I recently watched the Academy award nominated documentary Darwin’s Nightmare. What humans unnecessarily yet forcibly go through is an outrage, an affront, and degrading to all humanity: those who are involved in the degradation, those who know about it, and those who don’t know about it.
While two million Tanzanians are near starvation, nearly five tons of Nile perch are fileted everyday and shipped out of the country. This is not unlike what I’ve heard about the famines in India under British rule, when rice nearby was left to go bad for reason of economics and British profits, and millions starved, right into the 1940s, by many accounts.
I could say Darwin’s Nightmare was about fish and arms, but it’s really about human nature, and the repulsive journey of hatred that continues between Europe and Africa—for whatever reasons—and results in the endless degradation of the poor in Africa.
Such is the anguish of so many people. After awhile, this ongoing hell unchanged could almost make a tired person think it reall is some sort of planned slow decimation and extinction of the African population, bizarrely trumped by staggeringly high birthrates.
Most authorities, I’ve decided in my mood tonight, be they governments, Big Business, the World Bank, missionaries, the IMF or NGOs, are complicit, if not in deed then by excessive silence, by a lack of outrage. I can no longer hear that they are not, at least not tonight. They simply do not return, so to speak, and show the developed world enough of the hatred exemplified in Africa through economic policies, human greed and perversion, the market place and every other lie enshrined as inviolable doctrine, with bleeding sometimes stopped by band-aids of attempts and actions, but perpetually countered by the same forces they work for.
They (you know, them, let’s just say so many aid groups and of course the financial institutions like, of course, the World Bank and the IMF) do not apologise, they don’t change their ways, the don’t deeply address the people’s needs before their own (or even after their own), and they live and spend luxuriously in their claim to be offering aid. There are, of course, grand and noble exceptions.
I just watched Darwin’s Nightmare, I co-directed Uganda Rising, and I recently visited (in insane luxury) shanty towns in Johannesburg, pediatric wards in Mozambique, devastated villages in Malawi and Kibera, the biggest of the terrible slums in Kenya, and the facts are appaling.
In other words, I know I know next to nothing. We follow our instincts.
But I can say this: all the good work, the Antiretrovirals and so on, everything…? Poverty trumps it all. AIDS cannot be touched without addressing poverty. Almost nothing can be changed without, as Jeffrey Sach’s title states, “The End Of Poverty.”
A quote from the director of Darwin’s Nightmare, Hubert Sauper, from the film’s website:
The old question, which social and political structure is the best for the world seems to have been answered. Capitalism has won. The ultimate forms for future societies are “consumer democracies”, which are seen as “civilized” and “good”. In a Darwinian sense the “good system” won. It won by either convincing its enemies or eliminating them.
In DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this “fittest” animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order. I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds, in Honduras, bananas, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil. Most of us I guess, know about the destructive mechanisms of our time, but we cannot fully picture them. We are unable to “get it”, unable to actually believe what we know.
It is, for example, incredible that wherever prime raw material is discovered, the locals die in misery, their sons become soldiers, and their daughters are turned into servants and whores. Hearing and seeing the same stories over and over makes me feel sick. After hundreds of years of slavery and colonisation of Africa, globalisation of african markets is the third and deadliest humiliation for the people of this continent. The arrogance of rich countries towards the third world (that’s three quarters of humanity) is creating immeasurable future dangers for all peoples.
In talking to a highly articulate and impassioned doctor I met on my trip through South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi, and Kenya, and upon discussing the intensity of HIV/AIDS, poverty, malnutrition and neglect—and the endless resilience of so many people—the idea of a conspiracy to decimate the continent not being “outside the realm of reasonable thought� slipped into the conversation.
More likely than conspiracy, I think, is that this world has evolved as (or has always been) a function of nature and ideas—with an infinite number of internal and external variables that we humans can never grasp; unconscious, mistaken, misinformed and/or just plain cruel ideas and actions evolving over time. Cause and effect—in a web too tangled to see.
Still, it is no surprise that when conspiracy came up, the IMF and the World Bank also came up.
Is it not odd or at least unfortunate that Robert Strange McNamara (yes, Strange is his middle name) was named President of the World Bank in the early 1980s and Paul Wolfowitz today is President of the World Bank?
McNamara was one of the “bright young technocrats� of the 60s involved with Kennedy, and one of the chief architects of the Indochina War (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) which, by his own admission, killed 3.4 million people. McNamara also admitted in Errol Morris’ the Fog of War that he and his notorious boss, General Le May, would have both been tried for war crimes—had the allies lost—for the relentless carpet bombings of Japan, leading up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By most accounts Paul Wolfowitz was a crucial part of the Bush regime, with Cheney, Rumsfeld and others, that pushed relentlessly (and for years, still ongoing) for the American led invasions in Iraq. Whatever good may have been produced, untold, shocking misery to literally millions of civilians—as always mostly women and children—has been the legacy, ongoing.
Joseph Stiglitz, Chief Economist from 1996 until 2000 when he was ousted, once said:
They’ll say the [International Monetary Fund] IMF is arrogant. They’ll say the IMF doesn’t really listen to the developing countries it is supposed to help. They’ll say the IMF is secretive and insulated from democratic accountability. They’ll say the IMF’s economic ‘remedies’ often make things worse—turning slowdowns into recessions and recessions into depressions.
And they’ll have a point.
I was chief economist at the World Bank from 1996 until last November, during the gravest global economic crisis in a half-century. I saw how the IMF, in tandem with the U.S. Treasury Department, responded. And I was appalled.
Mahmood Mamdani and Noam Chomsky, back-to-back in Uganda Rising, described the World Bank/IMF relationship this way:
MAHMOOD MAMDANI: The African decline does not begin until the 70s, well over a decade after independence. It coincides with a particular twist to the cold war, increasing external pressure, the coming in of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, [IMF] Structural Adjustment Programs.
NOAM CHOMSKY: The World Bank gets countries to borrow up to their necks, you know, usually Third World dictators and then when they can’t pay the IMF come in and say, “Okay, now you gotta pay for it with Structural Adjustment Programs.� The poor people who suffer from Structural Adjustment Programs…? They didn’t borrow the money. They didn’t get anything out of it. And what happened in Africa was happening all over the world.
No one of course really knows what Mr McNamara or Mr Wolfowitz feel, or what they wanted to accomplish or what they believe in—or, for that matter, the true intent of these institutions.
Perhaps they don’t even know.
Heck, I barely know what I’m trying to say right now, except that the ongoing barrage on Africa and in Africa, and even from Africa to itself, is relentless. Could it just be too brutal, too deep, to inate to see in its entirety?
The European/African relationship was largely forged and founded on slavery, colonialism and an endless stealing of resources—all three “institutions” undeniable.
Yet despite great and compassionate minds seeking grand solutions—Millenium Development Goals, poverty reduction, access to drugs, increased infrastructure, abandoning the debt, sending in UN peace keepers and so on—the world in many ways remains as rough and brutal as ever.
This is a section of an interview I was so fortunate to do with the remarkable, honest, passionate and desperate Stephen Lewis, who has been relentless in his drive to help try and curb the devastation of AIDS in Africa.
Pete: You mentioned in Race Against Time the man from the World Bank who responded to your request for a small percentage of money for treatment of people with AIDS with a sort of: “You see, Stephen, it’s difficult. Let’s face the painful truth: the people with AIDS are going to die. The money would probably be better used for prevention. It’s all a matter of trade-off.” How does one counter this attitude of ignorance and hopelessness from the West about Africa?
Stephen Lewis: In large measure, you counter it by explaining the tremendous resilience and courage at the grassroots of Africa—and the fact that the women in particular have such extraordinary resources to draw on, emotional and physical resources, when their lives are entirely devastated.
I’ll never understand fully how they do it but there’s a tremendous generosity of spirit and basic human decency and intelligence and sophistication. I mean, very few people in the west understand what a knowledgeable continent it is and how good people are, fundamentally, to each other and with each other.
That strength at the grassroots is what sustains them because otherwise, frankly, you’d have a tremendous reservoir of hopelessness. You do anyway—let’s not pretend. The levels of despair and anguish when so many people are dying in such large numbers are profound.
But on the other hand, you always have that ultimate resilience to draw on. And you know that if they can just get the resources flowing adequately and if they can just have the technical assistance, the drugs and some additional capacity which they so desperately need, they’ll subdue this pandemic. It is entirely possible.
It is primarily the unutterable failure of the western world to respond which has compromised Africa’s integrity.
P: Despite pledges set by the Millennium Development Goals for the year 2015, you mention in Race Against Time that there has been an international reluctance in recent years to provide sufficient funding for food to feed the hungry. This seems shocking. How do you explain it?
S: It is almost inexplicable. It’s as much the reality of poverty as of AIDS. How else do you account for the fact that in the middle of 2005 in Niger,4 children were dying because there had been a drought?
This wasn’t AIDS, this was a simple climate [problem], and the western world could not provide the food fast enough. How do you explain the fact that around Darfur, where we’ve heard about more suffering than one would need to hear about in a lifetime, the World Food Program had to cut the caloric intake from 2000 to 1000 a day because there hasn’t been enough food aid given from the western countries?
And in southern Africa, in southern countries now, you have near-famine in parts of the countries and you’ve got tremendous hunger. How is it possible that the world is reneging on food? It’s bad enough that they’ve been reneging on resources and support around AIDS; how do you renege on food?
What in god’s name is wrong with the rich countries of the world?
P: What is wrong with the rich countries of the world? Is it racism? Is it economics? Is it political?
S: I don’t know. I will admit to you, I don’t understand it and I pretend to search for reasons which seem vaguely explicable but I’m not sure I’m right. I think sometimes it is racism. I think sometimes it is just that Africa has fallen off the geopolitical map after the end of the Cold War.
Sometimes everybody succumbs to this slander that all African governments are corrupt and you don’t give them any money because it will never get to the people. I don’t know how you choose to explain it: that we’re far away, insensitive, indifferent…?
I just do not understand the moral lapse. I’m not a wildly self-righteous person. I’m on the democratic left so I tend to be more self-righteous than most—but I’m not naturally self-righteous—but I have to say to you that the loss of the moral anchor is pretty evident internationally. We’re really distorting things.
The amount of money we’re ploughing into Afghanistan and Iraq, and conflict engagement generally, compared to the amount of money we’re pouring into alleviating the human predicament? I mean, there is no comparison and there is no justification.
It’s criminal, really, the way the western world has not adequately supported the World Food Program and its needs to buy and distribute and produce food. It’s just horrendous because, for children in particular, if you don’t have food, then you really can’t handle the medication. Anti-retrovirals can have side effects which are quite unpleasant and the side effects can overwhelm you if you don’t have adequate nutrition—if you don’t have food in your stomach.
It’s a real conundrum. The absence of food is terrible. And it is felt by everyone—except that women feel it more, because they receive food from men when the men deign to distribute it.
P: What keeps you going?
S: You know, it embarrasses me when people say, “Oh he’s such a great humanitarian” or “person of compassion.” I’m no more a person of compassion or with humanitarian instinct than anyone else in this world—or certainly in Canada.
I’m driven ideologically. My entire life has been filled with the conviction, which I imbibed from my father in particular, that you’ve got to spend a part of your life fighting social injustice and inequality or there’s no point being on the planet.
For me, the AIDS virus is the ultimate expression of social injustice and that’s why I’m so mad about it. Because it’s so profoundly wrong. I’m neither animated by spiritual inclinations, and nor do I retreat into them. For me, it is frankly my own social philosophy, my own ideology. I just think the struggle for social justice is the most important struggle there is. If AIDS violates it, then you fight AIDS.
And yet—with these and so many other unstoppable exceptions—among those in power, the most pointed questions are rarely if ever asked.
So let me ask one:
Could there be, even at an unconscious level, a policy-driven war of attrition against Africa (and other places) based on the deep-rooted racist objectives of slavery, colonialism, indigenous exploitation/religious domination and an ongoing belief in the right or necessity of controling African (and other) resources?
Put another way: given the putrid history of European/African contact, why are the best of intentions assumed today, when, say, colonial history should not, by almost anybody’s standards of humane behavior, encourage that assumption?
The only verbal attacks are against slivers of the problem, things like pharmaceuticals for clinging onto their patents while millions die, or against ineffective actions on behalf of the poor, dubbed pejoratively by some as the actions of the “Foreign Development Industrial Complex.”
Both complaints may be legitimate. But do they answer the deeper questions?
After all, are there any intelligent politicians and/or business persons who don’t believe that debt is strangulating Africa? Some even know these debts are criminal in how they were brought and how they are imposed, and evil in how interest is compunded out of thin air. Not only that, these same debts are being applied all over the world, the effects not yet murderously felt. Further, some even state openly that these debts must be cancelled.
Yet, collectively, why don’t business people or politicians en masse—or the leaders of these very institutions, for the love of God—demand that these institutions be stopped, that debt cannot be reconciled with people in abject poverty, misery, disease and starvation.
Why? Or why not?
Surely among the most powerful—those with the most resources, the most money and the widest reach—the question of how to continue on a world with such disparity, opulence and huge consumption is discussed.
A world which, despite all the killing and death in sub-Saharan Africa in the last ten years, has nevertheless increased in that same period by nearly a billion people.
And yet change does happen:
In Bolivia, communities could not afford water, and were denied the ‘right!’ to gather rainwater. This is from Tariq Ali’s book Pirates of the Caribbean (pg 91-92):
No single force was forthcoming [in Bolivia and Peru to overcome these peoblems], but gradually the interests of the deprived began to coalesce. They were going to speak many words and if no one listened they were going to speak more.
By the turn of the millennium, the Andean struggles against privatisation (water in Cochabamba [Bolivia], electricity in Cuzco [Peru]) were far more advanced than anywhere else in the world.
La Guerra del Agua (the War for Water) erupted after the killing of seventeen-year-old Victor Hugo Daz, who was shot dead by the Army in April 2000 for joining a protest in Cochabamba against the increase in water rates.
As his body lay in the main square of the city, many wept as they saw the bullet holes that had disfigured his face, but which could not hide the nobility and innocence that lay underneath.
Anguish turned to anger. The government had declared martial law, but Cochabamba, suffering from chronic water shortages, would not be silenced.
A million people inhabited this old Andean town and most of them appeared to be on the streets. The plaza where the body of the slain youth lay was now occupied by demonstrators. Their leaders had been arrested and taken to remote prisons in the Amazon, but the movement carried on.
A woman shouted: ‘We are the Amazon. They cannot stop our flow.’ She was right. The water warriors demanded the end of privatisation. The consortium that controlled Bolivia’s water was dominated by well-known US companies, Bechtel and (prior to its demise) Enron.
They had made it illegal for the poor to collect rainwater, giving the exclusive right to do so to Bechtel’s proxy company, Aguas del Tunari.
Now everyone—townspeople and farmers—was involved in this struggle; one of the most respected leaders was Oscar Olivera, a cobbler. This was democracy from below that is feared by neo-liberal elites everywhere.
Like the Caracazo in Venezuela, the rebellion in Cochabamba marked the beginning of the end for the political elite. Unlike the Caracazo, the people of Cochabamba won a significant victory.
Bechtel was run out of town and the city government once again took charge of its water supply, and a new water law prioritising the needs of the people against the ‘rights’ of the corporations, a law ‘written from below’, was passed.
The armies of the people had defined their right to water as a ‘human right’, lost their fear of authority and triumphed in the struggle against privatisation.
Professor Joel Bakan writes on page 166-67 of The Corporation:
Corporate rule [and may I add institutional rule, to not exclude those who mange to avoid what Bakan says] is not inviolable. When people unite and organize and have faith in themselves and one another, their dissastisfaction can become a powerful source of vulnerability for corporations and the governments that support and empower them.
No doubt the corporation is a formidable foe, but, as Olivera says [Oscar Olivera, a cobbler and union official who was one of the leaders of the uprising], “small battles are being won around the world…”
The corporation and its underlying ideology are animated by a narrow conception of humanity that is to distorted and too uninspiring to have lasting purchase on our political imaginations.
Though individualistic self-interest and consumer desires are core parts of who we are and nothing to be ashamed about, they are not all of who we are. We also feel deep ties and commitments to one another, that we share common fates and hopes for a better world.
We know that our values, capacities, aesthetics, and senses of meaning and justice are, in part, created and nurtured by our communal attachments. We believe that some things are too vulnerable, precious, or important to exploit for profit.
“We don’t have to see ourselves primarily as rapacious producers and consumers of goods who function in ways that are competitive and self-interested,” as philosopher Mark Kingwell says. “Humans have organized themselves by and large for vast sretches of what we call civilization in other ways.”
It’s also worth wondering why those that could protest the loudest against this on ongoing misery and slaughter, don’t—particularly against those institutions and policies that by their nature, their policies, their bottom line, counter all the positive work that is done. Why isn’t everybody as loud and angry as, say, Stephen Lewis, and others?
Maybe they just don’t see it this way.
You know, perhaps there is no conspiracy.
Perhaps these institutions, like some sort of psychotic computer we fear controlling us in the future, already do control us, inform us, overwhelm us.
Or perhaps it’s just policy.
It’s also worth noting that within or around this ideology of consumption, humans in unprecedented numbers (if not percentages) have also tasted through their own courageous/communal battles and activism, so much freedom, so much access to knowledge, to free speech, to human rights and on and on.
Mutual-interest, worldcentric community and activism may actually not only be everywhere already, which it is, but far closer than we believe, pulsing all around us, waiting to be mobilized further, more deeply, collectively, if we listen, if we act, minute-by-minute, day-by-day, with compassion, with an awareness of others and ourselves.
It’s got to be true, because, when you really, really think about it, can’t you feel you could love a lot of people you don’t even know? Don’t you love all your sisters and brothers?
We just have to, you know, throw more ideas, love, inspiration, encouragement, consumer power, defiance, humility and ideas into the pot, and keep going.
People are doing it all the time. People forgotten by the global economy, or hammered by dicatatorship, or whatever spirit and/or body-crushing force, are fighting all the time with acourage that is not infallible, but heart-blastingly inspiring and heroic by any standards.
In the end, this probably really isn’t about corporations or ideology at all, it’s about human beings. It’s about you and me, and remembering how temporary we are, this all is, and passing beauty along to the next round.
About loving more.
About making love the bottom line.
