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Al-Nahda
In 2005, many correspondents (mostly PFDJistas) who wanted to argue that the I am a sucker for names and titles. A new post-punk band in So I buy the book, to glean the wisdom that so many of my compatriots found so illuminating. Well, it is actually more like a pamphlet, when you exclude the epilogue and the prologue and the fundraising appeals: the safari hunter raising funds for the restoration of Serengeti. A perfect airport book. I am not saying this to be critical, just to pre-empt any correspondence that maybe I didn’t understand his very simplistic thesis. The thesis of the book Many moons ago, and until the 20th century, Europeans (and by extension Americans) practiced colonization and empires. The problem with this approach was that you had to carry guns, shoot people and the natives would eventually rise up and kill you. Even worse, from the perspective of private property worshipping civilizations, they will nationalize your assets. Aha, said the bad Westerners. Let’s invent a new way of colonization—one that doesn’t involve guns, administering messy countries and building highways for them that they will never maintain. What we will do instead is that we will extend to them so much debt, debt that they cannot possibly service, that they will be so hugely indebted that they will owe us big time. For collateral and payment, we will use their natural resources and we will expect them to provide us with military bases and vote as we instruct them. We won’t land marines to take their resources or re-build them, of course. We will use our companies—like Shell, American Food, Bechtel, Halliburton—to run them. Of course, it won’t make a difference whether they are private companies or the government because it is all a revolving door—two principals of Bechtel were cabinet members in the Reagan administration (Weinberger and Schultz) and Halliburton’s former CEO, as everybody knows, is the current US VP, Dick Cheney. Here’s how it works, claims the author. An economist—in his case, not even an economist, but a guy with BA in business from Boston University—works for a connected engineering company that is called by some Third World or Second World company to do an assessment of the country’s assets. The job of the economist is to fudge the numbers and make incredibly rosy forecasts about the country’s rate of growth in its GNP. Fooled by the forecasts made by these Economic Hit Men (EHM, according to the author, is an actual acronym used by people in his trade), the government of The Third World would take out loans they could never repay and then….gotcha. If the EHM could not do the job, then, argues Perkins, it is the “jackals” –CIA hit men—that will take over to neutralize the belligerent. Here, he mentions many names that reminded me of an old internet buddy, Elias Amare, who used to warn us of As an EHM, claims John Perkins, he (Perkins) was partly responsible for the deals that were pushed through to make the following countries highly indebted (materially or politically): But then he had a revelation demanding a confession: 9-11. He flew to My Problem With The Book Perkins does not come across as a sympathetic figure—he joined the Peace Corps to avoid service in Vietnam; he had pangs of conscience in year one but worked on for ten years; he started writing the book years earlier but was bought off (there is actually a chapter in the book called “I Take A Bribe”); he starts a consultancy firm thanks to huge tax breaks, sells it off, makes a gazillion dollars, buys a home in Florida where he “fights the power” by cruising in his yacht and taking people on tour to the Amazon Rainforest. In fact, he says, he was hosting a tour in the Amazon when he heard of 9-11. There is nothing in the book that tells us he was able to act on his anguished feelings that he got rich off the back of poor countries. From what I could tell, the anguished feelings are the reimbursement for the theft. But that is secondary; after all, if a person confesses his sins and shows remorse, then that excludes damnation. For a man who had second thoughts about his work for 9 of the 10 years he was there, the evidence he presents is very sparse. There is also some psychobbable about his childhood and how that contributed to his being an EHM. But that is all secondary because I tend to believe most of the stories he told. My main problem with the book is the exact same problem I had with Michella Wrong’s book I Didn’t Do It For You: both books completely absolve the subjects of the books from any responsibility. For example, in Wrong’s book, Eritreans who willingly handed If I go to get an equity loan on my house and the bank tells me, "your house is worth ten times what you think it is and we will give you a loan for fifty times what you are asking for--provided you use our consultant to rebuild your house", do I not bear any responsibility if I go along with it? If the Saudi government authorized the American government to take the interest on its equity in the American stock market (where there were quite a few other options that would not have violated its strictly conservative view that Islam forbids not just usury but even simple interest), does it not share any responsibility for its stupidity? Both books, in their own way, reinforce the notion that we citizens of poor nations are entirely powerless: it is all somebody else’s fault. And I understand perfectly why they could be best sellers in our current zeitgeist: we Eritreans are minding our own business, showing our willingness to obey international law to the letter, and see how they are treating us. Confessions also encourages every A Misreading of How Policy Develops in Like all liberation movements, the PFDJ was always suspicious of the “imperialist”, viewing all of them as Trojan horses for spies, but now its intellectuals seem to have completely internalized the message of Confessions and have gone on overdrive. Sometimes, I feel that the PFDJ had its 4th Congress in secret sometime in 2002 and passed only one resolution: this congress hereby nullifies and voids everything we said in our 1987 Congress, except the part about imperialist exported religions. It no longer believes in political pluralism, or private economy and it has taken its old resolution about the Jehovah Witnesses and Seven Day Adventists quite literally. And its leaning towards the hard left has been almost South American in its intensity. You’ve no doubt heard President Isaias Afwerki talk about some secret American plan to control the world in the 20th century and much of the 21st century. This paper is not “much-studied” and has to be studied, invites us Isaias. The paper he is referring to was produced by something called the Project for New American Century. I am not downplaying the organization; it included all the luminaries of the so-called “neo-con” movement. My problem is that President Isaias Afwerki seems to have surrounded himself with people who have no understanding of how American policy is developed. Shouldn’t the Organization of Eritrean Americans (OEA) give the presidential staff and the Eritrean foreign ministry a crash course in how American policy is developed? If they could find their voice, I am sure they would not cost as much as the 50,000/month lobbying firm that Jack Abramoff worked for and Isaias hired. The OEA’s first course could be entitled: Sir, It Is Not A Good Idea To Insult America When We Are Trying To Organize A Petition To Influence Them. But the OEA has developed into a monomaniacal organization, a one pony show (the pony is called Demarcation), so let me volunteer my services for free: · First of all, the document Isaias Afwerki is alluding to is not new: it was published in 1997, when Isaias was the darling of the · Second, the document is not only not new, it is not a secret either. Isaias presents the paper as if it is some sort of Protocols of the Elders of Zion but you can read it here for yourself: http://newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm · Third, the paper was hardly earth-shattering or influential or a blueprint for American foreign policy. The election and re-election of George W Bush in 2000 and 2004 by one of the smallest margins would tend to argue that the document, far from being the blueprint of Amercian foreign policy, was just one of many competing viewpoints; · Fourth, in the United States, the only people who even know that the paper or the organization exists are those in hard-hard left who blame George Bush and his neo-cons for engineering the war on Iraq, long before 9-11--in fact, as early as 1997. And, in fact, the paper did argue that the · Fifth, PAX Americana and American domination of the world cannot happen if there aren’t countries who are willing to provide their countries as military bases for the Of course I understand why my anti-democracy compatriots keep referring me to read Confessions of an economic hit man. It reinforces their view that the world is run by evil and malicious people, that we have no responsibility and we are not to blame for our sad circumstance. Knowingly or unknowingly, the book encourages tyrants to close off their country, kick out all NGOs (or maybe shoot them) and discount anything that comes from the West—like free press and democracy—since it is some kind of trick to enslave them. The author of Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man truly emboldens the un-elected PAX There was one vision for Like John Perkins, another American, George Bush, says that he experienced some sort of conversion on 9-11. He came to the conclusion that the problem with American policy of the past forty years is that it allied itself with governments that do not represent their people. And the way forward, he argued, was to ensure the expansion of freedom and democracy, regardless of whether those elected will advance or hinder American policy. Many people continue to question that But wait: the country that
There is nothing more terrifying to a tyrant than an
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