I transcribed the following excerpt from Silvia Federici's "Caliban and the Witch" in response to a news item on Truthaction about an 8-year-old boy who killed his father. Apparently the boy vowed to do him in after his "thousandth beating".
"Caliban and the Witch" explores the relationship between the enclosures in Europe (the original "privatization" movement), the philosophy of mechanization (or a "de-spiritualized" universe), early capitalism ("primitive accumulation") and the "Witch hunts" .
Federici argues that attacking women en masse for "Satanism" was less about superstition as it was about breaking up the commons (similarly, torture of "communists" and "terrorists" is less about acquiring information than imposing Neoliberal policy). As evidence, she points out that in areas where enclosures did not take place there were virtually no witch hunts. In order for mass privatization to occur, women had to be vilified and disempowered. She also draws from the thesis of “disenchantmentâ€, suggesting that the witch hunt and the commodification of the body (and the body’s labor) was not the last salvo of the superstitious middle ages but rather (paradoxically) a defining feature in the birth of the “rational†Enlightenment and its economic base -- capitalism.
What does this have to do with children and murder?
The process described above also occurred in the "New World".
Indian Reservations suffer from an inordinately high degree of domestic abuse -- including the abuse of children. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently issued an official "apology" for Indian residential schools. These schools popped up everywhere where indigenous cultures clashed with that of the Europeans. The idea was to "re-educate" the "savages" in the ways of private property, capitalist work discipline and Christ.
The tendency in the United States -- and increasingly the rest of the world -- is to try children as adults when they ape society at large and commit violent crimes. This makes a certain amount of sense considering the Western ethos of "rugged individualism" and "personal [NOT SOCIAL] responsibility". Yet even the hardiest of Ayn Randians must think twice about the practice. After all, children are NOT adults. They are children.
The Indian residential schools were resurrected with the introduction of mandatory public "education" for the children of white settlers in the Americas. You may be surprised to learn that these measures were met with extreme hostility. Riots occurred in several American cities. People understood at the time that the "re-education" of their children was not about a better society but social control.
To put these issues in context, here is the aforementioned passage from Federici's book about the introduction of corporal punishment in one Native Canadian society.
Violence begets violence.
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"The intervention of the French Jesuits in the disciplining and training of the Montagnais-Naskapi, in mid-17th century Canada, provides a revealing example…
As often happened when Europeans came in contact with Native American populations, the French were impressed by Montagnais-Naskapi generosity, their sense of cooperation and indifference to status, but they were scandalized by their “lack of morals;†they saw that the Naskapi had no conception of private property, of authority, of male superiority, and they even refused to punish their children (Leaock 1981). The Jesuits decided to change all that, setting out to teach the Indians the basic elements of civilization, convinced that this was necessary to turn them into reliable trade partners. In this spirit, they first taught them that “man is the master,†that “in France women do not rule their husbands,†and that courting at night, divorce at either partner’s desire, and sexual freedom for both spouses, before or after marriage, had to be forbidden. Here is a telling exchange Le Jeuene had, on this score, with a Naskapi man:
“I told him it was not honorable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou has no sense. You French people love only your children; but we love all the children of our tribe.’ I began to laugh seeing that he philosophized in horse and mule fashion’.
Backed by the Governor of new France, the Jesuits succeeded in convincing the Naskapi to provide themselves with some chiefs, and bring “their†women to order. Typically, one weapon they used was to insinuate that women who were too independent and did not obey their husbands were creatures of the devil. When, angered by the men’s attempts to subdue them, the Naskapi women ran away, the Jesuits persuaded the men to chase after their spouses and threaten them with imprisonment:
“Such acts of justice†– Le Jeune proudly commented on one particular case – “cause no surprise in France, because it is usual there to proceed in that manner. But among these people…where everyone considers himself from birth as free as the wild animals that roam in their great forests….it is a marvel, or rather a miracle, to see a peremptory command obeyed, or any act of severity of justice performedâ€
The Jesuits’ greatest victory…was persuading the Naskapi to beat their children, believing that the “savages’†excessive fondness for their offspring was the major obstacle to their Christianization. Le Jeuen’s diary records the first instance in which a girl was publicly beaten, while one of her relatives gave a chilling lecture to the bystanders on the historic significance of the event: This is the first punishment by beating we inflict on anyone of our Nationâ€.
The Montagnais-Naskapi men owed their training in male supremacy to the fact that the French wanted to instill in them the ‘instinct†for private property, to induce them to become reliable partners in the fur trade."