I used to run an email mailing list called Bol! in 1998. We
had 600 members who were interested in issues of reproductive health and development
from all over the subcontinent. I used to moderate daily discussions. One day, I
got into trouble. Someone forwarded me an email about South Africa’s health minister,
and how he believed that AIDS was a Western conspiracy. He thought the virus
had been developed in a lab in the West, and set loose on Africa to cause
depopulation.
I’m trained as an anthropologist. So for me, this was an
interesting belief that for better or worse we had to deal with, because it
came from a power broker in Africa, right in the heart of the AIDS epidemic. A medical
doctor on the list, however, denounced me for posting it, and immediately announced
he was leaving the list, because I was spreading appalling misinformation.
These things happen. If you want to have discussions, you
can’t avoid controversy. Medical doctors, in my opinion, often turn out to be
professionals very set in their opinions and their ways. But more on that in
another blog post.
In another recent episode, people in Pakistan started to
kill polio workers. Immediately people got into operation, denouncing the
terrorists and the appalling state of backward Pakistan. Although I didn’t know
at that time the CIA had used the polio program as a front to conduct its
activities, something told me that there must be more to the story than people
shooting polio workers because it didn’t fit their religious beliefs. “Ask them
why they are shooting,” I tweeted, at a time when this was clearly a very
unpopular thing to Tweet, since everyone was convinced that the Pakistani
tribals were irrational, trigger-happy beings who shot at polio workers just
for the sake of it. It took a while before the story of the CIA using the polio
program for a front for their activities came out—but eventually it did come
out.
This makes me wonder about many other events in world
affairs where we actually don’t have enough information to judge what’s going
on. Or else the information is being suppressed, because people feel it can’t
possibly be considered seriously in rational discourse. Many conflicts around the world, which appear
irrational and on the surface to have religious reasons, may have their roots
in economic exploitation (and military entanglements) which are hidden from
clear view. Its clear that much of the violence around the world, ascribed to
religion and religious groups, may actually get their financial and economic incentives
from higher powers whose final goal is the control of resources. Conflicts are
advantageous in that they keep countries destabilized and in deep poverty. This
makes it easy to rule, especially if your intention is to extract every single
scrap of raw material, diamonds, oil, timber and uranium out of a country.
China seems to be throwing a spanner in the Western
countries’ wheels by taking the opposite tack—instead of war, it offers peace. It
offers roads, hospitals and household items of daily use at a rational price,
in exchange for raw materials. It offers technical and scientific education. And it steers very far from
religion. China’s presence in Africa, for instance, seems to offer a different
model of the future than the one the Western powers offer—one where the region
will always be divided on linguistic and cultural lines, and where atavist
divides of religion will always hold sway. China offers roads that links countries together.
And it offers the vision of a future where Africa can one day be prosperous and
developed.
(As to whether China is totalitarian: I just read in
Counterpunch an article about an American who returns from China, only to
realize his own country has become more totalitarian than China. )
At some point, people are going to notice this. And at some
point, this relationship of give and take is going to overtake the “take and
take” of Western countries. At some point, the old colonial powers will have to
realize the 21st century demands a different relationship of power
between different stakeholders.
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