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the Norwegians call all polar foxes Mikkl

— A woman in the polar night by Christiane Ritter, Jane Degras, Rebecca Gallagher (Narrator)

“Now Chrissie has got 𝘳𝘢𝘳,” says Karl, shaking his head. “𝘐𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘵 𝘬𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘳. You must be reasonable.” Rar is a strangeness that overcomes many who spend the winter in polar regions. Ishavet kaller, or “the Arctic calls”, is what the Spitsbergen hunters say when one of their comrades, for mysterious reasons, throws himself into the sea.

— A woman in the polar night by Christiane Ritter, Jane Degras, Rebecca Gallagher (Narrator)

When she arrives her eyes smart from unending daylight; then comes the long night, with its psychological challenges. She experiences 𝘳𝘢𝘳, the Norwegian word for the strangeness that afflicts many who overwinter in the polar regions. All indigenous languages, such as Inuktitut, have a word for 𝘳𝘢𝘳.

— A woman in the polar night by Christiane Ritter, Jane Degras, Rebecca Gallagher (Narrator)

One reason for the persistence of a humanist, social-democratic left, one absorbent enough to take in demands related to gender, race, and sexuality, has to do with, I think, the fact that Spanish colonialism’s moral crisis came early with the Conquest. The critique launched by dissenters was frontal and all encompassing, and when independence from Spain finally came, many of those who led that movement understood “emancipation” (even if they didn’t always act on that understanding) in its fullest sense, to include, potentially at least, all forms of oppression. This, I think, helps explain Latin America’s commitment to a panoramic conception of citizenship, one that includes social rights. The Anglo experience was different. Evasion and denial were English settlement’s hallmarks. And remained so for centuries. No ethical dilemma accompanied the destruction of the continent’s indigenous people. When a moral crisis over chattel slavery did finally come, in the 1800s, it abstracted Black-skin bondage as a singular, exceptional sin. This, as the historian David Brion Davis wrote fifty years ago, had the “great virtue” of providing an “ideal” and “clear-cut” model of evil, which was useful for abolitionists when it came to fighting it but a hindrance to later historians and activists when they tried to relate it to the persistence of “other species of barbarity and oppression.” This, I think, helps explain the United States’ inability to overcome a narrow conception of individual rights.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

As early as 1975, Idaho’s senator Frank Church warned of the “Latin Americanization of the United States.” Church didn’t mean the phrase in a reactionary way, to suggest that the country was losing its WASP identity and becoming mongrelized, or that plebeians were falling for strongman populism. Rather, Senator Church, writing two years after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, was worried about the power that corporations exercised over domestic institutions. A regressive upward distribution of income, the emergence of “mammoth corporations operating on a global scale that transcends political boundaries” and function “beyond the effective control of the nation-state,” and the abandonment of the idea that it is the obligation of politicians to close the gap between rich and poor threatened, he worried, to do great damage to the nation.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Prébisch thought the rich world’s orthodox economists “scholastic,” working from a false first premise: that a free market funded by private capital would lead to an equitable balance of supply and demand, prices and wages. That first erroneous idea, accepted as writ, gave rise to ever more fantastical follow-up assertions bearing little relationship to the way the world works. They were used to justify, not explain, inequality, thus becoming “ideological weapons.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Latin America not getting free public capital did not mean that the region was left out of the Marshall Plan. The denial of such capital was the plan, or at least a key part of it. Western Europe would be reindustrialized, while “underdeveloped countries” would continue, as one report to the president put it, to export “raw materials.” As early as 1945, Washington’s economists expressed concern that “ways and means must be found to keep some twenty” essential Latin American commodities—that whole long list of minerals, metals, fuels, grains, and other materials that had fed the war machine—available “in sufficient volume and price to prevent economic depression.” This meant discouraging Latin America from industrializing, lest investment be sucked away from resource extraction, from providing a “dependable flow of materials at the lowest cost.” Washington, writes the economist Jon Kofas, was “unambiguous about subordinating Latin America’s economic development to Europe’s reconstruction needs.” Europe, then, not only got billions of free dollars, it also benefited from a secondary subsidy, in the form of cheap Latin American resources.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Vice President Henry Wallace, in 1943, had repeatedly promised that the United States would, when the Axis powers were defeated, provide capital to increase productivity and, more important, raise wages. George Messersmith, who replaced the elderly Daniels as ambassador to Mexico and was as tenacious in advancing the ideals of the Good Neighbor as his predecessor, seconded this pledge. “Mexico,” Ambassador Messersmith said, “will never be a completely satisfactory neighbor” until “the present wide gap between our standards of living is reduced.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

As Latin America oscillated between democracy and barbarism, the influence of the Mexican Revolution, especially its land reform, helped tip the region toward the first. For instance, land ownership in Chile had been organized since independence around a very Anglo, “absolutist” conception of private property. That ended in 1925, when Article 10 of a new constitution proclaimed that the “exercise of the right of property is subject to the limitations or rules which require the maintenance and progress of the social order.” The high countries followed, with mineral-rich Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia adopting a “social” definition of property rights. Peru’s new 1933 constitution held that private property could only exist if it was “in harmony with the social interest.” In Bolivia, veterans returned from the Chaco War tired of fighting Paraguay and ready to take on Standard Oil. Soon, nearly all nations, through edicts, legislation, and constitutions, embraced the idea that the right to property carried with it social obligations, that property was not something a person or corporation could possess in isolation but was instead a social relation. Land reform was at the center of most visions of progress. There could be no future without land reform. Nor could there be democracy.

— America, América by Greg Grandin