Shrink to bonsai

Wendell W. Solomons

Though cultivated as a bonsai miniature, a little flowering tree must sprout blossoms. An azalea or frangipane tree when grown as a bonsai needs nutrition, water and sunshine but less than a tree of normal growth. To make a bonsai, a sapling tree has its little branches clipped. Yet, the greatest effect in shrinking is achieved below the surface by using a shallow pot or tray that will restrain the growth of roots.

Can people be shrunk like bonsai?

Plato (c. 428-c. 347 BC) served Greece as a political philosopher. In his work ‘The Republic’ he presented a theoretical development of a perfect city. He exclaims in the latter work, “Oh, for a beautiful myth that everyone would believe!”

Plato was aware that myths could affirm or shrink nations.

Myths are created massively in modernity. For instance, we are accustomed to commercial superlatives generated in advertising. Notably for this account, it was an ad copywriter out in Chicago, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was contracted by publishers to create stories to mythologise for children, through pictures of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle - born Lord Greystrokes - an Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the world.

Intensify

In the 19th century, psychologists, writers and statesmen came to intensify myth-generation for behaviour adjustment. The generating of myths was to accelerate rapidly in the 20th century with the World Wars. We know Nazi leaders, for instance, created a myth of Jews as the ‘Evil Other’. The purpose of this myth was to make a powerful nationalist, military machine by mustering German citizens around the Nazis.

One of the responses to the Nazi war machine on the British side was a mustering by PM Winston Churchill of his own countrymen. He declared:

“So let us brace ourselves and do our duty. So bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: ‘THIS was their finest hour.”

With its Commonwealth, Britain was the largest empire the world has seen. The Churchills were informed, dynastic courtiers but does the allusion to ‘a thousand years’ appear mythical to you?

During the war, PM Winston Churchill cruised out to sea claiming with aplomb for media - a fishing trip. In mid-Atlantic and not on British shores Churchill signed a charter on August 14, 1941 with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. PM Churchill agreed Britain would liberate colonies (Churchill did this to add US aid to his war chest). Later, to Britain as a nation, Churchill left the fulfilling of obligations under the Atlantic Charter with the grant of Independence in 1947 to India, after which followed Burma, Ceylon and other colonies. Churchill’s “thousand years” ended formally in less than a decade.

However, if not under a formal name, might the Churchill-reasoned “thousand years” persist?

At the end of World War II, a large number of disciplines became available to study and to adjust human behaviour.

These disciplines include anthropology, management, marketing and advertising, political science, educational psychology, general psychology and social psychology.

Could these disciplines be applied in all or in chosen countries?

We might observe that after Independence, a remarkable division of countries ensued. Previously, children were just born in the world.

In the post-Independence period they might be born in a “Third World.” This turned out to be a label for those nations that were specially cordoned off to be shrunk to bonsai proportion.

During the 20th century, the financial city of London was activating its affiliates in New York such as the Schiffs and Warburgs to buy holdings, capitalise and influence US policy. American and British country shareholdings alone would guarantee finance capital a voice in the World Bank and IMF. Perhaps the shareholdings might support a “thousand years” of profit for finance capital houses, successors to the pawn trade against which the Buddha spoke in the times of the Silk Route? We must not underestimate the Churchills for grasp of ancient and contemporary history. They were schooled, elite intimates rendered dynastic through Arabella Churchill, 1648-1730, the mistress of King James II of England and the mother of at least three of his children.

Peasant agriculture

Soon after Independence, the World Bank and the IMF were used for Trojan horse attacks on new statesmen of emergent countries. This was originally planned for Germany in 1945 by US official Henry Morgenthau Jr. After the war Morgenthau had proposed dividing Germany into a handful of de-industrialised, agrarian states. However, that had to be set aside in 1947 for the Marshall Plan to industrialise Germany because neighbouring Eastern Europe was seen taking off faster.

Elite statesmen used Morgenthau in Asia for a three-way split of India. These elites traditionally bank on a capacity to reign in countries by activating bigots, fundamentalists and war-mongers.

In the case of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) colonisation had lasted almost half a millennium and had repressed its school for statesmen; this in a nation where written chronicles reach 200 BC. Finance capital, through its fronts (a key architect of the World Bank and the IMF was the same Morgenthau) browbeat the nation’s new leaders into the original plan for Germany: Invest resources in extending agriculture. In 1952 experts of the World Bank wrote up this fable in hundreds of pages and so the report had to emerge in hard cover. Following this behaviour-adjustment attack, country Treasury’s reserves were invested in bulldozing virgin hardwood forests and making allotment of 5-acre plots of land. In these farmsteads, wooden ploughs of an era not too distant from the Silk Route were to be used.

So, a frontier of mind instilled in the 1950s by Western experts in many post-colonial countries was opt for agriculture instead of industry.

In Sri Lanka in May 1995, Mahathir Mohamed expressed an opinion in speaking on “Beyond Existing Frontiers,” a related theme. He explained that one acre of land would support one farmer but if the country made a choice of manufacturing industry, the same acre of land would support 500 workers.

Industry

Worldwide, the 20th century had seen farm mechanisation continue to release people from agriculture and Dr. Mahathir Mohamed noted that those countries that managed to develop successfully in modern Asia had relied on manufacturing industry to employ the working hands released by agriculture.

So 50 years of the experiment “Grow More Food” retained low productivity and therefore Sri Lanka remains a food grain importer. Though the tropical country has grasslands unaffected by winter, it also imports milk products from colder zones.

During the half century, people released from agriculture swelled the ranks of the unemployed and many veered towards liberationism. Why was this fable for investment in low productivity agriculture ingrained in poor countries? Wasn’t it finance capital using spin doctors to protect for a “thousand years” the Western industries that it owned through mammoth holding companies?

Time saw this finance capital tactic lay waste many a small country in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Yet, through industrial growth seen for instance in China and India, the agriculture myth is being rolled into history’s attic.

(To be continued)