Incredible blog post by an old friend of mine..."When Cow Love Meets Car Love"
An old high school friend is traveling abroad, as he is wont to do, and put up this blog post yesterday. I thought some DUers would find it compelling. Tom's always been a good guy...I never knew he was such a good travel journalist.
[font size="+2"]When cow love meets car love[/font]
[font color="gray"]December 26, 2013 Tiny Energies[/font]
By Tom Abel
For an anthropologist like myself raised on stories of the Nuer and Dinka (and the other tribes in the region), the latest news from the Sudan is jarring. These men fighting each other are not ‘soldiers’, they are warriors. They live in ‘tribes’ or ‘local groups’ ruled by kinship. And they fight each other in terms of historical animosities. But they are now armed (who armed them?), and the big players (the US, China, others) have oil ‘interests’ in the region. So the language has changed, this is a ‘state’, it should follow the ‘rules’ of international law, people can be charged with ‘war crimes’, etc. The US has soldiers stationed nearby to protect ‘facilities’. Thousands of UN ‘peacekeeprs’ as well as ‘attack helicopters’ are coming. All of this, clearly, is not for the building of ‘democracy’ or for some other higher moral purpose, but to create ‘stability’.
(picture)
Stability is the overarching goal of our time, perhaps the only widely-agreed-upon social goal any more, with the ultimate purpose in this case of allowing the oil to flow. This is what we foist on the rest of the world, this is what the US and the UN and the Chinese and the Russians, and especially their corporations do when they set their sights on resource extraction from a region clearly not ready or even desiring of such economic ‘development’. All in the name of our addiction to oil, to automobiles, to plastics, to pharmaceuticals, to pesticides, etc. Just watch, we will end up blaming one tribe or another for the violence, or some ‘warlord’, or some ‘faction’, or the ‘uncivilized’ behavior generally of Nilotic peoples. But are they to blame? For having their world turned completely upside down? By peoples with weapons, technologies, and goals they barely understand?
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(much more at link)
http://prosperouswaydown.com/cow-love-meets-car-love/