Worlds of Pharmakopeia VI: Coffee and the Café, Stolen from Africa

Modern European civilization has cursed all of humanity. This curse now also includes all of the multiple autochthonous nations suffering inside of the European continent.

We all live as mental slaves to the petty hatreds, ego manias, sufferings and ignorance that first raped that same continent some two thousand years ago. Even worse is that we cannot turn back the historical clock: Earth’s humanity is moving on a clear and vile path to violent suicide.

Dinosaurs had their millions of years of glory, and soon the darkened farewell of time will arrive for us too. The putrid excrement and historical brutality surrounding the plant-drug of Coffea Arabica, or Coffee, proves such statements.

In Sao Paolo, Brazil, the regular people told tales about the murders that took place in late 1700s. Even with the expulsion of the Jesuits, their protected Guarani native nation, the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais, and the complete extermination of the coastal Tupamori native nation, the slave-plantation system in Portuguese colonial Brazil had recently transformed into a massive African Death Camp.

In northern Brazil, Bahia and Marañao, there weren’t any more Tupamori and Guarani native slaves to kidnap and work to death. Only pretos, or black victims, died en masse on the plantations, called Fazendas, deep in the red-hot blood pools of African flesh, mixed with dirty sea salt.

Some of the slave owners-traders-mass murderers dumped their weakened, useless slaves into the South Atlantic for shark feed. Other masters simply sardine packaged their slaves, in order to send them to the more sadistic fazendas in the south of the colony where the slave traffickers lived, called Paulistas. Sao Paolo is a now a Latin American megalopolis, but at one time, with Cartagena, Colombia, it was one of the slave trafficking centers of colonial Latin America.

Most of the slave fazendas produced sugar and manioc. But a new crop entered the evil world of African slavery in the Americas: coffee, or cafe. This plantation slave work was almost as brutal as sugar cane cutting and processing. The torturous labor required heavy hand work and bending of the body of the African in order to grab enough of the ripened red beans. The small factories later dried, heated and ground the beans down to a darkened hue resembling excrement and the African skin color. These small factories abused their African slave labor horribly. In southern colonial Brazil, the average lifespan working on a coffee slave plantation was around seven years.

There was one Portuguese white, or branco slave owner, arrayed in the pony tail, vest coat with tails, and knee breeches of late Eighteenth-century look, who used a peculiar method in maintaining control over his slaves. Some slaves escaped from the death-work infernos and became quilombos, or escaped slaves. This slave owner wanted complete labor control over his kidnapped African victims and the avoidance of any and all escapes.

He would usually purchase a sickly group of famished Africans recently off the slave ships. He then forced his slaves into a horizontal line on his plantation. None of them understood Portuguese, so he picked out the weakest of the bunch, often a young adult, skinny, almost dying African, and the owner then beat the kidnapped African to death, with the weapons of his choice, in front of the entire group. The shock of the murder would get the job done. This human monster never did any prison time for his mass murders. Most of this slave-owning class-criminals lived as respected white men within the black coffee-sugar white infernos of colonial Brazil.

Coffee production helped stabilize and augment the African slave plantation system in the Americas. Colonial Brazil was not the only place where such killing centers existed. During the late 1700s, the French also increased their African slave operations in Saint Domingue, (Haiti), Martinique and Guadeloupe, through the black gold of coffee. Sugar was the main export crop, but Coffee followed right behind it.

The British began coffee production in its colony of Ceylon, but soon switched to tea leaves. The Dutch also began coffee production on its colonial Malay islands of Java and Sumatra, (Indonesia). Unto this very day, Coffea Arabica maintains its associations with the most brutal conditions of capitalism: slavery, child labor, putting workers in debt to their owners, and murdering the poor through overwork. The irony regarding the massive kidnapping rings, ruthless slavery, and cruel murder system within colonial coffee, was that the coffee bean became another hostage from Africa.

Euro-Colonial thieves, kidnappers, mass murderers, and slave masters, with other elite arch criminals, have transformed the Coffee bean into the worldwide soft drug commodity of today.

The African elixir of coffee is the ultimate soft drug-stimulant with its high possession of caffeine. It doesn’t have any of the depressant effects of alcohol, nor does it contain the quick ego spikes of coca leaf. Because of its stimulant magic, coffee is now the prerequisite for billions of humans during their dreaded morning rituals, pathetic work schemes, and after meal snacks.

It has become the shared social sacrament for modern life’s rituals: friendly conversations, dating games, and hobby group meet ups. Coffee has even transcended into the drug pre-requisite for modern life, and the synthetic struggle against drowsiness in our modern times. The sleep of modern humanity has never been the same.

Coffee had its first cultivation in the highlands of Ethiopia, in the region of Kaffa. Legend has it that an Ethiopian farmer named Kaldi was the first human to successfully grow it. After the Islamic world culture took possession of most of Arabia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, North Africa and Iberia, Islamic merchants discovered the wondrous concoctions of this bean. They crushed the beans into a fine powder, and through boiling the grounds with water, created a liquid paradise.

The Koran, the Muslim holy scriptures, condemned the abuse of alcohol intoxicants, while this drug did not make people stupid, aggressive, nor act foolish. In fact, Coffee transformed its users into a more alert, intelligent and chatty group. Islam had found the sacred wine of spiritual elixir. Its center of trade was in Mocha, Yemen, where a great urban civilization existed, featuring the world’s first tall buildings and where almost every conceivable spice from Asia to Africa had its display vats in the merchants’ stalls.

Sufi mystics began to use coffee wine both during their orations of the sacred Koran and their worship ceremonies of dance, song, psalms and prayers. Coffee even joined with the magical herb of Hashish residues to become the drugs of choice across Islamic civilization, from the far east representing the Great Muslim Emirates of India to the far west, Al-Andalus in Modern Spain. Like farmers’ milk and beehive honey, Coffea Arabica mixed in good company with the toke of Cannabis Sativa.

When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, they became the Third Rome in competition with the Russian Czarist Empire and the Papal States in Italy. Under this great Turkish Islamic Civilization, the first ‘cafes’ opened. The cafe became an integral social space in a Muslim man’s life. After midday prayers at the mosque, Muslim men could gather at the cafe and enjoy fine, elevating conversation over some delicious Turkish coffee.

As Christendom, representing the Europeans, began to fight wars against Muslim Turkish Empire, called the Sultanate of the Sublime Port, they also discovered the wonders of the Coffee Drug. First, the Venetian Sea-Slave Empire, or La Serenissima, began to trade in the roasted black beans. Coffee became synonymous with wealth and upper class parasites, while having a ‘bitter, but good taste.’ The rest of Europe had to grab a piece of the blackened pie.

Europeans, always experts in the art of stealing and appropriating non-European cultures, and then proclaiming themselves the originators, tried to monopolize the cultivation and trade of coffee. We return to the evil system of African slavery in Brazil.

During the middle of the seventeenth-century, the 1600s, the first coffeehouses and cafes opened across Europe. Gentlemen across Europe visited the cafes, imbibed the brews, and discussed art, street philosophy – and politics. Women and royal authorities also became nervous about these contentious male spaces.

In Paris, the main cafe was right next to the Comédie Français. Did the royal emperor of France, Louis XIV, want French gentilehommes discussing politics and religion after seeing a work of Molière? The royal authorities in London closed down many of the coffeehouses, due to ‘issues of State.’

By the eighteenth-century, the 1700s, the British slavers and colonial murderers began to cultivate the beans on their sadistic slave plantations in Jamaica, as both the French did in Haiti and the Portuguese had earlier done in Brazil. The Spanish followed with their own coffee plantations stretching from the expropriated Mayan lands of Guatemala and Honduras, to the fields around Veracruz, Mexico and Cartagena, Colombia. They later planted coffee around the massive Sugar-African slave estates of Cuba. The Dutch joined the Coffee, Sugar, Slave triumvirate, which created extensive plantations in their American-Caribbean colonies of Bresil-Aruba-Curaçao-Suriname.

With Industrial Capitalism in full motion around Europe and North America, during the middle of the nineteenth-century, the 1800s, Coffee took the lead as the beverage of choice for factory laborers. Coffee also goes well with another herb drug, Nicotiana Tabacum, or Tobacco. The modern work ritual-habit had birthed. Better to have coffee-tobacco addicts than drunks.

By this historical epoch, the European corporate entities had overtaken the Arabs, Africans, Asians and Muslims as the premier sellers of the international brew. Coffee was a lot cheaper to consume. The owners loved it too: more work with cheaper wages and labor costs.

And so it continues to this very day, with special thanks to the coffee corporate chain of Starbucks, the price of Coffee has increased across the globe. Still, coffee consumption remains cheaper than spending money in local alcoholic dens with rude bartenders, (most of whom really aren’t trained bartenders anyway), and crazed, degraded customers who can’t handle their drinking. Coffee doesn’t turn you into a pathetic fool, although it does encourage excessive bowel movements, and it can make one ‘a little edgy.’

Unlike the European varieties, local cafes in the States, meaning coffee-house cafes, now often attract a motley clientage. The list includes bored-rebellious teenagers, pathetic hipsters, lonely, older male spinsters, unsuccessful folk guitarists, social cross sections of unemployable men, ex-drunks and junkies on their 12 step breaks, pseudo-Anarchist ranters, and other, assorted bizarre characters. As an unemployed PhD weirdo in the humanities, I unfortunately include myself in this group.

The article of this essay drinks at least three to four cups of coffee per day. I know some Anarchists that drink even more cups of coffee as a daily custom.

Coffee is a soft, wonder drug. It is the perfect stimulant for both the draining life of the wage slave and for encouraging the dying art of conversation. Coffee tastes great after a delicious home-made meal, while it often encourages a quick run to the toilet – and if one feels a need for an emergency work break.

European civilization has destroyed another sacred plant and bean, all in its desire to control the commodity under global monopoly capitalism. European colonials had first stolen and murdered millions of humans, animals and plants across the Western Hemisphere, or the Americas, as they named it.

They soon expropriated Tobacco, Chocolate and Coca Leaf. They have done the same across Asia, appropriating Tea, Sugar and Cannabis, and now comes Africa, the plundering of Coffee, Ivory, Gold, Diamonds, Scarce Metals, and most ominously – millions of kidnapped and murdered Africans, bought, sold, worked, murdered en masse.

European colonialism has thus murdered the African in order to process their own native African plant, while millions of native Africans have died horrendously across the foreign soils of the Americas. This peculiar genocide has yet to receive its Holocaust Museum.

Only the sickman of human civilization could have invented such nefarious history.

Worlds of Pharmakopeia V: Euro-Colonial Murder of the Coca Leaf

For most of human civilization, the earth’s natural bounty of plants, shrubs and trees have helped lift the spirits of the sad, hungry and sick. But in our modern world, infected with the double epidemics of European Judeo-Christianity and Savage Capitalism, there have been other plants who have attached themselves to some bizarre love-hate representations. Those plants have always maintained their beauty and potency; rather, the sickness resides inside of the Euro-Colonial mindset, which has manipulated and twisted the plant images.

Some unfortunate plants from the exotic Asia-Orient have received some strident Euro-controls throughout recent history, such as Cannabis Sativa, (THC-Hemp), Papaver Somniferum, (Opiates), Camellia Sinensis, (Tea), and Saccharum Officinarum, (Sugar Cane).

In the Americas, originally populated with savage ‘Indians,’ and later exterminated en masse through European Savage Colonialism, Euro-criminals have strenuously manipulated two particular plant varieties: Nicotiana Tabacum, (Nicotine), and Erythroxylum Coca, (Coca leaves-Cocaine).

What decade was it? On the Inca Tawantinsuyu Four Regions Cosmology or the Spanish Gregorian Christian Calendar? For us historians it was the decade of the 1630s – a cold and nasty one – and especially for the mitas. This mita group were all young men from the scattered regions of the Andes. These were peasant stock, farmer people, but they lost the war against the Spanish European invaders, back around the 1570s, so they had to supply a tributo, or tribute-tax. to the Spanish colonial state – and they had to give away their lives too.

There they stood on that cold and wet day in the early morning of summer; tired, forlorn and silent on a brownish-green patched, rocky ledge that overlooked the pit of evil, a city called Potosi, very high up in the clouds of the mountains. The gods looked down on the pathetic worker slaves that willingly ventured into the mountainous pit. Spanish royal fortunes totally relied on this one mine pit – filled with the silver lode.

The Kings of Spain needed the silver mint for their reales, or silver coinage, in order to finance the Habsburg wars across seventeenth-century Europe. The worker slaves knew that most of them would die inside of the mine monster.

Over the years, fewer native slave laborers showed up for the mita, and so the Spanish imported, kidnapped ‘royal slaves’ from Africa to do the nasty work. All of the miners, slave and non-slave, could grab a little silver for themselves, called a partida, but who could survive inside the belly of the tortured mountain? The mountain had to vomit frequently, and it often spewed the human meat of mitayo, or mita worker, African slave and the contracted miners of all ethnicities that risked it all for some pieces of silver.

The Spanish colonial authorities began to worry about fifty years previously. How do we get the native mitayos to work for their own bad deaths inside of the belly of the Potosi Monster? Catholicism couldn’t do it – but a local variety of plant might do the job.

The Catholic priests hated this plant, but a measly 30 pieces of silver would always trump Faith under the human condition. The Spanish noticed that the native Andean farmers functioned on the code of reciprocity. When a visitor entered a rural home, he or she often brought the infamous coca leaves as gifts. The Spanish often did the same when invited into another person’s house – except the Spanish brought wine.

This coca leaf was truly a gift from the Gods. Natives also used the coca leaves during the religious festivals of the Incan Empire. What was it about this coca leaf that the local natives prized so much?

Coca Leaf when chewed or used as a tea infusion immediately imparted a swift zest of energy. The plant relieved hunger, and helped fight against minor physical and mental pains. Locals felt better after chewing on the leaves and it even aided in sexual relations when working as an aphrodisiac.

Coca also alleviated altitude sickness, depression, loose bowels, nausea, and improved one’s circulation. Native farmers often felt the second wind of work coming on after enjoying the coca tea.

The Spanish colonial authorities had realized that coca worked better than the imported sugar cane plant from Asia, and it functioned even better than the American mate plant found in Paraguay, also taken as a tea. Coca had transformed into the ultimate stimulant drug.

The King of Spain encouraged the growth of the coca plant. Coca plantations produced high volumes of those small green leaves. In order to entice the mitas to kill themselves for the Spanish King, the Spanish guards freely gave copious amounts of coca leaves to the worker slaves who entered the dark, cold, humid mines of Potosi. Even at the point of death through exhaustion, the mitayos kept chewing on the coca. The Spanish even discovered that with the higher altitude of cultivation, the more concentration of coca in the leaf. The Spanish had found a winner. And still to this day, the greatest number of European Cocaine users have been the Spanish.

The added chemicals of sulfuric acid and hydrochloride solution created the addictive solution, called Cocaine. The Coca plant has become the most powerful stimulant drug in the modern world, while no other global-cultivated plant even comes close to it, such as Sugar Cane, Chocolate beans, Nicotine leaves, Tea leaves or Coffee beans.

This plant has given new life to the hurting, confused and tired, and yet European colonialism transferred the coca plant into the cocaine concoction, all in order to transform themselves into Nietzschean super humans. At least their minds told them so.

High powered financial advisers, corporate attorneys, expensive doctors, intelligence operatives, rock musicians-music producers, Hollywood Industry-Media types and other ego maniacs have embraced this drug, while the poorer elements, or capitalist society’s losers, smoke the cheaper, real diluted stuff, called Crack, and who often end up homeless, pathetic, or slowly die in a prison cell.

This Euro-colonial monstrosity took off in the late nineteenth-century. From the 1850s to the 1900s, European colonial powers transferred the cultivation of this American plant across the globe, and especially in Africa and Asia. The Dutch colonials established massive plantations of coca leaf and coffee beans on the island of Java. The British established imperial plantations of coca and tea leaves on the island of Ceylon. German Pharmaceutical Companies, such as Merck, established the first marketing of Cocaine.. Even the Japanese colonial empire entered the coca game with coca plantations on the island of Formosa-Taiwan.

An Austrian chemist by the name of Neumann first used the term of Kokain with his mixtures of hydrochloric acid. In the 1870s, a Corsican businessman marketed the first Cocaine drink, a wine called Vin Mariani. Sigmund Freud, the great psychobabble intellectual, also lauded the drug as a great help for ‘psychologically damaged’ patients.

In the 1880s, the American Coca Cola Company, marketed a non-alcoholic beverage that mixed Cocaine, caffeine and sugar syrup, and today, fructose corn syrup. If a regular American citizen tries to re-enter the US with coca leaves, he or she will probably spend the rest of their lives in prison. But this is not true with the corporate conglomerate of Coca Cola, which still maintains its corporate privileges in importing coca leaves into the United States. The US pharmaceutical Parke-Davis also has corporate rights in using coca leaves.

Around 1900, the Eugenics movement grew exponentially, and so did the Anti-Drug US empire. The concern of course centered around lower class fiend use, especially Black Jazz musicians and Latino degenerates coming up from Latin America. The Amerikan Empire introduced the Harrison Act of 1915 that prohibited Opium-Heroin and Cocaine use. Due to this prohibition in the 1920s, a US pharmaceutical company introduced the synthetic substitute of Cocaine, called Novocaine.

After WW II, the Amerikan Empire moved into a greater offensive against the Coca Leaf, including the Nicotine Leaf, the Cannabis Leaf and the Poppy plant. The Empire even forced the United Nations to move against Coca in 1960s.

Yet the same Amerikan Empire forged a strange alliance during the 1980s. The US government wanted to desperately overthrow the Sandinista Leftist government in Nicaragua. The CIA set up the Contra terrorist network that murdered supposed Sandinista supporters in the countryside, but even this tactic did not work so well.

Congress cut off the funding, so the Reagan administration used the Iran-Contra network, to sell arms to a supposed enemy, Iran, in order to fund the Contra terrorists. Meanwhile, the US favored the other side of the Iran-Iraq War, representing Saddam Hussein. But there was another part of the evil plan. the Contra leaders also wanted some profits, so they began to deal in drugs, like the US supported Kuomintang terrorists during the 1950s, and the US supported, northern tribal terrorists in Indochina during the 1970s.

The Contra-narco drug lords produced a cheap substitute in place of the expensive Cocaine, called Crack. The user could smoke the stuff easily and the high was shorter than the Coke high, so the user had to use more of the stuff in order to feel the same ego high of ‘blow,’ or snorting Cocaine powder. By the late 1980s, the Crack explosion hit the streets. Young gangsta tough guys now tried to sell the magic smoke.

Those working class dealers failed to understand the depravity of the US government or the Amerikan Empire. Also at the end of the 1980s, Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union power base. The Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War was officially over.

One of the players in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal, the vice-president, Bush I, was running for president. The Amerikan Empire needed another enemy to exterminate after the Cold War. The generals and spies in the US Military-Spy-Industrial Complex were getting nervous. The vice president candidate thereby used the Drug War for the next round of destruction.

The domestic prison population grew exponentially, and especially among African-Americans and Latinos. Even tiny amounts of Crack could give some victim a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence in prison! This same sociopath would soon turn on their man in Iraq, Saddam, and start even another genocidal war in order to end, ‘the Vietnam Syndrome.’ His son, Bush II, would really finish the job in that region of the world.

The next president continued the repression of the Drug War against American citizens, and with even greater sanctions against Welfare recipients. African-American neighborhoods got hit brutally with this new US government financed war. With hardcore gentrification increasing in the 1990s, old Black neighborhoods began to rot from the inside out, and the American system shoved the displaced African-Americans between the Supermax prisons and the poorer suburbs. The luckier ones joined the US military.

This same president then instituted Plan Colombia, which used the same paramilitary tactics during the previous Contra War, but this time against the Leftists guerrillas in Colombia. The Amerikan Empire murdered over 30,000 Nicaraguans during its Contra War of the 1980s, but lately, the Amerikan Empire has murdered over 250,000 Colombians using the Colombian state and its paramilitary henchmen.

Another part of Plan Colombia forces the Colombian government to spray chemicals against coca plant fields inside the country. Strangely, cocaine production is still a very profitable business. The real agricultural murder has actually targeted native, Afro-Colombian and other Colombian farmers. Colombia now has the largest internal refugee population in the Americas. The Colombian-narco oligarchy wants their lands – for greater coca production – with the continued help of the sociopaths that run the Amerikan Empire.

Here we have the strange legacy of the coca leaf. At one time, it was the sacred herb for chewing, tea ceremonies, religious rites and community relations in the Andean world. Thanks to European colonialism and mass murder however, the sacred herb became the egotist drug of choice for the European invaders and manipulators.

The US government now uses the coca leaf as a decoy for its murderous foreign policy objectives. Meanwhile, millions of young people of color putrefy inside the Amerikan Imperial Prison-Gulag. They have lost their lives and their dignity due to dabbling with the powdered leaf. And finally, a protective class of coca users, mostly music and media artists, while sharing white skin privilege with money to burn, still enjoy the fine sniffs of concocting, cocaine-infused ego magic.

Only Euro-Colonial, Imperial Evil could do so much damage to a nifty little plant found in the Andean mountains.

 

Worlds of Pharmakopeia IV: Tobacco, Euro-Colonialism Murders another Native Plant

 

Only in our evil, modern world do native flora varieties arouse such enduring hatreds.

There still exist the sick hatreds against cannabis sativa, psilocybe semilanceata, erythroxylum coca, and there is one plant that receives the coveted prize in pure hate, nicotiana tabacum.

What is so strange about this hatred is that this same plant was integrally important for European colonialism and industrial capitalism in world history. European and Euro-American civilizations could not have progressed as they did without the native american gift of tobacco plantations, working slave labor to death, and then, the tobacco processing, factory work, building even larger ships, international marketing and sophisticated advertising.

How did such an enjoyable American plant associated with native community peace, and smoked through pastes, leaves, hand-made pipes and even chewed, transform into such a European commodity fetish under global capitalism?

Nicotiana tabacum was once a naturally growing, medicinal and spiritual plant for America’s native nations. European colonial invaders, investors, and murderers transformed the plant into an export drug of commodity for elite consumption under the inexhaustible profit-making schemes of capitalism.

Columbus and his invading men did not just murder, imprison and sell native slaves on the island of Cuba during the 1490s. They also spotted some, ‘naked’ Carib natives smoking a herb placed in some leaves. The scent was quite intoxicating and the natives seemed to enjoy the community based smoke. They did not inhale, yet the effect of the plant was calming after they had eaten some fresh, delicious food, and the herb even had a sensual effect on the smokers. The European imperial-colonial invaders found another gift.

They stole the native plants from the Caribbean islands and transported them to Europe. The Europeans took a peculiar liking to them. In the 1500s, the Portuguese colonial invaders in the Americas, called Bresil, began to cultivate the native crop. It seemed to grow well in sub-tropical and tropical climates. When introduced into European aristocratic, social-parasite gardens inside of the great landed estates, tobacco plants sprouted quite well. Tobacco could also grow in mild, temperate, oceanic climates. The European elites were on to something.

During the seventeenth-century, some monarchs, political thugs and tyrants began to hate the plant. King James Stuart of England, Sultan Ammurath IV of Ottoman Turkey, and Czar Mikhail Romanov of Russia, represented some of the anti-tobacco elite crowd, while Pope Urban VIII actually had a papal bull written against the plant in the 1640s.

Yet the European colonial empires of Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal had succumbed to the gods of capital. Each empire set up their own royal monopolies for the plant. The annoying question was where to grab the labor in order to work long hours in the hot sun: picking, drying, curing and transporting the leaves. The Europeans had made themselves the self-proclaimed owners of nicotine tabacum, so at first, they used local penal labor to work them to death in order to enrich the tobacco lords or planters. Where could one find a continual supply of slave labor?

An even greater economic windfall emerged through such an American cultivation – the theft of human chattel, or the kidnapping, murder, transporting and working to death of African slaves.

The Portuguese had first established their monopoly of the Blackened Brown Gold during the late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century, (about 1560-1660). Due to the importance of such American export plantation crops, such as tobacco, the English, Dutch, (the Netherlands), and the French established their own ‘African’ slave monopolies. A plant associated with community peace and enjoyment, took on the ominous tones of legal crime, kidnapping, imprisonment, mass murder, genocide and working people to death. Tobacco actually helped birth mercantile capitalism.

Mercantile Capitalism implied royal European controls of an export commodity, such as tobacco, sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, salt and kidnapped African slaves, while it established permanent credit to slave plantation owners in order for them to purchase a continual supply of Africans and other penal slaves, (the European looking, or white ones). The American plantation-slave owners and European tobacco traders-ship investors made their profits through inflated price sales in the home or European metropolitan markets.

Meanwhile, European navies and missionaries tried to open greater markets for the American products in the Asian continents. Slowly, nicotine snuff and tobacco smoking had spread into the Islamic world culture, then Persia-Iran, the Indian sub-continent, Central Asia and ultimately into the Far East, China and even Japan.

In the eighteenth-century, the European tobacco manufacturers developed the smaller ‘cigarette’ varieties, and for those that preferred to chew, snuff boxes. All of this cigarette finery was for elite European consumption.

Elaborate, silver inlaid snuff boxes entered the world of fashion conscious, French aristocratic-parasite bums. In Britain, gentlemen established new cultural activities, fashions and spaces besides fencing, hunting, dances, card games, tea and reading – the smoking parlor with the smoking jacket.

A good tobacco smoke was always perfect after a good meal, with some intoxicating liquor or with some fine coffee. European grifters-Latin lovers, such as the Venetian, Giacomo Casanova, also took up the habit, and so tobacco grabbed some important cultural associations within European culture: sensuality, refinement, power and a coolness under pressure.

Most importantly, King Tobacco had changed the colonial-metropolitan relationships. The Scottish Tobacco Lords transformed the city of Glasgow into the premier tobacco import-export port. These same ‘lords’ would build their mini castles along Jamaica and Virginia Streets.

Those same streets had the infamous names of the most infernal, African slave killing centers in world history.

Virginia, once a colonial outpost of disease and hardship, had become the British Empire’s premier, tobacco plantation colony on the Tidewater during the 1700s. Is it any wonder that most of America’s revolutionary founders came from this proud plantation region made rich through the marvelous drug of tobacco?

During the same eighteenth-century, the Spanish colonial authorities had established the first urban factory for cigar-cigarette paper rolling and export packaging in Mexico City. Earlier, the Spanish had established the city of Seville as the premier processing center for cigars. For over a century in colonial Spanish America, and well before Metropolitan Europe, both men and women had been openly smoking tobacco cigarettes on the public streets. American fashion and prominence had come to Europe – mainly through the marvelous and medicinal herb of nicotiana tabacum.

Throughout the nineteenth-century, the 1800s, tobacco manufacturers had developed better technology in curing and rolling for three particular products: cigars, cigarettes, (blond and black versions), and chewable snuff.

The first tobacco companies consolidated themselves, while they competed with each other for the monopoly share of the smokers and chewers’ markets. This modern tobacco industry also encouraged the adulteration of tobacco through chemical engineering in order to hold their monopolies. Tobacco products even had molasses, rum, opium or honey mixed into the final product.

Tobacco eventually became part of modern, European and Euro-American cultural life. Royalty, lazy aristos, middle class-respectable clerks, and working class dock workers took up the smoking habit. The problem was that many of the men inhaled the nicotine fumes. Certain political-economic elites, Women Christian Temperance clubs and health workers noticed the persistent coughs of regular smokers. The modern anti-smoking movement had begun.

Meanwhile, tobacco shops and kiosks became one of the standard sights found on most city streets around the world, and where they also featured other items for sale, such as newspapers, books, shaving kits, pipes, rolling papers, pen knives, board games and playing cards.

In the twentieth-century, the 1900s, the tobacco industry transformed the world of advertising and mass marketing. A few tobacco monopolies had controlled the sale of ‘cigarette packs” and they made fortunes on the drug.

Smoking found associations with soldiers during World War I and for most wars afterwards. In the 1920s, cigarette companies targeted their advertising to the ‘new woman,’ thanks to the propaganda genius of the Austrian-American, Edward Bernays. Hollywood’s golden age featured most of their stars regularly smoking the sacred plant. Can anyone forget the famous pictures of Humphrey Bogart and James Dean without cigarettes dangling from their mouths?

While tobacco use seemed to sell exponentially – and especially in Asia, the anti-smoking forces mercilessly attacked the drug. Medical experts exposed the correlations between nicotine use and cancer, emphysema and other incurable maladies.

An anti-smoking coalition emerged. This motley prohibitionist group included family survivors of smokers who had died bad deaths, medical professionals, public education school administrators, and Christian religious groups,. Political-economic elites also joined their ranks, since they wanted better workers not taking so many smoking breaks, inclusive of less corporate health care costs.

Tobacco prohibitionists began to push for greater anti-smoking legislation. By the 1980s, they had succeeded in seizing the State.

In some urban cities in the United States, smoking is highly expensive, heavily taxed, and there are petty, minute federal, state and municipal laws that dictate where a person can or cannot smoke in public. Any street vendor trying to sell cheap cigarettes from another state, now has the felon tag of a ‘contrabandist,’ and can end up in prison or even have the cops murder him. The US government has a well-armed regulatory agency against tobacco, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or the ATF, and so the US government has declared another war – this time against tobacco.

Yet, millions of young women, and especially models, smoke tobacco in order to help them not gain weight. Rock artists, punk musicians and other fringe artists regularly flaunt the burning cigarette in the mouth while they play their guitars brutally. Even some right-wing political activists have proudly taken the puff. The cigarette has its own sexual fetishes, and due to the US government’s war against it, now has associations with rebellion and freedom.

The history of nicotiana tabacum shows us once again, the absurdity of the human condition under civilization. A plant that once helped natives in the Americas ensure community peace and unions through the spiritual worlds, has undergone a terrible and irreversible chemical-medical-industrial-state regulated surgery.

European colonial elites had imposed this condition. They did this without the consent of the native victims of their genocides. The addictive desires for naked profits enabled another genocide against kidnapped Africans.

Most assiduously, certain corporations have claimed their own patents or imposed ‘ownership,’ on this natural plant, while they have mixed harmful chemicals into the industrial melting pot, creating a type of fuming poison. Finally, the contemporary State, ruled and administered by shameless sociopaths, constantly devises sinister means in punishing the working class smokers of the drug.

Tobacco was never the original enemy to stamp out. The sinister legacies of our European colonial settler states, once again, carry all the historical blame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cutting down the Restaurant Dependency

The wonders of feeling served, cared for, and looked after represent some of our greatest life experiences. Even when we are physically ill, good rest and wholesome care help us to achieve that piece of mind and marvelous plateau of comfort. These actions display the gifts of unconditional love and they can eventually lead to true healing.

One of the most brutal aspects inside the culture of modern capitalism has been its perversion of such care. Whether they have the names of ‘health care, culinary centers,’ or ‘festival parks,’ capitalism has mugged and institutionalized the older enchantments of strong familial relations and community bonds into their profit-making enterprises.

These institutions have even gone farther into the crimes of legal theft and profiteering. The occult history of restaurants actually began in China during the 1200s, and for our modern restos, in France during the 1700s.

On a rough day in 1760s Paris, a coarse gentleman was clumping in the thin, narrow, cobblestone and nasty dirt, medieval streets of the city. The season was the beginning of an early winter in late November. The cold air was dead with frost, yet whips of cool wind fury could brutally bite the toughest soldier. He was also walking during the ratty, early morning hours. The sky had possessed an overcast grey muddy tinge that led to more foreboding.

The man wore his black hair in long locks with a tail at the end. He was clothed in an overcoat, a vest, a white blouse shirt, and unlike other wealthier men at the time, had on worker pants, while his long black leather boots covered his lower pant legs. He was of medium height, mostly clean-shaven, except for a permanent stubble on the chin and cheeks, and his face had that look of deep thought mixed with the pains of human suffering. He suffered from a mysterious illness inside his belly, a common ailment for that historical time.

He was actually walking to a ‘restaurant,’ a specialized medical dining hall that would hopefully ‘restaurer,’ or restore his health. There were a few in Paris, and this one was famous for its large spoon and bowl over the front door that advertised its palliative care. In those days, they still didn’t use numbers for specific addresses.

When he finally arrived at the care place, there were already a group of men, women and children sitting at the common table. The common table had the name of ‘table d’hôte,’ or the host’s table. He sat down at the end and already felt a nagging feeling.

The hostess suddenly slammed the large soup containers, hard bread, and salt in the middle of the large wooden, dirty table. The center mass of sick people began to hog the soup for the best choices of boiled chicken scrap, ‘bouillon,’ or broth, and seasonal cooked veggies. The bowl went around the table and so the people at the ends had to deal with what was left over. Eating at these places was often a surprise, since the meals often sat for a long time in large pots over the kitchen fire. Such was the ‘pot luck’ in those days. The tired man ate his food and paid his usual cheap ‘écus’ for the simple fare.

He also noticed some out-of-town travelers from the provinces at the table. The hostess charged them the ‘traveler’ fee, which was more expensive. He felt lucky in that he was a ‘Parisian’ local and knew the going rate. Until this very day, many restaurants are notorious for trying to fleece and legally rob unwary customers and out-of-town visitors.

This type of restaurant lasted until the French Revolution of the 1790s. By the beginning of the nineteenth-century, the 1800s, unemployed cooks that had previously worked for the parasitical ‘aristocrats’ began to advertise their culinary skills. If they had any capital, they could open a ‘restaurant’ for the ‘bourgeoisie,’ or upper class, owner-elites. These elites wanted to taste the exquisite plates from the previous epoch of sensual-gluttonous, aristo dining, represented by ten course meals.

The cooks offered ‘menus,’ or selected plates for the day at fixed prices and at certain eating times of the day. The cook owners cut up the tables to make sure there was greater privacy for the paying diners. Such was the birth of the modern restaurant that still spits out its notoriety.

Fine restaurants have continued to thrive as the ultimate conspicuous show of elitism and consumption. The wealthy elites can eat the ‘fine food,’ and enjoy the restaurant ambience, while they thumb their noses at the lower classes that cannot often afford to dine out.

Restaurants would soon perfect their harsh, capitalist division of labor. First came the owner, then the day-to-day manager, next the hot cook, or main cook, ‘le chef,’ and later, the front staff, waiters and hosts, or ‘serveurs.’ and finally the rest of the back staff – busboys, prep and assistant cold plate cooks – and the lowly dishwasher-general cleaner. But in China, five hundred years earlier, the restaurant existed as the extension of the spice and food market.

During the Sung dynasty in China, around the 1230s, this political dynasty had constructed a new capital and market center called Hangzhou. Hangzhou was not an ordinary city for those times. This megalopolis sold every type of imaginable fish, meat, vegetable and fruit – and most importantly, herbs and spices. Within the massive market, the traveler could find Muslim merchants coming from their routes in Africa and Asia, and even well-traveled Jewish merchant traders resided in the city. Famous world travelers visited the site, such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. The city was also the most populous city in the world with over one million inhabitants.

Within the canal and urban jungle labyrinth of markets, buyers and sellers, the visitor could taste the culinary wonders of the world. The majestic stories were quite famous concerning the beautiful city on the lake and the green hills surrounding it. The wonderful foods, tastes, exotic sights, stalls, markets, herbs, smells, and spices enchanted Europeans accustomed to the harsh medieval cereal, legume and vegetable diet.

European elites began to desire a more refined table and palette, and they also wanted more culinary art diversity and a regular diet of diverse meats and fishes.

Local food preparers in Hangzhou prepared stuffed dumpling delights, and mixed noodle and soup plates. These European elite desires for the gourmet plate led to the colonial sea race in order to find another maritime route to India, China and the South Seas, (or the South China Sea lands of Malays, Siamese, Khmers, Laos, and Annam-Champa, or Vietnam).

Six hundred years later, elite Europeans would become the colonial-imperial curse on the Earth. European elites had idolized the sensuality of food over the healthy and hearty diet of the European peasant. The display of wealth and class power had trumped the warm feeling of family and community around a simple, yet tasty fare.

Our modern restaurant is the sacred symbol of food idolatry, small time savage capitalism and the fraudulent display of class position. The resto ultimately serves the rich and lazy that refuse to cook for themselves. The elites want the culinary arts that come with money, yet they refuse to do the labor. Someone else must labor, and labor mercilessly, in order for the money people to enjoy the experience – and the profiteering.

This vice is especially true for the restaurant owners. They might know a lot about food, and a few might even have worked as chefs before, but their main hankering is for a profit, or taking advantage of the mark, or customer, and the laboring staff. If this means buying cheap, genetically modified wholesale food for consumption, leaving out side dish food in metal canisters with plastic wrap for over a month, charging triple prices for cheap drinks, or even taking half-eaten food scraps and putting them in the general use bins – they will do it. The restaurant owner truly wants to make a profit, not feed humanity out of love.

Some restaurant owners have never done kitchen work in their lives. They simply inherited the joint from their parents, or as small time capitalists, they went into restaurant work because they thought that the money would come quickly and easily. They often hire their friends and buddies from previous business ventures, and who also know very little about food and drinks, to manage the dives. Woe unto the service workers that have to deal with these restaurant hells. If the city health inspectors really did their jobs, they would close those rancid places down.

US Restaurants often attract the most vicious, petty, mean, and cheap bosses from the small business owner class, or the petit bourgeoisie. Due to the heavy use of cash, the restaurant racket, like construction, can easily hide the underground economy, or ‘under the table’ money, from the government. In America, the owners can get away with paying a slave wage to the front staff, since the marks, or the customers, are partly required to pay the servers’ wages through ‘tips.’

Also in America, restaurants like construction, hotels and cleaning services, are the mainstays in hiring illegal immigrant workers, In restaurants, they all tend to work and stay hidden in the back kitchen. If the kitchen workers complain, then a call to the Immigration Service will suffice. I have even seen with my own eyes, Latino-mestizo workers from Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador doing the hot cooking in varied ethnic restaurants, such as Indian, Japanese, French, Ethiopian and Thai places!

I have my own personal work stories. When I was younger, I only worked in the back kitchen as a dishwasher for the desperation of needed travel money. I usual bolted when I had made enough cash, or the managers just fired me for religiously taking my breaks. I noticed that many of the young cooks were serious hard drug addicts and a few even sold hard drugs from the back doors.

The waitresses also acted nasty and rude. There were some serious infighting and petty hatreds between the cooks, hosts and servers. The restaurant boss had successfully used the old divide and conquer strategy. No wonder coffee was always free to the wage and tip slaves. Worker turnover was always high.

The workers often counterattacked by making deals with the bartender, including sleeping with him or her, in order to cop free drinks – after the lazy owner went AWOL from the job. The cooks stole copious amounts of food for their own late night deep-frying. The petty and pathetic servers with bad attitudes even made fun of the regular customers to the other staff, who generally ordered their usual meals and drinks – and yet tipped those assholes well.

Some Anarchists counter the anti-restaurant arguments by arguing in favor of vegan-cooperative ventures, or small, family owned restaurants and ethnic food enclaves. But these restaurant options suffer from the same diseases of capitalism – making more money.

If all restaurants use funny money, than they have to make some base profit in order to survive. In family ethnic restaurants the bosses are still bosses and often demand that all the workers share their tips with the owner, which is one of the last holdouts of feudalism. In order for alternative coops to make money, they have to cut corners too, and especially with food freshness. Vegetarian-vegan hipster cooperatives are often the worst abusers of reusing old breads, rice, millet and quinoa, and nuking pre-prepared plates, often made a few days ago, inside of their multiple microwaves – so much for freshness.

If a regular customer that likes to go out to eat and could see inside the actual kitchens and operations of restaurants, then he or she would refrain from visiting them regularly. The real issue, and especially for us Anarchists, is not succumbing to the vicious culture of global capitalism. We continue to pay the servers through our tips in order to help a cheap small business owner make a profit.

We could do the cooking labor at our homes, or at someone else’s house where the fare is often better than the resto variety. At least we know the freshness content of the food we are using. Cooking is also an art, and it is open to all of us humans, since we all do art in some form. Eating out is quite expensive too.

In our contemporary world, we cannot simply avoid restaurants and ban them completely from our lives. But we can cherish those special visits and occasions at our local eating place with family and friends and during festivities.

For those of us that travel, we often have no choice in the matter. If we are in a foreign country, then we would also want to try the local dishes. Youth hostels offer a good option for travelers since most of them have shared kitchens for guests.

We should always remember that the modern restaurant began as an informal medical place for the sick. If we are alive and still healthy, then let’s control our own food consumption and share the cooking within our own families and among our own small, friendly communities.

 

Worlds of Pharmakopeia II: Cannabis Churning in the Mystical Orient

A cold wind was howling through the medieval streets of Rome during middle December. The days were real short. Darkness even shadowed the moon. This particular day was in the middle of the month, and the year was 1485. Christmas had its parties coming up, but the Pope Caesar had other nefarious plans tucked into his fat stomach. The sinister name of intolerance and hypocrisy was none other than Pope Innocent VIII, (the Eighth).

On this nefarious date he issued a strange papal bull against witchcraft and sorcery that seemed to infect the women of Europe, and especially the First Reich of Germany, bizarrely called, the Holy Roman Empire. This Empire was neither holy nor Roman.

Within this peculiar papal condemnation, he also cited the use of a demonic herb, called cannabis, often found, or imagined, in satanic religious rites. His informant-experts for these underground, conspiratorial satanic covens represented two German Dominican monks, Jakob Spengler and Heinrich Kramer. They would soon publish a nasty book, called ‘The Hammer of the Witches,’ which would help in the murder of close to 200,000 ‘witches,’ mostly marginalized women, during the next 250 years in Europe and in America.

Unfortunately for the plant ‘cannabis sativa,’ this strange and mystical herb from deep Asia, received the taint of evil with the papal stamp of approval. Yet, this same Pope Innocent the Eighth enjoyed some other mortal sins during his reign. He was obese and lived a life of extreme luxury inside the papal palace. He fathered two illegitimate children and had them married off into one of the strongest Families in Renaissance Italy, the Medici. He dipped some of the papal finances into the new Portuguese African Slave Trade. Meanwhile, he tried to revive the Papal Crusades of another Pope Innocent, in order to exterminate the Muslim Turks, the Protestant Waldensians in Northern Italy, and the Hussites in the Czech lands. All cannabis haters in history have shared three evil characteristics: intolerance, gross hypocrisy and state murder.

What is it about cannabis sativa that attracts such hatred and venom? The answer lies in its historical origins: the mystical rites for Lord Shiva and the Islamic Assassins in the medieval period. Cannabis still has these mystical, ‘orientalist’ associations to this actual day. Whether the foreign visitor enters the medinas of Morocco or the festivals dedicated to Shiva in India and Nepal, the scent of the cannabis herb inundates the consciousness.

From its evil oriental connections until its later appearances in the United States, cannabis would connect to a more infamous notoriety. African-American artists smoked the herb while they played their demonic, African sensualized beats, called jazz. Attractive white women even took off their shoes in the smoky clubs, and they danced with the demons. Mestizo, mixed race, Mexican fruit pickers and outlaws also smoked the leaf, called ‘mota,’ during their raucous partying. The dangerous, criminal classes, of course, used the oriental poison. The Amerikan Imperial thugs had taken notice. The historical hatred against cannabis has simply been another combined form of intolerance and murder.

Cannabis is actually a marvelous and natural soft drug. It relaxes and calms the mental nerves, and helps with bouts of nausea and gastrointestinal pains. Some doctors state that cannabis has other helpful healing properties. Cannabis can spark interior mental activity or engaging conversation. It stimulates the human appetites, both culinary and sexual. The drug goes perfectly with foods, entertainment, the arts and it especially compliments other natural drugs found on the Earth, such as alcohol, coffee and tea.

The only negatives to the drug are certain habitual users of it. It seems to have the similar effects of antidepressants on them, which produce lethargy, ego self-obsessions, or minor neuroses. But these are some excessive users. I have also personally met aggressive and successful attorneys that were avid smokers of the weed.

I return to cannabis’ ancient history and its orientalist associations. Lord Shiva, the God of both Creation and Destruction, the Cosmic Dance and the Holy Lingam, (phallic power), the revealer of mystical Tantra, patron of cows, yoga and the third sex, married to the goddess, Parvati, father to the god, Ganesh – also partook of the mystical drink, called ‘soma.’ Legend has it that the mystical drink was none other than ‘bhang,’ a milky concoction containing cannabis.

Shiva’s wandering followers called ‘sadhus,’ still partake of the magical perfumed medicine. During my travels around the world, I have seen these holy men, and some thieving-fakers claiming to exist as sadhus, smoking cannabis out of funnel type ceramic pipes called ‘chillum.’ Watching those holy men in action with their long dread locks, scruffy beards, blue and white-painted dyes, bodies smeared with cow dung, rope necklaces and bracelets, and dirty loin cloths, added to the whole Indian-Asian mystical effect.

On a more common level, during the Hindu festival of Holi, which happens around springtime, young Indians and Nepalese drink the marvelous liquid ‘bhang’ shakes, or ‘lassies,’ and later, hit the public streets throwing brightly colored dyes on the surrounding partiers and walkers. They hit me too – which added to the great fun during that day. Shiva’s gift was a truly a wonderful act.

Islam conquered the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the eleventh century. The cannabis magic of Shiva would also influence the Sufi Muslim mystics that lived in those regions. Even the great Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, praised the herb and the wine. Cannabis entered the Islamic world: it stayed and it prospered. Still today in the Islamic world from North Africa to Afghanistan, the traveler can spot old men sitting in cafes, wearing their ‘chalaba’ long outfits with hoods. They smoke the green and brown ‘kif’ in their long pipes, while they sip on herbal mint tea, Turkish coffee and chew on honey snacks. Religious controversies have continued between the Sunni, Shia and Sufi branches of Islam – but smoking the flowering buds united them all.

One of the truths of human history has been its reign of absurdity. Cannabis had attached itself to one of the Shia sects of medieval Islam – ‘the Assassins.’ The Assassins were part of the Ismaili sect or the ‘Seveners.’ They also drank the luscious wine and smoked the enchanting herb.

The medieval Japanese Shogunates had their ‘ninjas’; while Medieval Islamic World Culture had their assassins. The assassins lived outside of society. Those disciplined holy warriors squatted in abandoned, foreboding military castles in northern Syria, Iraq and Iran. Their founder, Hassan i Sabbah, or ‘The Old Man of the Mountain,’ organized this Shia sect military order into a hierarchical brotherhood. Inside the castle, the warriors studied religious and philosophical texts, scientific works, learned various languages, and most importantly, the arts of killing. Their three preferred methods moved towards the silent variety: the dagger, the poison and strangulation.

Their victims were always political leaders within the Islamic world. If the Islamic political hack instituted unjust acts, mandated cruel laws, oppressed the poor, allowed poverty to accumulate, or stole lots of money from the just – then the Assassins went on the attack.

The Assassins first left a note pinned with a small dagger within the confines of the caliph or sultan’s palace. If that didn’t work, then the spiritual leader picked an Assassin to fulfill the last deed – a violent death. The Assassins always reached their victims, and after killing the state bum, they would often let frightened onlookers see the terminating work. Many of the assassins never returned from their ultimate missions.

Only one Islamic political-military ruler survived them – Saladin the Great. He survived three attempts on his life. They aroused fear in both the Islamic potentates and the European royal Crusaders. One of the Crusader kings even used the Assassins as allies against his Islamic rivals. Their enemies called them, ‘hashasheen’ in Arabic, or the Troublemakers.

From this Arabic word, the European Crusaders, and especially the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, tied some connections between the sinister Oriental herbal paste, ‘hashish,’ with Assassin lore. According to the ignorant Euro-experts, hash was the powerful ingredient that transformed the Assassins into fanatical killers. This corrupted link also transformed European languages on the continent.

Most European languages have a separate word for killing and for murder: ‘matar,’ in Spanish, ‘tuer,’ in French, and ‘uccidire,’ in Italian. But these three languages share the same original word for murder, ‘asesinar, assassiner, assassinare.’ This outrageous relation between cannabis and irrational violence even stayed well into the 1930s USA with crap movies such as ‘Reefer Madness.’

This marvelous soft drug of cannabis has had its absurd orientalist associations. The real issue of cannabis was not its properties, but the European hatred for ‘the other,’ which still fuels the sociopathology of the Amerikan Empire. The murderous and hateful world empire still hunts for its victims through its continuous War against Cannabis, and all other ‘illegal drugs.’ The CIA can deal whatever it wants, yet the same US government prefers smokers to rot inside its hundreds of overpopulated prisons. In spite of all of this hate, Lord Shiva’s precious gift still wafts its distinctive breeze throughout all the lands of the Earth.