What has this to do with your ignoring the benefits. It confirms my view.
Sending an article that after irrelevant forays into SHells predation in Nigeria
and how nasty the new capitalists in Russia are shows the disastrous results of
one dam on one tribe. It fails even to mention whether there was any agreement
with the tribe to build the dam. How does it follow from this example that dams
have no benefits or that you do not ignore the benefits?
Cheers, Ken Hanly
Mark Jones wrote:
[The meat for this posting comes from Journal of Political Ecology Vol.5
1998 No 1, article by J. Stephen Lansing, Philip S. Lansing and Juliet S.
Erazo. Mark Jones]
Building dams almost always takes place on land occupied by First Nations or
people considered marginal and worthy of dispossession and 'resettlement'.
Of course, if you steal people's land and livelihoods from them, as happened
in the case of First Nations everywhere, most recently in the case of the
Ogoni in West Nigeria, whose land was turned into a reeking swamp of oil
pollution and gas flaring by Shell Oil (whose royalties financed the
government which then executed Ogoni playwright Ken Saro Wiwa), and you
decant them into some reservation and give them a few shovels to get by,
then you can expect them to turn nasty.
If, as in the case of for example Russia, capitalism's grandest and newest
reservation, you systematically promote the activites of notorious thieves
and robbers, making a new politico-financial elite of the most criminalised,
anti-social groupings, which is what the West did, then you can get virulent
anti-Americanism as one possible response, but you can also spread the idea
that in Western eyes, theft, cynicism, uncontrolled greed, plunder and a
devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to one's fellow citizens, are all
commendable, jolly good things which are normative western values. You
cannot be surprised if your quislings and placemen then turn into natives
before your very eyes and start to behave in the same way, even biting the
hand that feeds them, and do it without displaying any of the conventional
hypocrisy which masks such behaviour and conceals the true selfishness
behind the superficial good-neighbourliness of westerners.
Shocked by the appalling lack of gratitude and general bad manners of your
victims, the next logical thing to do is to call in the anthropologists, a
special breed of men and women invented in Victorian England for the sake of
salving bad consciences and explaining away in pseudo-scientific terms the
anti-social behaviour of colonial peoples traumatised by our own plundering,
genocidal behaviour. If you really want to see the kind of behaviour Dolan
describes in its most florid expression, you have to read not anthropology
but the works of Primo Levi, the Auschwitz victim who survived until 1987
before committing suicide as the consequence of his unassuagable guilt and
endless waking nightmare. In works such as 'The Truce' (1963) and 'The
Drowned and the Saved' (1986) he shows how physical torture and annihilation
inevitably produce spiritual degradation and the complicity of the victim in
the process.
This in particular is what destroys the sense of worth and self-esteem of
survivors; it is what drove Levi to kill himself and what drives people on
reservations to drink, demoralisation and early death. SS anthropologists
had a field day observing the odd behaviour of the Jews in the camps and
rationalising it for a grateful posterity. It's their Jewishness, you see.
The Jews are well known for being cunning, conniving, deceitful,
anti-social, thieving, beggar-my-neighbour etc.
I can give you an example closer to home of what happens when you steal
people's birthright. The Skokomish Indians lived in the Olympic mountains
in western Washington state. Unfortunately for them a utility company
decided to build dams and hydropower plants on the Skokomish River: after
all, who really needed the kind of value-subtracting actvities like
year-round salmon-fishing and celebrating nature which the Skokomish were
into? Just like at the kind of futile existence these people had before
they got the benefits of modernity: the Skokomish regarded the valley of the
North Fork as the home of their ancestors, an idea which recently received
archaeological support with the discovery of prehistoric village sites that
were inundated by the flooding of Lake Cushman caused by the construction of
the first power dam.
The age of these sites was estimated at between 5000 to 8000 years old based
on the style of artifacts found and their similarity to other presumed
"Olcott" sites in the Pacific. In the nineteenth century the valley was also
a major village site. The valley was the center for many important resources
for the Skokomish, including flocks of waterfowl, large herds of elk that
wintered in the valley, and many kinds of useful plants including ironwood,
yew,
