On dag:
OLOers: read these quotes and remember their creator. Dag said: "In fact the real step backwards in living standards in the second Millennium occurred as a result of the Norman conquests. Prior to then, the quality of life in much of England, in terms of life expectancy came pretty close to what we have enjoyed in Western Countries in the 20th century. The Black Deaths did improve the quality of life for the survivors..."[sicX4]

No careful selectivity, context-removal or word-twists there; all pure dag in one unbroken skid mark...

Mad as a cut snake? Thank God, and the people of Brisbane's Mt Coot-tha area, that he failed spectacularly to get anywhere near enough people to back his bid for a parliamentary seat. On behalf of all southerners, my deepest apologies to Queenslanders for the commonly unfair southern habit of disparaging their political tendencies.

---

divergence: "Diamond discusses districts where there were few Tutsis and Hutus killed other Hutus."

Yes, such was Rwanda's politics at the time: many Hutus opposed Habyarimana's Hutu regime; some worked in the Tutsi-dominated rebel forces. But Diamond's case is very inconsistent: not only unclear but self-contradictory. He is a very highly publicized sensationalist, as his chapter's title would suggest, and his inconsistent musings are an historiographical self-indulgence.

For example, consider his overriding Malthusian assertion (as expressed in the chapter's sickening title) that Rwanda's population density is "one of the important factors behind the Rwandan genocide".

Earlier, Diamond compares densely populated western Europe, claiming: "But the United Kingdom and Holland have highly efficient mechanized agriculture...only a few...working as farmers can produce much of the food for everyone else, plus some surplus food for export. Rwandan agriculture is much less efficient and unmechanized; farmers depend on handheld hoes, picks, and machetes; and most people have to remain farmers, producing little or no surplus that could support others."

But be in no doubt that Diamond's chapter is an apologia for genocide. Complicit in such misleading historiography and its Malthusian cop-outs are those international jurists and diplomats

[cont.]
seeking excuses for their own failures to fully investigate and prosecute that massive atrocity and its ongoing paybacks and repetitions in and around the Congo.

There are many ways to impose Malthusian genocide. Mid-19th century Ireland was one particular previous case where imperial rulers deliberately prevented and forbade efforts to relieve the famine-stricken and mostly tenant populace in its homeland. Dutch efforts against Javanese peasants were very similar; in many ways much harsher with their more explicit Apartheid-style discrimination. The Warsaw Ghetto in 1942-3 revealed creation of yet more intensive preconditions for such Malthusian practices: fascist film propaganda of that time expressed the same Malthusian (and Eugenicist) prejudices, stigmatizing the ghetto populace for its poor sanitation, malnutrition, and routine petty "crimes" of survival. On Rwanda's case, and contrary cases of the (more obviously) Malthus-confounding densely populated areas of the UK and Levant, Diamond avoids making the connection between catastrophic political and economic organization on the one hand, and the various effects of such preconditions in that latter-day imperialist barbarism we may term "Malthusian genocide" - a specialization of empire ever since the Reverend promulgated his theories for the British East India Company.

Malthusian dogma has far-reaching, insidious effects. Consider the example of those neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers who exaggerate the death camps' tolls from starvation and disease - as if in defence of Eichmann's transports and the close confines of cantonment for whole populations! Similar Malthusian apologia attended the Armenian Genocide, or the yet earlier British imperial practice against Boer civilians.

Throughout modern Africa the Malthusian template has relied chiefly on onerous debt regimes combined with imperialists' barbaric confinement of local economic opportunity to cash-crops and mineral extraction, both of which still compel an intensive labor effort when denied the developments of infrastructure and automation.

Diamond identifies that last point, but he fails to "join the dots" of historical causality and culpability. Whether Diamond's politically sanitized history is "corrupt" or "intellectually deficient", the result is the same: a perpetuation of the corrupt dogma of one Thomas Malthus, economist of a ruthless, depraved empire.

The UK, the Netherlands, and Japan are not comparable with Rwanda, because they are not and haven't needed to be self-sufficient in food. European countries export high value food products such as wine and cheeses, but most of them import large amounts of corn, soybeans, fishmeal, etc. A lot of those soybean plantations in the Amazon are producing feed for European chickens and dairy cows. Japan is only about 40% self-sufficient in food. If someone put up a wall around any of these countries, people would get very hungry, very fast. So far, they have been able to trade goods and services for food with no problems, but this may not be true in the future as food dries up on the world market, and food exporting countries put restrictions on exports to protect their domestic consumers, as happened last year, when there were food riots in 34 countries. This is why food importing countries have been trying to buy land to feed themselves in Madagascar and elsewhere.

I actually agree with you about diverting grain to biofuels, and the potential for expanded production is scary, but they were only responsible for about 30% of the increase in global grain prices last year (39% for maize, 21% for rice, and 22% for wheat).

http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/testimony/vonbraun20080612.asp

According to the CIA World Factbook, Rwanda currently has a 2.78% population growth rate, implying a population doubling time of less than 25 years. The land holdings per household and calories per capita were already clearly inadequate at the time of the genocide. I suspect you would need to see standing room only before you recognised a problem.

I note that mil-ob has responding to hardly any of the points in my most recent posts including two perfectly simple direct questions.

Instead, he has focused on what he thinks is my weakest point. On top of that he has dragged a stack of red herrings across the trail, including personal attacks.

In regard to living standards in pre-Norman England, they were clearly better, by all measures, than those for hundreds more years until the late 19th century, at least, certainly for labouring classes. How close they came to living standards in prosperous 20th century societies in terms of life expectancy may be subject to dispute, but I did hear on a documentary on ABC Radio National about 10-12 years ago in which it was claimed that they came pretty damned close.

That's a view held by people I know who are knowledgeable about that period of history.

Living standards went down after then, because the Normans uprooted communities and destroyed their ability to control their population numbers. As a consequence populations grew and living standards declined and, I would expect, the environment would have been degraded also.

This demonstrates that the view that history comprises steady improvements is wrong.

Clearly many societies have progressed phenomenally in some senses since we discovered fossil fuels, but that progress appears unlikely to be sustainable after our endowment of fossil fuels is depleted, that is, unless we act with a sense of urgency now to limit our numbers and act in other ways to care for our environment and our finite endowment of fossil fuels, metals, bore water, soil, etc.

Mil-ob wrote, "No careful selectivity, ..."

Rubbish!

This is the second time you have deliberately left out words which acknowledge that the black deaths were a tragedy for its victims. Mil-ob's quote strangely ends just prior to the parenthesised "(if, obviously, not for the victims)"

I think the lesson to be drawn from this is that people would be well advised to read for themselves the words of those whom mil-ob attacks and not just take his word for it, ...(tobecontinued)

From Jared Diamond's *Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed* (2005), Ch.10 'Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide' (with thanks for divergence's reference):

"...Rwanda's economic improvement became halted by drought and accumulating environmental problems (especially deforestation, soil erosion, and soil fertility losses), capped in 1989 by a STEEP DECLINE IN WORLD PRICES FOR RWANDA'S PRINCIPAL EXPORTS of coffee and tea, AUSTERITY MEASURES IMPOSED BY THE WORLD BANK..." (my upper case). Diamond thus refers to Rwanda's cash-crop and World Bank debt vulnerabilities as if just added stressors, or even side-effects, of a Malthusian "over-population" problem.

However, if we sought a flowchart of causality in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, logic would compel us to give early entry, if not primacy, to such entirely artificial and political factors as "austerity measures imposed by the World Bank" and "a steep decline in world prices" for Rwanda's cash crops. Without these oppressive, retarding obstacles, Rwanda's economy and population would not have been vulnerable to the explosive dynamics at work by 1994. In fact, Diamond betrays this fact himself when describing how economic and technological development in densely populated Britain and the Levant prevented any such situation as that seen around the 1994 Rwandan Genocide!

In his chapter on Rwanda, Jared Diamond mentions those matters of cash crop monetarism and World Bank usury just twice, briefly in passing, apparently to either flesh out his discussion or even to just appear learned, if not also to flash some token of "anti-establishment leftism" and "freethinking credibility". But for Diamond to then avoid examining those factors any further, or identifying their causal significance far ahead and above his pet neo-Malthusian "explanation", seems itself to lend his historiography itself a repugnant genocidal quality. Notice how he does not even hint at any reason just why we should not pursue those strategically critical circumstances that render countries like Rwanda so vulnerable, exacerbating as they do intense, and often catastrophic, domestic and foreign pressures.

And Rwanda's place in Jared Diamond's entire book and its summarizing sub-title: "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed"?

[cont.]

Diamond implies that the Rwandan Genocide was due either to: Rwandan society's "choice" of population density, or; the developed world's "choice" to not enforce limits on Rwanda's population. It's as if Diamond conjures some neoliberalist, free-trade supermarket, with Rwanda out shopping one day: "Now, should we choose the high population density and Malthusian disaster, or opt instead for western European high-tech civilization. But first we just HAVE to get that monetarist cash-crop dependency and seasonal employment slavery, World Bank debts and IMF accountancy!"

Jared Diamond writes sleazy, dishonest history.

[daggett: if it's any consolation, I've focused on Diamond instead because he seems more influentially dangerous than yourself]

[Fester: "You might note that Ethiopia has a per capita debt of about $50...less than one percent of the per capita debt in Australia."

Note that I referred specifically to World Bank-centred debt regimes in Africa, not to the other largely western-based derivatives casino that has overtaken the global economy since let loose post-87. You might find Australia's debt is actually much larger than that when considering its $14 Trillion+ derivatives exposure. Ethiopia would not be in the ball park there, but there is hardly any comparable functions between the two countries' respective debt liabilities. Of course, the two types of "debt regime" have related money trails and interests, but the dynamics have been essentially different in Africa's under-developed condition.

Nonetheless, interesting to consider how the western-based debt flood will inundate hitherto advanced societies in ways that Africa became all too accustomed.

Btw, Mugabe's Zimbabwe underwent embargoes. The background for such bullying against Zimbabwe was:

1) Tony Blair's removal, in the late-1990s, of financial aid (negotiated post-independence war) to compensate for the colonial structures of a largely European-owned agriculture sector. Thereafter, ZANU-PF had no domestic (or economic) justification to fend off veterans' persistent calls for the sector's nationalization.

2. Mugabe and ZANU-PF continued to reject most of the usurious "credit cards" on offer as "development" loans.

But they took his British Empire knighthood off him! As if Mugabe was really cut up about that!]