I recently watched a heart-breaking yet inspiring documentary called The Devil’s Miner. Set largely in a nearly depleted silver mine in the mountain (or mountain range?) known as the Cerro Rico, in Bolivia, the documentary follows a fourteen year old boy named Basilio who works under brutal conditions in these mines with his ten year old little brother. They are the financial support for his mother and baby sister (his father died).
If I understood correctly, workers are paid by how much silver and minerals they can excavate. Labour laws, health laws and dignity laws are non-existent. Silicosis, a cementing of the lungs, is a brutal and ever-present killer, as are death by gas or mine collapse.
One of the extraordinary segments of the film takes place deep in the cave with Basilio and his little brother sitting in front of a life-sized deity, Tio—to whom the miners of all ages make offerings of cocoa leaves and alcohol and so on in theoretic return for protection and increased mineral production.
Chewing on a cheek full of cocoa leaves, Basilio tells his brother the story of this god—Tio. The story is unintentionally a reminder of how humans remain subjugated by their belief systems.
For me it was also an acute reminder of how belief systems serving other interests (propaganda) can be intentionally imposed, sometimes subtly, sometimes under the most brutal and impoverished conditions.
This story reminded me further of something South African anti-apartheid leader Stephen Biko once said before he was killed:
The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
In an interview with Noam Chomsky (who else?), David Barsamian mentioned Biko:
Let’s talk about what individuals can do in overcoming orthodoxies. Steve Biko, the South African activist who was murdered by the apartheid regime while he was in custody, once said, “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
Noam Chomsky replied:
He’s quite accurate. Most oppression succeeds because its legitimacy is internalized. That’s true of the most extreme cases. Take, say, slavery. It wasn’t easy to revolt if you were a slave, by any means. But if you look over the history of slavery, it was in some sense recognized as just the way things are. We’ll do the best we can under this regime.
Another example, also contemporary (it’s estimated that there are some 26 million slaves in the world), is women’s rights. There the oppression is extensively internalized and accepted as legitimate and proper. It’s still true today, but it’s been true throughout history.
Take working people. At one time in the U.S., in the mid-19th century, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which northern workers went to fight in the Civil War:
We’re against chattel slavery and wage slavery.
Free people do not rent themselves to others.
Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, to put it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others.
That’s an Enlightenment ideal. Incidentally, this was not coming from European radicalism. There were workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, a couple of miles from where we are [MIT]. You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time.
It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression.
Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills 150 years ago.
In the Devil’s Miner, Basilio lovingly explains to his little brother—who is scared to go in the mines without his older brother, understandably—the meaning of the Tio.
You should not be afraid of the Tio. You should believe in him. Make him offerings and then he won’t harm you. He will give you more minerals and protect you from accidents.
And then Basilio tells his little brother the story of the Tio as he understands it:
This Tio is from colonial times. When the Spaniards arrived, the Indios thought they were gods sent from Heaven. But it wasn’t like this. They were evil people who abused them.
There was also a mita…Do you know what a mita is?
[the little brother shakes his head]
[Mita] was forced labour, without leaving the mine for six months. With twenty hours of work and four hours of resting.
The Indios didn’t want to work anymore.
So they rose up against the Spanish Crown and said, “We don’t want to work anymore.�
The Spanish knew the Indios believed in all kinds of gods so they built a statue with horns and a tail and to the Indios they said, “If you don’t work, this God will kill you.�
[The Indios] were not able to say “Dios� (God). They said Tios…because in the Qechua alphabet the letter “D� does not exist…so they gave him the name Tio.
These are the words, of course, of a fourteen year old living under almost unbelievable conditions, but the gist of the story is echoed by his adult boss, who is also a miner:
Outside [of the mines] we believe in God [Christ] who is our only saviour.
But when we enter the mine, things change. We are entering the world of Satan. Under the earth we must believe in Satan…the Devil. We ask him for favours, sometimes on our knees…lighting candles for him…so our belief is split into two worlds. In every mine there is a Tio. Every single one. A mine can’t exist without its Tio. Small one, big ones, they always have one.
These highly articulated yet simultaneously confused conclusions (except that they unconsciously limit the likelihood of often hopeless, bloody uprisings against power) left me at first with a sad helplessness.
But then it hit me.
This mythology/propaganda is a startling, living example of imposed oppression held in check exactly as described by Chomsky when he says “[m]ost oppression succeeds because its legitimacy is internalized”; and again with Biko’s: “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
What does this say for all of us? Where am I oppressed—and does it matter? Who has created the freedoms we live under? Who controls the grid of energy and economy, church and state, taxes and shifting moralities that we live under?
What is the function—or perhaps more importantly the objective—of those creations?
And in the Third World, where worker rights are less advanced, what is the role of poverty? What is the effect of education and economic improvement on these sorts of conditions?
Obviously one assumes that education and poverty reduction is vital.
Of course it is.
But it seems to have its own inherent “problems” and “side-effects”, too, depending on the the context of its arising, as some imposers of propaganda/mythology surely know.
BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW (than the Devil you don’t know)
The research of Scott Atran, the anthropologist/psychologist mentioned in an earlier blog—and author of In Gods We Trust—has with his colleagues revealed some fascinating facts about the demographics of suicide bombers.
From an article in the Toledo Blade:
“Suicide terrorists often are labeled crazed cowards bent on senseless destruction who thrive in the midst of poverty and ignorance,’’ Dr. Atran says.
Such is President Bush’s public stance, Dr. Atran writes. He quotes the President saying: “We will challenge the poverty and hopelessness and lack of education and failed governments that too often allow conditions that terrorists can seize.’’
But Dr. Atran argues that, if anything, education and greater wealth could lead to more terrorism if governments ignore root causes.
A December, 2001, poll of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians 18 or older showed that those with 12 or more years of education were far more likely to support armed attacks than illiterates.
Only 40 percent of those with advanced degrees favored dialogue with Israel, compared to 53 percent of those with college degrees and 60 percent of those with nine or fewer years of schooling.
A study that compared Hezbollah militants who died in action to other Lebanese of the same age group found Hezbollah members were less likely to come from poor homes, and more likely to have a secondary school education.
BEWARE THE GOD OF SIMPLE SOLUTIONS
I have a thought that could be way off, but I will present it.
One could make the assumption that suicide bombers in the demographic of greater education and income seem to be responding to an awareness that, even with these positive improvements, they remain oppressed and their opportunities limited.
One could also easily and justifiably say—for those in the Occupied Territories for instance—that this frustration/humiliation/anger is projected against foreign powers who by their oppressive tactics and humiliation prevent mobility even with these monetary and educational gains.
Further, this more educated and affluent group is no longer internalizing their oppression as “just the way things are.” They are aware that it should not be this way.
So to counter their frustration they blow themselves up and at the same time blow up, horrendously, other citizens—contributing to the endless and cyclical disaster and violence that led them to this despair.
But is this the whole story?
I think combined with this discord resluting from increased education but no increase in freeedom, is the unawareness that they are also oppressed by their own worldview—and an inability to admit that, or change it, adds to the likelihood of this madness known as suicide bombing.
The internal oppression is a religious or ideological worldview whose construct often goes against the educated mind. This discord is fine and natural, as long as disagreements with it are free to be expressed. However, the instinct of greater knowledge—to expand—is suppressed.
Thus, where greater education and financial affluency should lead to a desire to shake off the chains of both oppressors—foreign domination and domestic absurdities of culture and religion—the would-be Suicide Bomber doubly projects their misery and hopelessness, but to the only oppressor visible: the foreign oppressor.
The domestic oppressor goes largely unnoticed and ignored. The discord and madness of that oppression becomes internalized. The result is, literally, explosive—for the Suicide Bomber, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons, sees no way other way out.
In trying to have some sort of comprehension of that degraded journey into suicide bombing, I ask: who can stop the devil they cannot see? And if that “devilâ€? can create, by divide-and-rule tactics, further unconscious delusion in the mind of the oppressed, all the better for the “devil’s” cause—be it a colonial, religious, ideological, empirical or economic cause.
REMEMBERING THE HISTORY OF YOUR FAVOURITE GOD
Colonialism by Christians, it could be remembered, was often preceded by Islamic colonialism (which of course, was often preceded by Christian colonialism/Roman colonialism etc.). Some in the Middle East, I am sure, fought against their Islamic oppressors, some ran from it, some accepted it—but who could avoid it?
Who today can honestly deny that Islam has an intense Empiralist strand? This would seem to go against large portions of its history.
Similarly in the West, where endless invasions of sovereign countries brutally speak for themselves.
I wonder if little Basilio’s story—the construct and how it is manifested—is at its core so different from the stories and reconstructions we hear on the news every night, or from our families and ancestors’ obligations, from the threats and promises of our churches?
How “childlike” are our minds, accepting what we are told, however it came to be told to us?
How much does our news, schooling and culture program us to think in a certain way—and for the advantage of certain groups? What role does education play when it does not prevent oppression by either foreign or domestic powers—be it economic, militaristic or even the imposition of belief systems that are unable to allow freedom of thought, be it mystic or scientific or political, or all of the above?
OF POVERTY AND GODS
As for Basilio’s fear based confusion, this dynamic, this complex, seems to be symbolic of what goes on all over the world, creating Tios everywhere: Communism, Capitalism, Iraq, Iran, Fundamentalism, secularism, paganism, Hell, the free market—even freedom and democracy—so-called. Granted, there are truths within these concepts, but the result (from wherever it comes) is to divide; to stop solidarity; to instill fear.
The miners have internalized not only the colonizer’s religion, Christianity—which clearly has not brought them social justice for myriad reasons—but the Indios bow to a god the colonizers created, knowingly.
Literally, the workers “internalize� the “legitimacy of their oppression� and make offerings to the Tio all week in the mine and then Christ on Sunday and after work.
Moreover, in Bolivia and all over the colonized world, those who have been colonized, savagely brutalized and decimated, with the blessing of a given religion, now turn to that religion for their salvation.
India (and possibly China, although their colonization was partial and limited) may be the two exceptions.
In short, if education increases, but advantage does not—and illogical belief systems internally remain—what will be the effects in these places?
One shudders at the potential of sick projection against all forms of oppression.
Speaking of multi god manifestations, how many disastrous variations are there on the suicide bombing theme—and how many have we already seen?
My guess is that even these mad clerics, east and west, who have power in their own culture are surely projecting their anger through a personal and religious oppression by their own beliefs that they can’t even see.
How can one tell if this is true? Perhaps, ironically, in these biblical words:
By their (violent, oppressive) fruits they shall be known.
The priest in Basilio’s town, who appears to be a lovely and compassionate young man, seems to me equally confused and oppressed. Hints of clarity give way to a confused summary:
On the first day of sacrifice, the miners first pray to God [Jesus] in church and then return to the mine to decorate the Devil…
They are doubling their reinforcement. They go back to the mine with double reinforcement.
When I look into their faces…
The priest here gets visually choked up….
I feel we have not yet done what we should have.
Indeed! Nor can the priest acknowledge the relentless oppression that the church and the colonizers have imposed all over the new world(s).
When I look at [these miners] I see Jesus dying again without hope and nobody at their side defending them. Nobody can grasp what they are going through. The lives they have lived.
I feel pronouncements of Christian Liberation Theology coming, or something of that essence, about to arise saying “We must fight the power, the illegitimacy of oppression, the injustice of poverty!�
Instead the priest continues with, at best, limited truth:
What has to change is [their believing] in a God who they fear. Because if not, their God will always be the Tio and not Jesus. In the end they believe in the Tio, but their lives are destroyed.
The poor priest seems to neither recognize nor apologize that this Tio is simply another manifestation of the the same fallen Christian angel—the Devil—that has been imposed on the poor and the mis-treated for two millenium, not to mention on free, scientific thought.
In the priest’s analysis, poverty and degradation remain ignored; free to continue.
Is this a surprise?
I would like to suggest: no. Because when “oppression is legitimized� or “internalized,� it seems the thieves that escape scrutiny in the debate are so often the henchmen of the oppressor, of power: poverty, social injustice, degradation, misogyny, hypocrisy and humiliation, not to mention early death.
The confused priest believes, without a glimpse of irony, that the Indios must come to believe without confusion in the religion that significantly contributed to their colonization in the first place.
Talk about a discord.
And yet, ironically, colonized countries all over the world do believe in Jesus. I have read that Rwanda at the time of the 1994 genocide was the highest per-capita Christian country in sub-Saharan Africa.
Putting aside for a moment after-life salvation, on what legitimate grounds or evidence is devotion to Jesus or Allah or any of our other gods the earthly answer to injustice?
Long live freedom of thought, of hope, of love. Down with oppression, internalized or otherwise.
May the spirit of Steven Biko live on. May the resilience of little Basilio live on. May whatever part of religion that speaks out against social injustice, and will fight for justice, live on. May I learn to love more.
According to the film:
The Bolivian silver mines of the Cerro Rico mountain have been exploited for over 450 years.
It is estimated that over eight million people have died in the mines.
Today over 5000 Indios work in miner-owned cooperatives, in search of any remaining minerals within Cerro Rico.
It is known as “The Mountain That Eats Men.�
There are currently about 800 children working in the tunnels of Cerro Rico.
Chomsky once wrote:
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
That includes political power, ownership and management, relations among men and women, parents and children, our control over the fate of future generations (the basic moral imperative behind the environmental movement, in my view), and much else.
Naturally this means a challenge to the huge institutions of coercion and control: the state, the unaccountable private tyrannies that control most of the domestic and international economy, and so on.
What does this mean for me and you?
