>which was in keeping with a prevailing belief of the time, was that any excessive payment might create 'dependency' ...
Now where have I heard that recently
Now where have I heard that recently
It has made many countries refuse to create robust healthcare/education/military (etc.) systems with local resources and instead depend on foreign resources that can be zapped away anytime and are often used to control local leaders to do the donor’s bidding.
Many locals in aid-dependent countries (including mine) say the same thing, yet it seems do-good Westerners want to force people to collect their aid.
All the aid to Haiti, Afghanistan, and many other countries…their only achievement is now needing even more aid.
Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term..
These investments can be provided by foreigners, but it’s ultimately the locals that need to rise up to the occasion and use it well. Unfortunately, Haiti is rooted in endemic corruption, stemming in part from aid dependency.
There’s no point of giving aid to Haiti while maintaining the status quo of the country being a little more than a raw material supplier to richer countries.
My exact complaint is that many countries give aid to feel good…and also for the recipient to do the donor’s bidding instead of what’s right for their countrymen.
Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. If Haitian leaders remain more accountable to foreign donors than their local population, there’s no incentive to improve.
It’s not the responsibility of foreigners to feed other countries’ populations. Those countries have governments made up of adults (often voted in by the masses) who can take decisions for themselves…it’s their fault if their citizens are left to starve, not foreigners.
> Or you mean the Haitian leaders are paid exactly to keep the population half-starving?
It’s not intentional, but that’s what inadvertently happens. There’s little incentive to find unique domestic solutions to long-running issues when foreign saviors are willing to cover for the Haitian government repeatedly.
At some point, we should admit that it’s arrogant for foreigners thinking they’re responsible for another country’s problems and should be the ones solving them, not the locals.
The above reasoning is what caused the U.S. to spend trillions of dollars on wars and so-called nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, all to no avail.
It helped neither the locals nor the U.S., where these wars have contributed to political turbulence with dire consequences.
"do-good"? No, you are confusing legitimate aid with "the first one's free". The fake aid is often designed to create dependency and send large part of the money back to the donors.
So foreign aid may make governments less accountable to their people. But colonial governments don't start off being accountable to their people. The "aid" that the British ruling class said would create dependence can only be understood in the context of the intense extractive practices that were already in place.
> Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term.
... but because Ireland was still exporting food to Britain, "aid" in the form of keeping Irish food to feed Irish people would clearly still have supported local agriculture. Not evicting farmers would have supported local agriculture. This is structurally different from shipping American grain to Afghanistan.
I don’t think it’s fair to apply the modern concept of aid to previous eras of colonialism, wars, and frequent famines. It was a different ballgame I feel I wouldn’t be qualified to comment on except I experienced it first-hand.
2. focusing on the "assistance" without mentioning the circumstances which create the crisis is missing a big part of the picture. In the case of British policy in India, some important components leading up to that famine were:
a. favoring a bunch of non-food cash crops, including opium production for export to China, tea for export to Britain, and materials for industry like jute and cotton. All of this diverted land away from food production which only set up for the famine to be a larger and more deadly crisis.
b. of the food that was produced, as in the Irish context, the British exported a lot of it. And didn't stop exporting it when there was a local famine.
c. in some areas imposing extremely high taxes, and in others switching farmers to owe taxes to be a percentage of land rents rather than as a percentage of their production -- i.e. if your crops failed you became insolvent and were pushed off the land, _preventing you from working_.
"Mukerjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which huge supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion."
On the topic of brahmins, they were the elite, but mostly not the rulers. All castes discriminated against castes lower to them, even within scheduled castes. Blaming just brahmins for all ills of the society is an uninformed position.
Doing what? Starving people to death? Do you have any sources or made it up?
Blaming the British for their misfortunes. You'll find the articles yourself if you read about this subject. They're also fond of claiming that they were deindustrialized by the British, that British industrial development was predicated upon a theft of wealth from India (the figures here range from the bizarre to the impossible), and that the British created the caste system.
The rest is irrelevant for this thread.
You could feasibly make the argument that they exacerbated the Bengal famine. I don't think the scholarship supporting this argument is very good, but you could make the argument. As for the famines that occurred throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, no. There is no compelling reason to think that those famines occurred as a result of British mismanagement; they were the result of natural disasters.
Amartya Sen makes the argument that famines stopped occurring after India was granted independence, which alongside Churchill's general disdain for Indians is one of the more compelling reasons to think the British had anything to do with the 1943 famine, but this also coincides with the introduction of modern farming technologies (mechanization, chemical fertilizers, etc.), which complicates things.
These correlations are hard to parse apart. There wasn't any famine in the USSR in the early 1950s either, but that does not mean that Stalin, compared to the 1930s, suddenly became a humanist leader interested in prosperity of all subjugated people.
And this continues even today. Colonialism is alive and well, and rapaciously exploits the global south every day. Every company that exports jobs overseas because they can pay shit wages is part of it, every government that saddles newly-freed nations with unpayable debt is part of it, every environmental regulation that shoves polluting industry or waste disposal there, where their own voters don't have to look at it, is part of it. And yeah, paying office buildings full of workers barely making starvation wages to remove kiddie porn from Facebook is also part of it. We just traded guns for money, and sure, being exploited to near-death is better if you're getting paid than if you simply earn the right to not be shot, but that's a fucking low bar there.
No they aren't. The case for colonialism is that it improves the country so colonized and benefits the people therein by providing them with wealth and the trappings of civilization. For the most part, actual colonies failed in this ideal by doing more to exploit the people being colonized than to help them. But a company providing jobs to those overseas, even at a shit wage, is definitely providing benefit to those people by giving them a better opportunity than they would otherwise have.
The lesson of the "white man's burden" should be that you, the white man, do not know better than a people themselves what is good for them. Take that lesson.
This is not the truism as implied and saying that is not "white man's burden." Us filling beaches in developing countries with ships slated to be scrapped by people who work with plasma cutters while barefoot is not charity of any sort. Us polluting lands we do not own with waste we cannot dispose of under the environmental laws we ourselves have created in our own country is not "providing" anything, it's exporting misery. We demand our own people "earn" a living and by the same logic, demand thus of nations who do not necessarily agree, but we hold them hostage to it nonetheless.
If you want to uplift developing nations, tear up the agreements that give Western corporations the rights to plunder them, shred the documents of the "debt" they supposedly owe other nations for their own, deserved and far too delayed freedom, and treat their leaders with the respect they deserve and let them determine the destinies of their own countries, FOR ONCE, including and dare I say especially if said destinies are not the preferred ones by global colonial capitalism.
Everyone deserves freedom. No one deserves the freedom to be exploited, and it's long passed time we all started noting the difference. Freedom to be under the boot of capital is not freedom.
Why are "we" responsible for occupational health and safety in India? These shipbreaking yards aren't owned by British interests. Their conditions are reflective of a broader attitude of neglect across the entire subcontinent. "So cut off the supply of ships," you say; the attitude exists even in industries where "we" couldn't possibly change the working conditions (e.g. textile manufacturing) without engaging in what I'm sure you would call neo-imperialism.
Because we reap the rewards of it?
> "So cut off the supply of ships," you say
Yes, I do.
> the attitude exists even in industries where "we" couldn't possibly change the working conditions (e.g. textile manufacturing) without engaging in what I'm sure you would call neo-imperialism.
Imperialism is not as simple as "when you make people elsewhere do a thing." And more to the point, no activist on earth would state that it's Imperialist to say "your workers need PPE." There is no cultural stance on keeping your goddamn fingers. Poor as shit workforces scrapping ships are not forgoing protective gear because they simply enjoy the thrill of making sure their toes don't get hit by falling slag. They're people for Christ-sakes, just like you, trying to earn a living, and they can't afford to quit that job, nor can they afford a pair of boots to do it more safely, and no established organization is in their country making sure they do. Just like we did before we had things like OSHA and child labor laws made cheap business bastards do the right thing here, they deserve the same.
And while we can't make them form an OSHA, what we can do is tell our own corporations they are not permitted to dump ships on foreign soil where people working incredibly unsafely for slave wages will take them apart. That, we very much can and should do.
I have spoken with a Bangladeshi woman who made this exact argument. Granted, her father owned (what she swore wasn't) a sweatshop, so she wasn't impartial. This is also something you see a lot in Brazil. The westerners want to protect the Amazon rainforest, and the locals want to develop it. It's very common for Brazilians to resent this attitude, because westerners are effectively trying to have input on Brazil's economic development, leveraging their status as purchasers of Brazilian exports.
> There is no cultural stance on keeping your goddamn fingers. Poor as shit workforces scrapping ships are not forgoing protective gear because they simply enjoy the thrill of making sure their toes don't get hit by falling slag.
I've watched probably upwards of thirty hours of footage of factories on the Indian subcontinent and have also observed a similar work culture in Latin America. There absolutely is a cultural problem in both regions not taking occupational health and safety seriously, and it's not just a management issue (though this certainly plays a role, and I'd say is probably a factor if we consider the shipbreaking example). If you've ever worked in construction or manufacturing, it isn't rare at all to find employees who will mock each other for wearing PPE or abiding by safety protocols. This has thankfully been changing as the boomers have aged out, but even among young guys it's not particularly rare, and this is in the west. There was never a widespread adoption of workplace safety in the countries we are talking about. There is often a feeling among both management and employees that it isn't affordable, as well as ignorance on the part of the employees who simply view many of these workplace hazards as inevitable. This sounds absurd to you and I because we know that they are not inevitable and that most can be avoided simply by wearing PPE, but that's because we attended shop class and had various government PSAs reminding us of our rights to refuse unsafe work.
Think of something like our approach to trash: Both India and Latin America have significant problems with public littering. Some will protest that this occurs as a result of poverty, because no one can afford to ship their trash out of the city - but this problem was also common in America up until very recently. It took the implementation of fines and a series of public service announcements to change people's behavior.
Let's suppose this extraction had an appreciable impact on the development of Britain: Could you explain why the British are not as wealthy as the Germans or the Swedes, being that the British possessed colonies, and the Germans and Swedes did not? This pattern holds for almost all North European countries, so take care that your explanation does not fixate on the two I have chosen.
Surely there are proofs, then? And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks or "it is known" pseudo-common sense.
Saying that we need to consider opinions on the same level as actual observations because “political” is fundamentally wrong.
What is political, and must be, is how we act on those findings, the answer to the question “considering those facts, what do we do?” There are many possibilities that are worth discussion, from doing away with welfare entirely to UBI. But this must be based on facts, not ideology. Think tank opinion pieces belong here, in the political discussion.
If political bias means we shouldn’t look at scholarship, we should also ignore papers from uniformly left-leaning university academics, correct?
If your point is that no academic study can be trusted because academics are raging socialists, then I don’t know what to tell you. We clearly do not live in the same reality.
In the UK benefits are reduced as earnings rise, you then start paying taxes at an income (as an employee) of just over £1,000 a month (the employee NI threshold is £241/week). You lose 55% from the benefits reduction, then lose with taxes, then you lose various concessions such as lower rates of/exemption from the tax paid to your local government and help with utility bills, you may have to pay travel costs - so for some people working leaves them barely, if at all, any better off.
Would you work under those circumstances?
> Help must be conditioned to effort and have a limit, so recipients have an incentive to improve their conditions under some timeline.
So what do you do when people fail to meet that deadline? Let them starve?
So what is your solution ? To smash the robot, so busy-work can be restored?
It's been proven with children of rich families who become dependent.
It's been proven with poor communities who become dependent.
Most people don't do anything productive if they don't have to, and as this goes on they lose the capacity to do anything productive.
I have to disagree that you won't become dependent on assistance given too freely. Obviously these crises leaned way, way too far in the other direction to avoid it, however.
Scattered points - but during the famine to earn 'wage' of insufficient grain ration, you had to work. This happened in work houses and camps, not necessarily in their homes or home areas. Workhouses existed in most towns where labourers lived, leaving their homes and families or after being evicted. Families were split up, Men, Women and Children did not live together. The workhouses and camps had terrible conditions, and the work was hard enough to have injuries and deaths even ignoring the illnesses that spread and grew worse from conditions. The work was often pointless - famine roads for example, roads to nowhere, so the work effort did nothing to improve the situation.
Those that had been evicted for failing to pay their rent, as they couldn't afford food or had not potato crops to sell, were considered convicts. As they were paid for their labour in food and sometimes lodging, they could not work their way out of situation or pay for healthcare when they got sick or injured. Many immigrated as things worsened year-on-year, on famine ships, but were refused and rejected from docking in multiple countries due to fear of the infectious illnesses they carried and burden they would inflict - and those stuck on ships became more unwell.
There was enough food, in fact a surplus in Ireland - but the "excess" was exported and cheaper questionable alternatives were imported for the soup kitchens and workhouses. Potatoes were such a single point of failure not by coincidence - many lived as tenants on landlords land, on tiny holdings but were expected to produce their own food. Potatoes were the only crop able to do this, or rather the holdings had sized down because Potatoes allowed it.
To me, that all screams of a systems failure and would not have been fixed with simply larger rations. Even ignoring the morality part to how the system was formed, how Ireland was ruled and Landlord system worked - the Potato Famine exposed the problems and limitations of the system with urgent crisis. The system did not adapt, did not act proactively or even react, and did not seem to learn in time to respond to a growing crisis.
One of the learnings surely was how terrible the concept is of worrying about people becoming too dependent on assistance in a crisis - debating the morale hazard and long-term dependency concerns runs the risk for short term death, disease and collapse.
It isn't said in Ireland that the famine was caused by the Potato, or by the meagre rations - It's said it was caused by the British, really the system in place rather than the British race but that doesn't simplify as well.
That is, of course, ridiculous. You get the site back up and stop losing $BIGNUM. Once you've stopped the bleeding, then you can go back and do things the right way.
"We're giving the assistance too freely! Ah, maybe a little more work would be good for them, not me of course, but them, they are the ones not working hard enough, who are dependent, me? no I work hard for my money, that's why I get to decide who lives or dies because they are not working hard enough!"
The far bigger problem is creating entitled masters, not entitled slaves.
The question then is do you agree (certain) people are wild animals.
If so are you too not a wild animal and if not, what makes you special?
A bit of dependence that would need reducing later is a very small price to pay to avoid a million starved.
They deliberately never accepted help from outside for that exact reason. It worked for them.
The above is from a recent speech by Singapore's foreign minister; https://www.mfa.gov.sg/Newsroom/Press-Statements-Transcripts.... I think it's a reason why a handful of Westerners detest Singapore: that it developed without being dependent on them. "How dare they?!"
A fitting example is that Europe is currently learning a lesson about the implications of depending on an external partner (the U.S.) for defense. It means being bullied at will by that country and having no say.