Saturday 2 September 2017

The Burma Road

How badly are the Rohingya being treated? Well, they are fleeing into Bangladesh. Think on that.

No self-styled jihadi of the self-proclaimed "Islamic State", not a single one of them, has gone to Burma to defend the most persecuted Muslims in the world today. Think on that, too.

Now that we are permitted to know about the floods in South Asia as well as about the ones in Texas, consider that "Mumbai" is not a rendering into Marathi of the Portuguese-rooted "Bombay".

"Bombaim", meaning "Good Bay", is still the Portuguese name for this part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry. But "Mumbai" is a contraction of "Mumbadevi", the goddess of the fisherfolk who are the oldest inhabitants of what is now that alpha world city.

The Hindu nationalist change of its name is thus far more profound than might at first appear to an English-speaker.

As to the floods themselves, the problem has been ideologically rotted infrastructure in America (which used to be among the world leaders in such matters), and simply absent infrastructure in Asia while the money goes on nuclear weapons and on space programmes instead. The language of priorities, and all that.

We need an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

Climate change is supposed to be anthropogenic. The human race makes the weather. The burning of carbon is the foundation of the working class, the foundation of the Left, the foundation of human progress (problematic though that term is), the foundation of civilisation.

We need a celebration of the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

The problem with the world is not that it has people in it. Which people, exactly? We all know the answer to that. Rather, people produce wealth, material and otherwise. People are wealth, material and otherwise. People are therefore entitled to an equitable share of wealth, material and otherwise.

1 comment:

  1. It is an absolute scandal that you are not in Parliament.

    ReplyDelete