Website review: The hidden holocaust -- our civiliz...
laodan discovered this in Environment
•2 reviews since Jan 7, 2008
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•onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2803...
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laodan discovered 4 months ago- The hidden holocaust -- our civilizational crisis via The Oil Drum, in Online Journal by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development
This global system is hugely destructive of human life. Devoid of the capability to recognize and enact ethical values, it is driven purely by the imperatives of profit, efficiency, growth, and monopoly. Consequently, it is not only destructive of human life; it is destructive of all life, nature, and even itself. It is now generating multiple crises across the world that over the next 20 years threaten to converge in an unprecedented and unimaginable way, unless we take drastic action now. part 1: The holocaust in history part 2: Exporting democracy part 3: The end of the world as we know it? part 4: A whole new vision of life itself An excellent presentation about modernity and its side-effects. For Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed the " origins of modern civilization can be found partly in the pivotal voyages for European colonial expansion and trade from the 15th century to the 19th centuries." Two comments impose themselves at this level: - first modernity is not a civilization it is one particular stage of societal and economic development along the evolutionary road of humanity. Modernity did not supplant the Indian and the Chinese civilizations; those civilizations are internalizing modernity. - secondly the origins of modernity do not lay in the "voyages for European colonial expansion and trade from the 15th century to the 19th centuries". Those voyages came as a consequence of the groundwork laid earlier at the origins of modernity. The groundwork laid at the origins of modernity was made possible with the convergence of two factors: 1. a population increase, in Western Europe at the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries, led to higher consumer demand than what the feudal manors could produce and to secure their survival many were left with the only alternative to flee their manor and try to survive at their margins. This rapidly evolved into communities that grew in the early European cities. Those communities survived through agriculture and trade. 2. the crusades undertaken at the initiative of Pope Urban II, who enrolled the Squires and Lords under the guise of sin forgiving certificates (indulgences), were the occasion for the European aristocracy to discover the ingeniousness of Arab crafts, the richness generated by their commercial endeavors, and the high level of knowledge bestowed on their people in their universities. This encounter, of primitive Europeans with far more advanced Arabs, resulted in the plunder by the Europeans of the accumulated Arab richness (their gold, silver and crafts as well as their imported silks and other from the far East). Over the next decades those plundered goods find their way to the European regional market fairs that resulted from what is described in point 1. Long distance trade could not possibly have been made possible without the borrowing of financial and exchange techniques from the Arabs, most important among them the bill of exchange and the tools to enact a double entry accountancy system. The discipline and strictness imposed by the use of those instruments of commercial exchanges upon merchants, bankers and the others involved in long distance trade gradually fostered a more rational vision of the world that was dictated to them by the logic of their invested capital. The logic of capital is the blood of modernity. It is what dictated its whole history.
- The hidden holocaust -- our civilizational crisis via The Oil Drum, in Online Journal by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development
- dysviz rated 4 months ago
- scarystuff indeed, and i am not surprised. Slowly it is becoming apparent from all sides that the problem is accelerating, forunately there are technological solutions, but we cannot continue with the status quo, globalised capitalism of the neocon, protofascist kind we had for so long. I have always felt that the present system never was compatible with any concern about our ecosystem. and it's long overdue to a fundamental shift, what do you think jesus would have done??
