Steven W. Aunan responds to Vicky Osterweil’s recent book on the joy of looting (which was clearly informed by her almost total innocence of any economic understanding) and also tells the story of the perhaps mythical “John from America” and the cargo cults of islanders in the South Pacific during and after World War II:
Ceremonial cross of John Frum cargo cult, Tanna island, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), 1967.
Photo by Tim Ross via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1940, or so goes the myth, a man who identified himself as “John from America” appeared in a native village in the New Hebrides Islands with a message: Rebel against the colonizers, their missions, their schools, their laws, and John would reward them with free housing, clothing, food, and transportation.
The result was the “John Frum Cargo Cult” that persists to this day in the modern-day South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.
Frum’s message was remarkably similar to Vicky Osterweil’s message: rebel against settler domination, against the history of whiteness, and someone will reward you with all the free stuff you need.
Like Osterweil’s chaotic myth of impossibly contradictory Marxist worlds, we can’t be sure who the mythical John Frum was, how or when he arrived, whether he was a man or a spirit-being, if he lived in the U.S. or in the island’s active volcano, or if he first appeared as a tiger on an island where no tigers live, as a black man with a moustache, or as a white man who magically spoke the native language.
You can pick your own truth about Frum, because Marxists will tell you it’s no better than anyone else’s truth.
And, like every other false promise spoken by the fork-tongued followers of the dead white male devil Karl Marx, John Frum brought with him a vision of the future in which the old social order is violently dismantled, a new world is born, and the people emerge with material wealth, happiness, hope, and success.
After Frum left the islands, large numbers of Americans in their flying machines immediately and miraculously followed, building military airstrips and bringing in enormous quantities of cargo. Everything came to pass just as John Frum had promised.
The residents of the islands, of course, did not understand modern manufacturing or transportation, or that World War II was underway. The cargo simply arrived at the airstrip in the jungle, apparently by magic.
Kind of like the Target stores around the country that are repeatedly looted only to be magically restocked by the invisible hand of an invisible genius named John Galt.
