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Archive for the 'history' Category
There is a great post over on Women’s Space/The Margins (which is fast becoming one of my favorite blogs about women’s issues) about Seung-hui Cho’s family. I just posted a somewhat tangential comment over there about US global construction/reconstruction efforts and the patriarchy* and I wanted to repost here:
Thank you for doing this journalism… this post was an eye opening, provocative read for me.
I just wanted to comment that I don’t think “reconstruction” is a good thing. The US government and contractors like McNeil are a loosely connected but carefully aligned operation. They have two strategies:
1) Saddle countries with loans (from the World Bank) for building infrastructure that countries don’t need. Make sure the loans are too big for them to repay. and make sure the contracts specify that they have to use US contractors like McNeil. After all that money gets pumped back into the US economy, and the recipient country inevitably defaults on the loans, force the countries to make political concessions. This is how US companies got drilling rights in Ecuador against the will of the people.
2) Bomb the shit out of them. Send in US contractors and “protect” their “reconstruction” rights with US troops. Build all kinds of infrastructure that they don’t need. Saddle the new government you create with the debt, or just add the tab to the trillions of debt the federal government already holds.
I read most of this in John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The prologue is online, and is a great read. I heartily recommend the whole book, it really changed my perspective.
And I never thought about it this way until now, but maybe it’s really about how the patriarchy works on an international level, where entire countries are being subjugated, instead of gender/sex/ethnic/cultural groups.
* I’m still a little uneasy about the term patriarchy, but for now I defer to the wisdom of the feminist community. They’ve been thinking about/using the term longer than I have.
Kynthia mentioned in her comment on yesterday’s post that masculinism is not the only ism on Mt. Everest. Sexism is rampant in mountaineering. That reminded me of some sketchy language I was noticing the other day on Wikipedia. Look at these quotes from the article on Anatoli Boukreev, a russian climber:
“Scott Fischer and Sherpas began guiding the six remaining clients to the summit”
Sherpas are local mountain guides who are almost always stronger, often smarter, and sometimes better technical* climbers than the western folks they’re leading. Note that not only does the author fail to mention any Sherpa by name by name, they’re not even recognized with an article like “the” or “some”. Just “Sherpas”. As if they’re a bulk commodity. $4.39/lb at Whole Foods.
“Unnecessary delays at the South Summit, caused by fixed ropes not being setup by the climbing Sherpas by the time the team had reached that point, cost the team more than one hour of daylight”
Note also that the Sherpas are not considered part of the team, despite the fact that they are the part of the team doing most of the real work, and the whites are basically tourists. And note that they recieve the first blame for the tragedy. When thing goes wrong, it’s easy to blame the slaves by calling them lazy.
It’s Wikipedia so I should really just change the article, but I don’t know how to go about finding the names of the Sherpas who were on that expeditition. I think writing them into the history would be a wonderful project though. When I’m a high school teacher, my kids are totally going to be doing on that for at least one assignment: re-writing wikipedia articles to de-priviledge the oligarchy and empower the margins.
* climbing is considered more technical if it requires difficult maneuvers. Think rock climbing.