suburbanmusings

There were three stories on the BBC’s trusty website yesterday, which raised an eyebrow, or two.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7891434.stm

“The population of the Gaza Strip increased by almost 40% between 1997 and 2007, according to the results of a Palestinian census.”

That is a staggering rate of population growth; and the Gazan population is set to double again in the next 20 years. This rate of growth, three times the world average, has very important implications for the future of the region and poses questions about the semantics of the current situation. In 1948 the population of Gaza was approximately 69,000 and the entire Palestinian population was around 2 million. In Northern Ireland, Republicans have often expressed the hope that Catholics will eventually ‘outbreed’ the Protestants. I understand that Hamas have also encouraged this idea and consider population growth as a way of destroying Israel. Indeed the high growth rate of the Palestinian population has long been a source of existential angst for Israel’s rightwing leaders. It was partly a fear of being ‘outbred’ that encouraged Ariel Sharon to pull out of Gaza, and he might well have pulled out of much of the West Bank had he not been struck down by a severe stroke. However runaway population growth in Gaza is not an act of resistance but a result of early marriages and the low availability of contraceptives, but if it continues at its present rate it can only spell disaster for Gaza and the region.

Gaza’s unemployment rate is around 40%. This is partly as a result of war and Israeli sanctions, but it is also because of huge population growth. No country in the world can provide enough jobs for a population that doubles every two decades. Yemen, which has also experienced incredible population growth, has at least 30% unemployment. Furthermore a massive surplus of workers will drive down wages and increase inflationary pressures in the territory. Gaza is not the most crowded place on earth and it is nowhere near being so. However its infrastructure is decrepit and strained to the limit. Further unrestrained population growth may well cause it to collapse. Of course, all countries with exponential population growth face these pressures, not to mention the added problems of increased competition for resources and the effect on climate change. In Gaza, however, there is a political dimension to the issue. Even if a permanent ceasefire was agreed tomorrow, living standards in Gaza will continue to decline in the long run if plans are not made for Gaza's economic future. Poverty, unemployment and disaffection are the recruiting sergeants for extremist groups. Hamas and other groups aim to destroy the Israeli state. If this ideology continues to exploit a disenfranchised population experiencing declining living standards and competition for resources, the result could be fatal for even the strongest peace deal. Population growth may well have disastrous consequences for Palestine, Israel and the rest of the world twenty years from now.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/tennis/7891164.stm

“Dubai could be removed from the women's tennis calendar in 2010 after Israeli Shahar Peer was refused entry to the United Arab Emirates.”

Perhaps this is a tangential story, but to ban an athlete from entering a country because she happens to hold a particular passport makes me wonder whether the world has learnt anything over the last 60 years. It will be interesting to see how many tennis players to turn down the chance for the tournament's $2 million prize as a display of solidarity with their fellow professional.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7891132.stm

“There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, a US conference has heard.”

An American scientist has estimated that there could be one hundred billion earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. That means that there could be over ten billion trillion
potentially life-supporting planets across the known universe. With such incomprehensible numbers it is surely inevitable that alien life exists somwehere and perhaps nearly everywhere in the universe. Although as Arthur C. Clarke once said:

“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

I wrote about Fitna when the film was released. The film contains some horrible images but it certainly does not incite hatred or violence. In fact, if anything, it is anti-violence. I have some sympathy with the questions Geert Wilders has raised about Islam and I believe that criticism of religion is essential in a free society. However some of his comments about the future role of Muslims in European societies have been repugnant and are to be condemned utterly.

Repugnant views, however, are not illegal and in a free society we do not ban the British National Party or Holocaust deniers from having their say, provided they don’t incite violence. Furthermore, Ken Livingstone, was allowed to host Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi who promotes suicide bombing, homophobia, forced female circumcision and had this to say about the Jews

"Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers."

That is an example of incitement to violence, not free speech. David Miliband told BBC News that Fitna stirred up 'religious and racial hatred’, but when questioned he admitted that he had not actually seen the film. Critical thought and the right to express it are fundamentaly important if society is not to stagnate. Today was a bad day for British society.

The Credit Crunch promises to be one of the most severe economic events of the century. Democratic capitalism is facing one of the biggest tests in its long history and world leaders are talking about once in a lifetime economic challenges. This is a crisis for democratic capitalism, there is no doubt about it. But let us put things into perspective. This is considered to be a crisis because only 90% of people are now in employment and because, although the vast majority of ordinary people still own their own homes, they are worth a little less than they were last year. This is a crisis because ordinary working people are buying fewer frivolous luxury goods and because the developed world may record negative growth for the first time in six decades. This isn’t the same crisis that gripped the Soviet Empire in 1989 after three decades of stagnant or negative growth and five decades of brutal repression. And falling property prices are not a problem which the benighted peoples of Zimbabwe, Afghanistan or North Korea have the luxury of worrying about.

This is a crisis because we are comparing the current situation in the financial markets to the great success of the last 50 years. In 1900 there was not a single country with universal suffrage but today more than 120 countries extend that right to their citizens. Since 1945 free trade and open economies have triumphed over closed borders and nationalistic protectionism. It is no coincidence that more people have been saved from poverty in the last 50 years than in any other 50 year period in human history. More than 400 million people have been pulled out of poverty in China alone. But we are ignorant of social history. The West has come to see unending economic growth as a birthright rather than a privilege. A million French people recently held a strike to protest about the economic downturn, as if unending economic growth was written into the constitution. The much bigger strikes of 1968 actually took place during France’s greatest period of prosperity and were led by the students of the Sorbonne, the university that caters for the pampered and priveliged elite of French society. While redundancy and house repossessions are terrible events, the vast majority of people remain relatively unaffected by the economic crisis, so far at least. We should remember that we are materially still far wealthier than we were in the 1970s and certainly even more so than in the Great Depression of 1930s.

While the depression of the 1930s is well remembered in popular culture, it is less well known there was a much longer global depression between the 1870s and the 1890s as well as during the 1830s. However, despite these severe shocks the graphs recording global economic growth since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1760s (or thereabouts) show impressive increases in global wealth overall. In the 20th Century the increase in global wealth has been almost exponential. We are comparing our economic situation to a period of perhaps ten or at the most twenty years previously, yet we should really be comparing it to the situation hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Economic historians such as Gregory Clarke have argued that, from the Stone Age 30,000 years ago up to around 1800 AD, there was effectively little or no increase in global living standards. Indeed studies have shown that Tudor peasants lived on the same wages as did their Babylonian counterparts, some four thousand years earlier. Of course these studies are not conclusive, but we can see from empirical evidence that a peasant working the land in 18th century England lived almost exactly the same short life of drudgery and hardship as every one of his ancestors dating back to the Roman Conquest and beyond. It was a life of hard labour from dawn to dusk, with no disposable income, no education, with few material goods and few, if any, rights or priveliges. Up until 1800 that was the sum human experience for those born outside the aristocracy. But the rise in productivity caused by industrialisation stimulated a massive and unprecented increase in the amount of global wealth. The conditions in those early factories of the Industrial Revolution seem terrible today, indeed they were terrible then. But they were not any worse or any better than the conditions that existed for ordinary people before industrialisation. And as new ways of creating wealth emerged, a self-confident middle class eclipsed the power of the aristocracy, upward mobility replaced downward mobility and organised labour was able to form pressure groups for workers’ rights. Starting with the Factories Act of 1833, a multitude of acts guaranteed labour rights and the increase in productivity meant that wages increased steadily, despite the exponential increase in population. The Malthusian trap had been broken for the first time in history. The benefits of the Industrial Revolution are empirically obvious: brick houses with glass windows, slate roofs, electric lights and plumbing in place of mud hovels lit by candlelight, a regular wage in place of subsistence agriculture, political rights in place of feudalism, upward mobility instead of downward mobility, literacy and education in place of illiteracy and ignorance. The meteoric rise in living standards heralded the ascension to power, by democratic means, of the middle classes and, in the 1920s, labour. None of this would have been possible without the increase in productivity, and hence wealth, caused by the Industrial Revolution. Since the 1760s there have been countless recessions and a number of depressions but, in the long run, living standards have risen beyond recognition. A poor man living in the West today can arguably enjoy a better standard of living than any pre-twentieth century monarch.

However, although living standards have improved at an even greater rate since 1945, surveys have consistently found that people are no more happy today then they were 50 years ago. Perhaps part of the problem is that the definition of poverty in the UK can now include not owning a television and we too often equate material wealth with happiness. A few months ago the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that £13,400 per anum (before tax) was the minimum a single person needed to live adequately, but notably and unusually, its budget included such non-consumerist items as walking boots and a bicycle. One of the best times of the life was when I worked at a ski-resort in Canada after graduating from university, when virtually my only possessions were the clothes on my back, my bed and my snowboard. Perhaps having vanquished the tyranny of pre-industrial poverty we have, as a society, allowed ourselves to fall under the tyranny of the unquenchable desires caused by mass-consumerism and clever advertising. The Credit Crunch was effectively caused by everyone, from top bankers to ordinary workers, trying to cash in on the seemingly infinite rise in house prices. In short nearly everyone was tempted by the holy grail of making a huge profit without doing any actual work. Maybe Western societies should now take the opportunity to learn from our long forgotten pre-industrial societies and re-evaluate the importance of the non-materialistic aspects of life.

Of course, limitless progress has become the defining narrative of industrialised societies and we should not underestimate the challenges posed by this financial crisis. Indeed economic gorwth will remain of fundamental importance to future societies. We should ignore the impulses of nationalistic protectionism and the utopian ideologies which have previously caused the world so much ill. But we should also look at the lessons of history and understand how we have come to see materialistic wealth as a birthright. And when the global economy recovers and returns to its steady rate of progress, as it will, we should recognise the dangers of becoming so enamoured by the promises of Mammon. Most importantly we should always remember that we are still the most privileged generation in human history.

During today’s PMQs Gordon Brown appeared to declare the world had entered a depression. I’m not sure what evidence Brown based this statement on, as the world economy is predicted to grow during 2009, just. Although on the other hand, there is no technical definition of a depression and for the first time since 1945 the developed world as a whole may see an economic contraction.

In her blog, Stephanomics, the BBC Economics Editor Stephanie Flanders argues that the global depression of the 1930s was caused by the adherence to the gold standard following the shock of the Stock Market collapse and the subsequent loss of confidence amongst American consumers. Her explanation is a little too technical for me to understand properly but, I think, she is arguing that countries cut back on imports in order to maintain their depleted gold stocks. Milton Friedman also criticised the use of the gold standard because it prevented the Fed from increasing the supply of money in order to combat the shock of the Wall St Crash (the Fed was worried that if the supply of money was increased by slashing rates it would use its value against gold and become worthless). Flanders also implies that the damage caused by a small amount of protectionism can be tolerated in order to protect employment during a downturn. It is an interesting point and it is understandable that Obama’s economic stimulus package includes a ‘Buy American’ clause which means that his planned infrastructure projects will use American steel, even if it is more expensive than Chinese steel. I guess the aim of the package is to safeguard American jobs during a downturn, which is fair enough given that American taxpayers wouldn’t be too happy if their taxdollars were used to safeguard Chinese or Spanish jobs. The problem with protectionism is that it can become addictive and in less difficult times it rewards inefficiency and impairs global growth, especially for poor countries. As we saw at the Lyndsey oil refinery attempts to achieve limited protectionism, whether in trade or in jobs, can be overtaken by events. The world’s leaders will need to work hard to ensure that world economy does not collapse in on itself through prejudice and myopia, as it did in 1930.

The Sri Lankan Government’s onslaught against the Tamil Tigers bears so many similarities to Operation Cast Lead and has followed on so quickly from the Israeli action that the almost embarrasingly silent global response has become the ‘elephant in the room’ of world affairs.

Harry’s Place has produced a pretty good a stab at discussing the similarities between the two operations, (heavy firepower, UN buildings damaged, humanitarian crisis, mass civilian casualties etc) and the differences (no mass demonstrations apart from London’s Tamil community, no holocaust metaphors, no destruction of Buddhist property etc). The obvious question is why the difference in reaction to events of such similarity?

It would be easy to leave that question hanging rhetorically, because the answers are uncomfortable and inconvenient, but that’s why the question should be responded to. First of all the Islamist groups that arranged some of the UK demos and setup front groups to support Hamas, use the Palestinian issue to engender a rejection of Western society amongst ordinary Muslims. The suffering of Palestinian civilians becomes a kind of pornography, which is used to promote the Islamist ideal of Jihad against the Jews and Western society more generally. Of course the Islamist view is an extreme one, but it is a truism that Islamic countries, particularly the Gulf States, rarely donate aid or charity to non-Muslim countries; although they are prepared to sink millions on mediocre football clubs and golf courses in the desert. Saudi Arabia has donated £49 billion in aid in the past three decades, making it the world's most generous donor nation per capita, but the cash has all been earmarked for Muslim countries only. Sadly the Salafist approach to charity, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, has become prevalent across the wider Muslim world. I have no data to quote here, and I am speaking general terms based on empirical evidence, but I would suggest that in the UK, Muslim pressure groups and charities are likely to have very strong views about issues in which the West is perceived to have committed wrong in the Islamic World. However, such groups are unlikely to pass comment on issues in which Muslims are not involved. For example few would argue that mainstream Muslim groups hold strong views about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya or Bosnia. Indeed the Muslim Council of Britain again saw fit to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day. Yet do we hear pronouncements about Zimbabwe, North Korea or Sri Lanka from these groups? During the Crusades Saladin famously showed mercy to the Christian inhabitants of Jeruslaem, yet thanks to the spread of the Salfist meme, the Islamic world seems to have lost its culture of humanity and the Islamist view of a global struggle between Islam and the West appears to have entered the consciousness of many moderate Muslims.

There is another meme which helped galvanise the pro-Palestinian demos during Operation Cast Lead and it is a hangover from the Counter Culure movement that arose out of the 1960s. The anti-imperialist narrative of world events is a reflex viewpoint which seeks to be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, it is in short the classic act of token intellectual rebellion. This general narrative holds that the West is to blame for the ills of the world from poverty to war to racism to famine. Until the 1980s the Soviet Union was held as the exemplar of anti-Western ideology; George Galloway has said the collapse of the USSR was one of the saddest days of his life. The Islamist narrative of Western imperialism has in many ways replaced the icon of the USSR and this can be seen explicitly in the alliance between the Socialist Workers Party and the Muslim Council of Britain to form Respect. Similarly the Stop the War Coalition was formed by members of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party and has strong links with the Muslim Association of Britain, which is an Islamist group. Therefore this is the front page of the Stop the War Coalition’s website, indeed it has previously stated that it is only interested in stopping the imperialists wars against Islam in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. The imperialist West waging a war against Islam for oil profits, or at the behest of Zionist lobby groups, is a popular narrative and is perfect for mass consumption and populist agitation. In contrast a conflict between Hindu and Buddhist, brown man against brown man, involves arcane issues and raises abstruse points which do not fall into an easily consumed, all encompassing historical narrative.

I am certainly no expert on the complexities of Sri Lankan politics, but I know that the Tamil Tigers is a murderous terrorist organisation, just like the IRA, Hamas or Beider Mainhoff and I hope it is destroyed as an effective fighting force for the good of future generations. Moreover Sri Lanka is a democracy and I would hope that a democratic solution can be found for the bloody conflict and that the Tamils achieve an appropriate level of political autonomy in such a settlement. However Sri Lanka also has a bad human rights record and its use of heavy firepower has caused heavy civilian casualties; the international community should certainly be doing everything in its power to broker a lasting peace and ensure that human rights are upheld.

I am not a pacifist but I recognise that war is a form of hell on earth, and therefore I respect anyone that speaks out against conflict. However, I find it strange that those who give up a Saturday to march in the cold and call for peace in one conflict, do not do the same for the human victims of another conflict. Perhaps it is time that we took the politics and the prejudices out of our calls for peace for mankind.