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Two rounds of negotiation take centre stage, about halfway through Amitav Ghosh’s new masterwork The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.

In one, US State Department and Pentagon officials win agreement that carbon emissions connected with the military are to be kept out of the Kyoto Protocol – an omission that has been preserved in international climate agreements to this day.

At the opposite end of the global power hierarchy, Khokon, a refugee from the Kishoreganj district of Bangladesh, has engaged in desperate negotiations simply to stay alive. His family’s low-lying land had been flooded for six months, followed by long droughts, hailstorms, and unseasonal downpours. The environmental degradation was followed by political depredations, as well-connected people seized increasingly scarce arable land including part of Khokon’s family’s farm. Eventually there was no better option than to sell some land and send Khokon to France – but he was quickly deported back to Bangladesh. There was no paid employment for him so after seven months of hopelessness,

“his family sold the rest of their land and paid another agent to send him abroad again. Dubai was Khokon’s chosen destination, and he paid accordingly; but the agent cheated him and he ended up in Libya instead. For the next several years he had to endure enslavement, beatings, extortion, and torture. But somehow he managed to save up enough money to pay traffickers to send him from Libya to Sicily in a ramshackle boat.” (all quoted material in this article is from The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh, published by University of Chicago Press, October 2021)

Khokon was penniless, traumatized – but unlike many others he survived the voyage. Assisted by support groups for refugees and by relatives, he was able to stay in Italy and get a job at a warehouse in Parma.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Enlightenment Now’ rationalizes the violence of empire

June 4, 2018

‘Enlightenment Now’ rationalizes the violence of empire

Through an impressive array of data and visual metrics, Steven Pinker’s most recent book, Enlightenment Now, presents a fiercely optimistic portrait of the achievements of the human race.

Pinker uses stats and charts to show how, as one reviewer put it: “Wars are fewer and less severe, homicides are down, racism is in decline, terrorism is a fading fad, democracy rules, communicable diseases and poverty are on their way out.”

Pinker claims that technocratic progress — based upon the ideals of the Enlightenment (science, reason and liberal humanism) — has made humans happier, healthier and less violent than ever before.

His brand of popular science, rooted in the superiority of mankind, seems to appeal to the masses. An experimental psychologist at Harvard University, Pinker has been included in lists like “100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy and “The Top Most Influential People in the World Today” by Time.

Recent critiques have been made of Pinker’s latest work. However, few have explored Pinker’s implicit defence of empire and colonialism: the violent exploits in the name of Eurocentric understandings of “progress.”

I believe Pinker’s mechanical understanding of environmental problems in the age of climate change and massive species loss to be irresponsible. As a postdoctoral scholar of critical socio-ecological theory, I feel it is important to counter the data offered in Enlightenment Now, which aims to demonstrate how our world is less violent, less environmentally destructive and less poor than ever before.

We need to counter Pinker’s view with a broader understanding of what our relationship to nature and to each other has been within the context of Western “progress.”

Rationalizing colonial violence in the name of “progress”

Pinker implicitly rationalizes historical colonial violence and ecological destruction as invariable consequences of advancements towards greater emancipation as human beings.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NATO: a Promoter of Colonialism in the 21stCentury

May 8, 2018

NATO: a Promoter of Colonialism in the 21^stCentury

Five NATO members continue to possess colonies. These NATO states have no intention of granting their territories independence any time soon. Not only does France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United States insist on maintaining vestiges of their colonial pasts, but their colonies have been interwoven into NATO’s military infrastructure.

The continued presence of French, British, Dutch, Danish, and American colonies around the world extends what is officially called the “North Atlantic Treaty Organization” to the South Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. If there was ever an organization guilty of blatantly deceptive advertising practices, it is NATO.

Recent attempts to secure more political autonomy in the French Caribbean territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana, the latter the home of a French space launch facility having strategic importance, have been met with everything from indifference in Paris or extreme hostility. A January 26, 1968 SECRET Central Intelligence Agency report warned against Soviet attempts to establish space tracking facilities in French Guiana. That same year, the Guiana Space Center was established at Korou in the French colony. NATO ordered the suppression of independence moves by the people of Guiana to keep the center solely in the hands of France and the European Space Agency. In March and April 2017, populist tempers flared when Guianese protesters took over the Korou space facility over charges that France was ignoring the people of the colony. Youth unemployment, for example, is at a staggering 55 percent.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Echoes of British Colonial India in Plans to Partition Syria

March 23, 2016

Echoes of British Colonial India in Plans to Partition Syria

Russia’s decision to greatly reduce its military presence in Syria, coming as it did with little warning, has left the world struggling for explanations. Russia is to maintain a military presence at its naval base in Tartus and at the Khmeymim airbase. In fact Russia is “withdrawing without withdrawing.”

The partial withdrawal is seen by many as a message to the Assad government not to take Russia’s military aid for granted, and to be more flexible in the upcoming peace negotiations.

As Robert F. Kennedy Jr., attorney and nephew of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy explains, the major reason for the West’s attempt to overthrow the Assad government was to build a natural gas pipeline from Qatar that traversed Syria, capturing its newly discovered offshore reserves, and continuing on through Turkey to the EU, as a major competitor to Russia’s Gazprom.

By re-establishing the Assad government in Syria, and permanently placing its forces at Syrian bases, the Russians have placed an impenetrable obstacle to the development of the Qatar gas pipeline. Russia has also placed itself at the nexus point of other new offshore gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Israel, Cyprus, and Greece.

It’s not hard to imagine a new Russian pipeline to Europe serving these new partners. Could easing of sanctions also lead to the implementation of the long-stalled plans of Gazprom for a second pipeline under the Baltic Sea to Germany for Russia and its partners, Royal Dutch Shell, Germany’s E.ON, and Austria’s OMV?

Although the powers involved in Syria are trying to project the partition of Syria as a last resort and a stable political solution that would bring equilibrium, it is not a conclusion reached after all other options were exhausted, which has brought many experts to question whether the partition of Syria was the objective all along.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Carving up the Middle East

November 17, 2015

Carving up the Middle East

QUESTION: Why did ISIS target France rather than Germany? Someone said it was France who created Syria. Is that really true?

ANSWER: Germany is not actually a target in this chess game. It is one reason we selected Berlin for our conferences even compared to London since we had Panic Cycles in November. Germany has less than 62,000 in its army and being in the army in Germany was perhaps worse than a tax collector. The joke was the German army does not shoot. Germany is not in the view of ISIS as is France, Britain, and USA. Germany may be the biggest economy in Europe, but the people blamed their own military for the nation’s suffering as did Japan.

Indeed, the Middle East, as we know it today, emerged from decisions made by the Allies during and after the World War I. It was Britain and France who took it upon themselves to transform what had been provinces of the old Ottoman Empire into the modern states we have come to know, This has created an international tinderbox that remains at the core of the current conflicts and politics in the Middle East.

The partitioning of the Middle East into the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire was set under the terms of a secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of April-May 1916. The agreement gave Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Gulf and the regions bordering Palestine to Britain, and Syria and most of the eastern part of the region to France.

The Cairo Conference was a meeting of Britain’s Middle East experts which began formally on the morning of Saturday, March 12, 1921. The conference approved a plan for giving control over two large pieces of the former Turkish territories that Britain controlled to princes in the Hashemite family.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Famed Journalist Robert Fisk: Canada’s Moral Power Is Lost

September 23, 2015

Famed Journalist Robert Fisk: Canada’s Moral Power Is Lost

Middle East sage on ISIS, refugees, Harper, ‘short-termism’ and more. A Tyee interview.

Arguably the world’s most famous international war correspondent, Robert Fisk has been travelling to strife-ravaged regions of the world for over 30 years. His columns — he has been contributing to the British newspaper the Independent since 1988 — are trenchant, often angry analyses of missteps in military interventions in the Middle East.

Fisk has interviewed numerous leaders and figures in the region, including Osama bin Laden (three times). The current refugee crisis, created by instability in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, is the worst of its kind since the Second World War, he says.

Fisk argues the bombing campaign against ISIS — of which Canada is a part — is a huge mistake, one that will only complicate matters. “It amazes me,” he wrote in a column in May, “that all these warriors of the air don’t regularly crash into each other.”

Fisk blasts both politicians and the media for lack of historical perspective on the region. In particular, he points to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in which the British and French colonial powers covertly agreed to carve up much of the Middle East between them. It was a secret agreement that was later exposed by the Russians, one Fisk points to as a valid reason for ongoing resentment throughout much of the Middle East.

Currently on a cross-Canada tour, Robert Fisk spoke to The Tyee about the deepening crisis in the Middle East and how the global community should react to it.

The Tyee: Seeing the images coming out of the Middle East, of so much of Syria destroyed, of the things ISIS is up to, of the droves of refugees, of dead children on the beach, people feel a sense that something must be done. You have pointed to the dire complications presented by the bombing campaigns. What is to be done?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Greece and the Endgame of the Neocolonial Model of Exploitation

February 19, 2015

Greece and the Endgame of the Neocolonial Model of Exploitation

With the bankruptcy of Greece now undeniable, we’ve finally reached the endgame of the Neocolonial-Financialization Model.

We all know how old-fashioned colonialism worked: the imperial power takes physical control of previously independent lands and declares its ownership of the region as a newly minted colony.

What’s the benefit of controlling colonies? In the traditional colonial model, there are two primary benefits:
1. The imperial power (the core) extracts valuable commodities and low-cost labor from its colony (the periphery)
2. The imperial power sells its own high-margin manufactured goods to the captured-market of its colony.

This buy low, sell high dynamic is the heart of colonialism, which can be understood as one example of the The Core-Periphery Model (June 11, 2013).

The book Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History is an excellent history of how this model worked for Great Britain.

The tensions this model generated in the colonial elites of America are brought to life in Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution.

This traditional model of colonialism was forcibly dismantled in the 1940s-1960s. Former colonies established their political independence, a process that diminished the wealth and global reach of former colonial powers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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