THE HIDDEN HOLOCAUST AGAINST THE POOR
by Eric Sommer
The advent of the World Crisis, with its' disturbing mix of economic,
ecological, and technical Y2000bug elements, , brings new importance to the
hidden holocaust against the poor which has been taking place
for some time on a world-wide and accelerating scale.
Over the past few decades massive numbers of middle class, working class,
and - in the Third World - peasant people have been driven into poverty,
where they have been increasingly threatened with annihilation. To see the
truth of these statements, we need only look about us.
In the U.S., the richest country in the world, lower middle class and
working class standards of living have been falling for 20 years and now one
or two million - nobody seems to know the exact number - poor people have
actually been made homeless.
The life-span for Russian men has dropped since the fall of the Soviet
Union, along with a radical increase in poverty, from 75 or so years to 59
years.
Turning to the Third World, the picure is replete with statistics such as
2,000,000 homeless children in brazil, with 250,000 of them in the city of
Sao Paulo alone. Even before the current crisis there were hundreds of
thousands of child prostitutes in southern Asia; now, under the impact of
economic desperation, the numbers are increasing still further. Similar
facts and figures, confirming a holocaust of unprecedented proportions
against the poor, including massive former members of the middle and working
classes who have been driven into poverty, could be adduced for many other
areas of the
world.
One face of this new holocaust against the poor is that - like the original
Nazi holocaust - it includes a virulent hate campaign. The media,
government, and right-wing think tanks have in recent years sponsored a
sweeping propaganda attack against impoverished - and especially unemployed
- people. This campaign has sought to drill into the public consciousness
the notion that poor people are `shiftless', that they are infected with a
`culture of poverty' or `culture of dependency', that they are the `reason
for high taxes', that they are `deadbeats and criminals' and so forth.
One consequence of this campaign has been to scapegoat poor people; they are
blamed for economic problems which actually have nothing to do with them.
Declining working class living standards, and growing social misery and
economic insecurity, stem in reality from the current workings of the global
economy, from globalized competition, from the application of new
informational and robotic technologies, and from the extraction of super-
profits from the rest of the population by the upper 20% of society. But
government and media, using ideas spun in right-wing think tanks (such as re
labeling
poverty as `dependency'), have sought to re-direct public frustration
towards the poor, with their supposed responsibility for high taxes and
other social difficulties. This demonizing and de-humanizing of
the image of the poor has, moreover, served to harden public sentiment, so
that the current massive suffering - and mass deaths - of poor people can be
made acceptable.
The reality of this new holocaust against poor people is, to some extent,
obscured by its outward differences from the original one. In the original
holocaust, for example, ordinary members of society who happened to be Jews,
gypsies, homosexuals, communists, or other targeted categories found
themselves progressively publicly vilified, singled out for repressive
legislation, rounded up, worked to death, and then gassed. In the current
holocaust, growing numbers of ordinary people in the middle and
working classes, and in the peasant class in the third world, find
themselves `inexplicably' cast down among the working and non-working poor,
where they become `the new Jews' of their society, and where life becomes a
daily struggle for adequate nutrition, housing, and dignity.
Another difference which hides the similarities between the two holocausts
is the nature of the concentration camps which are used. The victims of the
original holocaust were interned in slave labour camps at places like Belsen
and Auschwitz. The concentration camp of the new holocaust is the street,
where the ever-growing numbers of homeless must try to live, sleep, and care
for themselves. For those who still have homes, the new concentration camps
are the ever-worsening poverty ghettos and substandard life-support systems
and housing of the inner cities and shanty-towns.
Finally, there is the difference in the methods of execution. Unlike the
original holocaust, the poor are not - for the most part - visibly murdered
by the state or the upper classes. Under a smoke screen of rhetoric about
the `necessary working of the economy' and `ending dependency' and `reliance on
market forces', we are told we must simply `let them go' to their fate, once
they have been deprived of any way to adequately support themselves. The
victims of the original holocaust were worked to death and gassed in walled
and barbed-wire enclosed `factories of death'. But the victims of the new
holocaust are simply `left' in their ghettos and, when they become homeless,
they are `let go' to the tender mercies of the street, where life is nasty,
brutish, and short.
What the Currrent Crisis Means
The current world crisis is, above all, a crisis for the poor. It is also a
crisis for the massive numbers of people from the middle and working classes
who are being driven into poverty. The holocaust-like conditions already
widely imposed on poor people are growing still worse, and are claiming
massive numbers of new people on a worldwide scale. Large parts of Asia have
already
plunged into economic chaos. Countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and
Thailand, with populations of hundreds of millions, are in *very* serious
economic crisis. The `middle classes' in these countries, product of the
export-led `Asian economic miracle' of the past few years, has to an
astounding extent been destroyed in the past few months. Moreover,
according to both the New York Times and the world bank, there is a dramatic
and disturbing expansion of hunger and actual starvation in certain rural
areas in several of South Asian countries. Worst of all, the World Bank and
the Indonesian government
have both stated that there is a real possibility of massive starvation and
hunger, affecting up to 100 million Indonesians this year, while the Russian
people also face possible severe food-shortages in comming months.
Meanwhile countries like Pakistan and Brazil are teetering on the edge of
massive
currency devaluations and/or defaults on foreign debts (Russia has already,
in effect, refused to meet its foreign debt payments on the original terms).
There is a very real possibility that the South Asian and Russia
depressions, compunded by the coming social and economic disruptions of the
Y2000bug, and by
ecological disruptions such as this years worldwide flooding, will become a
full-blown world-wide depression with massive unemployment, *and* with
technical and on/or economic factors leading to breakdowns in the key
industrial and agricultural infrastructures which make life in both cities and
countrysides possible.
This is the time to remember that, collectively, we have in our hands and
minds all the power and knowledge necessary to organize to both repell the
attacks on our being *and* to work together coooperatively to meet our needs.
If the victims of the original holocaust made any mistake at all, it was in
not organizing soon enough, in not fighting back vigorously enough, in being
`too law-abiding', in placing too much faith in the rule of law, the
existing state, and the existing economy to protect them. Today, working
and non-working
poor people world-wide face a similar crisis.. The existing system - and its
social forms of the job, the business, and government - will not protect us
from poverty or death.
In these deteriorating conditions, we must rely on *each other*, organize
with *each other*, resist the attacks on our being, and build a cooperative
Stewardship way of life in which we can work together to
care for one another and the planet. Building cooperative Stewardships is,
at this historical juncture, the only effective means of protection.
