- 'Europeans track famine like a sky full of vultures' Archived Message
- US Empire Exploits COVID-19 For More War Abby Martin - Tomski April 5, 2020, 7:08 pm
Posted by Ian M
on April 5, 2020, 9:52 pm, in reply to "US Empire Exploits COVID-19 For More War Abby Martin"
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Pretty damning, thanks for posting. Reminded me of Make Davis' book 'Late Victorian Holocausts' which describes how western colonialism & imperialism took advantage of massive El Nino famines in the late 19th century to break into and assert dominance over country after country in the global south. Here's a quick summary I found while looking for the 'vultures' quote: ***** https://sahelconsortium.com/2013/04/14/climate-change-and-political-consequences-redefining-colonialism-in-africa-and-beyond/ 'Redefining Colonialism in Africa and Beyond Under a crescendo of criticism for the corruption of his administration, the newly retired President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, his wife Julia, and his son Jesse left Philadelphia in spring 1877 for Europe…With James Bennett Jr. of the New York Herald paying the bar tab and the US Navy providing much of the transportation, the ex-First Family plotted an itinerary that would have humbled Alexander the Great: up the Nile to Thebes, back to Palestine, then on to Italy and Spain, back to the Suez Canal, outward to Aden, India, Burma, Vietnam, China and Japan, and, finally, across the Pacific to California.[3] The tropical areas then visited had in common more than the visit of the ‘American King,’ as he was called, and his family. Three years of drought and famine in Northern China killed between 8 million and 20 million people. In Egypt, the crop failure was almost total and thousands of people were dying from starvation due to a drought of biblical proportion. In India, by official account, more than 5 million perished from famine in the preceding three years. As historian Mike Davis put it, ‘What is germane is a coincidence in his travels that Grant himself never acknowledged, but which almost must have puzzled readers of Young’s narrative: the successive encounters with epic drought and famine in Egypt, India and China. It was almost as if the Americans were inadvertently following in the footprints of a monster whose colossal trail of destruction extended from the Nile to the Yellow Sea…with drought and famine reported as well in Java, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Korea, Brazil, Southern Africa and the Maghreb’.[4] In total, the second half of the 19th century witnessed three waves of drought, famines and diseases (1876-1879, 1889-1891and 1896-1902) causing between 30 million and 50 million victims. Mike Davis called it ‘the forgotten holocaust.’ He noticed that ‘The European empires, together with Japan and the United States, rapaciously exploited the opportunity to wrest new colonies, expropriate communal lands, and [tap] novel sources of plantation and mine labor’[5] while implementing industrial revolution and developing democratic institutions at home. ‘Famines are over the right to existence,’ he wrote. Reacting to this ‘ecological rapine,’ one African told a missionary, ‘Europeans track famine like a sky full of vultures.’[6] Actually, during the drought of 1877 in southern Africa, Britain put an end to the independence of the Zulu empire. In 1889-1891, during the period of famine in Ethiopia, Italy tried to expand its domination over the Horn of Africa. By the late 1890s Germany, taking advantage of both the floods and drought in the province of Shantung, undertook to extend its influence to northern China. In the same period, the United States took over the Philippines, plagued by drought. During the Victorian era and the French revolution, class division (and income inequality) within given societies was a universal phenomenon. By the end of the 19th century, what was more noticeable was rather the inequality of wealth among nations. The areas of the world affected by the series of drought in the second half of the 19th century never recovered. The ‘Third World,’ as it is known today, had emerged. And the rich countries in the ‘North’ had firmly established their prominence in world affairs.' ***** Has anything really changed since those days? The video suggests not. Bring on the day when the whole rotten system comes crashing down! cheers, I |
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