Starvation, Poverty, and Perceptions

Norman Borlaug received a Congressional Gold Medal yesterday.

If you can't remember reading that name before, don't feel bad. Norman Borlaug hasn't been in the press as much as great thinkers like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Cindy Sheehan.

All Norman Borlaug did was help start the Green Revolution, and devote his life to making sustainable agriculture available to people who didn't live on Catalina Island or in Kennebunkport.

I debated whether to post this in a 'War on Terror' blog, but decided that there is a connection.

I've posted before (Doctors, Terrorists, and the Proletariat: What's a Person to Think?) on how many people find the jihad against the west hard to understand. In my opinion, that's because we're involved in a conflict that is based on neither the colonial disputes nor the class struggles that plagued the 19th and 20th centuries.

Another blog, Greatest Living American Ignored, discusses Norman Borlaug in a very positive way. Even so, the blog itself and to a greater extent some of the comments show a world view that Guevara and Marx would have found fairly familiar.

I'd like you to read the blog yourself. Here are excerpts from two of the comments. Emphasis is mine.

"No American wants to see fewer people in the world. That would be bad for business. You can't have that. The Pope< just criticized Europeans for not having enough babies. So I guess God wants more and more people even if they die of hunger or disease or heat protration [sic] or malaria. Whatever. Anyway that is why Borlaug didn't get any press coverage."

"Greatest living American? For fighting world hunger with biotech foods that don't re-seed so that poor populations around the world are dependent on Monsanto, the venerable corporation that brought us Agent Orange?"

The first comment has the virtue of recognizing that religious beliefs are important, although maintaining the traditional view that religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, is a malignant force.

Both seem to me to be moderately good examples of a world view that insists on forcing issues and events into one of two categories: the oppression of indigenous populations by intolerant, expansionistic, imperialistic, racist European powers; or the oppression of the working class by the plutocratic, capitalistic, property-owning class.

My view is that jihad conducted by some (certainly not all) devout Muslims is exactly what they say it is: an armed effort to wipe from the face of the earth something which they believe is offensive to their god.

I doubt that the conflict between the open, free society that people enjoy here in the States and the nascent world caliphate represented by one part of the Islamic world can be understood without assuming that the motives of the jihadists are religious.

Finally: something in the news about the father of the Green Revolution: Scientist Norman Borlaug Receives Congressional Gold Medal for Food Research.

Doctors, Terrorists, and the Proletariat: What's a Person to Think?

Doctors and medical professionals being mixed up in the recent set of London-Glasgow car bombings seems to be confusing, at least to some in the news media.

I can understand that. White-collar professionals don't fit into the oppressed-poor / unworthy rich mental model that seemed to work so well with previous street-level terrorists.

When someone wearing explosive underwear was somehow related to poor people, the mass-murder-suicide perpetrator looked a lot like a revolutionary in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

When a doctor pops out of a flaming jeep in an air terminal, things get complicated.

Doctors, as professionals, do fit into a Marxist scenario, either as Petit-Bourgeoisie or maybe part of the proletariat, since they do a kind of work.

On the other hand, since professionals, at least in the United Kingdom and the States, get paid for something that they presumably ought to do for free, they're guilty of Commodification ("the transformation of relationships, formerly untainted by commerce, into commercial relationships, relationships of exchange, of buying and selling"). That would seem to make them at least complicit in the oppression of the proletariat.

The suspects in the recent terrorist attacks seem to have Islam as a common thread. Religion has a place in Marxist thought, too, as "the sigh of the oppressed creature," so for people who didn't notice the end of the Cold War, the "struggle will continue between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie."

I'd say that it makes better sense to decide that what we have these days, after generations of the Cold War, is something new. Or, rather, something very old: religious fanatics who are convinced that it is their sacred duty to kill certain kinds of people.