Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Category: Planet Earth (Page 1 of 3)

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.

“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.)

Looking back – far back

16.11.2024 /

In 1911, the composer Gustav Mahler died from a combination of poor heart valves and a streptococcus infection. He was only 50 years old. Never mind whether or not you like or have even heard of Gustav Mahler – for those of us who like music from previous centuries, he is one of the greats, though far from all lovers of classical music are Mahler enthusiasts.

The reason I was reminded of Gustav Mahler (I warn you: This is going to be a magna grada digression), in fact the reason why I am currently listening to his Symphony no. 3, is that I have just finished reading a gigantic novel by Thomas Mann, The Buddenbrooks, published in 1901.

Thomas Mann was heartbroken when Gustav Mahler died, and wrote the novella Death in Venice, upon which the eponymous 1971 film was based. Although Mann’s protagonist was a writer like himself, Visconti who directed the film made the dying Mahler the hero. I believe the film contributed greatly to Mahler’s increased popularity among even young people in the last quarter of the previous century.

Thomas Mann, on the other hand, (1875–1955), lived to stand up to Hitler in a big way and survived to a relatively ripe old age.

The Buddenbrooks for which he won a Nobel prize analyses as only an epic novel can, how a wealthy, respected and God-faring clan can disintegrate. An interesting aspect of the story is that the Buddenbrooks are both truly “good” people and astute businessmen. He is not – I repeat – not ascribing their demise to vice.

“Demise” is the key word here. What causes demise? Thomas Mann needed hundreds of pages to explain the matter, so how could I do so in few words? However, I don’t doubt that most analysts of past empires will agree that the causes of demise include internal cracks and external pressures.

In his novels The Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice, Mann is also obsessed with Death. Listening to Mahler’s music (now the Symphony no. 5) I imagine Mahler was too. After all, people died back then, in a big way, even from common colds! In The Buddenbrooks, the main protagonist dies in unbelievable pain from an infected tooth.

As I hear it, Mahler’s music is all about death, senseless, outrageous death, such as the deaths of the 225 people who were torn out of completely ordinary lives on 9 November 2024 (14 still missing) due to, YES, vice. No, not their own vice, that of the powers that be: Greed.

Greed that for decades has dismissed warnings about climate change.

See the pictures of the flood and its consequences from Elpais.com ( Double-click picture no. 2 to navigate with left/right arrows.)

Listen

12.10.2023 /

There are limits as to how long you can batter a dog, a horse, a man or a woman before he/she or it will rise and attack you with all the ferocity he/she or it had to suppress for months or years.

There are limits as to how long you can abuse a people, a nation, a continent, or a planet, before it will rise and attack you with all the ferocity it had to suppress for years or even decades.

On this cheerful note, allow me to urge you to watch and listen to Professor Jason Hickel. His voice is not often heard in the press – no doubt, he is up against powerful opposition from the owners of corporate media (including Google, Facebook, etc.) – but the voice is making its way, ever so slowly, to more and more people.

To quote him:

“This is not a time for timid responses, tweaking around the edges of a failing, degenerating system.”

Listen! Please, please listen!

(Part 1 of his lecture starts after about 10 minutes of introductory music, speeches etc. Part 2 is mostly critique of his lecture by 3 people. He is allowed to answer at the end.

https://www.sum.uio.no/english/research/networks/arne-naess-programme/videos/

Prayer for Africa

24.06.2023 /

What are the headlines in your country?

I bet one of today’s biggest headlines in your country is the same as in my country: about the implosion of a small vessel somewhere off the coast of Canada. It had a handful of passengers, it is true, and to their families, we of course offer our condolences. I’m sure that being imploded is a disagreeable way of dying.

Mind you, I watched Titanic, too – the film, that is – and I admit I was impressed by the luxurious tableware and the music and the grandeur of the disaster. Goodness, yes!

But frankly, looking back now, I realise that Titanic was nothing – even visually nothing – compared to the grandeur that meets the eye if you run a Google images search for climate+disaster+Africa. Try it.

I wonder, I honestly do, how it is that while few Europeans, and maybe even US Americans, remain dry-eyed at the edge of any one of the innumerable and endless French fields decked with plain white crosses over nameless humans who fell there in WWI, we turn our backs to what is going on in Africa. There are doubtless many and complex reasons, but I will mention two, for rhetorical purposes:

1) Could it be that we feel guilty, that we suspect that – although we never meant to hurt them, oh no! – that we suspect that our welfare (let’s be honest and admit that anyone who is reading this enjoys conditions of life far superior to the average African living in Africa) somehow, to some degree, for obscure reasons beyond us, has contributed to their plight? Through no fault of our own, of course.

2) Could it be that in spite of all our activism for Black rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and whatnot rights, we are just a wee bit, you know – just a tiny bit – um, I hardly dare use the word – racist?

Those who fell in WWI are unknown to most of us, but they were white. Those who are dying in the Mediterranean are also unknown to us, but they are not white. I hear there is much talk of anti-Semitism again. I resent such talk, not – I repeat NOT – because I condone what is real anti-Semitism in any way, shape or form, but because the term “anti-Semitism” is being abused with impunity to commit horrendous racist crimes against Palestinians, whose skin is just a touch darker than the former Europeans who moved to Israel after WWII.

So how, I wonder, do Africans feel about all this? Most of them are much darker, even, than Palestinians. Are we all, in the West (and Israel undoubtedly belongs to the West) a bunch of closet racists?

A good photographer can take stunningly beautiful photos of despair, while hinting at even more stunningly precarious human existence shrouded in mist or sand, somehow alive under unbelievably difficult conditions. David Attenborough has shown us that there are tiny animals that survive miraculously in the Sahara. Maybe we shall see him in a final scene, telling us about how the unbelievably brave and resistant sapiens sapiens is miraculously surviving in, yes, a spreading-like-wildfire-desert, in Africa. That would be his crowning masterpiece.

Many don’t survive of course. Another 39 just drowned, trying to cross the Mediterranean. But we don’t want to hear about starving Africans. It’s their own fault, isn’t it? They’re corrupt, aren’t they, and they’re ignorant. We, of course, in the West, are neither corrupt nor ignorant.

Sci-fi authors regularly write about how the entire planet has been destroyed by weapons of mass destruction, greed and climate disasters. I put to the community of sci-fi authors: Let Africans survive. The rest of us are useless.

I’M NOT FINISHED!

I check the news from the Norwegian National Broadcasting company every single day without fail. So I can assure you that we do hear about Africa from time to time. Listening to or reading the news from the Norwegian National Broadcasting Company, you will get the impression that the only problem in Africa is a few warlords. There are, indeed, a few horrible warlords in Africa, in Sudan, for instance, and in Congo. There is one fundamental difference, however, between a warlord from the global south and a warlord from the filthy-rich “West”: Warlords from the Global South would not be able to start WWIII. Our warlords, however, in the filthy-rich West, seem determined to do just that. After all, their kids will not be the ones to serve and die on the battle fields.

Warlords are an irresponsible psychopathic lot, agreed, be they white, black or green. Hegemon warlords, however, are the very, very worst.

Good news!

23.09.2022 /

Those of us who can still bear to read, watch or listen to the news do so at our own risk. The emotional cost of learning, day after day, that just about everything is going from bad to even worse is high. This morning, I learnt that ten per cent of all Norwegians use sleeping pills. I hasten to add that Norwegians are health freaks (they jog, ski, exercise in gyms, eat sensibly and don’t drink alcoholic beverages on weekdays). The real intake of sleeping pills is probably much higher since many people buy prescription drugs in countries that are less restrictive. Add to that all the people who have several glasses of wine before they go to bed – a new trend in Norway.

“The News”, as we used to call it back in our days of innocence, when grown-ups would gather around the radio to hear what was going on in the world, was implicitly trusted. It was, we were told, fact, not conjecture, hence not biased.

For my part, I make a point of regularly reading/watching/listening to Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera caters to people with business interests, but is not Euro-/US-centric. Also, they run very interesting debates to which they invite people of all ideological shades. Nevertheless, I was very surprised to see, among the list of Al Jazeera headlines on my phone app: “Degrowth is not austerity – it is actually just the opposite”.

Mind you, this turned out to be only an “opinion” piece (which I read jubilantly). Still, it had been given a prominent place, and that was truly good news. Maybe parts of the business world are starting to understand a thing or two.

Now, have you heard about “degrowth”? You probably wouldn’t have if you rely only on mainstream news outlets, where degrowth is considered a four-letter word. To the extent it is uttered, it is perfunctorily slated, because degrowth would mean the end of … – well, a lot of things. It would, however, save the planet and save those of us (including other species) who are still around. Most of us would even fare very much better than we do today, said the opinion piece.

Cheered by finding it in Al Jazeera, I decided to give degrowth another chance. (I had previously dismissed it as being wishful thinking: Those greedy fools who own most of the world would never allow it, I thought.) So I bought a book that has swept me off my feet. I recommend it to you with all my heart. It will make you feel that maybe there is hope after all. Don’t be frightened by the fact that the preface is written by members of Extinction Rebellion. The author is called Jason Hickel – he must be the smartest guy in town – any town. I say no more.

The book is called:

LESS IS MORE 
HOW DEGROWTH WILL SAVE THE WORLD

Enjoy, and have a much better day!

Democratic deficit

11.09.2022 /

The problem – one of the problems – is that nobody quite knows how to solve this mess. On the one hand the European sanctions against Russia are bringing Europe to its knees. On the other hand, the entire world is completely unprepared for the meteorological disasters that are thrashing country after country in spite of serious warnings over a period of 40 years.

The powers that be – i.e. politicians of all colours, mainstream economists, financiers and major corporations have betrayed the rest of us. Social media and the press – from which public opinion takes its cue – have failed disastrously. The USA wants to pulverise Julian Assange for allegedly damaging US interests; but what about all the individuals and institutions who have effectively fanned global climate collapse?

Now, those of us who can still bear to read the news finally understand, and we want to contribute our bit, but how? By refraining from eating meat? Will that solve anything? Obviously, Liz Truss does not know. Nor does the Labour Party, I’m afraid, in the UK or anywhere else. All the leading political parties have swallowed the neo-liberal bullshit. (I refuse to apologise for using a word that is accurate.)

They have all put their faith in technology, commodification, an unfettered free market and – in the case of Europe, the EU. I will not deny EU achievements, such as a more than welcome rise in living standards in the poorest EU countries. On the other hand, the EU is a technocracy that arguably suffers from a Democratic deficit.

The EU is at war. The EU is fighting for the USA, for NATO, and we will all go down together, as Billy Joel sang with reference to the Vietnam war.

The Democratic deficit has become all the more glaring now that we see that we are headed for a very bad place. Europeans feel like cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse. Voting for somebody else will just get us more “business as usual”.

For example: Yes, we must cease to squander water and electricity, but does that warrant colossal price hikes on water and electricity? Wouldn’t rationing be a preferable option? I’m sure Liz Truss and her ilk can afford the price hikes. But for the majority of Europeans, it would be better to limit water and energy usage to a few hours a day than to turn us into street beggars.

All the other tremendous “climate” questions are elephants on the rampage. There are lots of people with lots and lots of expertise and knowledge, but they are not – it seems – asked, and far less heard. There are even economists who dispute the neo-liberal narrative (e.g. Thomas Piketty). The issues, ideas, suggestions are all there, hanging in the air, but they are not aired, not explained, not properly discussed. In short, we’ve been had. Unless we take matters into our own hands, we will all – Europeans, Africans, Americans and Asians – go down together, victims of cyclones, fires, food shortages, droughts, floods and – not least – poverty.

We look after ourselves and our families, assuming that governments look after society and the planet. It should be clear for all to see, at last, that they do no such thing. Governments look after themselves too. The system, in short, is not working.

Something entirely different is called for.

Let us behave as mature human beings

31.07.2022 /

The title of this post is long, but I shall make up for that with a body text that is commensurately brief.

I put to you that almost all human beings

want:

  • enough to eat three times a day
  • a bed to sleep in (without bedbugs)

do not want:

  • to fear for their children
  • to fear being assaulted when they sleep

I could make both lists very much longer, but I am sticking to the most basic of basics, because even at this most basic of basic levels, we – that is, almost all human beings – are heading in the wrong direction. Those who never had enough to eat, will be eating even less. Those whose only fear for their children was that they might get hooked on drugs or that the girls might get raped will now have far greater worries.

War games may be fun on computers, but they are not fun in real life. Climate change is not even fun on computers, and it is devastating for farmers, for the victims of hurricanes, floods and fires, for domestic and wild animals, even for whales and surfers. Climate change is or will be – in the shorter rather than the long run – hell on earth. You may or may not believe me – or rather, you might as well, because … Climate change is not linear, it is ex-po-nen-tial.

The global Earth Overshoot Day fell on 28 July this year.

What are we doing about it? What are the people to whom we entrusted the responsibility of leading our countries doing about it? They are militarising. Against each other (i.e. not against climate change).

I promised to make this brief, and I intend to keep my promise, because there are people who know far more about militarisation than I do.

I urge you to take a look at this site: https://nocoldwar.org

This business of guns …

11.07.2022 /

During the seventies, feminists maintained that if women had power, there would be no wars. Women, feminists claimed, know that food on the table is more important than guns. After all, we can’t eat corpses. Back then, of course, many women spent most of their lives cooking, cleaning and looking after children. But now, with so many women in power – women who never even have to boil a potato and who delegate the care of their children to underpaid strangers – it would seem that women are no better.

Mind you, I’m all for women’s equal rights. Unequivocally so! It’s just that – well, women are no better, that’s all. Look at von der Leyen and Nancy Pelosi, hawks of the first order. Nancy Pelosi, for one, should know that the greatest threats to USA are not the Chinese nor the Russians, but domestic problems. Serious domestic problems. She knows! But she is bluffing, hoping to keep the Democratic Party morale up against all odds.

Domestic problems, yes, and the global climate crisis, which is still just nibbling away at the edges of human existence, not least in the continent we all initially came from, Africa; but it will come roaring over us, all of us, including the Chinese and the Russians unless we get our acts together. We’ve had foretastes in the shape of forest fires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, cyclones, mass migrations, power outages… – but in the end, we’ll know all of the above and more, at once and everywhere. You don’t believe me? Not my problem, really, because I’ll be gone soon, and I’m not religious, so if the human species doesn’t survive, that won’t bother me much. I will point out, however, in case you have forgotten, that even today, long after Freud, denialism is still considered a serious obstacle to rational problem solving.

To be frank, it is my problem, too, because I really hate seeing people suffer. Also in the US, people are suffering and have been suffering for decades. Decades! And your politicians haven’t done a thing about it, too busy defending the neoliberal economic order and, more recently, too obsessed with the idea of recovering the country’s irreversibly lost hegemony. The Biden administration’s proposed fiscal budget for 2023 includes spending USD 813 BILLION on “defence and national security”, but apparently both houses of Congress will demand to spend more (yes, more not less!). USD 813 billion is more than was spent on “defence and national security” during any year of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and more than what is spent by China and Russia and the 7 next top military spenders combined.

More than half of what US Americans paid to the military last year, about $2,000 per taxpayer, according to an analysis by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies…..will have gone to giant weapons contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, along with thousands of smaller arms-making firms.

People in Europe are also suffering now, and will suffer more because of this stupid war of attrition against Russia. And of course Ukraine is suffering terribly, having been tricked into waging a war it cannot win. Mind you, Russia is not – repeat NOT – suffering. The sanctions on Russian gas and fertilisers and wheat, etc. are bringing Europe (but not Russia) to its knees. That will not – repeat NOT – benefit USA, because who will buy products from the US when Europe’s purchasing power has been reduced to pennies? There will still be Australians, of course.

USA has its holier than the Bible+Talmud+Koran so-called constitutional amendments. The defence of these “amendments” is reminiscent of religious fundamentalists’ vindication of “laws” imposed many centuries ago, laws that might have made sense at the time when they were adopted, but that are completely out-of-time and out-of-place today, in short downright nefarious.

Guns! Good heavens, how ludicrous! How pathetic! Above all, how sick! Frankly I prefer an honest hurricane, which at least reminds survivors that we – women and men – are not omnipotent.

The matter of money

27.11.2021 /

Where were we?
Oh , yes:

   pandemics;
   rising inequality;
   and of course the pending implosion of basically all systems, due to climate change.

Is there any point in writing? Is there any point of signing petitions which governments don’t even bother to read, of joining protest marches that attract little notice unless they are brutally castigated by riot police. Is there any point of even discussing these issues?

Over the past decade, Greta Thunberg, Thomas Piketty, and Yuval Noah Harari have all been saying – each in his or her way – Stop the runaway train! They are no doubt still saying it and many, many others with them. Yet, all we hear from the powers-that-be is, as Greta Thunberg points out: bla-bla-bla.

Many of the passengers on the runaway train are bent over their mobile phones or tablets, some are chatting quietly, some are gazing out the window, a few are reading a book or a printout of a report or academic paper. In one of the wagons where a group of 6 are singing Christmas carols, a man has managed to fall asleep in a corner. Night has fallen outside, and the train careens on.

But not all is lost. Tireless efforts by millions of dedicated scientists all over the world have yielded results. Most of the deleterious processes undermining climate as we know it have been identified. By the same token, researchers have found out how these processes can be halted, even stopped. Yes, it can be done!

There is only one overwhelming obstacle: “the matter of money”.

Not that there isn’t enough “money”. Far from it. Somebody said the other day, “it only takes 2 % of all countries’ national product” – that’s not much, really, not when so much is at stake.

What is so utterly unresolved, however, is “whose money?”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skibbereen_by_James_Mahony,_1847.JPG

Alas, there is much callousness about! Take for instance the British authorities’ reluctance to provide relief to its own citizens during the great famine in 1845-52. (One million died, and more than 2 million fled.) Was there an element of ethnic cleansing involved (after all, the victims were Irish, Catholic and poor) or was this disaster only a matter of “who pays?” At any rate, Great Britain was the richest nation on earth, and the authorities knew exactly what was happening.

Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries, when neither the nobility nor the clergy paid any tax, was a different matter. The Spanish crown, nobility and Church desperately needed funds to pay for endless wars and unimaginable profligacy (“noblesse oblige”). For a while, the Crown had access to silver and gold, robbed from Latin America, but over time, Spanish decadence was basically paid for by the peasants, who had the nasty habit of dying of starvation and exhaustion. There was no industry, few if any bustling towns with wealthy, tax-paying burgers, and hardly any agriculture to speak of. Spain was an extremely backward country.

Why? Because of what we would nowadays refer to as an “attitude problem” or, more precisely, because of ideology. Finally, in the 18th century, “the enlightenment” started seeping in, eroding cracks in the pernicious ideology that enveloped Spanish society, and Spain slowly started picking itself up out of the gutter.

Mind you, there was plenty of resistance to the progressive reforms advocated by adherents of “enlightenment”. Neither the clergy, nor the nobility wanted to relinquish privileges and – this is key – the destitute peasants weren’t impressed either; the reforms sounded outlandish and would not immediately benefit them. Spain remained a backward country until after the death of its last dictator, Franco.

Ideological sea-changes tend to be painful. There will be unpleasant discussions between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and students. Besides, not all so-called “progressive” ideas are good ideas even if rioters are willing to die for them.

In many countries, we see a traditional “right wing”, a traditional “left wing” and a so-called “centre”. And then we have what the press calls “extreme right” and “extreme left”, both of which are condescendingly referred to as “populist”. The majority of voters want to play safe, so they tend to prefer “centrist” parties. In recent years, however, growing income and wealth inequality and anxiety about the future (immigration, crime, and climate change) has driven growing segments of many populations to lose faith in Democracy, to vote for fascist leaders, and to demand “tough action”. (We are now seeing a neo-fascist taking the lead in Chile, after the first round of elections. Interestingly, an Italian newspaper has seen the writing on the wall for Chile and has published an excellent analysis of Antonio Kast’s style.)

Whether a government is headed by traditional parties, fascists or “populists”, most countries are in the throws of ideological, economic and political petrification. There is an unwillingness to acknowledge that a free market has not and will not solve the issues of immigration pressure, crime and climate change. The free market has, inst exacerbated the problem of growing income and wealth inequality, i.e. the divide between rich and poor countries (hence the growing flow of desperate migrants) and between the haves and have-nots in each country (hence crime and civil disorder).

Moreover, no country that I know of has started adapting to a very simple little fact:

Continued economic growth is simply not sustainable. There is absolutely no doubt about this, like it or not. I repeat: Continued economic growth is not and never will be sustainable.

We need to find other ways of doing business. There are lots of ideas out there, alternative economic models, elephants we fail to bring into the runaway train. They are tied up outside the train stations, in the freezing cold. There is no doubt in my mind that something will have to give, sooner or later. We are at a sea change. In comparison, the advent of the Pill and the Personal Computer will have been small change. So bring in the elephants!


							
	

				
	


		

		
				
			

						
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