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Showing posts with the label under-development

Paradises of the Earth (2) – a Documentary

Part 2 follows an international solidarity caravan to the second stop of the trip:  the polluted and marginalised town of Redeyef  in Tunisia's phosphate mining basin.  Back in 2008, it was the site of the longest popular uprising in Tunisia's modern history, violently repressed by Ben Ali's regime. Watch Episode 2 of Web Documentary Series "Paradises of the Earth" - Tunisia
"At the start of the 18th century, India’s share of the global economy was 23 percent – the size of all of Europe combined. By the end of nearly 200 years of British rule, first under the proto-multinational corporation East India Company and then, after 1858, direct governance by the British crown, India’s share had dropped to just over 3 per cent, following the deliberate destruction of thriving local industries by the British. Perhaps most shocking is the section detailing the 30-35 million Indians who needlessly died in the series of famines under the British Raj, the most recent of which was the 1943-4 Bengal Famine. Tharoor calls these ‘British colonial holocausts’, comparing them to the 25 million people who perished in Stalin’s collectivisation drive and political purges." Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

Colonialism and Imperialism

We should flatly refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn us. Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories. For centuries the foreign capitalists have behaved in the under-developed world like nothing more than criminals.”  —Frantz Fanon “Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of the locality to the outsider; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored. Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through imagination.”  —Edward Said War on Want