David Prashker's World Hourglass

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Papua New Guinea

On the left side of the island of New Guinea is the country better known as Indonesia; on the right side is Papua. Fortunately there is room for both, as Papua is the world’s second largest island (Greenland is the largest, though technically are not Australia and the joint continent of the two Americas both islands, in that you can sail all the way around them, and an island is an area of land surrounded on all sides by water? No, I am told, they are continents. So what makes a continent? Answers please in the comment box at the foot of the page).

Some fascinating statistics for this island Paradise:

80% of the population live in rural poverty, with no modern conveniences of any kind (is that not Paradise? No TV, no cars, no fast-food joints, no computers, no loud music being played at 2am by your neighbours, no movies, no cellphones, no one constantly trying to convince you to buy something you don’t need, and can’t afford, but everyone else has one so you must…)

PNG has more languages spoken than the rest of the world put together – over 700 native tongues. And yet – no civil war.

Tribes who occupy the mountain region live such isolated lives, they are believed not to know of the existence of other tribes on the island, and use bartering instead of money (radical capitalism!)

The glorious rainforests are being cut down at an alarming rate. I should explain my use of the world “alarming”. What is alarming is that the companies undertaking the logging are Malaysian, not Papua New Guinean, so the income is going overseas and PNG is not benefiting. The fact that the rainforest is being cut down is only alarming to conservationists, who want the world tomorrow to be like it is today – conservatism and conservationism are etymologically synonymous. Based on historical precedents, if the rainforests continue to be cut down at the present rate, conservationists in PNG will be mourning the loss of PNG’s “glorious countryside”, the devastation of “this green and pleasant land”, in about 400 years. We in Britain are 1000 years ahead of that!

There is also the challenge of: how do we get out of this primordial poverty, unless we cut down the rainforests, because they are obstacles to our access to our huge reserves of oil and natural gas? To which the answer is unquestionably: don’t ask the Malaysians.

I should also explain my ironic use of the word "Paradise" earlier. PNG is subject to more volcanic activity, earthquakes and tidal waves than any other island in the world. "Paradise" is a term used by believers in divinities; so is "intelligent design", though it remains unclear how volcanic activity, earthquakes and tidal waves fit into either of these two concepts. Mount Tavurvur last erupted as recently as 2014; the time before that, in 1994, Mount Vulcan blew too, and completely annihilated the town of Rabaul.

Marks for: 1

Marks against: 3 (1 for the volcanoes, 1 for the earthquakes and 1 for the tidal waves)

You can find David Prashker at:
http://theargamanpress.com/
http://davidprashker.com/
http://davidprashker.net/
https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

The Argaman Press

Panama

The most north American of all south American countries, and not simply because it provides the umbilical cord that connects the two halves of the continent; though actually it's only north American in Panama City and one or two holiday-towns outside the capital; the rest is still living, quite literally, in the dark ages.

It was with US backing that Panama declared independence from Colombia in 1903, and the Americans who built, and then retained control of the Panama Canal until 1999, at which time the US military bases in the country were also handed over to Panamanian authority. It was also an American invasion which ended the rule of its former ally Manuel Noriega in 1989, overthrowing a tyrant who had turned the country into a major drug-smuggling outlet.

The canal is what makes Panama famous; every year more than fifteen thousand vessels make the eight-hour journey through the waterway, which is strange, because I made the parallel journey by train, from Corazol to Colon, and it took just one hour, on a dead-slow, old-fashioned steam train – too short to qualify for one of the world's great railway journeys, and yet, nonetheless, one of the world's great railway journeys. As former Nicaraguan Vice-President Daniel Ortega has described in his wonderful novel "A Thousand Deaths Plus One", it was Nicaragua that made the first attempt to finance a canal that would unite the Atlantic with the Pacific, and Nicaragua is still working towards that goal, only the Yanks preferred the convenience and proximity of Panama.

But it isn't the canal that should make Panama famous; it's the rainforests with their unique collections of plants, animals and birds, and its human population which, unlike the elite of Panama City and Boquete, with their American-style lives of luxury, lives way below the poverty line, in rain-forest and banana plantation and bamboo hut, much as they learned to live three thousand years ago, feeding themselves by fishing. If you do make the trip to Panama, do not miss the opportunity to travel back in time, by spending at least one night in the San Blas islands.

Marks For: 365 (one, not for every day of the year, but for the number of islands that make up San Blas, though only 49 are actually inhabited)

Marks Against: $5.25bn (the amount being projected as the cost of modernising and expanding the canal; money that might be better spent alleviating the poverty of the three million Panamanians who gain no benefit whatsoever from the existence of the Canal; though, of course, this could be argued the other way: if the modernisation is successful and the Canal helps grow the country's economy, then those three million can expect to receive their share; sadly the evidence of history is not persuasive in this case)

You can find David Prashker at:
http://theargamanpress.com/
http://davidprashker.com/
http://davidprashker.net/
https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

The Argaman Press

Pakistan

Many people today seem to forget that there were once two Pakistans, one called East Pakistan, the other called West Pakistan, the consequence of Hindu-Moslem enmities when the Raj - the British Empire in India - came to an end in 1947. No one was happy with the arrangement; Gandhi even refused to attend the independence celebrations, because he was devastated that a single country could not have been formed, still named India, with Hindus and Moslems living together in peace, harmony and cotton-weaving.

Peace, and passive resistance as an alternative to war, both died with Gandhi. Wars between the Hindus and the Moslems were fought in 1947 and again in 1965, with proxy wars continuing in the divided Kashmir and Bengal regions to this day.

In the meanwhile, the Awami League had become established in 1949, campaigning for East Pakistani independence, which it finally achieved in theory in 1970, only for implementation of the election result to be delayed by a cyclone that killed a half a million people, the refusal of the government in West Pakistan to accept the vote, and then the kidnapping by them of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, their leader; they held him for nine months, during which time Bengali nationalists launched a guerrilla war against the Pakistani army, India took the Bengali side, Bangladesh was declared an independent nation, and Sheikh Rahman released to serve as President, later as Prime Minister, which office he used, in 1974, to establish a one-party state, close down all political parties except his own, and most newspapers except those who volubly supported him. Seven months later he was assassinated and, guess what, the military took power.

So much for East Pakistan, about which you can read more under its new name, Bangladesh. West Pakistan is what remains, now minus the "West", one of many examples that could be cited to show that the political geography of planet Earth was not achieved by intelligent design, or not by humans anyway. As the adjacent map demonstrates, it is a tiny sleeve of land, squashed between the giants of India and Iran, with the anarchy of Afghanistan to the north-west, the even greater anarchy of rival warlords and Indians in Kashmir, and then the Himalayas...but what the map does not show is that this very small country (just 300,000 square miles, the size of Namibia) has 191 million people living in it, making it the sixth most populous country in the world (Namibia, by contrast, has 2.3 million).

Not surprising then that Pakistan's seventy year history is one of military coups, dictatorships, corruption, war-lords and general mayhem, best told through the history of its Constitution. This took four years to create, but only two more before it was suspended (by Ayub Khan), then replaced (by Ayub Khan in 1962), though that second version did not actually take effect until 1973, only to be suspended again four years later (by Zia-ul-Haq in 1977), and reinstated in 1985. Or we could take a look at Pakistani history through the eyes of the military historian: military coups which imposed martial law and then turned their leader into a civilian President took place in 1958 (lasted until 1971), 1977 (lasted until 1988), and 1999 (lasted until 2008), so the next one is due in 2016 or 2017.

Pakistan, like India, is also a nuclear power, and more importantly not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty (of the eight nuclear nations, the USA, UK, China, Russia and France are signatories, India, Pakistan and North Korea are not; Israel is not on either list because Israel continues to deny having any nuclear capacity). The Pakistani possession of the bomb appears to have been significantly overlooked by the Obama administration when it engaged in talks with Iran about its nuclear programme; Iran's eastern border is with Pakistan, and that, far more than the Israel factor, is why the Iranians want/need nuclear weaponry. They at least can count what Obama and Kerry have apparently forgotten, that Pakistan was known to have stockpiled up to one hundred and twenty warheads by the end of 2014, and has sufficient reserves of prepared fissionable material to expand that stockpile to two hundred. India probably has fewer, but its nuclear programme is so "highly classified" that figures are hard to come by; the current belief of the tracking agencies is between ninety and one hundred and ten. But If India and Pakistan can have the bomb...

Marks For: 9000 (the number of runs scored in test matches by Younis Khan, as of the time of writing this)

Alternative Marks For (Marks Against are obvious from all the above paragraphs, and far too many to enumerate): 6 - the number of places in Pakistan designated by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites (the Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro, the Buddhist Ruins of Takht-i-Bahi and Sahr-i-Bahlol, Taxila, the Shalamar Gardens and Fort in Lahore, several historical monuments at Makli, and Rohtas Fort)

You can find David Prashker at:
http://theargamanpress.com/
http://davidprashker.com/
http://davidprashker.net/
https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

The Argaman Press

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Switzerland

Strange, strange place. I have known countless Swiss during the sixty years of my life, and they have all, without exception, been lovely, charming people, who speak several languages with interchangeable fluency, regard skiing as the principal activity of the gods on Mount Olympus (or should that be Mount Engelberg), and smile with ironic boredom when you ask if they possess a cuckoo clock (they all do).

But then you challenge them about their tradition of neutrality, about the universally-known truths of their banking system, which sees no evil, hears no evil, and therefore cannot be accused of practicing any evil, and they respond by describing the gun they keep at home for their annual return to reserve duty in the conscripted peacekeeping forces of their military (why does a neutral country need a conscripted army anyway?).

Or you ask them, why did it take until 2002 to join the United Nations; and why have you not joined the European Community (the answer to both questions is, again, neutrality, and banking)?

And then, because if you are me you like to press the most controversial and provocative of questions: is it true that the largest party in your multi-party democracy, in the European country which has the largest number (20%) of foreign nationals living in it, is the Swiss People’s Party, whose main platform is anti-immigration, and which approved the banning of minarets on mosques after a referendum in 2009? When the British Prime Minister, in a speech in the Australian Parliament in November 2014, announced his government’s intention to restrict immigration from certain parts of Europe, and former Prime Minister John Major gave the same speech on the same day, the head of the European Commission responded by saying it was illegal to do so under EC regulations; a 2014 referendum in Switzerland approved by a large majority precisely such a restriction. No wonder they haven't joined the EC - they'd be thrown out.

There is Switzerland, and there is Sweden, two European countries with high standards of living and excellent provision of all the civilised basics of life. One achieves it through a “socialised” economy, the other through isolationist racism, closed doors, and an economy driven by money-laundering, tax-havening, and the financing of terrorism. Two models. Take your pick.

Marks for: 314 (the number of pieces in Hans Meister's 1991 version of the Swiss Army Knife, claiming the record for the world's largest version of Switzerland's one and only true contribution to world civilisation, given that you can't really count the now-obsolete cuckoo clock)

Marks against: 1934 (the year in which the Swiss Banking Law was passed, establishing "account confidentiality" with legal protection. Click here for the case for the defence)

The Argaman Press

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Saint Martin

Or Sint Maarten, to restore its original Dutch spelling and pronunciation. In fact, it was Spanish first, having been sighted by Christopher Columbus in 1493 and claimed for Spain, but it was the Dutch who first settled the island and exploited its salt deposits. The Spanish then retook it in 1633, fought with the French and Dutch over it, and gave it up in 1648. As with all Caribbean islands, its history for the next two hundred years was one of cotton, tobacco, and sugar plantations worked by African slaves; Napoleon abolished slavery on the French side of the island; the Dutch finally did the same on their half in 1863. After the Second World War, and now a free port, Sint Maarten joined with several other Dutch Caribbean possessions to become the Netherlands Antilles. Following a referendum in 2000, it then became a self-governing country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the change not formalised until October 2010, when the Dutch parliament dissolved the Netherlands Antilles.

The island's official website describes itself as "the capital of duty-free shopping", and offers watersports, beaches and calypso nightlife as its contribution to the improvement of human existence. What, no race-riots to selfie, no shanty towns to blog, no ethnic tensions to postcard, no religious rivalries to crusade for or against? It claims to be Paradise on Earth, and of course it isn't; but apparently it may be as close as we will get.

Marks for: 0 (the total number of customs duties, VAT, and other indirect taxes you can expect to pay).

Marks against: 0 (the total number of customs duties, VAT, and other indirect taxes you can expect to pay).

You can find David Prashker at:
http://theargamanpress.com/
http://davidprashker.com/
http://davidprashker.net/
https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

The Argaman Press

Saint Lucia

First sighted by Columbus as late as 1501, a French colony after 1635, ceded to Britain in 1814 as part of the Treaty of Paris, turned by the British into another of their innumerable sugar plantations, worked by slaves from Africa until slavery was abolished in 1834, it was one of the earliest of Britain’s overseas territories to become independent, being allowed a form of representative government in 1924, a constitution in 1936, universal suffrage in 1951, and finally self-governance in internal affairs in 1967, paving the way for full independence in 1979. By then the British had lost interest anyway, because the production of sugar cane was no longer viable, and so they closed it down and tried bananas instead. With less than 200,000 people inhabiting the island, and living in the shadow of its two volcanic peaks, there is little for anyone to be politically adversarial about, and anyway the weather's too hot and the beaches too inviting. A minor spat in 2003 when the Parliament voted to replace the Oath of Allegiance to the British monarch with a pledge of loyalty to itself; but the British got over it, eventually.

“Marks for” are very high indeed, for the splendid sulphur springs which are every tourist’s preferred destination, and for the arbitrary, haphazardous and chanceful fact that Derek Walcott, Nobel Prize for Literature laureate in 1992, grew up in St Lucia.

Marks against: None that I can think of; it doesn't even get a listing by Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International only mentions it in passing, and that as one of the countries that had absolutely no one on death row - the kinds of listing, or absence of listing, that every civilised country should aspire to. Maybe having such a very different type of flag is also significant!

The Argaman Press

Saint Kitts and Nevis

St Kitts is really St Christopher, named by Columbus for his patron saint rather than as personal self-aggrandisement.

Nevis is named for the mountain which occupies most of the centre of the island, and which does, if you get the angle right, and the sun is in a certain direction, and the clouds are being helpful, really does look a little bit like Mount Ben Nevis in Scotland; but not that much (actually I made that up; it's really an abbreviation of Nuestra Senora de la Nieves, Our Lady of the Snows, in Spanish, though no snow has ever been recorded on the island, and is never likely to be, given where it lies in the world – so my explanation is just as unreasonable).

The islands occupy that geographical region known as the Lesser Antilles, and are really part of the Leeward islands, though they like to think of themselves as separate, and would quite like to be separate from each other, and not just by the two miles of shallow waters that physically separate them. Britain gave them independence in 1983, with the administration based on St Kitts, which the Nevisians resent; proof that partition doesn't work, not just in big and complex places like Palestine and Pakistan, but even on two tiny islands like these.

Like most of the islands in the region, they spent centuries producing the richest and most valuable crop in the world – slaves; the islands were the headquarters for the trade in the Caribbean, with between six and seven thousand passing through the islands every year. Today those slaves' descendants are more or less the only inhabitants, the indigenous Arawaks and Caribs having been wiped out long ago, and the British and the indentured Irish on Nevis, and the French who took control of St Kitts for a while, having gone home. The last of the sugar plantations which the slaves worked was closed in 2005, leaving tourism, money laundering, off-shore tax havening and drug-transportation as the main sources of income.

The island of Anguilla was supposed to be part of this structure, which the British first set up in 1967, but the Anguillans didn't like the fact that it was centred in St Kitts, threw the St Kitts police force out, and seceded.

Marks For: This entire business of trying to give marks to countries for their contribution to human progress and development is becoming a bit pointless, don't you think?

Marks Against: Fewer than some, more than others.

You can find David Prashker at:
http://theargamanpress.com/
http://davidprashker.com/
http://davidprashker.net/
https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.com/
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com/

The Argaman Press

David Prashker's World Hourglass

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Papua New Guinea

Panama

Pakistan

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Switzerland

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Saint Martin

Saint Lucia

Saint Kitts and Nevis

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