The Myth of African Poverty
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There is a great fallacy, a lie perpetuated through history and around the globe: that Africa is poor.
Africa is presented as poor, because it doesn’t have any of this strange folding stuff called money. It has plenty of everything else, it is what capitalists and prospectors call resource rich.
Indeed, it is the most perfect place to grow our tea, coffee, cocoa… vegetables, fruit, flowers… and harvest our rubber, hardwood… oil… jewels, minerals… It’s enough to destabilise governments for!
We then offer them some of this folding stuff and they fall back into line. And lie and cheat and steal all the way from the top down, so this paltry representation of real value never gets anywhere near those who work the land or were driven off it. Yet because the dispossessed were duped with the concepts of land ownership and hierarchical authority (and violence), they feel disempowered and they too have fallen under the spell of this strange stuff called money.
Africa has never been poor. It has a history and wealth of diversity unequalled. And further, if we are to believe our anthropologists and geneticists, the very birthplace of humanity. Surprising then, is it not, that while in Western Europe and North America we’ve decimated the forests, worn out the soil, polluted the rivers and water tables and exhausted the mines, Africa remains, to the large part, thriving and fruitful. A godsend to Western governments with stomachs to fill, corporations with consumers to satisfy and banks with interest to manufacture.
Africa’s Western educated, financed, supported, armed leaders remain happy to perpetuate this myth, too ignorant or seduced to wish any change in perception: preferring the enormous power and the largely unsupervised bankroll. Corruption further suits Western interests: favouring personal/tribal associates, backhanders, etc. creating resentment, division, tension and potential conflict.
Manufacturing and maintaining divisions is a tactic that dates back two and a half millennia. More recent however is the lucrative and thriving arms industry, the UK’s only remaining indigenous industry, which reaps the benefit of internal repression and maintaining fictitious borders – while banks, merchants and Western governments profit from the extraordinary value such power hungry individuals place on violence, and how little value they place on basic foodstuffs.
Again, we find this strange folding stuff valuing the most useless and dangerous commodities with enormous worth, although they have no practical purpose, while basic nourishment, God’s gifts and harvesting, are valued as virtually worthless (one should however note, upon reaching Western supermarkets their value will have multiplied many, many times).
So we find the impossible situation, where the richest place on earth is labelled poorest, continues to haemorrhage genuine wealth, while being kept enslaved and divided through arbitrary concepts and artificial boundaries, turning tribe against tribe and hoodwinking the people with the lie of money.
Amen to this.
But remember that western societies are also being consciously destabilized through economics at the moment. It is apparently better to spread the enforced poverty of Africa around the world instead of developing the 3rd world.
If you think this is a dubious claim then think about what the economy really is in a healthy society. It is PRODUCTION of goods and essential services, while in monetarist globalism it has been perverted into FINANCE, which is something else entirely.
Finance is currencies and the relations between them, symbols of the real economy supporting them. We are atm assigning all importance to finance and none to production. In fact we are deindustrializing at an alarming rate, moving whatever is left to the third world to maximize financial profits. Our infrastructure is crumbling because of this, education and health follows down the drain.
For any society to thrive it needs meaningful production, not superfluous services. The US for example has gone from about 60% of labor engaged in production in various forms, to currently about 20%(figures for this vary alot, but these are from Webster Tarpley). This means that a smaller part of the workforce need to support a growing number of nonproducing citizens. These are all selling burgers, delivering pizzas, being lawyers, hairdressers, interior decorators, real estate brokers and a multitude of other things that are totally pointless economically.
They are however superb at raking in a quick buck, because the costs are lower and the workforce can be kept in disorganized squalor. Industrial and agricultural producers had a nasty tendency to organize themselves, which is really bad for profits.
Considering this situation…
…tradition will show you that rulers will always use any means they can find to dispose of surplus populations, war being a classic favorite. Enforced famines and plagues can also do the trick. My point is that when nearly all of us are unproductive and disorganized we are, to all extents and purposes, expendable.
thanks for your comment skulb – pretty much agreed. in the UK less than 5% are in manufacturing – and most of that is guns and bombs, or Jap cars.
we exist on ‘added value’, not real value – image and finance, smoke and mirrors, intellectual property – i.e. patent and copyright (and money + interest) – no more than opinion, but held in place by laws fabricated by those who benefit. in other words, poppycock.
and yes, i fear, as you say, power elites are thinking it’s time for a cull.