David Prashker's World Hourglass

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Malta

Lying in the very heart of the Mediterranean has made Malta extremely interesting to every nation in history with a boat, a desire to trade, and an aspiration towards empire, from the Phoenicians to the Greeks and Romans, to the Arabs and the Crusaders, and more recently to both France and Britain. Britain was the last, giving up its claims in 1964, a reward to the Maltese people for their part in the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini. Malta joined the Eurozone in 2008 but is currently under siege by a new type of invader, literally hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing out of Africa on boats owned by pirates and in conditions little better than those their ancestors were hauled away in to slavery centuries before. Over 150,000 of these people are drowning every year as their boats capsize, sometimes in storm, sometimes because the pirates sink them for the insurance claim, having already taken payment from the corpses swimming in its wake. Refugees arriving in Malta are placed in detention camps, another reminder of its less glorious past – the displaced persons (as refugees were called back then) of post-Hitler Europe also found temporary homes in camps of the same type. The main source of income for the islands (there are also Gozo, Comino, Comminotto and Filfla) is tourism, and though Valetta is worth the visit, a holiday in Malta is not exactly Ravenna or the French Riviera.

Christopher's Marlowe's play, fully entitled "The Rich Jew of Malta", was written in 1589 or 1590, and is probably the most wilfully and deliberately anti-Semitic play ever to have been set to paper, in English or any other language. Its central character, Barabas, was a demonised re-modelling, like Faust in Marlowe's better-known work, of the royal physician Roderigo Lopes, a Jew of Portuguese origin who underwent forced conversion to Catholicism in his native land, and then accepted the requirement of conversion to Protestantism in order to practice medicine in exile in England. Marlowe's plays stirred anti-Semitic riots in London at the time of their first performance, and then again when the play was revived in 1593, immediately after the execution of Lopes on trumped-up charges of spying for Spain - all of which riots rather make nonsense of the claim by British historians that there were no Jews in England at the time.

Marlowe's plot, and those riots, appear to have angered a young playwright named William Shakespeare, still in his early twenties and just beginning to make his name in London. Lopes was Shakespeare's doctor, and later he rented the house where Lopes had lived; Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" is modeled on Lopes, while the play's title is a pastiche of the "The Jew of Malta", its plot and relationships likewise, and only its purpose is very different - one of the great diatribes against anti-Semitism in English or any other language; but you have to know the full historical context to understand that, and English historians have spent four hundred years denying that context. Read my novel, "The Plausible Tragedie of Roderigo Lopes", due for publication in 2017, and you can see the full picture at last.

Marks For: 2

Marks Against: 3

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The Argaman Press

Mali

Update November 2015

Meanwhile, back on Poverty Alley and Desolation Row…

When Europeans first set out on their conquests of the world, starting at the end of the 15th century, it was a matter of common understanding that European Christians were the most advanced form of humanity yet developed, while everyone else was inferior to the point that most were not even regarded as fully human, and were therefore murderable or enslaveable with impunity, though conversion to Christianity at least gave them the chance of evolving fully into humans after a number of generations.

Three hundred years earlier, the greatest trading empire in the world was centred upon Timbuktou and Gao, the latter the capital of Mali. It encompassed an area of land three times the size of modern France, and stretched all the way to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. More than a million manuscripts from the time, written in Sudani, a dialect of Arabic, demonstrate extensive and sophisticated knowledge of most intellectual material, including astronomy and mathematics, the two subjects above any others for which thinking people in Europe were being burned at the stake at the time of Columbus, and for at least a century afterwards. The Mali Empire, like those of Ghana before it, and the Songhai after it, were Moslem, and developed in parallel with the great Moslem civilisations further north, across the Maghreb in Egypt and Tunisia and Morocco and Spain. There were more schools, including universities, in the Mali Empire, than in the whole of Europe combined.

Clearly Europeans had at least some inkling of this because, even to this day, people in Europe still make reference to Timbuktou, though most assume it is another Shangrila or Eldorado, a town from some writer’s imagination, to the extent that 19th century dictionaries include the name, but define it as a metaphor for “any faraway place”.

The Mali empire lasted for three hundred years, and to be fair it was not the arrival of the Europeans which brought it down; that had already been achieved by the Nigerian Songhai, and then by the Moroccans who defeated the Songhai at the end of the 16th century, and made Timbuktou the capital. Today Timbuktou is so far declined that the Berber origin of the city’s name has become accurate again, not Tim but Tin-Bouctou, the place of the sand dunes.

Today’s Mali gives little hint of the greatness of its past – but then, neither does today’s Athens, and Jerusalem before 1967 was much the same, though neither of them have witnessed the sort of political and economic disintegration currently facing Mali, a consequence of the Tuareg peoples in the north of the country seceding in 2012 and declaring their own state, Azawad – essentially a conflict between nomadic Berberin whose roots lay in Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and across the Maghreb, traditional Moslems who had run the country for many years, and the new breed of radical Moslem who has begun to appear globally. A military coup followed, and not long afterwards the French launched Operation Serval, enabling the government to push back the Moslem radicals, and to reclaim most of the north.

Mali is fortunate in having the river Niger, which renders it self-sufficient in food; cotton and gold are exported, but it is listed among the twenty-five poorest nations in the world.

Marks for: 4 (historical)

Marks against: 4 (contemporary)

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

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Maldives

You have no idea, do you ? Me neither, I confess, until I looked it up. Go to the southern tip of India and take a boat west of Sri Lanka (Ceylon as it was once called), and you will find hundreds, literally hundreds, of tiny islands, bundled in twenty-six coral atolls, of which the largest are Malé and Hitaddu – these are the Maldives. Like the San Blas islands off Panama, though coral here rather than sand, none of them protrudes more than human height above the ocean, so that you can stand in the centre and, from the distance, it looks as if you are walking on water; a hundred years from now, if global warming happens as predicted, you will be, knee-deep.

Moslem for centuries, and authoritarian for just as long, the islands decided to try democracy in 2008, but the man elected President, Mohamed Nasheed, was then, according to his version, forced to resign at gunpoint by mutinous police and soldiers; seven years later he was arrested, and has now been sentenced to 13 years for terrorism. The most recent Vice-President, Ahmed Adeeb, is also being held there, impeached and charged with plotting a coup after an explosion on President Abdulla Yameen's yacht – it turned out to be a mechanical failure rather than a bomb, but why waste a convenient opportunity to get rid of your principal rival, especially if you can then impose a state of emergency and arrest all the other political rivals too? Not that there were many to arrest, given that it has been declared "mandatory for the government and parliament to halt any activities with negative repercussions on the nation’s tourism". That may include negative holiday reviews on AirBnB and Trip Advisor, but this is not specified. Islamic fundamentalists are rumoured to have infiltrated the islands, but this may just be a ruse of the politicians, seeking to obtain the high ground.

Amongst the major issues concerning inhabitants of the Maldives is: who was the most beautiful woman ever to pay a visit. Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel from Saudi Arabia is the current choice, but Saudi Arabia is Wahabi Moslem, so this may be contraversial among Sunni and Shi’a, especially as the Princess has been pictured in the media wearing the veil on the wrong part of her head. This story took precedence over the tale of a 15 year old girl, raped by her step-father, who was then sentenced to a hundred lashes for fornication. An international campaign overturned that ruling, but has no say in whether she now has to return to her family. Do rape and lashes not count as “activities with negative repercussions on the nation’s tourism”? Or is it only negative when it gets into the foreign press? "Honeymoon Island" indeed!

Marks for: 1

Marks against: 1

The Argaman Press

Malaysia

Most politicians struggle to run countries that are unified in a single place, but how do you run a country that comes in two very distinct parts, one of them the northern tip of a large island shared with other countries, and itself two distinct ethnic regions, the other, six hundred and forty miles away across the sea, sharing all but the tip of a peninsula with another one, which used to be another part, but broke away?

When Malaysia was still a British colony, it was known as the Federation of Malaya. Then the Japanese occupied it, during the Second World War, and Britain granted independence under its new name in 1957, including Singapore, which is the piece that broke away in 1965, and with Sabah and Sarawak, previously part of Borneo, on that island far away across the China Sea.

Britain likes to think of itself as the epitome of multi-cultural, but Malaysia is a far better example, with the Moslems making the religious majority, and ethnic Chinese not far behind in numbers, though ethnic Malays, if you do the census secularly, are actually the largest group, and then there is the Indian community, and various indigenous groups, many of them extremely ancient. Having multiple cultures does not, however, also mean having equality and mutual respect. Most of the wealth-generation is done by the Chinese, most of the power-games are played by the Malays, most of the poverty lives among the Indians.

Rainforest products (palm oil, rubber, timber) and computer disks provide the most significant sources of revenue, though nothing beats tourism - which statement should worry Malaysia, as it should worry the dozens of other countries in the world which are now dependent on tourism to sustain their economies: tourism is a dependency industry, a service industry, passive, obsequious-responsive, and unproductive. Just as every city has its rich quarter, and somewhere nearby the poor quarter where the valets and concierges and swimming-pool attendants and laundresses and housekeepers live, so do rich countries have tourist-countries, where they like to go for a holiday and spend their spare change, but expect to be treated as kings and queens while doing so. There is one key difference between the home-cities and the holiday-countries. When rich people lose some of their money, they downsize but keep the servants. When rich countries go into recession, they take their vacations at home. A country that has become dependent on tourism is a country with no economic future beyond dependency and service.

And in the meanwhile, sex trafficking, drug smuggling and discrimination against refugees provide counter-ballast to Malaysia's economic growth, with migrant workers coming to Malaysia from Nepal, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Around a hundred thousand of the refugees are Rohingya from Burma (Myanmar), but there are also large numbers of ethnic Indians, and the children of Filipino and Indonesian illegal migrants. The Rohingya face the biggest crisis, because the Burmese government stripped them of their nationality in 1982, but Malaysia has declined to grant them Malaysian citizenship, preferring to keep them as stateless refugees. A number of Filipino and Indonesian children whose parents failed to register them have been awarded birth certificates nonetheless; unfortunately these birth certificates carry the stamp "foreigner", so the children are prohibited from attending government schools and unlikely, given the poverty of their refugee status, to be able to afford a private one. I have taken these facts from the CIA WorldFactBook, and simply note that, in the USA, such people are known as Mexicans.

Marks for: 5

Marks against: 3

The Argaman Press

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Malawi

Independence for the former Nyasaland brought the great and honourable Hastings Banda to power, where he sat for the next thirty years, and I confess I can see the attractions of the lifestyle, being treated like a king, having any woman you want at your disposal, and men with brown tongues sycophanting to your every vision and ideal, inhabiting a world in which you have no enemies because they are all dead or in jail, where all the money that people make is being kept for safety in a bank account that you are philanthropically managing on their behalf.

Clearly there are many who aspire to this lifestyle, and some of them run multi-national corporations, and some of them run media empires, and some of them run banks. Hastings Banda ran a country, and if he ran it into the ground, well, apparently nobody told him that this mattered – but then, before the crash of 2008, when the cowboys demanded a world without sheriffs, nobody told the people who run the multi-national corporations, the media empires or the banks either. Banda finally went off to the great tax haven in the sky and his successors have tried to undo the damage, though there are several centuries of colonial damage to undo as well, and now there is also AIDS to add to the corruption, the poverty, and the limited resources of a land dependent on virtually nothing, which is to say subsistence farming, even to survive. In the 1980s, when I was working for a while with War On Want, Malawi was rated just behind Eritrea and the Sudan on the list of countries in Africa reliant on western aid; today it is still on the list, but you need to turn the page to find it: a sign of considerable progress. Another is the fact that more people now die each year from AIDS than malnutrition – which is a startling statistic in a world that has cures available for both.

Malawi is landlocked, which ought to be a major economic problem; but virtually the entire length of its eastern border is the vast Lake Malawi, and the wildlife there, and throughout the country, is magnificent, placing the country in the top ten of the list of "best countries to visit" for several years. Presumably those who look at the zebra from the yachts manage to do so without noticing the shanty towns in the foothills or the queues outside the hospitals.

Marks For: 2

Marks Against: 4

The Argaman Press

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Madagascar

The argument in favour of global warming is rarely put, but merits putting. Let me do it by analogy.

If you, as a nuclear family, are living in a house that becomes a daily mess because one of the children, probably a teenager, cannot aim straight at the toilet bowl, and another leaves her entire maquillage on the dining room table, with mascara spilling this way and henna staining that way, while older brother has left unfinished pizza sitting on top of the TV for so long there is now mould, and his ashtray has tipped over, leaving a large burn on the carpet because he failed to put out his last cigarette properly, and the air conditioner filter has not been changed for so long that the house’s ozone layer has collapsed into a state of mildew, and the mildew is competing with the pizza mould…someone, usually mum, has to call the troops to order, employ a housekeeper, and lay down some strict rules, which of course no one is going to follow anyway because they are too lazy, too self-absorbed, and anyway they don’t think they are the ones who should carry the responsibility. So the house goes on deteriorating, and eventually someone comes along from the local authority, and stamps a “Condemned” notice on the garage door, the lawyers get rich from the appeals, and by the time mum and dad have resolved the legal dispute the money has run out to repair the place, and the only solution is to demolish and begin again. Fixing the cause doesn’t work.

But why, anyway, does it matter? We need to deal with global warming, we are told, because the effect of global warming will be irreparable damage to the planet. What exactly will be damaged? As the ozone layer continues to disintegrate, the Earth will get hotter, causing the ice-cap to melt, which in turn will raise sea-levels, flooding low-lying land, turning some semi-deserts into full deserts (Arizona, for example). New York will disappear, as will most of Florida, the countries on the North Sea coast of Europe, Bangladesh, many others. On the other hand, parts of the currently uninhabitable world (middle Canada, the Antarctic) will become agricultural paradises, with plenty of room for the citizens of New York, Florida etc to rehouse, and with technology we can easily adapt to the new conditions, providing ourselves with indoor cities (Toronto, for example, is already equipped for this), that are climatically controlled, and with all our food created in solar-powered laboratories. Just as there was no Armageddon when the railway was invented, and we got over the loss of the donkey-and-cart, just as our moon and Mars colonies will be, so the Earth will be manned differently, and people will look back with a smile at that innocent age when we foolishly lived in the primitive conditions of today. Roll on global warming!

Ah yes, but, and this is why my little sermon is being delivered from the pulpit of Madagascar, what about the lemurs and the orchids, what about the elephant bird and the hippopotamus? How will Nature survive global warming? The answer is very simple: it will adapt. Every year, hundreds of species die out, and new ones emerge. When cities crumble, grass and wildflowers and trees quickly populate the space. From Nature’s point of view, global warming is irrelevant, but Mankind, the cause of global warming, is not, because Mankind insists on leaving its unfinished pizza on the TV and its maquillage on the dining room table.

A better solution for mum and dad would have been to tell the three kids that it was time to leave. Goodbye. You are done here. And then, kids gone, clean up – mum will do most of the work, but dad may be persuadable to help. Mother Nature feels just the same. Roll on global warming, and let it wipe out the human race. Then mum can clean up, and the Earth adapt to the new conditions, and move forward. Those who are concerned about global warming because they care about the future of the planet would be well advised to support global warming as the best possible scenario for the future of the planet.

But again, why am I preaching this utter nonsense from the pulpit of Madagascar?

Partly because there is absolutely nothing else of any interest to say about the island (Madagascar is the world's fourth biggest island after Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo; Australia, which is bigger, doesn't count. Because of its isolation most of its mammals, half of its birds, and most of its plants exist nowhere else on earth. The island is heavily exposed to tropical cyclones which bring torrential rains and destructive floods, such as the ones in 2000 and 2004, which left thousands homeless. The Malagasy are thought to be descendants of Africans and Indonesians who settled on the island more than two thousand years ago. Malagasy pay a lot of attention to their dead and spend much effort on ancestral tombs, which are opened from time to time so the remains can be carried in procession, before being re-wrapped in fresh shrouds. Thanks to the BBC for the details in this parenthesis).

Partly because, actually, there is something of very considerable interest to say about the island, but Madagascar exists in the consciousness of the West as a paradise of nature, and I am hesitant to be the one to shatter the rose-coloured glass and reveal something more than just lemurs and penguins and panther chameleons and ideal locations for movie-makers and strange baobab trees. Hesitant, but only for a moment.

Madagascar, according to the CIA World FactBook, "is a source country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and women and children subjected to sex trafficking; poor Malagasy women hired as domestic workers in Lebanon and Kuwait are vulnerable to abuse by recruitment agencies and employers; an increasing number of Malagasy men were victimized by labor trafficking abroad in 2012; Malagasy children are subjected to domestic servitude, prostitution, forced begging, and forced labor within the country, often with the complicity of family members; coastal cities have child sex tourism trades, with Malagasy men being the main clients." The CIA World FactBook, mind, not Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, neither of which even bother to include Madagascar in their country profiles. Far too concerned no doubt about the plight of the other endangered species, the non-human sort. Another reason why we should spend less time worrying about the impact of human beings on global warming, or that of global warming on human beings, and more on the impact of human beings on other human beings.

Marks For: CIA 10

Marks Against: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, 11

The Argaman Press

Macedonia

For decades there was a personal fiefdom in eastern Europe, owned and run by Marshall Tito under the pretense of Communism, and known as Yugoslavia. The despotic autocracy of his rule kept the country so “stable” that his supporters preserved his dead body in pickle for months after his demise, fearing that the announcement of his death would lead to wild celebrations of hysterical blood-letting. Eventually both got out, the information and the knives. When Yugoslavia collapsed into ethnic civil war, all parties put into practice what they had been taught under Nazi occupation, and war crimes trials are still in process.

Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia were the countries that emerged from the ensuing chaos, as well as two autonomous enclaves within Serbia: Vojvodina and Kosovo. All nine were still run by the Communist Party, but it was ethnic and religious divisions that induced the barbarism. Macedonia was the surprising exception, though it nearly tumbled, because there were also Albanians emerging from their own decades of Communist brutality, and many of them lived in what was now Macedonia. EU and NATO peacekeepers helped the government put a new constitution in place which recognised the rights of those Albanians, and even some local autonomy, and there has been such progress that the European Non-Islamic Caliphate (EU), whose ambition like all imperial powers is to rule the whole world, eventually, is moving Macedonia at great pace towards EU membership. India and China may be a little further behind.

For reasons unclear to most people, Macedonia has a name-plaque on its seat at the United Nations which announces it as the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)". Nostalgia for Tito in New York? How unlikely! The trouble is, calling itself straightforwardly Macedonia does not go down well in Greece, another imperialist power that still hasn’t realised its day is gone (the empire collapsed in the 4th century BCE!); Macedonia was Alexander the Great’s birthplace (did you know he had Aristotle as his teacher when he was at school?), and Macedonia is still in existence, other than this Macedonia, as a province of northern Greece.

Speaking of Alexander the Great, the one and only Macedonian of whom the world has heard, and speaking of people whose ambition is to rule the whole world, there is a question that nobody but me appears to have asked, but which I believe has to be asked, and answered honestly, if this "best of all possible worlds" is ever to improve. What on Earth did Alexander of Macedon ever actually do, to merit the sobriquet "great" (see my entry on Italy where the same question is asked about the Romans)?

And the answer given in the history books which venerate him? He built an army which conquered its way around the world, murdering, raping, slaughtering, burning, enslaving, and generally destroying, until vast tracts of the Earth were under his imperial command, though it required further military brutality and incessant martial law to keep it that way, and not actually for very long.

Does this truly merit the term "great"? Today it would merit a visit to the International Court of Justice in Den Haag on charges of war crimes - except that there are no spaces available, because of the on-going post-Tito war crimes trials of his fellow Yugoslavs, and the spare seats have "reserved for Africa" on them. If it does merit the term "great", then we should also speak of Hitler the Great and Stalin the Great and Mao the Great, and applaud the efforts of Islamic State in Syria to establish their Caliphate on much the same lines. And then close down the ICJ in Den Haag.

To merit the term "great" one has, surely, to leave something behind of true significance in the world: the unifying of peoples who wish to be so unified, and not by force; the building of new cities, but not in the ruins of older cities torn down for the purpose; the feeding of the poor, rather than the exacerbation of their hunger. In the world of art, literature, music and culture the term "great" is easy to define; but in the world of politics? Did Alexander promote the spread of literacy and numeracy? Did he invest in new technologies? Did he leave behind any significant art or culture? Did he add one jot of improvement to the human condition? No, none of these - unless one counts a handful of statues in the Pathan hills of Pakistan, Buddhas dressed in togas and with Semitic noses. He marched, fought, destroyed, marched on. It is time, I believe, to remove the sobriquet from his name, and from a long list of others too.

Marks For: 1

Marks Against: 3

The Argaman Press

David Prashker's World Hourglass

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Malta

Mali

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Maldives

Malaysia

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Malawi

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Madagascar

Macedonia

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