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.