Worlds of Pharmakopeia VII: Chocolate Delights, Slavery & Gluttony

In the strange, occult worlds of pharmacopeia, few drugs have escaped the repressive clutches of European sadists and madmen.

The reasons for non-prohibition often refer to a particular exotic drug’s negligible effects on the mind. If the drug causes havoc with the sinful body, and yet does not induce much of a mental change, then the elixir transforms into a good and marketable digestible. Such is the modern story of Chocolate, or as the Mexica-Aztecs referred to it, in their language of Nahuatl, Xocolatl.

The 1430s AD was a consequential decade for human civilization. In China, the Han Chinese, Ming Dynasty established a naval fleet in order to extend the economic influence of the Empire. Yet during the same period, agricultural disasters, famine and pestilence hit the Chinese rural valleys, and so the naval empire had to end. In Indochina, the Empire Ayutthaya, (modern Thailand or Siam), conquered the great empire of the Khmer at Angkor Wat (modern Cambodia).

In Europe, the religious wars and Crusades of the Catholic Papacy and Orthodox Christianity continued. First, they fought against the Muslim Turks, who surrounded the Second Rome, Constantinople, on both flanks, Asia Minor and Greece. The Teutonic knights maintained their violent forays into the northeast, against both Poland and Lithuania. The Catholic Holy Roman Emperor eventually defeated the Protestant Hussites, (influenced through Jan Hus), in the Czech lands.

In the southwest, the Spanish knights advanced their attacks against the Moors, or Muslims, in the region of Nasrid Granada. The Church continued its noxious insistence on the conversion of Europe’s Jews, whether through persuasion, legal harassment, or even the sword.

The French Royal forces began to push out the English Plantagenet royal armies from French territory, and a German, by the name of Johannes Gutenberg, developed the first printing press.

Italian artists finally moved away from the medieval, Byzantine-influenced figure painting of long faces and wide eyes, to more realistic portraits, using the ocular mirror-reflection method. The Venetian Empire possessed the most powerful naval army, and the most heinous slave trading, mass murder, sugar plantation system in the Mediterranean.

With the Pope’s mandate for the Christianization and enslavement of the pagans, the Portuguese Empire traded for gold in west Africa, and especially with the Mali Empire in Timbuktu. Due to this trade, this same Empire would later claim slave prisons and colonies on the western coast of sub-Saharan Africa, in a region referred to as Guinea. The Portuguese colonial navy initiated European Civilization’s most heinous mass murder scheme in human history: the Atlantic African Slave Trade. Europe’s invaders had yet to conquer the Western Hemisphere.

This decade also featured the political-military consolidation of the Mexica-Aztec Empire. The emperor, or Tlatloani, had the name of Izcoatl. Izcoatl was a great warrior and political leader who merged the military Triple Alliance of the three most powerful cities: Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, in central Mexico.

He also oversaw the construction of the great buildings inside the grand city of Tenochtitlan. The two pyramid apexes represented: the God of Agriculture and Water, Tlaloc, and the greater structure, the God of the Mexica: war, blood and fire, Huitzilopochtli.

His successors would continue conquer lands for imperial tribute – until the unfortunate death of Moctezuma II, during the Spanish invasion of the 1520s. One of the coveted lands for tribute, or for taxes, were the southern Mayan farms of cacao beans. When grounded, those cacao beans transformed into a dark and powerful, yet delicious, bitter drink, called Xocolatl.

Towards the end of his glorious reign, Izcoatl ordered the priests to consecrate the temples for the grand sacrifices and coming religious festivals. The emperor and the noblemen drank Xocolatl in the courts of the palace. They sipped Xocolatl cold with ice, inside of large, dark red ceramic bowls. The cooks mixed in cornmeal to make the froth thicker. The royal preparers also added honey to soften the bitter taste, and then the local spices of red chilies, annatto red color, and canella cinnamon, all of which gave the icy Xocolatl the appearance of human blood.

The Aztec priests had their long black hair drenched in red blood dye. The Jaguar skinned and Eagle feathered knights were in attendance, and they were all in the presence of the feathered serpent-god, Izcoatl-Quetzalcoatl emperor.

All of them gulped the blood-colored, darkened froth, which transformed the participants into a mental state of rapture. They sat around a large and low stone table, and continued to taste the bowls of delight, meanwhile royal musicians played military drums and flutes, and the priests burned pungent copal incense. All of the six human senses flourished under this military reign.

Emperor Xocolatl’s body was the blood and oil to the mental states of war bounty, the delight of death, and sacrificial festivities.

Through these intense royal Mexica rituals, Moctezuma I, the successor of Izcoatl, initiated the Flower Wars. Aztec knights engaged in noble combat-contests with their enemies, such as the Tlaxcaltecans, in order to increase their military courage and fighting abilities. The great market of Tenochtitlan even used cacao beans as currency. Xocolatl had finally united, both in body and spirit, or tonalli, with the drink of the Gods.

Xocolatl, or its Latin name, Theobroma Cacao, like other Western Hemisphere wonders, such as tomatoes, corn maize, squashes-zucchinis-pumpkins, potatoes, red-green chili peppers-paprika, coca, tobacco, avocados, annatto, amaranth, peanuts-cashews-pecans-sunflower seeds, papaya-guava-pineapple, wild berries, common bean legumes, and vanilla, would permanently transform European cuisine – and even world gastronomy.

These Western Hemisphere native, garden delights now find themselves at every world table: the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. European colonialism has transformed Chocolate Cacao once again, and it has cut off its sacred origins from Mesoamerica.

The first methods represented the African killing centers or the Americas, or within its infamous slave plantations. Chocolate plantings coincided with tobacco, sugar and coffee crops, all of which functioned as export commodities on the Atlantic slave trade.

European investors would later add industrial concoctions into the chocolate mix, which gave the drug – from the once extinct Mesoamerican gods – a new identity. European food capitalists introduced the dark-thick cacao to ravenous sugar, silky cow’s milk, and the sweet tooth decadence of fruits and nuts.

Chocolate is not just a drink anymore; instead, consumers can purchase the drug in cakes, cookies, candies, bars, creamy spreads, chips, white and cream colors, powders while cooks have added it to fine dishes, such as the Mexican recipe of mole.

Chocolate has entered the fine drug Valhalla of vintage wines, sweet liqueurs, pungent tobacco cigars and expensive bottled spirits. This drug is also ubiquitous inside many processed GMO, sugary snacks, which destroy the fragile human body. For those gourmets of gluttony, the physical price leads to obesity and diabetes.

During the decade of the 1580s, in the Hispano-American lands, Spanish ecclesiastics and other elites began to partake in the leisurely enjoyment of the drink. In the seventeenth-century, the 1600s, Mercantile Capitalism exploded chocolate into the refined tastes and idle pleasures of European aristo parasites, representing the first two social estates, or classes, the nobles and the clergy.

Coffeehouses in London started to serve the hot chocolate brews, and in Paris, the first artisan workshops of chocolate emerged, calling themselves, chocolatiers. Those chocolate artisans sold a most expensive delight, called bons bons.

On the American continent, every single Euro-American colonial power: the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English ensured that their sugar, salt, coffee and tobacco slave plantations, had to leave a few grounds for the cultivation of chocolate beans. The European colonial monsters gave the African slaves more work to perform before their short, brutal lives, and even more cruel deaths.

Like Sugar and Coffee export commodities, Chocolate production also violated the horrible existences of kidnapped African chattel. The European aristo rage for hot chocolate, or hot cocoa, and exquisite chocolate candies, called pastilles, would not subside.

In the eighteenth-century, the 1700s, Europeans became so enamored with chocolate that inventors developed mechanisms in quickening the pulverization of beans into cocoa powder. The French and the English became quite adept at this grinding process. Thanks to the such technology, the European working classes began to partake in the ‘drink of the Gods.’

It was during the 1800s, in Europe and the Americas, and especially in Switzerland, where chocolate factories invented industrial schemes that transformed chocolate to the consumer product of today.

First, they used machines to remove the chocolate butter from both the beans and powder during the grinding down process. Second, the factories added sugars, fatty nuts, and whole white milk into the mix, all of which created a finer, creamier and more delicious chocolate, free from its bitter origins. Third, they created assembly lines that formed the butter, powder, sugar, nuts and milk into bite sized candies, called pralines.

Some of the more notable names of the European-American Chocolate capitalists included: Stollwerck, Berwaerts, Cadbury, Ghiradelli, Lindt, Tobler, Hershey and Nestle. All social classes enjoyed the chewing, eating and drinking of chocolate.

Nowadays, most of the worlds’ chocolate bean production occurs in west Africa. Apparently, the chocolate capitalists still treat and pay their workers like slaves.

Chocolate still lives among our innumerable products on the supermarket shelves, yet massive food corporations combine it with high amounts of sugar, and then mix it all with horrid GMOs, or genetically modified products. All of those carcinogens destroy the delicate human body. Chocolate is still delicious, yet it eventually leads to gluttony, fast weight gain, and if abused, obesity.

Chocolate was once the food of the gods – found in the secret halls of Mayan and Aztec royalty. Later in history, European colonials invaded the Americas, destroyed their grand cultures, and stole their wondrous products.

European mercantile capitalism then murdered millions of Africans in order to process American plants, inclusive of the other European addictions, such as sugar cane, coffee beans and tobacco leaves. Ultimately, European technology transformed Chocolate through the processes of industrial capitalism, so that it is extremely rich and tasty. This process will also destroy the tenuous human body.

In fin, the Chocolate drug, with its sordid history, exposes Modern European Civilization’s profound culture of avarice, luxury and gluttony.

 

 

Class War, Always and Forever

There exist certain unmistakable symbols and ideas, which define a political movement or an ideology.

For Communism, it is the hammer and sickle over the bright red flag, the labor gulag and Stalin’s execution lists. For Fascism, it is the strutting dictator stapled with phony medals, goose stepping SS soldiers, the swastika and the death camps, experts in the art of murder. For Liberalism, it is the grey institutional, corporate-bank building filled with bureaucratic drones, the local white stone courthouse, the police station, jail-prison with bars, the office of the local sheriff, and the brown brick, state school, with yellow school buses added for a little touch of class.

But what exists for Anarchy? We have the classic A with the circle around it. We have the long N shaped symbol with an arrow moving upward and a circle around that. And we have a black flag with some red in it – with part of the flag having a star, or even a fist, or whatever. There is also the Anarchist Black Cross, a type of Greek Cross or a Medical Cross, which usually has a clenched fist on the top of the vertical bar. We can also add a punk looking individual to the mix, and some Anarchists have even appropriated the classic black and white pirate flag with the skull and crossed bones. But there is an idea that maintains its constancy within all Anarchy practices: the Class War.

How many memories and bad experiences do we continue to hold from all of our crap jobs history – or where we still trudge and grudge our lives away?

All of my diverse jobs in my personal life were bad ones, including the one that I held for the most labor time of my life: as a lowly paid, graduate teaching assistant at some western land-grant American university. My second longest work stretch was my time surviving in the US Military. I was lucky to not get kicked out of that one.

My employment history mostly shows a shattered list of short work stints, about a few months at the most, and in the end, the owner bastards often fired me. I am damn proud of this spotted work record too. I have openly lived my life as a true warrior inside of the Class War. I have never traded nor soiled my honor, nor my dignity, to a boss-manager parasite.

Believe it or not, I’ve actually worked hard – if the job interested me. I have always arrived on time to work, and while inside of the wage struggle, I got straight into the labor intensity. I have never liked just sitting or standing around, and I always tried to find some initiative or creativity on my own in order to learn more things. But in the end, we all live under the loaded shotgun of the Class Struggle. The loaded shotgun has always aimed at us – the regular workers, the drinking class, the working class.

The commandeering class parasites don’t see it that way however. They want to avoid the most work as possible in order to collect a higher salary with lots of benefits – the worker ants damned! Those losers constantly delegate the hated work jobs, often cleaning or organizing tasks, onto the lower worker peons. Those hacks also have the ear of the owners. And the owners only want one thing – profits!

This is the Class Struggle: the owner wants more work out of the wage slaves, while also hoping to cut down the employee wages in order to increase profit margins; meanwhile, the workers want to conserve their energy for life outside of work, while hoping for a measly pay raise – maybe some time in the distant future.

Since its ugly surfacing some hundreds of years ago, Capitalism has waged a most ruthless war or struggle against the lives of most humans. Whether we like it or not, we all must survive in the Class Struggle, and fight until the bitter end – inside of the Class War.

The owners holding the capital have waged a relentless war against us. Our wage slave jobs slowly rot out our bodies, and eventually clog our vital energies, and so we must fight back. We battle the owners every day on the job, or we fight back as consumers against their crap products, or we even expose the owners’ dishonest practices through writing scathing reviews on the Internet. There are many more ways to struggle.

There is also sabotage. Sabotage does not just imply purposely breaking the machines; although, in extreme situations, this works too. It can also mean following every single rule in the business in order to slow down production or any system of overwork. It can even mean informing the state authorities about the owner’s negligence of the laws. Yes, we can use the divide and conquer method against our foes, since they have continually used similar methods against us.

Another sabotage tactic is giving out the product for free to customers in order to show our appreciation for choosing the business! This has also worked splendidly in the past. The owner crooks can lambast all they want about stealing, but this is just giving the customer a bit more appreciation. Customer service is king – and especially under Global Monopoly Capitalism that truly rules our evil world.

Capitalism steals more than our wages. The system robs us through its flimsy tax scams, which we lower orders can never use, such as unemployment and social security money. In the United States, most employers reject the unemployment claims of fired workers most of the time – and the corrupt judges generally rubber stamp the boss’ dirty deeds. We can only receive some federal, state and city back taxes, if we make less than the poverty wage. Anyway, the poverty wage is so low that it exists as a worthless system for any wage earner.

The thugs in the US federal government are getting a little nervous however. They recently started an Earned Income Credit scam that allows the peons to keep a little crumbs from the ‘taxed money.’ Nice try. Those band aids never help.

Capitalism also robs the lowly paid wage workers grievously through stealing their surplus labor. Every day that we arrive to work and labor hard, we actually create a surplus product ready for sale. Our unpaid surplus labor creates a surplus of value, or wealth, for the owners. Yet, we only receive a low wage that barely pays for our dismal lives of bill paying, taxation and basic cost of living, such as food, housing and clothes.

Nowadays, many wage slaves have to work two or three jobs in order to live in an sub-standard apartment. Landlords have also become desperate within this capitalist shell game, and in many small cities and towns, ‘with jobs,’ they have lifted the prices for basic living into the American megalopolis price zones of New York and San Francisco.

Many Amerikan landlords have transformed themselves into property pimps who push anyone who can’t pay their exorbitant rents into the poorer or rural suburbs, such as the young, lumpen poor and minorities.  The displaced poor then have to flush their money into urban scam ‘public transportation,’ which costs more than actually driving a car around the city. Other wage slaves living in the more rural parts will have to dig deeper in their pockets for paying gas costs, state mandated taxes, state mandated insurance and auto part-repair bills. And these people still have to buy decent food, wear cool clothes – and possibly enjoy their scant leisure time.

The owners have successfully colonized and scammed our leisure activities. Most of our ‘fun activities’ cost something: bars, restaurants, cafes, concerts, festivals, amusement parks, outdoor sports, parties, lotteries-casino gambling, etc. We have to throw our money away to another group of owners in the ‘service industry,’ and whose members often represent the more noxious elements of the small business owner class. Going out and enjoying our lives, during ‘our time off,’ is not so cheap anymore.

We must structure our crowded lives around our ‘jobs.’ which slowly degenerate our meager existence. The boss-owner group can take off whenever he or she wants, and do whatever he or she wants during work hours: a golf game, a two-hour lunch, a visit to family, personal shopping, or even just a light nap or refreshing break. We continue working, and worst of all, the job steals away our precious personal time – and sadly, our fleeting youth. The owners makes the work-life schedules, not us.

The owner-bosses like to take multiple week vacations throughout the work year. Few wage slaves get the old, two-week paid vacation from the distant past. If you ask for it, it tells the boss that you want fewer hours – and he or she will soon terminate your employment.

Most wage work doesn’t even have work contracts anymore. The owner can fire the employees at will, and they often do just that – for whatever reasons. There are so many other wage slaves, and especially young ones, banging on the doors. The owner can just go down the list and call up the most pliable worker.

In some service professions in the US, such as restaurants-bars, distributing centers, cleaning services and construction-repair work, the bosses have a massive pool of illegal immigrant workers to exploit. Other businesses can use a pool of legal, foreign visa students-workers. The owners inside the education, nursing and software industries exploit this privilege all the time. I have yet to see the federal, state or local governments punish those dishonest owner crooks who prefer to hire non-Americans. If you can hire a foreigner to do the same job, worker harder, and for less pay – than why not?

Ultimately, more and more owners refuse to pay the full amount of salary when they fire employees, or when the employees quit. Fighting for the rest of the pay is simply not worth it, since the legal system always backs up the owner class, and the proof of outright theft is on the employee. How many employees have the time or energy to fight back? If the wage slave does not have any family money to help him or her, then he or she had better find another crushing, soul killing job – or he or she will then join the ranks of the homeless ‘bums,’ or drifters.

The worst part of the story is still not over. As this Global Monopoly Capitalist system becomes more outrageous and more brutal, so there emerges a smaller pool of available jobs. The only jobs left will be those high paying administrator-commandeering manager-executive class jobs. Those people do no useful work whatsoever, except attend meetings and pass e-mails. Those jobs are for the people who have attended highly rated universities and have some wealthy family contacts. This leaves the rest of us thrown into the Capitalist Maelstrom.

The lucky ones will have some important manual skill where they can find work as ‘independent contractors’: electricians, builders, plumbers, welders, or simply fix-it-all, jack of all trades, people.

For the rest of us, losers, the future enters a biting darkness. I include myself in this group, since PhD bums in history were stupid enough to believe that there were jobs for intellectually smart-street wise dummies. In the past there were job prospects, but the sociopaths that hold power in the Amerikan Empire don’t care anymore. Why should they? Most PhD recipients have transformed themselves into pathetic cowards. How can any PhD with any sense of honor and dignity work as an adjunk, part-time teacher for less pay that any McJob dweeb?

What can we do to forestall such a monstrous future waiting for us?

We must embrace the Class War, since the elites, the top owner class within the boards of directorships of the major corporations and banks, including their top political class minions, have already declared war against us – from the beginning of human history. Before it was the master-slave relationship, now it is the owner-wage slave relationship.

We have only two choices ahead. First, We could bow our heads and keep looking for different work situations, and if we have family money to help us out, then we can survive with odd jobs.

The other option is that we can reject work altogether and just become traveling bums or drifters – like the hobos of the Great Depression. Yes, I mean drop out of the work force, travel around to different parts of the country, and find the odd job for some desperate cash.

Yet even this old ‘job search’ system is dying. Most of the ugliest, slave-like jobs either require a background check of a few pages, inclusive of a drug test, or they are only reserved for the illegal immigrant slaves who will desperately do any job, including septic cleaning and slaughterhouse killing.

The Class War continues: always and forever!