to the flood of precious metals!
No! Those 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver must be considered the first of many friendly loans from America, destined for the development of Europe. The opposite would be to presume the existence of war crimes, which would entitle us not only to demand immediate restitution, but also compensation for destruction and damages.
No. I prefer to think in the least offensive of these hypotheses.
Such a fabulous export of capital was nothing more than the beginning of a ‘MARSHALLTESUMA’ plan to guarantee the reconstruction of barbarous Europe, ruined by its deplorable wars against the cultured Muslims, creators of algebra, polygamy, daily bathing, and other achievements of civilization.
Thus, in celebrating the Fifth Centenary of the Loan, we may ask: did our European brothers make rational, responsible, or at least productive use of the funds so generously advanced by the Indo-American International Fund?
We regret to say they did not. Strategically, they squandered it in the battles of Lepanto, in invincible armadas, in Third Reichs, and other forms of mutual extermination, with no other result than ending up occupied by NATO’s gringo troops, as in Panama, but without a canal.
Financially, after a moratorium of 500 years, they have been unable either to repay the principal and its funds or to become independent from the net revenues, raw materials, and cheap energy exported and supplied to them by the entire Third World.
This deplorable situation confirms Milton Friedman’s assertion that a subsidized economy can never function, and obliges us to demand from them, for their own good, repayment of the principal and the interest that we have so generously delayed in collecting for all these centuries.
In saying this, we make it clear that we will not stoop to charging our European brothers the vile and bloody interest rates of 20 or even 30 percent that they charge the peoples of the Third World. We will limit ourselves to demanding the return of the precious metals advanced, plus a modest fixed interest of 10 percent, accrued only over the last 300 years, with 200 years of grace.
On this basis, and applying the European formula of compound interest, we inform the discoverers that they owe us, as the first payment of their debt, a mass of 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver, both values raised to the power of 300. That is, a number whose full expression would require more than 300 digits, and which far exceeds the total weight of planet Earth.
These blocks of gold and silver are very heavy. How much would they weigh if calculated in blood?
To claim that Europe, in half a millennium, has been unable to generate sufficient wealth to repay this modest interest would be tantamount to admitting its absolute financial failure and/or the insane irrationality of the foundations of capitalism.
Such metaphysical questions, of course, do not trouble Indo-Americans. But we do demand the signing of a letter of intent to discipline the debtor peoples of the Old Continent, obliging them to fulfill their commitments through a privatization or restructuring of Europe that would allow it to be handed over to us in its entirety as the first payment of the historical debt.”
This is often credited to Evo Morales but it’s a fictional speech - the resources stolen from the third world though, not fictional.
And about the last part (as for the Judas), for those not familiar with Latin America history: From the puppet government installed by USA-backed military coups in the 60s and 70s, to the 80s and 90s “modern” neoliberal democrats, we were all put into massive debts made by loans pushed by the IMF and other international backers and bankers, and those loans were used as an excuse to privatize all resources and services the continent had. So the “privatization or restructuring” is a reference to the rhetoric they used, “you can’t handle your economy and have sunk into debt, we have to take it over for you” (of course, the debts weren’t accidental, but a project).
Anarchists never beating the nationalist allegations
Michael Parenti world renowned . . . anarchist?
Your takes just get shittier and shittier mate.
ngl i completely misread the post (my illiterate ass thought it was about soyfacing about capitalist development in poor countries for some reason), gonna take an L on this one
