Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Month: December 2024

Distraction

18.12.2024 /

I try not to think about the people in Gaza and on the West Bank, but I find it difficult. After all, we have been taught in school about the Holocaust, we have seen more films about WWII and its racism and victims of racism than about any other single historical topic. Films are a powerful medium. I used to be fairly thick-skinned, but in recent years, I can no longer endure scenes of torture at the cinema: I can smell it! It’s true. I can smell it! Smell the blood, the faeces, the urine. I can hear the screams, see the jugulars of the sadists, and I long to …

I will not tell you what I long to …

My friends laugh at me when I need to leave the television on the pretext of getting a cup of coffee – or at least, they used to; I don’t think they are laughing now. They said: “For Pete’s sake, it’s just fiction!” But I always knew it wasn’t fiction. Now I think they know, too. But they will forget. As soon as Palestine is obliterated and Gaza has become a fashionable Israeli tourist destination, the corporate media will help us all forget about all the Palestinian blood in the soil of Gaza’s tourist resorts. Is Gaza’s soil red, I wonder? I shouldn’t be surprised.

But again, as I say, I try not to think about Gaza. I turn to Isabel Allende, to distracting, relatively intelligent light entertainment.

Now I don’t know what you think about Isabel Allende. She is no doubt smart, probably a good business woman, and with great acumen for what her mostly female readers want. She tells a good yarn, full of unexpected twists and turns and acrobatic leaps. She’s very good at describing sexual bliss. So I was not expecting what I got in “La isla bajo el mar”.

For one thing, the book is painfully long! She is not trying to sell us something light and easy. She is furious, and she goes on and on about it, and believe me, I am hanging on to what she writes, sentence by painful sentence.

In brief, it’s about slavery. Not only slavery: racism. And she is not going about her story in an easy way. She is really trying to understand racism! And that is, to my mind, the greatest merit of this very long and painful book about the remarkable and heroic slave rebellion in Haiti against the French army, no less. A remarkable story, but she tells it as though she was there, and that must have cost her no small amount of research.

How can a reasonably decent man actually believe that people of dark skin are so different from us that they can and should be treated badly, she seems to be asking, because surely, not all slave owners were morally inferior? And I find that she does an impressive job of portraying a slave owner in Haiti and explaining why he behaves in such an appalling manner and how plantation ownership gradually turns what initially is a “reasonably decent man” into a cowardly scoundrel.

Mind you, her slaves are not angels either! Far from it. Once they escape, they seek vengeance and are as cruel as their former owners. In view of how slaves were murdered, tortured to death in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, their vindictiveness is fully understandable, but the reader finds it more painful to learn that they also betray each other. The ghastly tendency of some people to seek power over others – even global hegemony – is not limited to those of white skin.

I had picked up the book thinking I would enjoy light entertainment, a distraction from the ghastly realities being so eagerly aided and abetted by genocide Joe and his ilk. Instead, what I was reading seemed to indicate that this planet would be better off without humans.

But it certainly would be better without the kind of humans that can blithely write and even publish without shame Which Path to Iran (June, 2009). Those are the humans advising the White House.

Look at page 12, for instance, the table of contents that lists, among other things, the options:

Disarming Tehran: The Military Option

  • Chapter 3: Going All the Way: Invasion
  • Chapter 4: The Osiraq Option: Airstrikes
  • Chapter 5: Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike [my emphasis]

Toppling Tehran: Regime Change

  • Chapter 6: The Velvet Revolution: Supporting a Popular Uprising
  • Chapter 7: Inspiring an Insurgency: Supporting Iranian Minority And Opposition Groups
  • Chapter 8: The Coup: Supporting a Military Move Against the Regime

Next, read page 14 in its entirety, under the heading The Trouble with Tehran. Please note, that this is not about women’s rights, not even about justice and democracy. It’s about US interests. Please also note that this was nearly 15 years before 7 October.

Was 7 October the very badly needed excuse Bibi has been waiting for?

Believe me, every time I hear about US interests, I start itching. All over. Abolition of slavery ran contrary to the interests of plantation owners. US interests run contrary to the interests of the vast majority of all humans.

Syria

15.12.2024 /

I am not going to write about Syria. I have never been to Syria and know very little about the country.

I do, however, remember that I learnt and knew – with absolute certainty when it happened – that the USA (starting with NED) played a dirty game in Syria’s civil war. The US was heavily engaged there from the very start. Or before.

Like Libya and Iraq, Syria was once a country with very respectable living standards, relatively high levels of education and health services, but no free press. In 2011 people started clamouring for a free press. Protesters were imprisoned and viciously tortured.

The Syrian government claimed they were cracking down on terrorists. Of course, most of the protesters were not terrorists.

But there were terrorists, and they were being trained and financed by the USA which could not countenance that Assad was under Russian influence.

Did I already mention that Syria was once a country with very respectable living standards, relatively high levels of education and health services?

I might even mention it a third time, since the USA is not a country with very respectable living standards, availability of higher education and decent health services. Much good the free press and the circus of democratic elections have done the majority of US citizens.

Anyway, the US has since imposed “sanctions” on Syria, has stolen Syria’s oil and has occupied its most valuable and productive agricultural land. In short, the USA has done what it regularly does to countries that offer citizens outside Europe respectable living standards, relatively high levels of education and health services:
It has tried to starve the country to death.

This I did not know. Not until now, when I have spent quite a lot of time and effort trying to understand why Assad’s troops simply caved in, why Turkey is playing its strange game, why Russia walked away, and why Israel is applauding a Jihadist occupation of Syria. Very confusing indeed unless you understand the background, which the corporate press painstakingly declines to do.

So rather than tell you all about Syria, I leave you with Chris Hedges, or rather with Alastair Crooke [yes, that is how the name is spelt] to whom he addresses a few questions. I must warn you: The former MI6 officer and diplomat has a weak voice but a most extraordinarily nimble mind.

“North–South Divide”

11.12.2024 /

The title to this post was the humble search string I entered in DuckDuckGo a couple of days ago. It returned less than a dozen results, some of them about the UK.

“North South exploitation” yielded more results, it is true, but if you are a student with an open mind preparing a paper about the issue based on what you find by means of search engines, I’m afraid you will be very misguided. For example no. 3 on the result list I got is an article from thegeographyteacher.com: “The North South Divide made SIMPLE”. Simple it is. Obviously many a student will go for it, and boy-or-boy how misinformed they will be. For one thing there will be no mention of modern exploitation. The exploitation referred to will be from colonial times.

It is true that Aljazeera has somehow managed to get on to the first page of my result list with an opinion piece from 2021. Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960. (Did you notice? That was trillions.)

Most of what you will read in the corporate media will give you the impression that Africa, poor dear, is struggling as a result of past colonialism, and current corruption, and that we, the enlightened and mostly “liberal”, not to mention “humane”, West are doing our darnedest to drag Africa out of the rut. (The corporate media is – I repeat for the umpteenth time – a slut serving the powers that be.) Google and DuckDuckG, I am sorry to say, are part of the corporate media.

True, DuckDuckGo lists a whole bunch of highly academic research papers discussing minute aspects of North South exploitation, but they tend to be arcane. Nevertheless, their existence demonstrates that the issue is known, at least to researchers.

You will find no clear and comprehensible explanation of the basically simple mechanisms of what is often referred to as neo-colonialism. It is not taught in school; it is not highlighted on the internet; and if you google “neo-colonialism”, you will get definitions galore, and a few so-called examples, but little understanding of how it works.

DuckDuckGo will not flag that what we, the enlightened-mostly-liberal-humane West, have done to Africa is to subject the continent to IMF’s neo-liberal dictates and interest rates – usury – so that the countries’ annual incomes are spent mainly on servicing cumulative debts, to be paid in USD, the reserve currency. To obtain USD the countries have to produce what the West demands of them, to be sold to the West at prices determined by the West. And if a country’s government fails to do as ordered by the West, the US will clap sanctions on it and/or organise a regime change operation, as was the case recently in Pakistan (with the coup against Imran Kahn), later in Bangladesh, and most recently in Syria (after more than a decade of crippling sanctions against the near starving Syrian population). You won’t find this stated, far less explained, merely by googling.

We are not supposed to be aware of what’s going on; that’s the point. We, Western consumers don’t want to feel we are cheating workers who cannot afford to send their children to school in far-off countries. We want to feel we are “good people”. Awareness of injustice tends to kindle tensions or, as they say, disrupt “social cohesion”. We feel bad when our governments, voted on by us, actively support a genocide. Distrust grows. And threatens status quo. An example of smouldering tension is the extraordinary reaction to a recent murder in the USA.

In the USA, more and more people feel that they are being cheated. Their jobs have been outsourced. Indebted farmers have had to sell their land for next to nothing to agroindustry. Trump voters, in particular, are angry. They blame China and migration. Nobody is telling them about Bangladesh. Remember the garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed killing 1134 people injuring 2500? I don’t know about where you live, but where I live it’s very hard, still, to find garments that are not produced, in part or altogether, in Bangladesh. “Bangladesh is today one of the world’s largest garment exporters,” this article jubilantly reported in 2021. Amnesty tells another story.

What has triggered the inordinate immigration to the US and to Europe? There are causes, multiple causes. I put to you that those causes are almost all related to the issue “North–South Divide”.

No matter how many malaria vaccines a charitable organisation sends to Africa, we are e-x-p-l-o-i-t-i-n-g – repeat EXPLOITING not only Africa, but the entire global south in a monumental way. This fact is illustrated by a paper that is not easy reading but all the more shocking.

In general, I find that most people in the West still imagine, on the basis of what they have read and heard from the corporate media, that Africans have themselves to blame for their poverty, China and migration can be blamed for poverty in the USA, whereas our governments in the West are doing the best they can, be they “centre-right” or “centre-left” to defend themselves against forces of evil.

Are they doing the best they can? Behold how, as we speak, Santa Ursula and the EU political elite are cynically celebrating an agreement that will turn European farmers into paupers and benefit a small European elite.

Google and DuckDuckGo are not innocent parties. DuckDuckGo inc. is an independent company. It has stakes, as have all companies. It protects, first of all, its own interests, and so it should. But should we trust it to satify all our needs to know; yours and mine and those of the people in, for instance, Bangladesh? I put to you that we should not. I use DuckDuckGo every day, many times a day, but I know its limitations. So I put to you that we must also seek information about the state of the world actively, not from the corporate media, not using the corporate media’s search engines.

And one of the first things we need to understand are the causes and mechanisms of the North–South Divide. Why must we understand them? I’m afraid the answer to that question is a logical loop. We must understand them in order to understand how important it is to understand them.

I suggest starting with an introduction to third world debt, provided by two economists who are generous enough to devote some of their valuable time to explaining the matter to us – non-economists – in plain English. I listened to the linked “lecture” – for that was what it was – several months ago, but today, I printed the transcript and have been pouring over it for a couple of hours with a marker pen. I also downloaded the UNCTAD report commented on by one of them. I honestly think we owe it to ourselves and not least to the planet and future generations to seek to understand how imbalance of power is beeing abused destructively. I am sure somebody, though I cannot for the life of me remember who, once declared that “knowledge is power”.

(You might also take a look at some of the the other lectures in the series.)

Sociopathy – past, present and future

05.12.2024 /

Most people I speak to nowadays are worried about the future. Not that I speak to many, but those I do speak to have varying political viewpoints, and are of widely different ages and levels of education. Most of them disagree with very many of my views. But they are all worried; frightened even. One person told me today: “I am almost always angry now, rancorous even. It’s very uncomfortable, a corrosive state of mind.”

I told her: “As time passes, you will feel more sad than angry. We know there are scum-bags out there, particularly among those in power and those wanting to be in power. That’s how it’s always been and how it will always be.”

I happen to be reading the book “Una historia de España” by Perez-Reverte, which angrily summarises Spain’s inglorious past. I have read it before, but feel a need to read it again, because it mirrors what some of us in the West feel today in the face of our own very inglorious present. I have come to that very point in Spain’s past, as described by him, that seems almost to be about us now. Here is my interpretation of Perez-Reverte’s take:

In the second half of the nineteenth century, there were basically two political parties: the self-serving, often decadent liberals, and the conservatives (headed by a Church fanatically opposed to enlightenment) both equally intent on exploiting and suppressing peasants and the nascent class of industrial workers. (Spain had been a supremely backward country and had had virtually no industry until well into the nineteenth century). Both parties were supported by powerful military factions.

BUT at that very time, books were being written, spread and read, in spite of rigid censorship, by offspring of the burgeoning bourgeoisie. A number of “brave men and women” organised clandestine literacy classes. There were even a couple of revolutions, one in 1854, that were promptly suffocated with mass executions. For the majority, life was bleak, to say the least, suppression was more systematic than it had ever been. But looking back, the author seems to be saying, we see that seeds had been sown that would come to fruition a century later, at the death of Franco.

I think there is no doubt that US supremacy is coming to an end, just as the supremacy of the medieval Spanish oligarchy eventually came to an end. But will the process take another century? Will the Middle East have to wait for a century before it can know peace? Will USA’s distant vassals in Europe have to send their children to fight against Russia and die in the hundreds of thousands to protect the USD?

And what happens after that? Will the climate a hundred years hence accommodate life on this planet? Will the Chinese truly abide by their much vaunted Confucianism? Are there not scum-bags in China as elsewhere. Are we as defenceless against scum-bags as against climate change?

Crime passionel?

01.12.2024 /

When we read about a serious crime, we tend to look for a financial motive – “follow the money”. Forcing Ukraine to fight “to the last Ukrainian” is, from an ethical point of view an execrable crime. Is it merely a crime of passion – “russophobia” – as some critics have suggested?

While the blindfolded Norwegian population undoubtedly suffers from acute Russophobia, the Norwegian and other European governments may have more rational reasons for sacrificing Ukraine. After all, they know perfectly well that this war was provoked by NATO, prolonged by NATO and exacerbated by NATO.

I put to you that there may be important financial motives. Apart from Ukraine’s natural resources which US and Western European vultures are eager to get their hands on, there is the matter of the US dollar, the “reserve currency” (the stuff that central banks theoretically have stashed away in case all the country’s bank customers simultaneously demand their savings). It used to be gold, now it’s USD, the currency that has underpinned most business transactions all over the world for decades.

The Reserve Currency is being challenged by the BRICS de-dollarization movement in which Russia plays a prominent part.

JP Morgan, Investopedia, and such are downplaying de-dollarization, which does not mean that it isn’t very real. On the contrary, they keenly realise that “the trend toward further de-dollarization seems unstoppable“.

We are already seeing that the price of gold has more than quadrupled since 2002. (Gold cannot be produced and exists only in very limited quantities. It is therefore considered a safe investment.) The price has risen because demand has risen. We have also seen, as you surely know, a spectacular rise in the price of Bitcoins. This tendency reflects a “loss in confidence in America’s management of the global order” and hence a perceived need to “diversify” reserves.

Meanwhile, US debt is now at 34 trillion USD. That is 120 % of the country’s GDP. Of all taxes, tariffs and fees collected by the US, 23 % goes to paying interest on debt. The US runs an increase in deficits every single year, not least to invest in wars, and every year, it finances the new deficit with new loans. How long can it keep the ball rolling?

What happens if people/countries stop investing in loans to the US? Well, the US would have to raise the price it is willing to pay for the loan (interest rate). US citizens are still buying treasury bonds, but the share of US treasury securities held by foreign investors has fallen from 34 % in 2015 to 24% in 2024 although Europe and other allies are still bravely buying them. (China holds $800 billion of US debt, down from $1.3 trillion in 2014.)

This is not good news for the USA. Even Investopedia admits that

the U.S. has long depended on the dollar’s role as a reserve currency to support running large deficits on government spending and international trade. If central banks around the world no longer felt the need to stuff their coffers with dollars, then the U.S. would likely lose this flexibility.

So back to Europe’s suicidal war against Russia: To be frank, I’m not into the mechanisms of Europe’s economic reliance on the dollar, but I believe they are linked to the growing financialisation (what we used to call “speculation”) of our economies. At any rate they say that “When America sneezes, Europe dies of Covid.” Or something to that effect.

Europe is joined at the hip with the USA and is very shaky now, with zero growth and huge debts. Meanwhile, the EUROzone suffers from “serious structural weaknesses”, whatever that means, and even Deutsche Bank has had liquidity problems. In short, the Euro might look defiant, but it is and has long been on life support.

There are many obstacles to de-dollarization. Nevertheless, as you can hear in this long but extremely interesting conversation between three economists, it is already well under-way, and BRICS and non-aligned countries are enthusiastically working out ways and means to overcome them.

I believe, in short, that Europe (and the US) fears that BRICS (rather than Russia) represents a financial (rather than military) threat. European leaders are prolonging and exacerbating this war not to defend Ukraine but in the hope of weakening Russia and slowing down de-dollarization.

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