Glamour History and ViolenceThe poor in the Third World are up shit creek. Is that supposed to be news? I mean, after all, there has always been a large part of the world which was "uncivilised" and "backward". The white people of Europe, bless their hearts, went to these poor benighted parts of the world to "civilise" them and "educate" the "natives".Then after the end of the 2nd World War, these countries were given independence, but my, they do seem to have made a mess of things. It's not their fault though - they're just not intelligent enough to run their own countries - it's genetic, you know. Well....there are a few problems with this point of view. The primary concern of the colonial powers was to gain sources of raw materials and markets for expanding industry. To do this they destroyed the existing economy, social structure and culture of particular regions and replaced it with their own. This has caused problems after independence because the people of these countries are left with a society and economy they didn't create themselves and to some extent they've got to unmake them. But are they, in fact, really independent? Following independence, many of these countries experienced significant political turmoil - civil wars, coups, and general instability. In almost all of these countries, the Western powers intervened to back the faction sympathetic to their interests. Sometimes the intervention was direct military intervention, as in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada etc., but more often it was through covert operations, as in Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, the Congo, Angola and Iran. Insurgents and regimes sympathetic to the West were helped with military supplies and training, economic aid and subversion of their opponents. The CIA has achieved particular notoriety, and there are many books by agents who have left in disgust about "the company's" covert operations - which anyone is free to disbelieve - but the British and the French also have a lot to answer for. Often these days, operations are not carried out by employees of Western governments, but by private companies staffed by ex agents or soldiers, and paid secretly by the government or a multinational, thus ensuring deniability. What has resulted from all this is a world 'safe for democracy'. Please understand we are talking about Western democracy here, not Third World democracy. It is true that in Africa recently, many previous dictatorships have been replaced with a measure of democracy, but (except in South Africa) it is often democracy in name only, and doesn't mean any power has actually passed to the people. The reality is that things in the Third World are not getting better - they have been getting worse for some time The reason is that almost all the Third World countries are in deep fincial debt and that any money they make, instead of being invested in the country to improve its economy and the standard of living of the people, is being used to pay the banks in the West. Worse, there is no hope of any improvement, because the countrie can hardly squeeze enough money out of the people to pay the interest on the loans, let alone pay them off. This is why the Third World is practically falling apart. Now you might argue - it's their own fault; they shouldn't have borrowed money if they couldn't pay it back. But this is unfair. To begin with, as I tried to point out earlier, most of the Third World elites were put in power by the West, against the wishes of their own people, and these elites have been notorious for corruption and creaming off money from loans into personal consumption, Swiss bank accounts, etc. However, even if they were people of high integrity their countries would still be in deep trouble. Most of the money was borrowed in the 1960s and 70s, in an
expanding world economy when the price of commodities exported
from the Third World was much higher and interest rates on loans
were much lower. It made sense, then, to borrow money to
industrialise; all the financial institutions in the West were advising
them to do so. At that time, representatives of Western banks were
wandering the Third World like heroin dealers, trying to get Third
World countries hooked. However, since then massive increases in
the oil prices have pushed up the price of everyday life, the price of
Third World exports in raw materials has dropped dramatically and
the United States budget deficit, much greater than that of the Third
World, and due to massive spending on arms, has pushed up
interest rates to a level Third World countries can't cope with.
However they're hooked now, dependent on the international
markets. It is in this situation that the financial equivalent of the
drug barons, the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) and the
What is a Structural Adjustment Programme? It is an agreement between a country and the I.M.F. and World Bank to carry out several economic policies which together change the relative proportions of each type of economic activity - public services, production for internal use and production for export. There are four main policies.
(Above to be greatly expanded) Now, like the Mafia, the World Bank and the I.M.F. claim that they are acting on behalf of the community, and it's for the country's own good. In reality, they are acting on behalf of the first world in trying to arrange the country's economy entirely around exports, payment for which the people of the country will never see - it is spent entirely on paying interest rates on loans made many years ago. The internal consequences for the country are devastating. Do you remember the government poster "Heroin screws you up"? Well, Structural Adjustment Programmes screw up countrie in a comparable way. (Expand)But just like heroin and the drug barons, SAPs, and the World Bank and the I.M.F. are promoting a culture of crime. The social chaos caused by SAPs is resulting in a withering of state authority and community power, where increasingly desperate people turn to robbery and banditry to stay alive, and all areas are controlled by crime lords. And like a virus, this is starting to infect our own societies. In a way, the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels, the drug lords of Pakistan and the Golden Triangle of South East Asia are the Third World's revenge, as people turn to producing a commodity we in the West are prepared to pay for. Large amounts of money can pay very high bribes, and in the U.S. it is well known that the actions of the Drugs Enforcement Agency are undermined by the access to political power, right up to senatorial level, of the drug cartels. However, there is a different kind of corruption. The World Bank and the I.M.F. do not operate in a vaccum; they have links to the world of finance and are ultimately controlled by politicians. For people to get away with the abuse of large numbers of people abroad makes them more likely to behave similarly to the weak and vulnerable among their own people. What is all this about? That's a rather large moral question that I do not propose to try to answer here. However, I want to look at one aspect of it; the development of our society into what a French thinker, Guy debord, has called "The Spectacular Commodity Economy". By spectacular commodity economy, he means an economy where commodities are desired or purchased nto simply as basic necessities, but to impress others. There is a social hierarchy of glamour which everyone tries to climb; those on the top, like rock stars or media personalities, are the most desirable, socially or sexually, and those at the bottom are the rejects, having to invent their own fantasy worlds to compensate for an appalling reality, ending up in the loony bin etc. Mind you, I think reality is over-rated - how real is the stuff anyway? Still, it's pretty ruthless out there. People give up their own authentic sense of identity and try to organise a socially acceptable appearance, an essentially passive process. Everything is important - clothes, accomodation, work, social life, travel etc., but most of all knowledge, the ability to talk about say, modern art, Susan George's latest book on the World Bank, Guy Debord's later writings, but most of all the social code of the select social group you are trying to join. So what I'm sort of getting at here is that a lot of the reason that people are being crushed into pulp is so that you can be seen in that dress/jacket whatever in that nightclub with those people. And to do all this, other people have created a lake of blood on your behalf. Some years ago, a radical Christian group in the United States, the Christic Institute, produced a cartoon history, of the CIA, called "Brought to Light". As a means of bringing home to people the results of covert operations, they described the number of people killed in each country in terms of the number of swimming pools their blood would fill. Our prisons are full of people some of whom have only been caught shoplifting, but there are politicians and civil servants in power whose decisions have killed thousands or more people To quote a journalist in the film "The Killing Fields", about the Khmer Rouge murdering 25 per cent of the population in Cambodia, "This isn't going to end in sweetness and light". If the countries of the Third World continue to be sucked dry by the money dealers, their governments will be overthrown and the nation state in the Third World will simply cease to exist. The United States is building a new kind of warship, an "Arsenal" ship, with a small crew but armed with guided missiles, including cruise missiles, to police the Third World, but that will only cause society to fragment to a state where there are no definite targets. Ultimately, through drugs, viruses, or the destruction of the ecosphere, this will all come back home, and the predictions of some kind of a Mad Max style "New Middle Ages" look increasingly realistic. Propaganda Home Page |
