Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha

Despite the Napoleonic connection, Saint Helena is not a French property, but a British Overseas Territory, included in the triad that is also the Ascension Islands, and Tristan da Cunha.

Saint Helena was entirely uninhabited when the Portuguese discovered it, either in 1502 or 1503, depending on which version of history you prefer. The 1502 version gives the discovery to the Spaniard João da Nova, who was employed by the Portuguese; the 1503 version claims that da Nova actually discovered Tristan da Cunha, and that it was Estêvão da Gama who discovered Saint Helena. Whichever it was named it for the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, a fanatical Christian who convinced her son to accept baptism and to make Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, the reason why the Vatican is still in Rome today.

The Portuguese never settled the island, but simply used it as a convenient mid-Atlantic port, until it was rendered inconvenient by attacks from Dutch and British fleets; the Dutch claimed the island in 1633, but also never settled it; the British then took it in 1657, when Oliver Cromwell gave the East India Company a charter to seize the place. When the English monarchy was restored, the fort was named Fort James, and the main town Jamestown, in honour of the king.

Why exactly the Dutch and British then spent decades fighting over the island, seizing it, and seizing it back, is unclear, as the place was so utterly uninhabitable - drought, infertile soil, collapsed forests, and vast amounts of ghastly vermin - that the British commander at one point recommended the transfer of the entire population, which was about a thousand people including the half that were slaves, to Mauritius. A perfect place for a penal colony, if you thought about it. But neither the British nor the Dutch did think about it, until they needed somewhere to put Napoleon Buonaparte after the Battle of Waterloo had finally ended his tyranny - or his liberation of Europe from feudal monarchism, if you prefer that version of history. Napoleon, for the information, was initially lodged at the Briars Pavilion, owned by the British Superintendent of Public Sales for the East India Company, a man
 named Balcombe; the pavilion was located on the grounds of the family's home. Napoleon stayed there until his permanent home, Longwood House, was completed; he died there on 5th May 1821, probably of stomach cancer. The only member of the Balcombe family who could speak French was their thirteen year old daughter, Betsy; she acted as translator and later wrote a memoir. Sadly Betsy became rather enamoured of Napoleon, and her parents took a liking to him as well, which led the governor, Hudson Lowe, to suspect the Balcombes of not being properly Britishly stiff-upper-lip and Francophobe, and had them dismissed from the island. Or perhaps he just liked their house, and wanted it for his own; once the Balcombes were gone, he sequestered it for his own use, and it remained the Admiralty on the island forever afterwards. The garrison then served as a prison during the Boer war of 1900-1903, by which time Saint Helena's value as a way-station in the Atlantic had diminished to zero, because all ships now went by way of the Suez Canal.



Ascension Island was discovered at the same time as Saint Helena, and likewise ignored until it found a useless sort of use, in this case as a garrison to protect Saint Helena, in case anyone should think to launch a rescue of Napoleon. No one ever did. After this, it served as a provisioning station for the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron when said force was out on anti-slavery patrol, and during the Second World War the UK allowed the US to construct an airfield there to enable planes to refuel en route to Africa, and as a base for anti-submarine operations in the South Atlantic; later the Americans used it as a space tracking station. But the real moment of glory for Ascension came in 1982, when Queen Margaret of England sent the largest Navy in her nation's history to rescue another irrelevant island in the Atlantic from being returned to its rightful owner, and the Ascensions provided the midway staging-post and refuelling point. Viva Las Malvinas, Viva Las Ascensionas!

And last, and by every means least, Tristan da Cunha, which sounds like a single island, and is, but it is also the overall name for a group of islands, of which Nightingale, Inaccessible, and Gough make up the remainder. Before that, Tristan da Cunha was Tristão da Cunha, who was born in Portugal somewhere around 1460, and might have been the first Viceroy of Portuguese India, only a mysterious case of temporary blindness prevented him from taking up the post; or it may have been the thought of living forever on tandoori and chutney, which is hot and spicy and fine if you like it, but the pasta was being perfected in Rome, and serving as King Manuel I of Portugal's emissary to Pope Leo X, which he did from 1514, was definitely a better option. In the period between the blindness and the Roman appointment, da Cunha led a Portuguese naval fleet into the southern Atlantic, ostensibly to find and rescue the explorer João da Nova, whose ship had become stranded en route home from India, in practice to discover lands which could be claimed for Portugal, and to garrison them to consolidate the claim. Socotra, which are four islands that now belong to Yemen, were the first that he claimed, followed by Madagascar, Mozambique, and finally the group of islands that bear his name. His mission came to a convenient end, given his Roman aspirations, in Barawa in Somalia, when da Cunha was wounded trying to add that city to his collection.


And so to Rome, where King Manoel wanted to show Pope Leo just how substantial and significant the Portuguese world empire now was - a case of sibling-rivalry with Spain, though actually Portugal was all but bankrupt as a consequence of its attempts at imperialism. No one would suspect it from the triumphant arrival of da Cunha and his entourage in Rome, the details of which we know from the diaries of his secretary, the poet Garcia de Resende. The embassy consisted of one hundred and forty people, and it travelled in a very public pilgrimage that started in Lisbon and marched to Alicante, on the Spanish east coast, sailed to Majorca, then across the Tyrrhenian Sea to Rome, which it entered on March 12th 1514 in what could have been the July 4th parade outside Macy's in New York, but transferred in time and space. The generally preferred adjective among historians is "extravagant", and it included large amounts of exotic wildlife, displays of wealth from the Indies, members of the entourage dressed "Indian style", and at its vanguard, pride of the show, an elephant named Hanno, King Manoel's personal gift to the Pope - though it was unclear where he was going to keep it as the Roman Zoo was four hundred years in the future - as well as forty-two other creatures, including two leopards, a panther, several parrots, a gaggle of turkeys, and some extremely rare Indian horses which did not like the Italian climate. Hanno carried a platform of silver on his back, shaped as a castle and containing a safe with royal gifts, including vests embroidered with pearls and gems, and coins of gold minted for the occasion. The Pope welcomed the procession at Castel Sant'Angelo, where the elephant knelt down three times in reverence and then, following a wave of his Indian mahout (keeper), sucked into its trunk the contents of a bucket of water, and spat it out again over the assembled Cardinals. Six weeks after this ostentatious but illusory display of wealth, King Manoel made confession of his nation's bankruptcy, and had his emissary in Rome request a bail-out from the Pope, much in the manner of contemporary Portugal with the European Union. The Pope responded with rich gifts, in gratitude for which Manoel sent first a ship full of Indian and Arabian spices, and then another containing an Indian rhinoceros. Unfortunately the rhinoceros didn't like the Italian climate any more than did the Indian horses or the elephant, and it caused such trouble on-board that the ship sank off Genoa, and the last anyone heard of the rhino was a portrait by Albrecht Dürer. 

As to the island which da Cunha named after himself, it was garrisoned by the British in 1816 for the same reason as Ascension Island, and then resumed its former existence as an out-of-the-way and uninhabited nowhere until that status was formalised when it became a World Heritage Site in the late 20th century. South Africa leases a small corner of Gough Island for a meteorological station.



Marks For: You decide

Marks Against: Ditto



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Monday, June 29, 2015

Saint-Barthélemy

Yet one more French dominion far from the native land, Saint Barths, as it tends to be abbreviated, or Ouanalao, as it should properly be called, is just ten square miles of tropically hot weather in the midst of the Caribbean, midway between Saint Martin and Saint Kitts. It was first discovered in 1493, by Christopher Columbus, who everybody knows was secretly French; Colombe named it for his brother Bartolomeo, which likewise is self-evidently a French name. And the place was packed with French people, otherwise known as indigenous natives, or Taino, an ancient offshoot tribe of the Franks who also inhabited Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and the riviera between Nice and Saint Tropez.

The trouble with Christopher Columbus was that he liked to find places which he thought were India, but weren't, and plant a Spanish flag close on the beach, but close enough to his boat that he didn't get sand between his toes, and then leave again, aware that English pirates were sneaking up to loot any gold or silver he might have, but blindly oblivious to the French who were also sneaking up behind him, less interested in the gold and silver than in settling these new lands, tearing down the Spanish flag, and claiming them for France. It took them until 1648 to do this on Saint-Barthélemy, and then, deciding that cultivating cacao was all very well, but fighting the Taino was not, they sold the island to Sweden, who renamed the largest town Gustavia, after their King Gustav III, and made it a free port - well, that was the name they used, though it is unclear how a place can be, at one and the same time, a "free port" and a place which operates under an "Ordinance concerning the Police of Slaves and free Coloured People", even though it has no plantations. The last slave on the island was freed in 1847, which was fourteen years after the British, but still several decades ahead of most of the other Caribbean islands, let alone the Americas.

The island made a very comfortable living for the Swedes, less from the cacao than by providing a trade and supply center during the colonial wars of the 18th century; so successful, indeed, that France bought the island back in 1877, placing it under administration from nearby Guadeloupe.

So there you have it - a Taino-Spanish-French island, whose street and town names are Swedish, so that there should really be four and not three crowns on its coat of arms. In 2003 the populace of the island voted to secede from Guadeloupe, and in 2007 the island became a French overseas collectivity.



Marks for: 7, based on the significant contributions made to human civilisation by the Taino people. These are, in total, the addition of the words barbecue ("barbacoa"), hammock ("hamaca"), canoe ("kanoa"), tobacco ("tabaco"), yucca ("yuca"), potato ("batata"), and hurricane ("juracán") into European language and culture.



Marks against: 0, based on the significant contributions made to human civilisation by the French, Spanish and Swedish settlers of Saint-Barthélemy.



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Sunday, June 28, 2015

Rwanda

In Jonathan Swift's great satire, "Gulliver's Travels", the war is ostensibly between two nations, the Lilliputians and the people of Blefuscu, but it isn't nationalism, nor patriotism, nor land, nor food, nor ethnicity, nor religion, nor ideology, but sheer, downright, crass human stupidity that divides the two, a difference of opinion over the correct way to crack eggs. There are, as Swift explains in his deadpan manner, two correct ways to crack open a soft-boiled egg, which we might call the Catholic way and the Protestant way, or the Sunni and the Shi'a, the Orthodox and the Reform, the Maoist and the Leninist, the Republican and the Democrat; one can crack the egg at the Big End, or one can crack the egg at the Little End (non-conformists like me like to crack the egg in the middle, while anarchists and revolutionaries simply take a potato masher and never mind the shell).

In Rwanda the Tutsi, who ruled the country for many years, insist on the Little End, but the Hutu are Big Endians and, three years before the country became independent from Belgium, they overthrew the king, massacred Little Endians by the tens of thousands, and drove about 150,000 more into the yolk of exile. The children of those exiles formed the Rwanda Patriotic Front and started a civil war in 1990, which led the Hutu rulers to impose a crackdown, and about a million people were turned into omelette, three-quarters of the Tutsi population among them. What was left of the Tutsi scrambled to Uganda, or to the north of the country, and carried on fighting, and won, and now it was the turn of the Hutu to pack their egg sandwiches in a hurry and flee, about two million of them in total, rightly fearing the retribution that inevitably followed…

What has happened since falls into the category. not of satire but of farce, which is known in the Rwandan language as "gacaca"; properly speaking a "gacaca" is a community court, and it is here that people accused of involvement in the genocide are put on trial, and generally acquitted because key witnesses tend to be lying dead among the egg-shells, or simply fear the meringue that will be made of them if they collaborate, I mean participate.


The latest stage of the farce took place in June 2015, when General Karenzi Karake, the head of Rwanda's secret intelligence service, was secretly invited to the United Kingdom for secret meetings with the UK secret intelligence service, and found himself arrested on a European war crimes warrant as he boarded his plane home again. Human rights lawyer Cherie Booth is on the General's legal team, which means he must be a good guy after all, because Mrs Booth's husband, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair - himself wanted for war crimes over the war in Iraq - is...well, actually we don't know, because the UK Foreign Office had declared this to be a secret too. Tony Blair is also an advisor to the President of Kazakhstan, and...well, why not just click here and you can read it for yourself. It doesn't make for pretty reading, though it certainly does make for serious wealth-creating. Nice job Tony!


Marks for: 6 million, in US dollars, if you take The Blair Foundation's figures at face-value;  35 million, according to one, 60 million, according to several other sources.

Marks against: 2 million (the number of people estimated to have been hutued and tutsied in the genocidal wars.




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Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press

Russia

Properly The Russian Federation, which name is also an indication of its imperial aspirations.

Best looked at through the eyes of http://english.pravda.ru/world/ - you can do that for yourself; it's worth the effort.

But Russia is not really a country; it is simply the home of President, sometimes Prime Minister, unofficially Czar, and residually Comrade Vladimir Putin; it is just that his home is very large, extending as it does from Europe in the west to Siberia in the east. Putin's personal website makes for fascinating reading (http://eng.putin.kremlin.ru/bio):

"Vladimir Putin was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad," it begins, and then, as has tended to be the story of his rule, it shifts very quickly to focus on the first person singular, the I-that-matters: "I come from an ordinary family, and this is how I lived for a long time, nearly my whole life. I lived as an average, normal person and I have always maintained that connection".

Average and normal are, of course, terms impossible to define, but still, I doubt whether too many people in Russia, other than the billionaire oligarchs who stole its resources when the Soviet Union collapsed, have ever lived remotely like Comrade Putin - which, incidentally, is not supposed to be pronounced as though it were a French word, like raisin or Africain or ignorantin.

"Vladimir Putin’s mother, Maria Shelomova, was a very kind, benevolent person," the website continues to bake blintzes in the Russian style (much yeast, much cheese, lots of raisins as a sweetener). "We lived simply - cabbage soup, cutlets, pancakes, but on Sundays and holidays my Mom would bake very delicious stuffed buns [pirozhki] with cabbage, meat and rice, and curd tarts [vatrushki]," Mr Putin says. The phrase from "my Mom" to "curd tarts" is then posted a second time, in a large box, in much the same way that a website dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, say, might pull out "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time", or one dedicated to Winston Churchill might highlight "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." But this, the pirozhki and the curd tarts, this is Vladimir Putin's most noteworthy contribution to the intellectual aphorisms of political philosophy. And note the glorification of the Putin mother into upper case Mom.


By the time you have read this far into the biography, you should have become both bored and cognisant that the website is as unlikely to reveal anything of value as is his reign as Czar of all the Russias. But you are wrong. Somewhat further down it is revealed that "In 1970, Vladimir Putin became a student of law department at Leningrad State University, earning his degree in 1975. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr Putin studied at KGB School No. 1 in Moscow." No. 1. Not just any KGB school. The elite of the KGB. Where they don't teach grammar alongside poisoning their enemies ("student of the law department....).

After graduating from Leningrad State University, Putin was assigned to work in the state security agencies. "My perception of the KGB was based on the idealistic stories I heard about intelligence." (Does he mean James Bond here? Grahame Green? John Le Carré? Bay of Pigs? The Blunt-Philby-Burgess-Maclean quartet?) He was first appointed to the Directorate secretariat, then the counter-intelligence division, where he worked for about five months. Half a year later, he was sent to operations personnel retraining courses - which leads me to ask why he needed retraining; had he failed that badly after the first attempt? "Mr Putin spent another six months working in the counter-intelligence division." That was when he drew attention from foreign intelligence officers. "Fairly quickly, I left for special training in Moscow, where I spent a year. Then I returned again to Leningrad, worked there in the First Main Directorate – the intelligence service. That directorate had branches in major cities of the Soviet Union, including Leningrad. I worked there for about four and a half years."

"Then Mr Putin returned again to Moscow to study at the Andropov Red Banner Institute, where he was trained for his trip to Germany. Having completed his studies at the Andropov Institute, Putin left for East Germany in 1985 and worked there until 1990." Between 1985 and 1990, Vlad the Impaler worked in East Germany, serving at the local intelligence office in Dresden. "Over the course of his service, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and to the position of senior assistant to the head of the department. In 1989, he was awarded the bronze medal issued in the German Democratic Republic, 'For Faithful Service to the National People’s Army'. After returning to Leningrad from Germany in 1990, he became assistant to the rector of Leningrad State University in charge of international relations. In 1996, he and his family moved to Moscow, where his political career began. Starting in June 1991, Putin began work as Chairman of the Committee for International Relations at the St Petersburg City Hall, and from 1994, concurrently held the position of Deputy Chairman of the St Petersburg City Government."

"In 1996" - I am simply continuing to quote his website, with as few interjections as my forked tongue can restrain - "Vladimir Putin moved with his family to Moscow, where he was offered the post of Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property Management Directorate. 'I would not say that I did not like Moscow, but simply that I liked St Petersburg more. But Moscow was very obviously a European city,' Putin recalled. His career rise was rapid. In March 1997, he was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office and Chief of Main Control Directorate." Busy with work as he was, he still found time to defend his doctoral thesis on economics at the St Petersburg State Mining Institute. In May 1998, Putin was made First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office, and in July 1998, he was appointed Director of the Federal Security Service. From March 1999, he also held the position of Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. In August 1999, Putin was appointed prime minister of the Russian Government. The post was offered to him by then President Boris Yeltsin, who probably didn't know he had done this, as he was more than likely drunk at the time.

As Putin later recalled, "Mr Yeltsin invited me to come and see him and said that he wanted to offer me the prime minister’s job." (It is interesting that "prime minister" appears in lower case on the website, while "Mom" and "President" appear in upper case). "Incidentally, he never used the word 'successor' in his conversation with me then, but spoke of becoming 'prime minister with prospects', and said that if all went well, he thought this could be possible". Putin described his time in the prime minister’s office as an honour and an interesting experience. "I thought then, if I can get through a year that will already be a good start. If I can do something to help save Russia from falling apart then this would be something to be proud of."

Unfortunately, Comrade Putin has done absolutely nothing to save Russia from falling apart, though he has done a great deal to re-establish the Soviet Union under the alias of the Russian Federation, and very soon, no doubt, he will have the constitution changed, so that he can stand for election as Czar Romanov Putin the First. With Kiev, presumably, as his royal capital.

And finally, though it is not in his website, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, as Mark Haddon titled his splendid book about something completely different. It was January 21st 2007 and Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, was visiting Putin at his Presidential residence in Sochi to discuss energy trade. Putin was well aware that Merkel is terrified of dogs. As soon as the press were gathered for the joint interview with the two leaders, Putin summoned his favourite dog, an extremely large, black Labrador, which sniffed Merkel's legs, while Putin grinned, and Merkel performed her best imitation of dementia. She recovered enough to tell one of the American journalists, "I understand why he has to do this — to prove he's a man. He's afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this."

Now that is a quote that should be pulled out and put in a box.



"I understand why he has to do this — to prove he's a man. He's afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this." German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Vladimir Putin.
















Marks for: 1 (as in Czar Putin the First)

Marks against: as above





You can find David Prashker at:
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Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press

Saturday, June 27, 2015

Romania



In Europe, for many centuries, three groups of people have been the specific target of communal hatred, based on detailed negative stereotyping and a tendency towards nomadism, both of which are less the culture of the people themselves than the effect of the racial and ethnic hatred – which is to say, they have become nomads, and they have come to fit the stereotypes, because both have been forced on them. Best known of the three groups are the Jews and the gypsies (Jews came originally from Israel; gypsies, as the name should make obvious though it is little known, from Egypt). The third group are the Roma, though they are now also known as the Tigan, because their compatriots in Romania do not wish to be identified with them, and have previously been known as the Sinti, or Sindhi, or Kale, pronounced Kali, or simply Romani.

The Roma probably originated in northern India, and arrived in Europe with the Mongol invaders in the 13th century, only to find themselves enslaved or expelled. There were never more than about 200,000 of them, and when slavery was abolished in 1856, finding themselves totally unwelcome in what was by then their native land, they took to the roads. Of those who stayed behind, another 25,000 were deported as “unwanteds” in the early 1940s, and another 36,000 were exterminated during the Nazi era. Today they are the butt of everybody's hatred wherever they go, especially in France, where they live in camps that are regularly vandalised by the police, who then deport them in numbers despite having no grounds to do so.

So much for the history of the Roma; now for modern Romania itself, which ironically took its name from the Roma people, before turning against them and throwing them out, or murdering them. For centuries it formed two parts of the Ottoman Empire: Wallachia and Moldavia. Today, when we speak of Romanians, we really mean Wallachians and Moldavians. This usurpation of title is one of the methods by which people perform, or in this case attempt to perform, genocide against another.

Among the European despots, dictators, autocrats and general monsters of the 20th century, the names of Hitler and Stalin stand out, but not far behind them come Italy’s Mussolini, Spain’s Franco, Portugal’s Salazar and especially Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, who led the Communist government as General Secretary, and then as Head of State, from 1965 until the fall of Communism in 1989, and who was shot by firing squad in 1989, after being found guilty of genocide and sabotage of the Romanian economy by the post-Soviet era authorities. Genocide is a very precise statement, and the brutality of the Securitate, Romania’s version of the KGB, was unquestionably one of the most brutal anywhere. Sabotage of the economy is a rather more vague statement, but was intended to describe his decision, in 1982, to require that all of the country’s product, agricultural and industrial, be exported, to pay off the vast national debt accrued by his penchant for building, of which the apogee was the People’s Palace in Bucharest, probably the most extravagantly pointless and narcissistic building project in human history. The export of all goods left the country impoverished, even without electricity for six days in every week, and might even have led to a coup against him, except that the soldiers designated to carry out the coup were sent to harvest maize, and were therefore unavailable.


When Communism fell, Ion Iliescu’s National Salvation Front took power, until it became clear that nothing had changed – the NSF was almost entirely constituted of former Securitate and Communist Party members. In June 1990 the people rose up and threw them out, after which democratic coalitions worked with President Iliescu, until he lost power in 1996 to Emil Constantinescu, regained it in 2000, then lost it again, and again to Constantinescu, in 2004. Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007, though it is hard to understand, from Europe's point of view, why it would want the failed state of Romania in, and even harder to understand, from Romania's point of view, why it would want to be in the failed economic community of Europe.

 

Marks for: 0, and that's generous

Marks against: Too many to count




You can find David Prashker at:
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Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press

Reunion Island

Try looking up Reunion on the Internet and you will be sent to a thousand college and high school alumni pages, and then, inevitably, appealed to for a generous donation to support the institution’s football team - you may even be asked to support its academic departments, though this is unusual for American colleges, where Masters degrees in golf and full-time PhDs in quarterbacking are now the highest aspiration of the majority. 

Finding Reunion Island in the reality of the Indian Ocean is equally difficult – it is located to the east of Madagascar and to the south of Mauritius; and of course, being that close to Le Havre and Calais, it's French, though it was once Portuguese. It was also, once, briefly, used as a penal colony; once, briefly, named Ile Bourbon; once, briefly, the victim of a mosquito-borne disease called chikungunya; and many more than once the recipient of lava from the Piton de la Fournaise, a shield volcano formed from a hotspot volcano on the other side of the island named the Piton des Neiges, which is now extinct; and no, I am not able to explain what a shield volcano or a hotspot volcano are, but I can state categorically that you cannot have absolute opposites in the same place and at the same time, and therefore you cannot have shield and hotspot volcanoes simultaneously with intelligent design.

It isn't the volcanoes, however, which make Reunion Island one of the world's top danger-spots. And no, it isn't Islamic terrorism either. It's the sharks - and I don't mean the sharks who try to sell you insurance policies or extended warranties or shares in their Ponzi scheme. Real sharks. Jaws' cousins. Surfing has been banned, and a mass-cull is under way, to protect the island's most endangered species - tourists - from the world's most endangered species, Nature.


Marks for: 11.3 billion (the amount in pounds sterling that France contributes to Reunion Island every year)
 

Marks against: 170 (the number of times Piton has erupted since records were first kept, which was in the 17th century)




Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press

Friday, June 26, 2015

Qatar

Why is Qatar hosting the next soccer world cup? Why is Qatar not part of Saudi Arabia, given its geography? Do they still fish for pearls in Qatar? How did the Thani family come to rule it? How does a son depose his own father (as Crown Prince Hamad did in 1995), and why did he voluntarily abdicate in favour of his own son? Who on earth designed those hideous modern buildings which make Qatar look like a bad edition of Star Trek? Is al-Jazeera now more significant than Fox News? Do Qatari women take up their right to vote and stand for election? How come there are so many migrant workers dying while building the stadia for the world cup, all of whom are living in conditions of debt bondage, delayed or non-payment of salaries, confiscation of passports, abuse, hazardous working conditions, and squalid living arrangements? How does a modern country allow itself to be ruled by a despotic feudal family which siphons all the oil revenue into its own pockets, and allows men, women, and children to be subjected to forced labour and prostitution? Why is Qatar rated number 3 on the list of "top world tax havens"? Why have I run out of questions about this anomalous corner of the world so quickly? Oh, I do have three more, especially after the revelations of bribery and corruption surrounding the World Cup: first, is there anyone out there organising a boycott of the World Cup? Second - if not, why not? And third, the saddest question of all - why, given what we know of this human world, why did I waste my energy bothering to ask those first two questions?


Marks for: 0

Marks against: 1.35 million (the number of people estimated to be working on the world cup building programme; 94% of the country's workforce)



Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Puerto Rico

I am sure that, if they could, the Americans would like to “own” all the island-nations in the Caribbean which were not in the safe hands of the British or the French. Cuba obviously. The Dominican Republic would be useful, though its proximity to Haiti would establish some economic and humanitarian issues. Puerto Rico it already has, as evidenced by the vast numbers of Puerto Ricans who live in Florida – Puerto Rico is an official 51st state of the union, re-endorsed in a 2012 referendum where less than a third of the population opposed the status quo. The island has a governor, and is exempt from US income tax as well as receiving federal funds. Usually the Americans want these places, as the French and British do, for exploitation of their natural resources or to host a military base, but Puerto Rico has no natural resources beyond its climate and its beaches, and the military base has been considerably scaled back in recent years. Maybe the Americans just want it as an advance-warning location for in-coming hurricanes.


Marks for: 3.5 million (the number of US tourists who provide its main source of income every year)

Marks against: 70 billion (the size of the nation's debt)




Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press


Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Polynesia

The World of Many islands, to translate the name literally from the Greek - more than a thousand South Pacific islands, some of them so tiny they don't even have names let alone inhabitants, but also, technically, New Zealand and Hawaii, Samoa and Tonga, Fiji and the Cook Islands, many of these islands countries in their own right.



Whoever it is who determines these things - which is definitely not God and just as definitely not the people who live on these islands - the South Pacific is sub-divided into three regions, of which Polynesia is the large triangle in the south-east, something in the shape of a stingray, with Melanesia and Micronesia forming its backbone and tail.

If you really want to know more, this is one of those occasions when Wikipedia is the place to go; but truthfully you should not want to know more, for the name was artificial, an invention of colonialists and imperialists in the 18th century, and it served them very usefully as a way of reducing a great variety of people and places to a comfortable and inferior homogeneity, an anthropological paradigm of unsophisticated, even primitive, "natives" and "pagans", after which it was legitimate to conquer, enslave and exploit them without compunction, as the global corporations continue to do even now. "Manifest Destiny" as it has also been termed. The time came long ago for civilised human beings to throw the insult in the garbage can, the same garbage can that contains the N-word and the Y-word and the I-word ("nigger" and "yid" and "red indian" if you really need me to spell it out), and in dispensing with the word, to start acknowledging people as people, and not treating them as commodities. "Human being." Try it.

The doing of this, however, depends on the French, who were the first to use the term, and who continue to use it to this day, describing a collection of their South Pacific territories as French Polynesia. In the meanwhile, while there are no actual countries named Polynesia, Melanesia or Micronesia, the division of the South Pacific in this manner remains in use among anthropologists, military strategists, and those who like to test nuclear missiles, so it cannot be ignored, but only counter-argued.



Marks for: 0

Marks against: 8 (the number of locations in the South Pacific where nuclear tests have been carried out. These are Bikini Atoll, Enewetak Atoll, Johnston Atoll and the so-called Pacific Proving Grounds [by the US], Kiritimati [Christmas Island] and Malden Island [by the UK], Fangataufa and Moruroa [by France]).




Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press