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Waves of humanity
Sprawling Mexico City rolls across the landscape, displacing every scrap of natural habitat‘If our species had started with just two people at the time of the earliest agricultural practices some 10,000 years ago, and increased by 1% per year, today humanity would be a solid ball of flesh many thousand light years in diameter, and expanding with a radial velocity that, neglecting relativity, would be many times faster than the speed of light.’ Gabor Zovanyi
Photograph: Pablo Lopez Luz
Posts Tagged ‘Mike Davis’
Forget aids: Desist from further exploitation
Posted on February 28, 2016
Enough of aid – let’s talk reparations
Should the poor colonized States wait another 100 years to earn $1.25 per day?
Colonialism is one of those subjects you’re not supposed to discuss in polite company – at least not north of the Mediterranean. Most people feel uncomfortable about it, and would rather pretend it didn’t happen.
Debate around reparations is threatening because it upends the usual narrative of development
Habib Battah shared this link and commented on it
Enough of aid – let’s talk reparations The impact of colonialism cannot be ignored theguardian.com|By Jason Hickel. Nov.27, 2015
Who built Europe?
“In the mainstream narrative of international development, peddled by institutions from the World Bank, the Monetary Fund to the UK’s Department of International Development, the history of colonialism is routinely erased.
According to the official story, developing countries are poor because of their own internal problems, while western countries are rich because they worked hard, and upheld the right values and policies…
And because the west happens to be further ahead, its countries generously reach out across the chasm to give “aid” to the rest – just a little something to help them along.
If colonialism is ever acknowledged, it’s to say that it was Not a crime (against human rights), but rather a benefit to the colonised – a leg up the development ladder
The historical record tells a very different story, and that opens up difficult questions about another topic that Europeans prefer to avoid: reparations.
No matter how much they try, however, this topic resurfaces over and over again.
Recently, after a debate at the Oxford Union, Indian MP Shashi Tharoor’s powerful case for reparations went viral, attracting more than 3 million views on YouTube. (Algeria is re-launching the reparation issue of French colonialism also)
Clearly the issue is hitting a nerve.
The reparations debate is threatening because it completely upends the usual narrative of development. It suggests that poverty in the global south is not a natural phenomenon, but has been actively created.
And it casts western countries in the role not of benefactors, but of plunderers.
When it comes to the colonial legacy, some of the facts are almost too shocking to comprehend.
When Europeans arrived in what is now Latin America in 1492, the region may have been inhabited by between 50 million and 100 million indigenous people.
By the mid 1600s, their population was slashed to about 3.5 million.
The vast majority succumbed to foreign disease and many were slaughtered, died of slavery or starved to death after being kicked off their land. It was like the holocaust seven times over.
What were the Europeans after? Silver was a big part of it.
Between 1503 and 1660, 16m kilograms of silver were shipped to Europe, amounting to three times the total European reserves of the metal. (Most of this silver was coined as money and exported by Portugal to China that had started collecting taxes in the form of silver money)
By the early 1800s, a total of 100m kg of silver had been drained from the veins of Latin America and pumped into the European economy, providing much of the capital for the industrial revolution.
To get a sense for the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if 100m kg of silver was invested in 1800 at 5% interest – the historical average – it would amount to £110trn ($165trn) today. An unimaginable sum.
Europeans slaked their need for labour in the colonies – in the mines and on the plantations – not only by enslaving indigenous Americans but also by shipping slaves across the Atlantic from Africa.
Up to 15 million of them.
In the North American colonies alone, Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that’s worth $97trn – more than the entire global GDP.
Right now, 14 Caribbean nations are in the process of suing Britain for slavery reparations.
They point out that when Britain abolished slavery in 1834 it compensated Not the slaves but rather the owners of slaves, to the tune of £20m, the equivalent of £200bn today.
Perhaps they will demand reparations equivalent to this figure, but it is conservative: it reflects only the price of the slaves, and tells us nothing of the total value they produced during their lifetimes, nor of the trauma they endured, nor of the hundreds of thousands of slaves who worked and died during the centuries before 1834.
These numbers tell only a small part of the story, but they do help us imagine the scale of the value that flowed from the Americas and Africa into European coffers after 1492.
Then there is India.
When the British seized control of India, they completely reorganised the agricultural system, destroying traditional subsistence practices to make way for cash crops for export to Europe.
As a result of British interventions, up to 29 million Indians died of famine during the last few decades of the 19th century in what historian Mike Davis calls the “late Victorian holocaust”.
Laid head to foot, their corpses would stretch the length of England 85 times over. And this happened while India was exporting an unprecedented amount of food, up to 10m tonnes per year.
British colonisers also set out to transform India into a captive market for British goods.
To do that, they had to destroy India’s impressive indigenous industries.
Before the British arrived, India commanded 27% of the world economy, according to economist Angus Maddison.
By the time they left, India’s share had been cut to just 3%.
The same thing happened to China.
After the Opium Wars, when Britain invaded China and forced open its borders to British goods on unequal terms, China’s share of the world economy dwindled from 35% to an all-time low of 7%.
Meanwhile, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20% to 60% during the colonial period. Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.
And we haven’t even begun to touch the scramble for Africa.
In the Congo, to cite just one brief example, as historian Adam Hochschild recounts in his haunting book King Leopold’s Ghost, Belgium’s lust for ivory and rubber killed some 10 million Congolese – roughly half the country’s population.
The wealth gleaned from that plunder was siphoned back to Belgium to fund beautiful stately architecture and impressive public works, including arches and parks and railway stations – all the markers of development that adorn Brussels today, the bejewelled headquarters of the European Union.
We could go on. It is tempting to see this as just a list of crimes, but it is much more than that.
These snippets hint at the contours of a world economic system that was designed over hundreds of years to enrich a small portion of humanity at the expense of the vast majority.
This history makes the narrative of international development seem a bit absurd, and even outright false.
Frankie Boyle got it right:
“Even our charity is essentially patronising. Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself. Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.”
We can’t put a price on the suffering wrought by colonialism.
And there is not enough money in the world to compensate for the damage it inflicted.
We can, however, stop talking about charity, and instead acknowledge the debt that the west owes to the rest of the world.
Even more importantly, we can work to quash the colonial instinct whenever it rears its ugly head, as it is doing right now in the form of land grabs, illicit financial extraction, and unfair trade deals.
Shashi Tharoor argued for a reparations payment of only £1 – a token acknowledgement of historical fact. That might not do much to assuage the continued suffering of those whose countries have been ravaged by the colonial encounter. But at least it would set the story straight, and put us on a path towards rebalancing the global economy.
End of Lebanon: Merchant Republic? Comprador Republic? New expatriate contractors Republic?
Posted on: November 27, 2017
Saad Hariri, ou la fin de la « République marchande » libanaise
Nicolas Dot-Pouillard, Politologue, Chercheur associé, Institut français du Proche-Orient, les propos de l’auteur n’engagent pas l’institution
Les pressions Saoudiennes sur le premier ministre libanais Saad Hariri ont presque eu gain de cause d’un court état de grâce : en annonçant sa démission lors d’une conférence de presse tenue à Riyad, le 4 novembre 2017, c’est le mythe de l’unité nationale libanaise qui est encore mis à mal.
Saad Hariri a certes « suspendu » sa démission, à l’occasion de la fête d’indépendance libanaise, le 22 novembre 2017. Mais le Liban n’est pas loin de renouer avec une politique du vide caractéristique des années post-2005, une fois le retrait des troupes syriennes du Liban effectué : c’est plus traditionnellement la présidence de la République qui est vacante, de novembre 2007 à mai 2008, puis de mai 2014 à octobre 2016.
Les limites d’un compromis national
Saad Hariri s’était donné la stature progressive d’un homme de compromis.
À terme, ce fut aussi la figure d’un homme seul. Opposé à Damas, il s’engageait pourtant, en novembre 2015, à soutenir la candidature à la présidence de la République de Sleiman Frangie – leader maronite du parti des Maradas, et partisan de Bashar al-Assad.
La politique de la main tendue avec la Coalition adverse du 8 mars – emmenée par le Hezbollah chiite- aboutit à l’élection à la présidence de la République de Michel Aoun, en octobre 2016, et à la naissance d’un gouvernement d’union nationale, deux mois plus tard.
Nul n’était pourtant dupe des tensions qui traversaient le Courant du futur – la formation de Saad Hariri- et les différents leaderships de la communauté sunnite libanaise : les élections municipales de mai 2016 voyaient Tripoli tomber dans l’escarcelle de Ashraf Rifi – un ancien responsable des Forces de sécurité intérieures (FSI), particulièrement virulent envers l’Iran et le Hezbollah.
Les échelles libanaises et régionales se confondant, le Sommet islamique arabo-américain de Riyad de mai 2017 accrut sans doute la pression sur Saad Hariri.
Américains et Saoudiens – ces derniers soutenus de moins en moins discrètement par Israël – ont fait de l’Iran, du Hezbollah – et du Hamas palestinien- des ennemis à abattre.
La perspective d’un gouvernement d’union nationale intégrant le Hezbollah, et dirigé par Saad al-Hariri, si elle faisait sens au Liban, rentrait ainsi de plus en plus en contradiction avec les grandes lignes de force régionales, structurées par le conflit entre l’Arabie saoudite et l’Iran.
Le récit sunnite libanais
Saad Hariri n’est pas seulement la victime de pressions saoudiennes ou des contradictions internes du jeu politique libanais : il porte à bout de souffle un Courant du futur qui est en manque de récit historique – notamment pour la communauté sunnite, qu’il peine de plus en plus à mobiliser.
Le leadership de la famille Hariri n’est pas en totale continuité avec l’héritage des générations qui les ont précédées.
Premier ministre sunnite et père de l’indépendance libanaise de 1943, Riyad al-Solh (1894-1951) pensait un Liban inséré dans son environnement arabe – en même temps qu’il posa les bases d’un service public libanais pour toutes les confessions, comme le rappelle l’historien Ahmed Beydoun.
Yabebeyrouth/Wikimedia
Dans les années 1950, la communauté sunnite libanaise avait ses grands récits : le Parti des Najadeh de Adnan al-Hakim s’inscrivait dans une narration nationale et arabiste.
Le nassérisme égyptien eut ses enfants sunnites libanais : dans les années 1970, les Mourabitouns de Ibrahim Qoleilat tenaient le quartier de Tariq al-Jdideh, à Beyrouth.
À la même époque, les jeunes générations sunnites se raccordaient aisément à une dynamique révolutionnaire régionale – emmenée par les Palestiniens de l’OLP.
Le discours confessionnel était plus atténué que de nos jours : au début des années 1980, une révolution iranienne chiite pouvait bien fasciner une partie des sunnites libanais comme en témoigna le chercheur français Michel Seurat (1947-1986) à Tripoli.
Ces mouvements eurent certes leurs limites marquées notamment par l’échec d’un véritable dialogue avec les maronites libanais, même une fois la guerre civile terminée.
Toujours est-il que les sunnites du Liban avaient leur grand récit historique : il était arabe, parfois développementiste – le socialisme nassérien – ou s’accordait avec de grandes dynamiques populaires régionales.
L’éphémère « République marchande » des Hariri
Saad Hariri, quant à lui, hérite simplement du projet néo-libéral de son père, adossé aux capitaux du Golfe : celui d’une « République marchande » libanaise, selon les termes de l’écrivain libanais Michel Chiha (1891-1954).
Rafiq Hariri (1944-2005) pouvait cependant se prévaloir de ses origines populaires, d’un engagement passé dans les rangs du Mouvement des nationalistes arabes (MNA), inspiré du nassérisme, de la figure du self-made man et d’un Rockefeller libanais attaché à la reconstruction du Liban post-guerre civile.
Les années 1990 fonctionnaient selon un partage des tâches : le premier Ministre Rafiq Hariri soutenait officiellement la résistance militaire d’un Hezbollah au sud du Liban occupé par Israël, et pouvait inscrire ses mandats dans un grand récit relatif au conflit israélo-arabe et à la cause palestinienne. Cela n’empêchait pas une opposition sur les volets économiques, mais la complémentarité fonctionnait – jusqu’à un certain point.
Le fils ne peut avoir ces prétentions : il est « l’héritier de ».
Son père était né à Saïda, d’une modeste famille d’agriculteurs. Saad Hariri est quant à lui né à Riyad. Il peut bien essayer de mobiliser la communauté sunnite libanaise : mais il manque d’une véritable narration historique.
En conséquence, sa base populaire s’érode. Dénoncer la Syrie et l’Iran, certes : mais chercher l’appui des États-Unis dans une région traumatisée par les effets de l’invasion américaine de l’Irak d’avril 2003 n’est pas sans conséquence néfaste.
Le soutien saoudien devient plus handicapant que par le passé : le récent rapprochement israélo-saoudien (ce rapprochement n’est pas recent mais date de 1918 avec le mouvement Zionist) n’aide pas à gagner en popularité, ni au Liban, ni dans le monde arabe.
Saad Hariri est dépendant des intrigues de palais du Royaume Saudi : mais la « modernisation de l’autoritarisme » saoudien que décrit bien le politologue Stéphane Lacroix ne fait pas un projet politique porteur à l’échelle régionale.
La rhétorique tout à la fois anti-américaine et anti-chiite des salafistes radicaux concurrence un Courant du futur qui ne propose pas d’utopie concrète.
Quant à la « République marchande » libanaise rêvée par Hariri père, elle est à l’image de la compagnie qui fit sa fortune, BTP Saudi Oger, aujourd’hui gérée par Hariri fils.
Durement affectée par la chute des cours du pétrole, l’entreprise a plusieurs dettes françaises ,un dossier discuté à Paris avec Emmanuel Macron lors du « sauvetage » de Saad Hariri.
Ce que l’historien américain Mike Davis a pu nommer un « stade Dubaï du capitalisme » libanais se traduit surtout par un surendettement national chronique, et un accroissement des inégalités et des écarts de richesses – affectant particulièrement les classes populaires sunnites du Akkar, au nord du Liban.
Entre le marteau saoudien et l’enclume salafiste
En l’absence de grand récit national et communautaire, Saad Hariri – et son allié au sein du Courant du futur, le ministre de l’Intérieur Nohad Machnouk– sont devant un problème désormais insoluble.
L’une des options serait de se mobiliser contre le Hezbollah, et faire de l’épouvantail iranien le cœur de la politique libanaise. En ce cas, il renoncerait à un pouvoir logiquement fondé sur l’idée d’un compromis communautaire avec les chiites.
Au pire, il s’engagerait dans une logique de confrontation civile et communautaire avec le Hezbollah. Ce fut le pari de l’ancien premier ministre Fouad Siniora, dans la seconde moitié des années 2000 qui se solda par un échec cuisant lorsque les ministres Hezbollah se retirèrent du gouvernement, paralysant la vie politique.
Ou bien, la direction du Courant du futur choisit le compromis national, l’idée de Saad Hariri depuis novembre 2015. Mais cette option a montré ses limites : il s’est retrouvé débordé par un front du refus allant des courants fondamentalistes sunnites libanais les plus radicaux – le Cheikh Ahmad al-Assir à Saïda – à des figures nationales de son propre parti (Mustapha Allouch, Muin Merabi) lui reprochant de faire trop de concessions à ses adversaires. La politique saoudienne a fait le reste.
Le Courant du futur est également venu à bout de sa logique originelle : dans la seconde moitié des années 2000, il fonctionnait sur la dénonciation systématique d’une mainmise syrienne sur le Liban, en dépit du retrait militaire de 2005.
En 2017, cette stratégie ne porte plus : c’est désormais moins un régime syrien qui est présent au Liban, qu’une formation politique libanaise, le Hezbollah, qui est militairement présente en Syrie.
Opposé à Bashar al-Assad, la coalition du 14 Mars voulait voir la Syrie dehors : la ruse de l’histoire fit qu’au final, ce fut un parti libanais à dimension régionale qui imposa sa marque en Syrie. Reste alors l’éternel repoussoir iranien : mais ce terrain est désormais occupé par d’autres.
Saad Hariri est ainsi pris entre le marteau d’une Arabie saoudite puissante et soucieuse de son influence régionale, une logique d’État, et l’enclume d’un radicalisme salafiste qui a un projet et une utopie – fut-elle mortifère.
Le rêve d’une « République marchande » portée par son père a fait long feu.
Nicolas Dot-Pouillard, Politologue, Chercheur associé, Institut français du Proche-Orient, les propos de l’auteur n’engagent pas l’institution
La version originale de cet article a été publiée sur The Conversation.
Note 1: It is confirmed that Israel executed late Rafic Hariri PM (assassinated him in 2005, father of Saad) with the decision and finance of Saudi Kingdom. US Bush Jr. didn’t oppose the decision.
Note 2: Expatriate contractors https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/typical-modern-neoliberal-expatriate-contractor-class-in-lebanon-politicalsocial-structure-part-4/
Enough of aid – let’s talk reparations
Should the poor colonized States wait another 100 years to earn $1.25 per day?
Colonialism is one of those things you’re not supposed to discuss in polite company – at least not north of the Mediterranean. Most people feel uncomfortable about it, and would rather pretend it didn’t happen.
Debate around reparations is threatening because it upends the usual narrative of development
Habib Battah shared this link and commented on it
Who built Europe?
“In the mainstream narrative of international development peddled by institutions from the World Bank to the UK’s Department of International Development, the history of colonialism is routinely erased.
According to the official story, developing countries are poor because of their own internal problems, while western countries are rich because they worked hard, and upheld the right values and policies…
The impact of colonialism cannot be ignored
theguardian.com|By Jason Hickel
And because the west happens to be further ahead, its countries generously reach out across the chasm to give “aid” to the rest – just a little something to help them along.
If colonialism is ever acknowledged, it’s to say that it was not a crime, but rather a benefit to the colonised – a leg up the development ladder
But the historical record tells a very different story, and that opens up difficult questions about another topic that Europeans prefer to avoid: reparations.
No matter how much they try, however, this topic resurfaces over and over again. Recently, after a debate at the Oxford Union, Indian MP Shashi Tharoor’s powerful case for reparations went viral, attracting more than 3 million views on YouTube.
Clearly the issue is hitting a nerve.
The reparations debate is threatening because it completely upends the usual narrative of development. It suggests that poverty in the global south is not a natural phenomenon, but has been actively created.
And it casts western countries in the role not of benefactors, but of plunderers.
When it comes to the colonial legacy, some of the facts are almost too shocking to comprehend.
When Europeans arrived in what is now Latin America in 1492, the region may have been inhabited by between 50 million and 100 million indigenous people.
By the mid 1600s, their population was slashed to about 3.5 million.
The vast majority succumbed to foreign disease and many were slaughtered, died of slavery or starved to death after being kicked off their land. It was like the holocaust seven times over.
What were the Europeans after? Silver was a big part of it.
Between 1503 and 1660, 16m kilograms of silver were shipped to Europe, amounting to three times the total European reserves of the metal.
By the early 1800s, a total of 100m kg of silver had been drained from the veins of Latin America and pumped into the European economy, providing much of the capital for the industrial revolution.
To get a sense for the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if 100m kg of silver was invested in 1800 at 5% interest – the historical average – it would amount to £110trn ($165trn) today. An unimaginable sum.
Europeans slaked their need for labour in the colonies – in the mines and on the plantations – not only by enslaving indigenous Americans but also by shipping slaves across the Atlantic from Africa.
Up to 15 million of them. In the North American colonies alone, Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that’s worth $97trn – more than the entire global GDP.
Right now, 14 Caribbean nations are in the process of suing Britain for slavery reparations.
They point out that when Britain abolished slavery in 1834 it compensated not the slaves but rather the owners of slaves, to the tune of £20m, the equivalent of £200bn today.
Perhaps they will demand reparations equivalent to this figure, but it is conservative: it reflects only the price of the slaves, and tells us nothing of the total value they produced during their lifetimes, nor of the trauma they endured, nor of the hundreds of thousands of slaves who worked and died during the centuries before 1834.
These numbers tell only a small part of the story, but they do help us imagine the scale of the value that flowed from the Americas and Africa into European coffers after 1492.
Then there is India.
When the British seized control of India, they completely reorganised the agricultural system, destroying traditional subsistence practices to make way for cash crops for export to Europe.
As a result of British interventions, up to 29 million Indians died of famine during the last few decades of the 19th century in what historian Mike Davis calls the “late Victorian holocaust”.
Laid head to foot, their corpses would stretch the length of England 85 times over. And this happened while India was exporting an unprecedented amount of food, up to 10m tonnes per year.
British colonisers also set out to transform India into a captive market for British goods.
To do that, they had to destroy India’s impressive indigenous industries. Before the British arrived, India commanded 27% of the world economy, according to economist Angus Maddison.
By the time they left, India’s share had been cut to just 3%.
The same thing happened to China.
After the Opium Wars, when Britain invaded China and forced open its borders to British goods on unequal terms, China’s share of the world economy dwindled from 35% to an all-time low of 7%.
Meanwhile, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20% to 60% during the colonial period. Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.
And we haven’t even begun to touch the scramble for Africa.
In the Congo, to cite just one brief example, as historian Adam Hochschild recounts in his haunting book King Leopold’s Ghost, Belgium’s lust for ivory and rubber killed some 10 million Congolese – roughly half the country’s population.
The wealth gleaned from that plunder was siphoned back to Belgium to fund beautiful stately architecture and impressive public works, including arches and parks and railway stations – all the markers of development that adorn Brussels today, the bejewelled headquarters of the European Union.
We could go on. It is tempting to see this as just a list of crimes, but it is much more than that. These snippets hint at the contours of a world economic system that was designed over hundreds of years to enrich a small portion of humanity at the expense of the vast majority.
This history makes the narrative of international development seem a bit absurd, and even outright false.
Frankie Boyle got it right: “Even our charity is essentially patronising. Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself. Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.”
We can’t put a price on the suffering wrought by colonialism.
And there is not enough money in the world to compensate for the damage it inflicted. We can, however, stop talking about charity, and instead acknowledge the debt that the west owes to the rest of the world.
Even more importantly, we can work to quash the colonial instinct whenever it rears its ugly head, as it is doing right now in the form of land grabs, illicit financial extraction, and unfair trade deals.
Shashi Tharoor argued for a reparations payment of only £1 – a token acknowledgement of historical fact. That might not do much to assuage the continued suffering of those whose countries have been ravaged by the colonial encounter. But at least it would set the story straight, and put us on a path towards rebalancing the global economy.
Over populated. Over consumed. Overshoot
Andrew Bossone shared this link on FB this April 4, 2015
Powerful stuff: Overpopulation, overconsumption – in pictures
How do you raise awareness about population explosion? One group thought that the simplest way would be to show people
theguardian.com
