A month ago, on 6/12/2014, “The Economist” wrote guessed what might be coming and wrote: ““The industry’s weak balance sheet is also a vulnerability, says Michael Cohen of Barclays, a bank. Most firms invest more cash than they earn, making up the difference by issuing bonds. Total debt for listed American exploration and production firms has almost doubled since 2009 to $260 billion (see chart), according to Bloomberg; it now makes up 17% of all America’s high-yield (junk) bonds. If debt markets dry up and profits fall owing to cheaper oil, the funding gap could be up to $70 billion a year. Were firms to plug this by cutting their investment budgets, investment would drop by 50%. In 2013 more than a quarter of all shale investment was done by firms with dodgy balance sheets (defined as debt of more than three times gross operating profits). Quite a few may go bust. Bonds in some smaller firms trade at less than 70 cents on the dollar.”
While money is cheap, interest rates low, taking up debt is a possible basis for a business model. When interest rates rise, it won’t be. And the massive investments required to run shale oil fields will suddenly become more expensive. Since Saudi costs are far lower, they can keep priming the pumps at the Arabian oil well heads, until the mass of shale oil producers belly up when the phone-call is indeed a bank with a cash call. The Saudis won’t be attacked by the US Administration for what they are doing, because the low price of oil has, after all, helped the global (and that includes the US) economy bounce back forcefully in recent months. In fact, had the Fed raised interest rates the shale boys would have been sweating a lot over Christmas when checking their balance sheets prior to the New Year.

This is only one side to the Saudi policymaking coin, however. The flip side is not about economics, but about extending political influence beyond the country’s immediate region. In an op-ed back on 22/8/2014 in the “New York Times”, Ed Husain wrote: “Let’s be clear: Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram, the Shabab and others are all violent Sunni Salafi groupings. For five decades, Saudi Arabia has been the official sponsor of Sunni Salafism across the globe….Textbooks in Saudi Arabia’s schools and universities teach this brand of Islam. The University of Medina recruits students from around the world, trains them in the bigotry of Salafism and sends them to Muslim communities in places like the Balkans, Africa, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Egypt, where these Saudi-trained hard-liners work to eradicate the local, harmonious forms of Islam.”
Clearly, Saudi Arabia’s Western ‘business partners’ have not succeeded over time in persuading the country to desist from this course. But then, before the real plummet in the price of oil, the country decided to donate 100 million dollars to the UN to fund a counter-terrorism agency. Ed Husain termed this a “welcome contribution”. Perhaps, however, it was a smokescreen, because Saudi Arabia had come up with a two-pronged strategy that would enable it to achieve the goal of spreading Salafism emphatically without this being noticed.
The drop in the price of oil will potentially hurt the shale oil producers. It already has hurt one country in particular, and I am not thinking of Russia or Iran, both of which commentators have suggested, Saudi Arabia has set out to punish for the policies they have pursued in the country’s backyard – in Syria. I am thinking of Nigeria. Where the country’s level-headed super Minister of Finance and Economics Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala had sensibly pegged the budget to an oil price of USD 77.40, a figure she revised downward in December to USD 65.
While the country has some policies in place to diversify away from oil, and the current administration has prioritized promoting agriculture as such a path, it has an awfully long way still to go. A good three quarters of government revenue is generated by oil exports – meaning one half of the figure that looked to be beckoning in January 2014 when the price hovered around 100 bucks a barrel. The Goodluck Jonathan government is quite literally caught over a barrel. Cash-strapped would be kind by comparison.
And this is where the Saudi oil policy becomes foreign policy. If there is a government in the world that at present needs to muster all its resources to repel Salafist-driven Islamic violence it is Nigeria. It needs to invest in materiel and men to counter the insurgency of Boko Haram. It needs to invest heavily in infrastructure to drive socio-economic development in Northeast Nigeria (which is one of the regions with the lowest position in the Human Development Index on the continent). Without money, the largest economy in Africa is staring down the barrel of complete political instability, with Northern Muslims potentially radicalizing and Christian southerners potentially wanting to sever the covenant of the union on which the national federation rests. This is the second, covert goal of Saudi Arabia’s current oil policy. If they can crush the regional and continental ambitions of Nigeria, nip its burgeoning presence in Africa in the bud, the chances of radical Islam taking long-term root in the Sahel and sub-Sahel zones are good – and with these prospects the creation of a region that would be the natural objective for Saudi investment. And it is this that Western, Chinese and Indian foreign policy makers and businessmen should sit up and take notice of – not the few now doubly toxic shale-oil assets…
In fact, it’s a treble play by the Saudi gorilla. As the further it lets the price of oil drop, the more it in the interim trashes the massive investments the moderate Muslims in the Gulf states have made in solar power and in manufacturing. Over the last few years, in particular Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar have consistently been pursuing this course as a means of diversifying their economies in an effort to ramp up life in the post-oil or post-gas world. The investments have been committed to both R&D, panel production, and in a variety of pilot and non-pilot plants. The countries’ various projects cover generating capacity of XXXX specifically commissioned by SolarGCC or the Qatar Foundation. Saudi Arabia, by contrast, boasts a total of only 5 MW in solar power generating capacity, commissioned by Saudi Aramco. The further the price of oil drops below $60 a barrel and the longer it remains lodged there, the less the value of the investments in solar, as diesel gensets deliver power at the same generating cost and are cheaper to buy. The Gulf moderates could find themselves simply having to write off their upfront investments, and their diversification strategy, so proudly touted as showing the emirs’ far-sighted efforts on behalf of their not-so-democratically ruled populace, would be left in tatters. Whether popular support for them then prevails is anyone’s guess.
And then there’s manufacturing, driven in Saudi Arabia by cheap energy prices and the presence of ores, such as bauxite. Alcoa has already entered the market. Or the presence of oil, like petrochemicals. Saudi Aramco and Dow Chemicals have just signed away $20 billion in a joint venture.

These sectors are note exactly known as big local job creators, nor will they suffice to drive a post-oil economy. Moreover, Saudia Arabia with its religious conservatism is not finding it easy to attract the foreign talent required to operate the industries, either. In both respects it is strategically at a disadvantage to its tiny moderate neighbors. Firstly, there the numbers of persons requiring employment in the future will be far lower (population growth rates in Saudi Arabia are far higher as is the absolute size of the population, while the per capita wealth available to create the jobs is higher). Moreover, the more open-minded autocratic societies of the Gulf do not face the same problems of not attracting foreigners. Indeed, they have not been busy building industries based only on cheap energy, but have been looking to an energy future, to tourism, etc., while diversifying into industries far afield. Their success has been prodigious. And perhaps this has spurred the economic big boys of the region on in their willingness to dump the oil price in an effort to shore up an economy originally founded on oil if it enables them to sink the economic and ideological competition for many years to come. Saudi wellheads produce cheaply –so the policymakers evidently do not need to worry about forgoing profits, they are simply forgoing windfall profits.

The third shade of black followed after a brief interlude, from 1949-89, and brandished red flags. The one authoritarian regime (critical theorists, remember Adorno’s “Authoritarian Personality” scale!) gave way, once the Red Army left, to an equally authoritarian regime. This third shade of black was highly confusing for the population, not only because it initially painted the towns red, but also openly declared: “You are all anti-fascists”. In other words, officially those to the West in Europe enjoying liberal democratic freedoms were now labeled as fascists. Things had not been helped during the region’s time as the Soviet Zone, as that brief interlude also did not do anything to render the local culture more permeable. Rather, East or East Germany ‘missed out’ on the influx of refugees from the East that flooded into West Germany. The wagons were filled by admittedly ethnic Germans, but these were Germans with a very different culture and in part a distinctly Slavic acculturation. Likewise, the East Germans also missed out on the influx of ‘guest laborers’, be they Italians, Turks, or Spaniards (a fact that set east German cuisine back decades), and later Yugoslavs. Instead, the East Germans anti-fascists were all busy declaring their solidarity with the non-aligned countries – not that they had never visited such countries, let alone been exposed to persons from there, bar the odd West African, Angolan, Ethiopian or Vietnamese.
European bell jar
In fact, what gets forgotten in the official histories is not just the shades of black that characterized political life in the region, but also that it was not Great Britain but East Germany (the Germany Democratic Republic) which was the only country ever to exist in splendid isolation inside Europe. It was cut off from its cultural roots (and language) to the West and had little or nothing in common with its Warsaw Pact neighbors to the East. To make things worse, unlike them it had to tolerate a far larger number of Soviet troops on its soil, and a far larger proportion of quislings among its own folk, as exemplified by the film “The Life of Others”. Small wonder that it was East Germany which was last to come out – against the paymasters or whip-wielders in Moscow as the undertow of Glasnost swept the Eastern Bloc away. (Officially, the country only beat Bulgaria to ‘freedom’ by a day.) The popular discontent with the government did not actually bubble up until May 1989 (in the context of the local elections), long after Solidarnosc, the Hungarians and the Czechs were busy freeing themselves from the Muscovite yoke. In East Germany, the popular civil discontent became more manifest after the 1989 summer (hey, holidays come first), in the form of the September Monday demonstrations in Leipzig and later in Dresden. The East Germans were the me-too’s of their Eastern brothers and sisters, a country under-exposed to things foreign, foreigners, and the open-mindedness that is said to come through an encounter with ‘difference’.
Check-book unification
Into this bleak and black scenario steps Helmut Kohl, with a big fat check-book to pay Gorbachev’s bill for East Germany and to welcome it back into the fold swiftly. It was a great achievement, with Kohl putting his money (well, it was the West German taxpayers’ cash actually) where his mouth was and dishing up a 1-for-1 exchange rate – whereas the east German mark fell short of the deutschmark by a factor of at least four. In this regard, and henceforth, unification was about economics. And it was always part of the neo-liberal flavor of the day, was a purely market-driven, economic project. Unification saw capital shift into east (lower case now) Germany, wooed by subsidies and other incentives, turning brownfield industrial combines into wastelands and setting up new factories that stayed as long as the subsidies. Countless kilometers of new black top were laid, and the population was soon enjoying the blessings of cable TV, porn shops, second-hand cars, modernized city centers, and all the other things that go to make Western-style consumer capitalism such a laugh. Unemployment was a bit of a problem, as was migration from rural areas (where the farming collectives had collapsed into piles of porcine manure), but all change has a price tag, does it not.

East German immigration
Unfortunately, the heavy-handed politicos forgot that these east Germans had still not been exposed to foreigners – at least not on the ‘home front’, for they all set about getting Canary, Balearic or Turkish sunburns as soon as the charter flights started taking off from Berlin or Leipzig. Those politicians then placed nothing worse than asylum-seekers among the east German populace – in line with the standard metric for dividing up the flow of incoming refugees among the German laender. They did so without having first putting in place an acculturation program teaching east Germans what democracy was, how it was not to be confused with consumerism, and spelled, among other things, tolerance. Hardly surprising, since tolerance cannot be quantified and therefore measured by some economic system. And this shortfall has knocked on into the political system, where equality of economic opportunity does not go hand in glove with an equality of representation – or certainly not at cabinet level, where to date the Conservatives have posted one east German minister (Thomas de Maizière), as have the Social Democrats in the form of Manuela Schwesig. A glance at former Merkel-led cabinets shows that the only other east Germans to ever make the grade has been Wolfgang Tiefensee, formerly Lord Mayor of Leipzig. Matthias Platzeck made Chairman of the German Social Democrats, but never achieved ministerial status.
The politicians have ‘integrated’ east Germany successfully if the yardstick is ensuring the quality of life there has been continuously raised such that it no longer lags so far behind that in the west of the country. But they have done so while neglecting to provide a real education in democracy and tolerance – after a couple of centuries of shades of black something that is desperately needed. Unless you count exercising democratic rights a majority of a town deciding to burn down a home for refugees. Or the majority deciding not to bother going to vote. This is pure anti-anti-fascism, as back under Honecker everyone went to vote and the Socialist Unity Party of course pulled well over 95% of the vote. Today, under 50% of the Saxon electorate goes to vote, no doubt out of a wish to demonstrate that they have learned democracy is about choice and that they have chosen a Sunday in front of the TV. This is a sane strategy, as they need to be nicely rested to go and protest against being flooded by immigrants and refugees at the Monday PEGIDA protest marches in Dresden. There, they declare that “we are the people” (sounds like Democracy Lesson One) and that they are fed up with politicians not listening to them and instead gently inserting the one or other foreigner under the bell jar that was once East Germany and has now been robbed of its capital.
Politicians, listen, these people have not been socialized to like foreigners, neither have their fathers nor were their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. These people, who at least realize they are the people, have spent decades, if not centuries, under authoritarian regimes, have never experienced much other than black. They certainly have not experienced blacks. Their sense of colors is limited to red necks. Their palette does not include yellow or brown, or Turko-black moustaches, or Italian red-white-and-green. They do not understand color. They cannot understand color. They have not been taught to. All they know is that they have gained much over the last quarter of a century in terms of spending power – and that they will defend at any cost. Because, like 25 years ago, they are still the people. And in this regard Germany is certainly not unified, united or otherwise welded together.
The center is right
The only conservative to have understood the lessons pre-War German history might teach us would seem to have been physicist Angela Merkel. She, at least, seems not to have suffered from the same loss of collective memory as everyone else in her party. The only way of keeping the country impervious to right-wing extremism is to maintain a strong center, she insists, something very much missing in Weimar. And neatly this also means keeping herself in power by occupying the middle ground. Perhaps she also realizes that she need not worry about a majority in Germany left of the center, as the one or other leftist has claimed was possible or hoped for in recent decades. (For the Greens, and that is now the dilemma they face, found out in Baden Württemberg that they mainly bag new votes from the right, among conservatives driven by an opposition to progress and a wish to uphold old values, such as nature as opposed to railway stations.) By admonishing her fellow citizens in her New Year’s address to not become xenophobic she sought to maintain that strong center. The subtext was a different one: It was Merkel the successful leader seeking to warding off her very own legacy of failure in unification.

The 2007 crisis actually cracked Europe wide-open along debt de-fault lines. And the debt in question was not the sovereign debt that the newspaper pundits and talk-show experts all started talking about avidly. The ‘sovereign debt crisis’ was window-dressing to disguise the real root of the problem. For the crisis placed its finger in a festering wound that few politicians wanted to look at, let alone admit was there: the wound of hyper-materialism. Europe’s 65 years of relative peace had a cost and it had been one gladly paid by the consumers, be they in work or pensioners: The power of purchasing kept the European economic locomotive running smoothly, with the German economy in particular stoking the engine. Suddenly it became apparent that much of the purchasing, particularly in Great Britain, Spain and Italy, had been done using credit and was not sustainable. The house of cards collapsed. And like the Great Depression of 1930, the crisis brought right-wing parties back into play with a vengeance.

What the politicians under-estimated was the fears triggered by taking away the credit cards. While it may sound simplistic, it has been this that has cracked the political landscape open and triggered a sudden surge in support for nationalist anti-EU parties, such as the Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, UKIP in Great Britain, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Front National in France. All of them swiftly scored strongly in elections to something they opposed – the European Parliament – and all of them suddenly found themselves able to muster mass support. Was the European idea itself at fault, unable to adjust to allay the fears, fears nurtured by politicians not saying Europe had delivered peace and prosperity but saying Europe had “taken from us”. What exactly has been taken is left unclear, as ‘freedom’ or ‘sovereignty’ have in post-War years never been particularly water-tight definitions for something tangible that the man on the street had in his back pocket.

What do the four countries in question have in common that could explain why this phenomenon has happened in them? They have all enjoyed comparable affluence for the last 30 years, in fact possibly since the 1972 Oil Crisis and perhaps that is why each population could be readily persuaded that something was being taken away from it – that it had something to lose. Writing in that august strongly anti-materialist left-wing journal the Daily Telegraph, back in June of 2013, Alistair Heath stated: “We still aren’t remotely living within our means and – for all the genuine pain in some quarters – still haven’t made a decisive break with the irrational exuberance of the 2000s and the cultural delusions that accompanied it.” He went on say that “together, families and non-financial firms’ debt is still worth 208pc of GDP and is merely back to levels last seen in mid-2007, a time when leverage was already utterly unsustainable. Current debt levels remain much higher than they were a decade ago (170pc of GDP) and 15 years ago (128pc of GDP).”

Eurostat is slightly kinder with its figures, saying that the figures for the United Kingdom were 184 pc (2007) and 169 pc (2013) respectively. Maybe the UKIP argument underneath everything is that the UK should be granted independence to be privately financially incompetent – it will never be able to pay its bills. People have not learned from the disastrous Northern Rock / RBS setting. (In fact, were Britain to have been a member of the Eurozone, it would have been spat out the back of the European Monetary Union train and punished for financial incompetence.)

In the Netherlands, during the same period, private-sector debtor soared, albeit not nearly as fast as the upturn in the fortunes of the Party for Freedom, but still significantly, leaping from 222pc to 246pc of GDP. In France, private-sector debt has risen from 150 pc to 175 pc over the same period. People buy things they cannot pay for and possibly will never be able to pay for, and seemingly do so gladly. Rather than considering how many people lost their savings when the banks they had been persuaded to buy mortgages from that they would never be able to repay collapsed, the politicians looked to bad banks and insolvent nations. And were happy to let the people continue spending as if there were no tomorrow.

Judging by the above figures, the average consumers have evidently responded to the crisis by trying to buy their way out of it – on tick. Which is a bad choice, as a paper published by Alan Taylor two years ago at the US National Bureau for Economic Research shows. Taylor’s analysis of 138 years of performances by 14 advanced economies show that the more private ‘leveraging’ there was, the greater the proneness to crisis. Yet the response to the financial crisis has not been to get private debt on a more even keel. No, although the political leaders in all three countries should know the problem, they have elected to stick their heads in the sand and have not levelled with the electorate. That blind-eye on consumerism has blind-sided them on Europe and has undermined the European idea and the EU.

This is where we come to the odd-man out in the quadrumvirate: Germany. In Germany, private-sector debt over the same period fell from 118pc to 110pc, so there the argument does not apply. Germany is the special case, as it is the one country inside the Eurozone that has been depicted rightly or wrongly as the person picking up the tab for the moribund over-spenders in Spain and Italy. That has been the chink in the armor that the Alternative for Germany has exploited. The argument was different, but the underlying fear they have fed on has been the same: “We are having to pay for others – with our (budget) independence.”

However, this is not the only point on which Germany is the special case. After all, what do the first three countries have in common other than excessively high private debt ratios, meaning they live above their means, meaning they live at someone else’s cost? Sadly the answer is that they share in common a history of having always done so, although the habit has gone by different names. All three countries built empires on exploiting parts of what is now called either the Third World – or America. Put differently, all three empires rested on the same mindset as ‘shop till you drop’: someone else somewhere else was footing the bill. (Most recently that person is possibly a Chinese worker dying from being contaminated in an Apple factory.)

Each country in the trio has a long-standing tradition of regarding itself as a ‘master of the universe’ as a key element in its national identity. For two of them, the last nail in the coffin of nationalist fervor came when Germany overran them and occupied them in 1940. For Britain, an acceptance that the price-tag for victory over Germany in 1945 was the final loss of its Empire has been such a bitter pill, that many have not swallowed it. Could it be that the reason why Germany is the odd man out is therefore less a matter of its populace not opting for excessive debt? Perhaps the key factor is that the three countries where the new political parties insist they are the “patriots” and are championing ‘independence’ or ‘freedom’ are the three that have ‘lost’ empires and have not come to terms with the fact.

How has the population in the triad coped with this sudden ‘downgrading’ in the national rating? It has not embarked down the path taken by the Germans after 1945, with its mixture of mea culpa, never again, and let’s build something together. No, the Brits, Dutch and French have instead evidently chosen that classic means of alleviating pain: They have gone shopping. And when the ability to go shopping as the main value in life (OK, I’m simplifying here) comes under threat, because a younger generation is not getting into jobs that pay more than service-industry-piss-poor wages because the politicians abandoned manufacturing in the 1980s in favor of a financial industry (and are not prepared to own up to the fact that the latter is closely connected with the house of credit cards that just fell down) then social cohesion starts to melt and dissatisfaction spreads.

Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Nicholas Farage are all given credit by the electorate – for projecting a vision of past glory into the future. This is apt and makes sense, as it is the political version of saying my past credit rating was good, I spent masses, so surely I can continue to do so in the future. It’s always someone else who pays. Remember Black Friday is the first big shop of the Christmas season and also the day when in 1929 Wall Street came unstuck. This year, Amazon UK, that great taxpayer, posted record sales – not of records, but of just about everything else. The BBC reported: “Black Friday was the busiest day on record for online retailer Amazon UK, with sales that ‘surpassed all expectations’, the company has said. Its website recorded orders for more than 5.5 million goods, with about 64 items sold per second. Amazon said the public’s appetite for Black Friday was ‘bigger than ever’.” It will take a staunch politician to tell his electorate that maybe such a spree is not so good an idea after all. As always, history runs along an ironic trajectory. For the irony here is that those parties who claim to champion Western Judeo-Christian values (remember: Islamic banks don’t give credit as easily) are the ones undermining our societies, as consumerist values are simply not sustainable. It is high time politicians started offering us non-consumerist visions. If they don’t, Europe will fall apart and we will enjoy be ‘independent’.

Here in the Ethiopian countryside, as in other African countries, the women seem to be the beasts of burden. Like those I have seen carrying baskets, wicker panniers, bales of fodder, stacks of wood, claypots or babies on their backs. Most of them have no shoes. Over the last hundred kilometres the number I have seen walking solitarily or in twos or threes, single file, along the road, strap over their head or a rope across their upper chests to keep the load in place, has exceeded anything else. One long procession of women at work. Like the equally endless lines of eucalyptus trees, sucking the water from the ground and denying the short conifers and palms the same. Without trees, no life. Without water no life.

Not that there isn’t a lot to see along the side of the road. Processions of goats, orange, grey, white. Processions of hunchback cows, black or brown. Processions of donkeys, tan or light grey. Occasional mules, where a horse erred in judgement. Processions of older women with umbrellas. Children, some of them infants, selling roast kolo barley or shining shoes in the villages, rows of them, one spot, one profession, some of them calling you-you-you farangi after us, in the hope we will part company with coins or smaller banknotes. Other, more fortunate children, walking in line, sometimes two deep, homeward bound from school: some in uniform, others not, but almost all of them with a rolled exercise book in one hand, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, between the school and wherever the round straw-roofed hut is they call home. Lines of pylons now and again, otherwise lines of wooden electricity poles, many tilting precariously.

Leaving Addis Abeba it was initially processions of corrugated hovels that accompanied us, with paper laid out to dry outside on the pavement, or piles of collected plastic waste, or lines of open waste-water culverts. The hollow-block huts gave way in the countryside to less corrugated iron and rows of mud-covered wooden square houses in straight lines along the road, set back by the storm-water drains, or concrete-block sheds that were shops. Occasionally, way out in the fields one saw a procession of a solitary herdsman and cows, in one long line.

Roads as the only links

The road itself, when it turns steep, which is a lot of the time, challenges the underpowered, which is most of us here it seems, and leads to processions of drool-dripping cows plodding their way upwards, being over-taken by slightly fleeter-footed but definitely overladen mules, who are being passed by very-slow-moving trucks belching black fumes whose line is constantly interrupted by slightly faster trucks that go by names such as Dove, Mammut or Tata, but get hounded by what are by most yardsticks still slow buses that were built before 2000, the blue “Level 2” busses, which in turn get overtaken by a line of green “Level 1” busses, which in turn get burned off by horn-blaring SUVs, all for some unknown reason trying to get to the next crest of the high plateau first. Before the uninterrupted line becomes a broken line of bald tires all racing downhill, past the six-year-olds at the side of the road calling out for plastic water bottles, a means of storing the life-saving liquid in these scorched heights. Past the herdsgirl with the braided hair who stand proudly above it all, a school book in one hand, a long metal-studded crook in the other. Past a young woman in an emerald green long dress, bending into the ascent to offset the weight of the bag of rice on her shoulders. A man strides along in front of her, his crook held by his right arm over his shoulders, a huge bale of straw on the other side of him, supported by his left arm. He walks upright. I assume straw is less heavy. In front of him marches a dog, who seems to have decided in this heat he will defy his canine instinct and not chase one of the trucks.

The road through the towns is lined by blue Pepsi hoardings, each of which bearing the name of the hollow-block two-storey abode that is a truck-driver hotel in an allotment behind it. Interspersed by shops and restaurants selling just about everything, the smell of the dust and the diesel mingling with the fragrance of the roasting kolo. The towns stop as suddenly as they start, giving way to long flowing fields, with in the distance, speckled like poppies in a Van Gogh, people out working the fields, or cattle, or vultures. Now and again a line of thickset oxen pulling ploughs behind them in the sets of squared smallholder fields. The procession of fields follows a patchwork pattern, the high teff wheat runs red as the heads hang heavy readying for harvesting, the next field is yellow, and yet another green, Ethiopia’s national colors splashed here across the entire plateau. Interspersed with stubble where an unthinkable number of man-hours have been spent stooped scything or sickling the harvest. Then there are lines of maize to match the processions of corn rows.

At this point, the road explodes into thin air, we have reached the Rift Valley, a massive stepped gorge, where the road descends from over 2,500 down to 900 meters, where the Blue Nile runs brown. Now the cars have to navigate the striated blacktop, crushed into furrows by the procession of trucks, lines that occasionally become whorls resembling Amharic characters or something I try and write on the bouncing back seat while the shock-absorbers groan beneath me. The road is steep, so very steep in parts that the girls who run across it in one village, bursting out of a house that is lined by yellow mountain gladiolas, arms straight down at their sides, but swinging, flipflops flapping as they rush, seem to be far faster than many an ancient truck crawling its way to the top like a beetle with a huge cargo carapace atop. However inhospitable, the flanks of the gorge are lines by processions of thin terraces, perching precariously but bearing grain among the fences of brushwood and cacti erected to keep out the next procession of goats.

Next morning we drive back along the same road. Between the villages, in the villages, between the towns and the villages, there is one constant flow of people on foot. The men again in shoes, and this time a few of the women, too – albeit only those in the light white cheesecloth shawls donned to go to church. The broken line is one long procession of wares heading for market, or purchases heading back home.

It is as though the whole of Amhara province were on the road, walking either this way, or back the other way. For the most part silently it seems. The distances they are covering to get the grain or beans to buyers is great. After all, up here on the high plateau, or so my driver Melese, one of ten children, tells me, about half of the grain in Ethiopia is grown – given a population this year of some 96 million, up from 93 million last year, the sheer tonnage of grain needed to keep people fed is immense. Especially if one remembers that Addis Abeba is now home to some 3.5 million persons officially, with the unofficial number much higher, and none of them can till fields. All of which translates into countless hands working the fields and countless feet walking along the road to market.

Paved roads can be killers

The road is being renewed, with proper layers of thick compacted gravel topped by asphalt, a project kindly paid for by a grant from Japan. Where the road is already ready, even the slower trucks are now mowing faster, no longer having to navigate the countless gaping potholes, deep enough to swallow an oil drum in the smaller versions, resembling bomb craters in the larger versions. The new road will facilitate travel north from Addis Abeba, I am told, as Highway 3 will then be able to link up the north far better. Travel times will be slashed, with the trip to Debre Markos said to soon only require a bit more than 3 ½ hours rather than the six we required. That will be real progress, hooking up the countries urban centres better in this vast country that lacks a railway network of any kind – there is a single line running from Dire Dawa to the port in neighbouring Djibouti.

Sadly, those hundreds of thousands of feet seem to have been forgotten by the infrastructure planners who design these new roads. There is no pavement, a side on which to walk, and the right of way was evidently such that the new road runs flush to the fields, other than a brief shoulder of sharp gravel. Meaning people are forced to walk on a road on which the traffic is now flowing, at times at real speed. It is a 300km-long suicide trap. Goats on strings do not understand the speed of cars. Nor do cows, or donkeys, or children. It is a national disaster waiting to happen, the kind of conflict that so easily undermines progress. If the smallholders can’t walk, there will be no food in the village market places, and no food move to the towns in the now faster trucks, and on to the cities.

Many paths to progress

There is an Ethiopian tale about the donkey, the goat, and the dog. They all feel tired one day and flag down a Level 3 bus to take them to the next village to have a cup of coffee. On the bus, the donkey pays the conductor its fare. The goat ducks down behind it and gets off paying anything. The dog, sitting at the back meekily, pays the full fare but with a large denomination Birr bill, and the conductor kicks it and doesn’t give it back the change due. This is why when buses, or trucks for that matter, come through a village a goat bleat and run away, frightened that the conductor has noticed its fraudulence. The donkey, a short-sighted beast at the best of times, knows it has paid and has nothing to worry about, and therefore simply keeps wandering it whatever direction it was moving in, ignoring all honking or cries or whips. The dog, still irate at being short-changed, comes running out, snapping at the bus, wanting to claim its money. The tale is old, and pre-dates the new roads. A contemporary version would need to include a whole group of villagers, incensed by some of their children having been mown down, or maybe it was only their livestock, or their guard dogs, board the bus, armed with their long, metal-studded sticks, and head for town to vent their anger on the planners. Progress can all too easily be impeded by such small oversights as a couple of meter of flattened dirt additionally created by a steamroller that was there anyway.

Internalizing oppression

There are other place where the oppressors are not apparent, where the oppression is so ubiquitous, so internalized as to be invisible, where people have, or so one might imagine, identified so strongly with the aggressors that everyone is an aggressor. A state of affairs that is surely inconceivably unhealthy for the population. In one of these other places, killing fear walked the land, the killers extinguishing life with a bullet to the skull, piling up the corpses like so many mementoes. Only to fail in their genocidal intentions. Indeed, genocide itself is always a fantasy of the oppressor, as there is (thankfully) no instance in human history where such has been successful, where an ethnic group has been completely wiped off the face of this earth.

In one such place, plastic bags are banned, a seemingly sensible move to protect a fledgling environment otherwise rent by the blood that soaked into the earth. At the same time, such a prohibition is symbolic of an accepted internalized yearning for complete order, for obedience to moral code that prevents any iteration of past barbarism. In this place, all the cars seem to be cleaned regularly, to have good tires and to stop at traffic lights. In such a perfect world, the ex-pats who are all working on projects to do good can cycle to work, despite the oppressive heat.

Perfection is not godly

In this country, namely Ruanda, Arica’s most densely populated country, all the gardens, and there are many of them, in fact almost every institution has them, look perfectly tended, well-kept, like those strange men who are constantly combing and jelling their coiffeurs to make certain not a single hair is out of place. The blades of tropical grass all seem to have been cut to some normed height, a sign that there is some standards organization that rules almost all aspects of life. Not surprisingly, the cassava and maize fields within the city limits of the capital Kigali (now home to a tenth of the population) and there are many of them, are all set out in perfectly straight lines, as if the poor smallholders who still own their particular little patch, used a string, two sticks and a right angle to get things in rows.

Out on the street, not is a motorcyclist in sight, let alone a paying passenger on the back of a motorcycle, who does not wear a helmet. Despite the incredible spread of the bikes as a simple mode of transport – some Indian businessman bagged the monopoly on importing them. Perhaps he imports the helmets and drinks with the lawmakers who impose ruinous fines on those caught without one, but such an assumption would be cynical. All the steep streets the bikes, motorbikes, cars and small trucks toil up and down are not only precipitous in part in this the country of a thousand hills, but perfectly swept each morning, any unsightly existence, any dust-and-dirt particles brush-panned away. And the picture is no less elegantly surreal off the streets. Even in the carpentry yards, chippings and sawdust are gathered up and whisked away. As if people get a guilty conscience if there are any blemishes anywhere. The roads are mostly well paved, the signboards announcing the donor-agency-sponsored projects that line them all, like the fields, at almost perfect right angles.

Perfect development

Nature here is ancient, many of the trees are monocotyledones, the elephant grass, the frangipanis, the acanthus, the palms, etc. But that old world is swiftly giving way to a population intensity unprecedented even in Africa, and to a firmly controlled environment of build, build, build, be it health programmes to counter Type 1 diabetes, or blanket and highly praised primary-school coverage for all (it manages to turn out illiterates all the same. One tiny pockmark on this perfect face: Parliament still bears a few bullet-chipped marks on its walls from 20 years ago, retained to remind those within of what price parliamentary assembly can have. The lip-service gloss over everything else seems to be working. At the end of the main avenue stands Fortress America, the embassy, architecturally lording over the ministries that run either side of the road that leads away from it. They are interspersed by embassies and hotels where the exchange rates are completely unlike those set by the central bank: not that anyone evidently complains, as in a system where all aspire to be correct and atone for the past, who would wish to complain. Everything has its place here, no one dare step out of place and raise his voice – or hers, for that matter. Next to the exit from the Gents in one such hotel, the prostitutes with their super-high-heels and ultra-tight-skirts stand or sit, but without stating their case at any volume. They have their place, go about their profession without upsetting any balances.

The hotel band plays happy music, foreigners come and go with the flow of donor money assuaging donor guilt and not having intervened when murderous madness ruled the streets. The only thing that gives anything away that the order is precarious and had to be kept by inner and outer force is a heavily armed paratrooper standing at a key crossroads. And an equally heavily armed private security guard, female, lurking on a balcony of one of the main memorials to make certain no doubt that no one treats a memorial wrongly.

Here, after what happened 20 years ago, life did not return to normal. There is nothing normal about normality here. There is a frighteningly omnipresent wish to always invoke that past’s horrors while at the same time being over-perfect in the present. It is a form of denial that makes one shudder, so oppressive is the official policy of being ‘correct’ about everything, about maintaining order. Beneath the surface of this model nation, the divide between rich and poor widens faster than in any other African country. The country imports wares it could itself produce, so that the import/export traders make more; even palm oil is brought in, though there are plenty of palms, even coffee is purchased from outside, though there could be plenty of coffee, the conditions are ideal. Perhaps the palm trees or the coffee trees refuse to grow in perfect straight lines, since the climate so encourages rampant, verdant growth.

Nightmare of efficiency

Ruanda today is a lived waking nightmare. Do-gooders mingling with doing-gooders. The past commemorated everywhere with memorials, society held together now by an oppressive inner wish for perfection. There is a ubiquitous and compulsive lack of creativity, a compulsive orderliness that is inhuman and stifling. The current population live as ghosts of what they themselves could be. Genocide didn’t kill all the bodies, but it killed all the hearts.

Surviving

The guitarist is well past the national average, as here life expectancy just edges past 40. He must have been 30 or so back then, when the world suddenly came to a stop and turned upside down. And he survived. To his right, up the hill, is the National Stadium where this summer there were the international celebrations with all the international politicians celebrating themselves and reconciliation 20 years after, after the genocide. Which also partly took place just down the road here. An event when the world watched on TV or listened to music, while the Hutu hunted, and 75 percent of the guitar player’s tribe were murdered.

Back then, this place was the Novotel, and only it and Hotel Ruanda, then called the Hotel Mille Collines existed. Today, there are many international hotels in the city; the boom can possibly be explained by the large number of foreign consultants who come here to administer the average of US $ 200 million in foreign development aid that are injected into the national economy each year. I wonder which government officials own the hotels.

The old guy plays a mean guitar. It’s a white Fender, metal strings strangely. Maybe they last longer. He’s poor, his neatly pressed trousers are shiny on the thighs and when he turns to adjust his amp, I see they are stained. Just as his cap saw better days a while back. But he survived. And now he’s gazing out into space while his hands enjoy a life of their own. Teee-a-moh, the far younger Hutu singer cajoles, more ramazotti than eros. Sounds a bit like tea and ammo, the way he pronounces it. He’s got a cowboy belt buckle, boots and Foster Grant style shade. His coolness. Maybe he stands out all the more because his guitarist is so the opposite.

The old guy’s mind is elsewhere, he’s drifting, just letting his hands earn the money. When it’s time for his lick, he plays his riffs, never moving, not altering his gaze, head looking slightly sideways, eyes invisible. He survived. And he can (still) play music. Maybe it banishes the demons. Maybe it is exactly what is needed. Playing guitar after Nyamata is not barbaric at all. Perhaps it’s the best way to live on with the memories. Tozzi had a hit with the song as long ago as 1977. That was 17 years before the genocide.

Can you ever forget?

A great poet once wrote that “Death is a Master from Germany”. He was right in the sense that no two acts of genocide are comparable, and that the Third Reich mastered its killing method. But he was wrong in that Prussian military discipline and efficiency were brought to bear elsewhere, exist in other militaries. There is a clear line linking the church in Oradour and that in Nyamata, in the former women and children were killed, in the latter the death toll was some 10,000. The methodology was no different in either case to that applied in the Kravica warehouses outside Sbrenica. Lock people in a church (where they think they are safe out of a superstitious faith in everyone’s respect for religion) or in another edifice, and then throw in the grenades. This requires no mastery, just evil. It is systems of command efficiency that when coupled to the right ideology evidently allow the inchoate and primordial instincts kept in check within humans to rise up like some sort of anthropological horror constant, bubbling and seething on the surface, unleashed by some de-civilized bloodlust, be it in a battle for resources, land, or private property. And then such evil gets perpetrated. Here in Ruanda in a frenzied burst of post-anti-colonial revenging. There are ghosts of Pol Pot in the lineage.

Since 2002, Ruanda’s population has increased by almost 50%. It is now the most densely populated country in Africa. The $200 million the international donor community has thrown at it this will have to go a long way, as there are scant resources to be exploited here in this little landlocked nation, GDP is only US $ 7 billion, and the more foreign aid has poured in, the more the Gini coefficient marking wealth inequality has risen. At the table next to me a groups of indigenes are drinking beer, their golden Rolexes glinting in the sun. If one thing is for sure, I never liked the sing-a-long “Ti Amo”. I watch the guitarist’s face and still discern no emotion. If one thing is for sure, I certainly hate it now, for how bleak must life be if it is so bleak that you escape it through that saccharine song? I try and focus on the frangipani to keep my own balance. Maybe come night-time and the Southern Cross, it will bring some fragrance wafting my way.

Cairo is a city that is an architectural and urban design disaster. If the sentence is true that “all Egyptians want to be designers”, as one professor of the applied arts tells me, then it is a pity that this was not the case at least 30 years ago. Cairo is the city of the block, the slab, the monolith. It reflects the nimbus of construction in the country, whose first industrial champion was Arab Contractors, a state corporation that privatized and is now tantamount to a state itself. Having built the Assuan Dam it branched out. And was soon followed by the cement industry, which was in turn followed by the light breeze-brick industry. The slabs are often only two apartment boxes wide, with a single utility shaft for the elevator, stairs and piping. The sides of the building are left bare, no money shelled out for plasterwork – the desert dust will sandblast the red bricks beige soon enough.

Meaning that unless a tenant decides to paint the façade around the balcony, all buildings look alike in terms of dingy color tone, and their shapes differ only depending on whether they are cylindrical (next to the Nile) or a greater or lesser grid of boxes. And each sand-colored building is topped in the same inimitable way: by a crown of satellite dishes, all aligned in the same direction such that if you buzzed the city with a small plane the impression looking down would probably be similar to gazing across an extensive field of mussels all standing in rows reaching up into the water – from the sandy seabed below. Even at 25 storeys in height, it is a matter of 25 layers of identicalness. Difference is a matter of the interiors or the street life at ground level, or the proximity of gardens or parks, of which there are many – despite the excessive price of land that has prompted all these buildings to rush upwards, clamoring for space.

In the hallways and lobbies there is a constant fight going on to repel the dust, to wash down the tiles or marble floors and wall panels. It is an undertaking that recurs everyday with the regularity of the sun, but not as bright. As often these public sections of buildings are as under-illuminated as they are under-cooled, as landlords seek no doubt to keep operating costs low. This is particularly the case in ministries, where the cabling is often not concealed now doubt out of a wish to facilitate repair work without breaking walls open. The stairwells are often illuminated only by shafts left open to the sky that run parallel to them. In this respect the presence or absence of light is a defining rhythm to urban life here. For some that life is always dingy – in the elevators in the ministry buildings there is inevitably a lift boy. In the Ministry of Higher Education, he is possibly aged 60 and is diminutive in stature, probably chosen for the job for that reason. He has a small seat made of bent tubular aluminum and plastic belting, which he offers to an old lady. Next to it, balanced precariously beneath his telephone and the top of the faux-formica panel stands his coffee cup, the smell of cardamoms bringing the outside world into this little under-lit office of his, prison cell that moves up and down all day, albeit not smoothly. The fact that outside the building the traffic is sheer pandemonium, the decibels rising and falling by the meters gained seems as good as implausible, a rumor but not a reality.

The gridlock reality which prompts people to leave for meetings hours in advance has led to the foundation of new housing and office estates between downtown Cairo and the satellite cities the planners strung like so many pearls along the outer ring road. These new towns sometimes have names or simply borrow from the names of the adjacent district, such as all the sprawl round Gomnia on the road to the airport, where the line of apartment blocks is brought to an abrupt halt by the outer perimeter fence. They fill the gap left to the satellites, such as New Cairo, and in some cases have become more glitzy than these, boasting ultramodern office blocks or complexes thereof, already bursting at the seams with tenants eager to have escaped the gridlock. Albeit only for such a time as it takes for developers to fill in remaining gaps, bringing in more people, and thus more traffic.

This trend is de-urbanization in a sense and re-suburbanization, whereby the residential belts are often between the new commercial districts and the rapidly decaying or emptying downtown. Downtown is now often a matter of old buildings half empty – here, brownfield is not the word, which should be beigefield. And by old I do not mean 100 years back, with an ornately carved frontage on a three- or four-storey building. I mean the 1970s or 1980s blocks that are much higher, were the sentinels of Nasserian or Sadatian progress. Under Mubarak all that expanded were the barracks…

Why should Germany need an alternative, let alone an alternative to the alternatives? After all, the Black&Grand Coalition (grand as in large majority, grand as in pompous) is doing a great job in terms of steering the great central European state down the channel to further prosperity, piloted by manuals written by social market economists. The government has ensured it has set the lights on Green light for growth and stability, and that is what the majority of the population seems to want, otherwise they wouldn’t have voted so overwhelmingly for the Black&Red heavyweight tanker in the general elections.

Anti-European EMPs

Now, state elections are a different matter altogether, and are traditionally the place where people have a dig at the political establishment. Recently this fact has been borne out once again as there have been no less than three state elections, all of them in east German states, first in Saxony, and then a couple of Sundays later in both Brandenburg and Thuringia. In all three at least 10% of those who voted did so in favor of the Alternative for Germany. (Mind you, the turn-out was admittedly pitifully low, as evidently on Sundays people have other things to do in east Germany than recollect that since 1989 they’ve been allowed to vote any way they want.) And the pundits, the TV experts, the political journalists next day, they were all shocked, stunned, gob-smacked… the whole caboodle.

It is worth noting here that the AfD narrowly missed out on a few seats in the federal parliament, having run mainly on an anti-euro platform, but ironically bagged a few slots in the Strasbourg EU Parliament, complaining that it does not believe in the need for such a parliament. Something also worth remembering it that the AfD has not been around for much more than two years, and the man who founded it and spearheads it in Strasbourg is therefore indeed a lucky man. Which is hardly surprising, since that’s his name. Bernd Lucke.

Authoritarian Germans no doubt all sat up and noticed that yes at long last their wish had come true and a real-life prof was leading a political party. What is more, he had to be right, as he is an esteemed professor of macroeconomics and therefore the kind of guy you believed on TV. No, his name is not actually pronounced Burnt Lucky, just as Farage is not pronounced “far age” as in something from a very distant past. But they have certain things in common. And no doubt the two of them cavort in Strasbourg at politico-business lunches together comparing pass notes. Yes, the two rabid anti-EU-EMPs wasting our money on the expenses for being anti in the EU– that’s the price of democracy….

Like Farage, of course Lucke doesn’t say what the EU does for us, has done for us, could do for us. In fact, the party manifestos for all three afore-mentioned state elections fail to comment positively on the subject at all. No, Lucke is compelling (once-only) TV talk show viewing, when he rants in professorial manner about what the EU doesn’t do for us. How it’s all technocrats or bureaucrats and they are eating up our money. How the EMU robs Germany of its sovereignty and its ability to budget properly. How there are all these non-austere Southerners who evidently can’t get a handle on their debts. (He neglects to mention that Germany bust the Maastricht treaty first, and big time, and that the Southerners didn’t start Kraut-bashing.) And for all his cleverness on occasion I get the feeling he and his party conflate the EMU and the EU.

Misconception of the EU

Now Lucke came good first up by campaigning against the EU outlawing the good old tungsten filament light bulb. And lucky we are that he ran a campaign against it after stockpiling countless thousands of them in the cellar. (Yepp, those professorial cellars are damn large). For, a highly modern man, through the Web he offered to sell them to us poor EU-tormented individuals who simply could not adapt to their successors. Enabling us to protest against the EU’s incursion on our civil liberties, those technocrats who imposed energy-saving lamps and then LEDs on us.

The AfD did not discuss whether we should save energy or not, as it’s heavily into burning fossil fuel, and equally heavily into exploiting the hankering for the past instead of talking about the future. So the light bulb was an easy one. Selling crooked cucumbers stockpiled in a cellar might have made less of an impression on your average German citizen and left him in more of a pickle. After all, the cucumber shows how silly all such arguments are. Of course everyone complains about having to buy EU-norm-straight cucumbers, but actually none of us law-abiding citizens are crooked enough to actually like the bent variety – it’s a matter of having the civil liberty to have a boomerang cucumber if we so wish – that’s what makes the West free.

The Alternative for Germany – yes, they’re far age. Things were better in the past. And not just did we have better light bulbs. We decided everything ourselves without Brussels or a Euro note. We did without foreigners, aliens, and refugees. There was little theft. Values were Christian, gays did not marry (assuming they even existed), and abortion was something only practiced in Holland or by illegal Roma immigrants using clothes hangers, one assumed. Well, I’m exaggerating a wee bit, but only just. As the AfD manifestos for the three states do contain a lot of this sort of stuff.

It must be said that Prof. Lucky, if I may call him that, for all his hyper-intelligence, never seems to have read any of them as when challenged on such issues he invariably denies their existence. Instead he welcomes his state election wins with a truly smug self-satisfied smile. Lucke’s look is that of the class wimp who no one ever wanted to pick for the ½-a-class-against-½-a-class soccer match, when even the severely weight-challenged girls got chosen ahead of him – the rationale being at least you could fill the goal mouth with a couple of them, whereas weedy wimp L would invariably own-goal things. No, while Prof. Lucky has not grown significantly since in stature (he still boasts a complete lack of shoulders irrespective of the bespoke suits he wears when preaching evangelism from the pulpit to kids on Sundays which his other penchant), but he has real spine, that we know. He stands up tall for ideas that are RIGHT.

The same stance is adopted by his side-kick, his National no. 2, who is actually a was-been-come-good from the 1980s CDU in Hessen, a man who Walter Wallmann used as his front desk officer until deciding Johnny Walker would do the trick instead. I am talking about the AfD’s chief candidate in Brandenburg. The man in question goes by the honest name of Alexander Gauland. Now, we all know the Nazis called the federal states gaus, and we all know that the rural countryside is called the land in German, but no, his name has nothing to do with that His name, if one checks out his manifesto, goes with the nuclear variant. Gauland couldn’t stop the “I-told-you-so” grin on his face when he won his 10%+. He simply thought he was super. And, yes that is apposite, as actually he is, and should be called Mr. Super-GAU-Land. Nomen est omen, or rather omin-ous. Just what sort of a super-GAU he is as in greatest atomic accident possible can be gleaned from a glance at the manifesto he championed shows – don’t worry, you only need look at the first page to get the gist of where is Gau is coming from.

Free Brandenburg!

The manifesto calls in its headline for the courage to champion a bodenständige free Brandenburg: that’s the earth, that’s back to the earth, that’s back to the past, to the farmers’ life. And it comes pretty much close to revitalizing the Blut-and-Boden mythology they managed to cobble together here after Fontane had finished writing tiringly long novels about the Brandenburg Marches and before the 1945 defeat. The manifesto that Gauland touted started by saying “The politics of recent decades has taken the western world and our country to the limits of what they can endure and to the verge of no longer being able to function.” Hark, ye citizens of Brandenburg, your state has almost ceased to function. The same paragraph goes on to talk about the economic over-exploitation of the natural habitat, the fact that many people are over-strained by having to perform under pressure. Oh, and lest it be forgotten, the constant involvement of Western states in military conflicts, another bugbear, and that despite the lack of funding and the fact that almost all European states are really cash-strapped, European institutions are constantly being expanded and we keep on taking in new member states and discharging international duties.

Well, Mr. Gauland, sorry, you’ve nuked us with so much in that first paragraph that I’m left breathless. But I must admit, on collecting a few thoughts: I haven’t noticed much of this massive EU-expansion. I have admittedly noticed Germany standing up and taking its rightful place on the international stage, and, as an export-driven economy, now also participating in stabilizing the international order. And the state around me seems to be functioning, collecting my taxes, providing me with water and electricity, etc. Indeed, looking through your manifesto, Mr. Gauland, I don’t find any list of the expansion in question.

What I do find, and this really shocks me, is that two sentences later, and still on the first page of your manifesto, you are busy stating in big words that the root of all this evil is that “the economy is geared to the needs of global corporation who monopolize economic power” instead of being nice to us. Well I hate to say it, Mr. Gauland, but some of that I’ve read before, back around 1933, when the global corporations also got lambasted for conspiring against us all, and, dare I say it, being Jewish, too. Back then the claims were also all that the majority of the population was having to bear an awful strain as well…

In case you haven’t noticed it according to the Gaulands of this world that “awful strain” is truly diabolical in the ancient forests of Thuringia. There, the election manifesto found out that wind turbines were trashing the beauty of the countryside and making poor Thuringians pay for national policy fuckups, where a few profit and the “predominant part of the population pays”. The AfD knows why. “The Old Parties claim it is necessary to change our form of energy because of ‘anthropogenic climate change’.” Wait for it, here comes the double-Thuringia-whammy: “The AfD discerns considerable scientific uncertainty as regards the linkage of a long-term forecast climate trend and manmade greenhouse gas emission. The scientific status does not justify…” Like everywhere else, no evidence is given for this statement, no sources cited for such spurious claims. In fact the paragraph closes by saying grandly “a global problem cannot be solved by national or European go-it-alones.“ Of course it can’t, which is why Europe should persuade everyone else how serious the problem is. Or we should bundle Prof. Lucky and Super-GAU onto a plane and send them to somewhere already hard hit by climate change in the Sahel zone. They could do some real help there digging wells.

In the EU but no obligations please

All of this pretty much comes together in the general thinking by the AfD that we should batten down our borders, keep our fossil fuels from oozing out, no doubt, stop the Poles from coming in. Because, hey, the AfD knows that there are masses of criminals out there, lurking, waiting to be nasty. As the Brandenburg manifesto makes very clear. Well, OK, the statistics for crime are actually down, bar a few small towns, and there it is unclear whether the figures for the criminals caught are not because of the fenced traffic going through from elsewhere. But the fears are not. And fears are an easy way of getting votes, and can be stoked and stoked. Like saying there’s no climate change and we can gladly burn coal whenever we so like. Just like Gauland thinks speed traps should be abolished – hey, one of our civil liberties is also to speed as we like. Waste fuel. Burn rubber. Spend our money rather than pay taxes so others spend it. We’re fed up with politicians ‘up’ there who don’t know what the common man wants. We’re common men. We’re here in the beer halls, with our fingers on the pulse of what ordinary Germany wants. (It’s hardly beating for the booze, mind.)

Speaking of beer halls brings us back to colors, the AfD’s campaigning colors: Insipid blue and white – the nationalist colors of Bavaria, Land of the Free, well State of the Free, and Super-Land of the beer halls. Especially in October. But the AfD have hone one better. They’ve added the blood of the earth. The blue-and-white-and-red (Faraga would love those British colors). Maybe, on balance, the dash of red is added for the votes they pinch form the far Leftists who hate international capital, or for the blood of the brains of those who thought they might be an alternative.

We can of course do that every day. But we often choose not to. We delegate such actions to politicians. And we have to accept that sometimes our views are represented by a majority and sometimes are not. Be the representatives in Westminster or in Holyrood. (Indeed, in this context there are perhaps grounds for assuming that if there had been a strong Labour government in Westminster, driven by John Smith, may he rest in peace on Iona, the SNP would not be pushing quite so hard to sever its links with Westminster.) Whereas at present, Holyrood is waging a war-by-proxy against the upper class toffs ruling under Big Ben and is prepared to split a local populace in the process. To return to literature, the SNP may wish to de-Cameronize Scotland, but do they wish to do so at the price of a real De-Camerone, telling tales to recreate a lost and glorious past, when men were men and always wore kilts, and the present offers little cause for joy, something that has been the case in Glasgow for far too long already.

EU as the goal

Salmond, and sometimes I think he added the “d” to his name to make himself seem less slippery, is hungry for real power, whereby for power read: the ability to decide how all the cash is spent and the ability to decide how to spent it, all by and for himself. In the process he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants independence from Westminster, but he doesn’t want to spend the North Sea oil revenues, for example on repaying the sovereign debt used to bail out RBS, let alone the infrastructure built using it. He wants to rejoin the EU, to continue to rely on all the subsidies the EU grants Scotland, without paying into the EU. He wants to keep the pound but not keep the bank policies that govern it. He wants defence cover from NATO but he doesn’t want ‘their’ tactical nuclear weapons in his lochs. He wants the money from North Sea oil and he wants it to flow forever. He wants Scottish, but he campaigns in English.

In my league table of philanthropic terms, “evolutionist” and “Social Darwinist” both come pretty close to the bottom. Because my gut feeling tells me that human society, if it is to be sustainable, hinges on the stronger helping the weaker, the richer helping the poorer. One of the reasons I have often found Cameronist Tories so distasteful is that they seem to think they live in a world where such a social contract is not necessary, where the rich can gladly get richer, and beggar or bugger the poor. In this respect, Salmond is deeply Cameronist and is a social Darwinist. He wants the money from the oil. But he doesn’t want to share it with those not fortunate enough to have such a source of wealth. Because he says it is ‘his’. Maybe if massive gold deposits had been found just south of Hadrian’s Wall he would now be arguing that the Wall be moved slightly south, as the line had not been drawn correctly.

Separate or stay?

For let us be honest, separatism in Europe today, and New Russia is a prime example, is all about laying claim to the cherries (or the wheat and the mines) and leaving everyone else with the rotting vegetables. Separatism, dressed up as national identity, is a bland excuse for egotism. Vaguely Germanic Northern Italians don’t want ‘their’ tax money spent on ‘lazy’ Southerners, hard-working (or was that hard-partying?) catty Catalans don’t want ‘their’ tax money spent on ‘lazy’ (read: unemployed) Spaniards, decidedly unphlegmatic Flems don’t want ‘their’ tax money spent on ‘lazy’ (read: unemployed) Walloons. And Alex Salmond certainly does not want to spend the oil revenue on the NHS south of the border. Wave the flags, roll out the bunting, decorate the idea in whichever colours apply, blue-and-white, red-and-yellow, red-and-black, the idea remains the same: I want it only for myself.

Oil for all

Alex Salmond has no notion of society as something where you create balances. His is a deeply unsustainable business model that he must have known for a long time would exclude a large part of the people he claims to represent. He evidently does not understand how Euroland works, although he ostensibly wants to join it – there a few carry the can for a many, they complain now and again, but they continue to do the heavy lifting. He does not understand how the EU works, where the richer countries pay to help the poorer ones develop. And he certainly does not understand the rationale of a peaceful country that has evolved from a deeply problematic feudal past such as Germany, where some federal states happily pay for their less wealthy fellow states. In those structures, the equivalent of the oil revenues automatically get shared, as the insight is that this way society and peace prevail, and you don’t divide society into two camps.

Nor does Alex Salmond have a sense of history, although all he does is band about history as a source of identity. Georg Lukacs suggested that history only served as a source of identity if it told you things changed, meaning identities evolve in line with decisions taken, that we could create a better society. Sadly, Salmond does not seem to know this, He certainly does not know what it means for a colonial Lord Lugard to bundle you together with others with whom you have little in common and for that colonial master, a few generations later, to leave you to get on with it. Alex Salmond should have read up on where his forbear Mungo Park first ended up, far up the Benue River, in the shit, and without a paddle, having mistaken the Benue for the Niger, and by extension Nigeria for Mali.

Nigerian federalism

n Nigeria the Northerners, the Hausas and the Fulanis, their feudal kingdoms thrashed in the battlefield by mercenaries’ Enfields, found themselves in a nation in 1960 that they shared with Southerners, who not only did not share their language, they did not share their religion either. And no this was not a Protestant v. Catholic affair, like Rangers v. Celtic, this was a Muslims v. Christians. Ahmadu Bello and Tafewa Balewa, the pre-eminent Northern leaders of the young Nigerian Republic, understood that history had to be put aside if this new country was to succeed. They realized, as commercial oil started to bubble up out of the Southeastern wells on a scale that would turn the North Sea black, that a balance had to be struck. Not much later Nigerians fought a Civil War over the oil/identity/ownership issue. The Republicans won, insisting that the oil be used for everyone’s benefit. In the late-Noughties it was a Northerner called Umaru Yar’Adua as President who insisted the “boys” in the Delta, where the oil still bubbled up so copiously, be given a greater share of the proceeds in order to recognize the fact that there was where the oil was. And he was succeeded by a man from the Delta who has done his best to make certain the oil proceeds are spent throughout the country – albeit ignoring the Northeast.

Nigerian society, for all its factions and fractions, for all the oil violence in the Southeast and for all the zealot thug violence in the Northeast, has nevertheless remained united. Sure, the oil revenue has spawned oligarchs and a fast-growing middle class. Sure, there are millions still living below the poverty line. But the country’s politicians, however they lambast one another in public, however they try to yell one another down in private, have still kept their country together, have still shared. Despite all being brilliant negotiators who know every trick of the trade of persuasion, thrust and counter-thrust. And despite some being Muslim and others being Christians, their arguments don’t get conducted in dualities, in yes/no, right/wrong, you/us. They do their utmost not to divide their nation.

Alex Salmond could easily know all of this. In fact, he has no excuse for not knowing it all. After all, it was in 2005 in the hotel at Gleneagles which Salmond enjoys frequenting that President Obasanjo pushed through the “aid deal” at the G8 that gave countries like Nigeria a new lease of life, not throttled by debts no one could repay. And the G8, chaired by Tony Blair, graciously realized that social stability depended on their agreeing to reschedule or cancel the debt. History is not made by choosing egoism and dressing it up in separatist, nationalist adjectives, but by knowing that generosity, sharing, is the key to the future. The former is an own goal. Moving the score up a notch: Nigeria 2, Scotland 0.

A devilish huddle

What happened next is less a matter of the imagination and more of historical fact, but perhaps because there were so many facts, the overall picture has been largely left uncharted. The roles played by the National Security Advisers (Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice) the Secretaries of Defense (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld), the Secretaries of State (Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice), by Paul Wolfowitz as their main underling, and by Dick Cheney as Vice President all depended on a view of the world first promoted by Bernard Lewis in a September 1990 article in The Atlantic on “The Roots of Muslim Rage” and then lent official status by Samuel Huntington.

Lewis opined that:
“In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam. But the greater part of the world is still outside Islam, and even inside the Islamic lands, according to the view of the Muslim radicals, the faith of Islam has been undermined and the law of Islam has been abrogated. The obligation of holy war therefore begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.” It need not concern us here whether this black-and-white view attributed to Islam was actually an example of a myopic analysis by Lewis and its dualism would not have withstood empirical assessment. What must concern us is that having created such a monolith, he then also described its opposite. He assumed two things. Firstly, he suggested, “suddenly, or so it seemed, America had become the archenemy, the incarnation of evil, the diabolic opponent of all that is good, and specifically, for Muslims, of Islam.” Secondly, he re-establishes the dualism in geopolitics: “More than ever before it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought and life. Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people.” What reach the fundamentalist leaders had, and whether they did indeed think in such a manner is not of any relevance. Because even if they did not, Lewis in an influential journal said they did and was believed. And he told his fellow Westerners that they were going to have to sharpen their swords and prepare to do battle, not just any battle, but The Battle as foreseen in the Revelation of St. John, of Good with a capital g against Evil with an equally capital e: the battle of Armageddon. It is in fact a battle to be in found in Christian, Islamic and Jewish eschatology. For Lewis concludes by saying: “It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations.” Now in a unipolar world that spells trouble.

Civilizations can’t clash

Harvard’s Huntington, whom Kissinger describes as “one of the West’s most eminent political scientists” takes up the image of the clash and uses it as the linchpin for proposing a new post-Cold War world order that is structured around such clashes and certainly has nothing in common with Fukuyama’s notion that history had been ended by vanquishing Communism. Huntington first voiced the idea in an article for the august journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, and then elaborated on it in a full-fledged book published in 1996. Crucially, between Lewis and Huntington came Gulf War 1, came Western audience participation in a war thanks to journalists who were in bed with the soldiers and new multimedia opportunities. And those audiences were shown an image of Iraqis as Muslims that was as alien to them as the footage of Afghani Talibans was to be.

Signally, our Harvard intellectual quotes the above passage from Lewis, whom he describes as a “leading Western scholar of Islam”, only as a means for extending the argument’s applicability and giving it blanket coverage: He opines that “similar observations came from the Islamic community.” (213). (The evidence he gives is rather meager: two statements from TIME magazine in 1992 and one from New Perspectives Quarterly, which is published by Jerry-Brown-sponsored Institute for National Strategy and has keen pol-sci experts Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas as two of the members of its Board of Directors.) In fact, since he views the matter as the very fabric of the new world order, Huntington broadens the hypothesis even further: “These images of the West as arrogant, materialistic, repressive, brutal, and decadent are held not only by fundamental imams but also by those whom many in the West would consider their natural allies and supporters. (214).

US: We know what’s best

In other words, by 1996, 17 years after the failure of US policy in Iran, the fall of the Shah, and various attempts by Bush Sr. to bankroll Iraq into bludgeoning Iran, and a brief interventionist escapade under “Storming Norman” with Colin Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the American establishment had decided that the Middle East was qua Muslim one thing and one thing alone: a clear and unequivocal enemy that challenged its hegemony. And since the geopolitical construct offered to shore up this position was crypto-religious, under Condoleeza Rice the geographical designation (which refused to follow religious fault lines) had to be expanded. Instead of the Middle or Near East, American policymakers started focusing on the “Greater Middle East”, which includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and various of the Central Asian ‘stans’. And Rice declared that the appropriate policy to pacify this hydra was not to chop off seven heads in Crusader fashion, but to introduce “transformational democracy” in all the relevant countries. After all, if the existing feudal structures were open to possible abuse by Islam, as had been seen in Yemen, then they needed to be replaced by modernized structures.

The idea has a flaw so simple as to be shocking. If Western democracy evolves from a free market economy in an industrialized society, then you need the economic basis for it, and that did not fit the non-diversified, oil-or-gas-producing, rent-seeking societies in question. And it has a second flaw, one that is even more stunning: If, according to the Huntington school of world history all Muslims are anti-Western, then introducing such democracies would be tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot, as it would invariably open the door to popular Muslim governments. And oops that was surely not Rice’s intention? After all, she was acting under Dick Cheney, and we can assume that what he had in mind was to keep control of the oil – a goal he certainly achieved with Gulf War 2.

Fighting a devil you made

However, what Col, Condy, Dick, Don and Paul did achieve was to fashion the world of the Middle East in their image, an image that was at the time a complete real con by neo-cons, as neither Lewis nor Huntington actually offered evidence for their claims. And the Big Five under George W. were ironically assisted in the undertaking by the very person who became their nemesis for so long and who thought just as dualistically: Osama bin Laden, the man who so despised the feudal totalitarianism of the House of Saud that he wished to do a Saddam and topple it. It was the attacks of Sept. 11 which gave the younger Bush administration populated by the older Bush confidants the justification for their world view, almost a decade after they had first embraced it.

Indeed, it is fair to day that in the 21 years since Huntington published his essay, the Middle East has disintegrated into a tribal free for all, irrespective of the hopes attached to a jasmine spring or Tahir Square. (The young Islamic social-media generation may call for democracy online, but it does not influence the flows of money or weapons.) For the arsenals and the troops are commanded by the old scheming men who plot away behind the scenes and control the oil. Toppling an autocrat such as Gaddafi or attempting to do so (Assad) does not create a clean state of affairs, does not turn a failed state into a successful one, it just makes things worse and moves societies further into the mold Lewis suggested already applied. After all, as mentioned in passing, you need economic development if you want democracies to take root, not unilateral commodity extraction. You need masses of jobs (Huntington at least said Islam was such a powder keg because of the high birth rate in the Middle East.) We now have a Middle East that is in the throes of inner Islamic conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, between young unemployed men and old rich men, and significantly the major emerging block calls itself “Islamic State”, known as ISIS for short.

The old American men should have remembered what Bob Dylan had to say on the subject back in 1976: “I married Isis on the fifth day of May. But I could not hold on to her very long. So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away. For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong.” It is simply a pity Dick, Colin and co. did not cut off their hair and ride in penance for a place where they could not screw up about 20 years ago and instead forged a Middle East in their own gravely mistaken image.