the problem with sedentarization

People should know better. This may as well be the theme of this blog. It may be that more often than not, genocides are perpetrated by "people who should know better."

Today's featured man-who-should know-better is Nick Kristof, whose own father escaped Romania in a time of not-so-humanitarian tendencies.

Kristof had an article in the Times supporting what appears to be yet another genocidal green relocation and sedentarization policy, done going by the old standby, "slash and burn is bad, anybody growing food using a practice that resembles it must be forced to change."

Almost never is a distinction made in these pop media accounts of "deforestation" or "slash and burn" cases between lands where: 1. homeless peasants just trying to survive are pushed to the frontiers of agriculture land because there are agribusiness monopolies on all other land; 2. Illegal loggers or other commercial interests are clearcutting these forests mercilessly for profit; 3. State or private oil (or "hydrocarbon") companies or mining interests or development projects have cleared the land; or finally 4. Indigenous people are simply farming in their traditional manner, not selling the forest, and they are not encroaching, they are the ones who have been encroached on. Overpopulation? There are how many indigenous in all of the Amazon? No, these people are just inconvenient. They are in the way of someone's "interests."

If the indigenous happen to be in a spot where any of the other cases is in effect, they will be the ones blamed for the actions of the commodity-hungry opportunists, they will be targeted for assimilation and population control measures, they will be quarantined in some ghetto of a reservation until they can pick up some of the dominant language and customs of the local commercial culture, then they'll be fit to enjoy the fruits of global industrial capitalism. And all the land they used to live on will be off limits to them, perhaps turned into a national park, or an area they can visit with the eco-tourists for an "authentic" indigenous experience. Most likely it will have been surveyed by an extractive industry after the indigenous were pacified, and by the time the indigenous have learned the dominant language it will have been legally taken from them. They or their children will only much later, after they learn to read, be able to read about precisely how their land was stolen from them "fair and square," even when they were supposed to be protected by certain international laws their government was signatory to. They'll want their land back, but most likely it will be poisoned by the extractive activity or locked up in a legal status which excludes them forever.

Kristof enthusiastically buys into the willful breaking of this particular group people, and he also contributes to the same sort of treatment of other groups when he promotes fundamentalist assimilationist missionaries as being selfless humanitarians even with their harmless "ulteriors." Almost none of these "humanitarians" are doing a single thing to help preserve the traditional territories of these indigenous groups. They are actively pacifying and coercively assimilating them, with the encouragement of the national governments. Economic hitmen one and all. Someone should look into the original economic hitman himself, John Perkins, to see if his projects with the Shuar or Achuar check out. If he's not working to protect their whole traditional territory he's no friend of the indigenous.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/opinion/01kristof.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Now the term genocide does tend to be thrown around quite a bit, but if one goes by the article 4 Geneva definition, any sort of forced sterilization or assimilation or language change or other form of systematic elimination of a distinct people qualifies. There is literally genocide happening in most nations on earth. This is no overstatement.

An example of what is not genocide is the Hillary Clinton statement from her May 08 globalization campaign talk wherein she says, "First they came for the auto manufacturers, and I didn't speak up. Then they came for the high-tech companies, and I didn't speak up...." so on. Loss of your manufacturing jobs is not genocide. That's just the neoliberal capitalism you are the beneficiary of. Genocide and its attendant language has become a cliche, and will soon lose all meaning. After Rwanda, then Darfur, "never again" is obviously not having its intended effect. As a matter of fact, we are all willing and conscious sponsors of many genocides right now, we just prefer not to think about it.