Creating Surplus Populations
In the 1980s and 1990s, the world has seen one refugee crisis after another - Rwanda, palestine, Somalia, South Africa, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and many other places. Western news media generally portray these human tragedies as the result of intractable ethnic or religious warfare, incompetent post-colonial governments, or natural disasters. What's almost never mentioned is the role of Western armed forces and corporations. This book lays the blame for the creation of surplus populations squarely at the feet of the military and development policies of Western nations, much of the damage being done by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and weapons manufacturers. Along with GATT and NAFTA, these international agencies act as the apparatus of neo-colonialism. Traditional cultures have dealt for centuries with the problems of food scarcity, population, ethnic strife, and natural disaster in ways that did not lead to massive refugee camps that we now see. This is a courageous and important book which refutes the self-serving over-population myths coming from the UN Population Conference or Western governments. The new challenge for human rights activists progressives is to guarantee to indigenous peoples the same rights that modernized societies claim for themselves.
