I've never kipled

What with things and all, this entry is a little late.

So to get to the point, what's wrong with the whole neo-colonialism situation today? The Bretton woods twins, the IMF and the World Bank. Neither of which is really supposed to be involved in developing countries anyway. They were specifically constructed to dispense rebuilding money to Europe after the second world war and more or less replace the gold standard as a regulatory influence on exchange rates.

But the whole system was tilted in the favour of the United States. "One dollar, One vote" doesn't even have a semblance of fairness. This leaves war-torn Europe with some pocket money to get the whole reconstruction under way and gave the Americans ample opportunities to pick over imperial carcasses.




In the fifties and sixties, like every other supranational organisation, the twins became tools in the fight against communism. You've all heard about propping up right wing regimes, and this is how they used to do it, collectively. There was good reason to, post-Stalinist communist regimes were outperforming the U.S. Not that they made anything useful or valuable, but still.

In the 1970's the oil crisis and the war in Vietnam were enough to make Nixon decide to simply unilaterally leave the system so he could devaluate the dollar, a common strategy afterwards. Neo-liberalism was on the rise and Keynesian state-intervention seemed like a recipe for disaster now. But what about the twins? What could they be used for now?

Well, developing countries could benefit from forced privatisation and arbitrary cash infusions, of course. No matter that the same measures when applied to first world nations just tend to dismantle civil society, it will work even better when there is less money. Western companies are much better equipped to administer to former national industries.

Or how about another IMF brainwave? Remove trade barriers in conjunction with the GATT, now WTO, and export the entirety of your production, so another country can process the raw materials more efficiently and turn you into a resource pump? The WTO is, of course, basically an ethical organisation, as the following clip from The Yes Men will prove.



It shouldn't come as surprise that developing countries are deeper in debt now, than they ever were under colonialism. After all, you wouldn't do something like this to a place you owned.

Debt-relief is the new hobbyhorse of International development. If we could only fix these countries massive debts to us, we wouldn't need to keep lending them money. So, we should give them money now. Not that the standard of living hasn't improved in developing countries, but they can't afford it themselves, and the better it gets, the more we'll have to pump in there to keep it that way. It's the very definition of unsustainable.

So, instead of an organisation which funds governments based on whether or not they've embraced Reaganomics, why not invest in local companies interested in economic growth and let them be taxed by a government that has to actually govern? The main revenue stream of a third world government doesn't have to be an international organisation whose only purpose is to intervene on behalf of the United States and Europe. Andrew Mwenda, a Zambian journalist living in Kenya, is proposing to stop all foreign aid and replace it with targeted investments in African industries.



But thank god, the plight of starving peoples hasn't gone unnoticed by celebrities, who as we all know have a keen grasp of the socio-economic history of the world.



Oprah is personally responsible for this fantastic project. A handful of disadvantaged girls get i-pods and a first class education, everybody else in Soweto can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, like Oprah did.

The World Bank and the IMF have over a trillion dollars between the two of them. That's enough to repay all third world debts. So why don't they? Corrupt charities and useless multi-million dollar projects collude in keeping a lot of people working that would otherwise be unemployed.

Capitalism leading to economic growth is no cure-all. Human rights and the environment are usually the first to suffer. But it is the only recipe we know of to improve living standards in a sustainable way, that has proven to be successful. Let's not forget that any delays in industrialisation a country might have, the quicker it can implement state-of-the-art technology. It's not pretty, but it'll work.

White man's burden

I've always been lukewarm about charities in general. Whether it's starving baby animals or humans, disenfranchised Chinese people or Africans, something about the way these organisations present themselves annoys me. It's only been compounded over the years by the corruption scandals that institutions like the world bank or the IMF are involved in.

I believe this is partly due to our misconceptions about what it meant to have colonies. People often think that the West has been stealing resources from it's colonies all along, and are in fact still doing it now. But even at the height of colonialism, no European country imported anything but gold and valuables from it's colonies. Every country in Europe was pretty much self-sufficient when it came to coal, metals, food, and they mostly traded with each other, i.e. massive coal exports from England. The only country that imported resources on a large scale was Japan, which didn't have any colonies. Wholesale import of fruit and grain is a post-war phenomenon. Even the few resources unavailable in Europe, like cotton, rubber and phosphorus were synthesised when the First World War strangled supply lines.
(P. Yates, Forty Years of Foreign Trade, London 1959)

Nor is it true that colonies were needed as a market for the motherland's products. It's a rare piece of backwards reasoning. Just because a large percentage of the products exported to the colonies come from the motherland, doesn't mean that it was a significant market for the colonisers, in most European countries in the nineteenth century, exports to their own colonies accounted for less than a tenth of production. Economic growth averaging between 5 and ten percent a year in most of the nineteenth century, this is a completely negligable part of production in general.

Economic historian Paul Bairoch has proven that there is a negative correlation between economic growth and the colonisation of other countries in his book Economics and world history; Myths and paradoxes. Belgium had the fastest growing economy in Europe when it acquired the Congo, but fell back almost immediately and has been in the middle of the pack ever since. England and France are still powerful despite their colonies. In fact, they didn't even begin colonising until after their respective industrial revolutions. A colony is actually a gigantic financial sinkhole and western economies have benefited immensely from decolonisation. And the colonies themselves have a bunch of infrastructure and traumas that can be turned into work ethic.



Nobody who's seen the success of India and China these last few years still believes that former colonies are kept poor because of their economic relationship with the Western world. It's not that they trade with the West too much, they don't trade enough.

The guilt about colonialism has created an entire industry. I wouldn't be talking about it if I didn't think it sucked. Tomorrow, part two; "I've never kipled, or how I stopped caring about brown people and found Jesus."

Fear the Reaper

The fabled plateau of Leng, Atlantis, the island of Dr. Moreau, all of these fantastic creepy places that just don't cut it anymore these days. The creepy abandoned house, the mysterious castle, even the old factory or warehouse can't get to you anymore, not really.

We first tried to replace the mysterious island/continent with planets, light years away. We were just putting it further out. Even the planets in our own solar system are boring compared with how horrible we thought they'd be. Mars' canals are just geological features. The more we know about the world, the less we seem to fear.



The focus shifted from swarthy Europeans and demonic dog-men to atomic monsters and cosmic creatures during the cold war, so much so that even ol' gipper was convinced. We moved in towards serial killers, strange inbred hicks and virtual reality. But even those have become boring.



Even pedophiles aren't scary anymore. A veritable glut of pederast villains in high-budget Hollywood thrillers and even some straight forward "I'm a pedophile, but can't help it."-sob-stories have reduced the last horrifying fear to a ridiculously ordinary affair. Doughy, pig-eyed men (or Micheal Jackson) that seem made for the phrase; 'The banality of evil.'



We've evolved from being scared of everything that goes 'bump' in the night, through the whole gamut of irrational, primordial, symbolic, rational, bizarre and ultimately totally ordinary fears. From the uncontrollable lusts of the wolf man to the cold, unfeeling alien probe, we've managed to explore hairy, sweaty puberty through to the realisation that science isn't necessarily a good thing.

And that's why there is no possible decent ending for Lost. It's not just the fact that it's too popular to end, there is no possible way that it can end in anything but a horrible disappointment. There really is no good horror left, because there is nothing outside of ourselves left to be scared of. Chuck Palahniuk does a decent job of trying to scare you with everyday objects in Haunted, and the news tries it's best with the terrorists, but all the movies are about cheap shock effects.



Just a bunch of random images about death and pain and a clever editing trick. Fast cuts and unexpected sounds are the cinematic equivalent of someone running up and saying boo in your face.There's still death, and fear itself, but unsurprisingly, these usually don't make for good movies.