[lbo-talk] The militarisation of poverty in Africa

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Sat Jun 2 13:37:54 PDT 2012


BTW, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the text is13.4 - well above
> the moronic level of the American political discourse.
>
> Wojtek
------------

Yeah, AJE has been about the only serious news presence in Africa, or the band of conflict along the sub-sahara where land, resources, and failing governments seem to abound. But they are slow on deep background, which I can only guess and probably don't really want to read except in essay form. Practically every story needs a major progressive study to flesh out what's going and why.

The basic scenerio as far as I can tell is a combination of western US-EU corporate state games over wealth extraction by any means necessary. But China is also moving around somewhere in the mix. Meanwhile another story that AJE occasionally covers is India and its relations with Afganistan. A lot of the road building comes from Indian companies.

Again guessing, the basic technique is to fund whatever social-tribal identity who promises the best deal, which leads to endless political conflict and economic chaos. Yes, well here it is:

``Frantz Fanon wrote in 1959 that:

Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of underdevelopment and poverty, or at all events, sinks more deeply into it.

This is the basis of "combined and uneven" development: a state in which most of the continent still finds itself. The aid industry has masked some of these effects, yet in the current moment it has been forced into retreat, as country contributions are cut away in austerity budgets.''

I would only add that aid industries are profoundly complicit. Some turn the apparent aid into nightmares, like US pharma contracts for human subject studies, to dodge FDA and NIH human subject reporting requirements...

This is a long and interesting article, which just scanned because I want to get to something else to take my mind off the centers of human misery...

I once signed up for an intro to Africa class back in the mid-60s and was completely overwhelmed by the first few weeks reading list, which started with a giant geography text that introduced the continent in terms of environments, economies, languages, history, etc. It was a muct more promising era when it seemed possible that Africa could finally escape its multiple oppressions...

CG



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