Regarding the Stupid White Men

Dear Mr. Gill

This is an informative, balanced and entertaining piece - really fun to read; I admit the title of book puts me off. How the election was handled, decided is a lesson for the entire world - even if the game was not played by the rules, there was enough circumspection for the consequences of a prolonged fight over exactly who won - that Gore relented.

This is typical ``FOLLOWER`` thinking. To shoot something down simply because ``society`` deems it ``racist`` (as if anything `racist` is inherently WRONG. NOT necessarily).

``The white men may have visited the most gruesome misdeeds on the human beings.``

Howinnahell did u get the courage to use the word ``MAY.`` Defend that word!

``but they don`t hold the monopoly on such things exclusively``

A sophomoric debating technique. Ur holding Moores statement to a DIFFERENT forum then he intended. He was NOT trying to say they have a monopoly.

``Who gave us the computers? White man.``

MAYBE this is because THEY had built the institutions needed to make these discoveries. HOW again were these institutions built? Through America`s wealth and research which is directly related to its foriegn dominance, slavery, genocide etc.

``Who developed the intellectual curiosity about physical sciences? White man.``

L.O.L!!

PS: I doubt anyone will touch this, but if u do, PLEASE do not make unnecessary assumptions. This doesnt mean that i think white people are ``evil`` or whatever. Im simply contesting the MISinformation written here. And MOORE IZ GOD-LIKE.

drumz #2

….oh man, are you going to have a ball with this:)...

Gill Sahib,

Thanks for the breath of fresh air; never thought I`d see a review on Moore on Chowk, but it serves me right for underestimating this pearl of a website.

Roger and Me was unbelievably funny; Moore and his cohorts have been known for dead on satire; not so endearing to those in the political class. Any thoughts on Joan Didion`s Political Fictions?

AIDS

AIDS is the most potent mystery of the 21st Century. There is no vaccine or cure. No-one knows for sure where it came from. No-one can adequately explain why it is devastating Africa and other Third World populations, but has not spread in the West.

There are many unanswered questions surrounding AIDS, and while it is known that the HIV virus definitely causes AIDS, its origin and mode of transmission still remain in dispute. While the scientific community believes HIV may have jumped species by ``a hungry African eating or having sex with a chimpanzee``, this origin scenario must seriously be questioned in light of recent discoveries. The explanation that the recent rapid spread of AIDS in Africa is by sexual transmission alone, must also be scrutinized as the disease fails to take hold in the Western World.

1. ``Depopulation should be the highest priority of US foreign policy towards the Third World``.

2. ``Reduction of the rate of population in these states is a matter of vital US national security``.

3. ``The US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries. That fact gives the US enhanced interests in the political, economic and social stability of the supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resources, supplies and the economic interest of the United States``.

The National Security Council. NSSM 200 - ``Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security & Overseas Interests``, Washington DC, the White House, December 10, 1974. Declassified July 3, 1989.

Henry Kissinger wrote the above report in 1974, ten years before the announcement of the discovery of the HIV virus.

The scientific community state that HIV entered the human population of Africa for the first time around 1975, just months after this top-secret agenda. Tests on blood and tissue samples collected in Central Africa from 1964 - 1975 showed no evidence of HIV infection. ``Something dramatic happened in 1975``, said leading AIDS scientist Dr. Jay Levy.

At the start of the Cold War, both America and Russia eagerly pursued many avenues of biological weaponization. The Russian scientists concentrated their efforts on bacteria-based weaponry designed for use in a large-scale military war, including anthrax and plague. However, Russian spies discovered that the American program was far more advanced, and was specifically geared towards genetic engineering, cancer and viruses - a continuation of the Nazis` research. Recent disclosures by the Simon Wiesenthal Center show that the CIA gave Japanese war criminals immunity in return for medical research from the horrific experiment camp ``Unit 731``, whose victims numbered ten times those of the Nazi scientists, including American and British POW`s.

As a consequence in 1976, eight years before the discovery of the HIV virus, the Russians called for a ban on ``exotic`` arms - an expansion of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. According to Pentagon think-tank participants Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their book ``War and Anti-War``:

``The Russians warned of the hideous possibility of race-specific weapons genetically engineered to single out and decimate only the members of selected ethnic groups - the ultimate genocidal weapon for race war``.

Within the scientific community debate still rages about the origin of HIV/AIDS. Many claim it crossed from chimpanzees that carry a similar retrovirus now known as SIV. The crossover, it is claimed by the West, occurred when ``a hungry African ate a chimpanzee``. Not surprisingly Africans find this deduction to be startlingly racist and inaccurate as chimpanzee meat has been popular in the African diet since the beginning of the human race.

If a policeman were to be looking at the occurrence of AIDS as a potential crime or an unsolved mystery, he might begin by asking who gains from the consequences of the disease - i.e. the motive. Since the announcement of the discovery of the HIV virus on April 23 1984 the predicted spread of the disease in the West has not occurred. However, Africa now sees infection rates running as high as 40 percent in some regions, while many countries have a 25 percent infection rate. According to recent United Nations` AIDS in Africa reports ``The probability that you die from AIDS when you are 15 today is over fifty percent``.

If American teenagers were affected to this degree, parents would be running around in the streets screaming for help.

Head of UNAIDS Peter Piot says ``Entire generations are being taken out. We are going into societies were there are more people in their 60`s and 70`s than in their 40`s and 30`s. This is unheard of.`` Although sexual activity and sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea are no greater or lesser than in other parts of the world, sexual transmission is blamed for the massively disproportionate spread of AIDS. And yet if initial infections occurred ten or more years previously, as is common with HIV/AIDS, these teens and children would have been too young to be involved in sexual behavior. Ignorance is also cited as a major factor, and yet the worst hit nations such as Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa have the highest literacy rates - more than 90 percent. The only common factor amongst these age-groups is inoculation, which is widespread and implemented to most babies and children until their teens.

The population of Africa is irreversibly declining, which is causing massive economic and social instability. Agricultural production is slowing as thousands die every week, which will have a devastating effect on the continents poorest countries.

Strangely, fears of this disease negatively affecting the West do not seem to be very high. Indeed, Western governments are even working to prevent African nations from manufacturing their own protease inhibitor AIDS drugs. While these drugs are by no means a cure, they do offer sufferers an extension of life, while a cure is sought. This kind of Government level interference goes beyond concerns about trade and economics, and speaks of the deep rooted racism of the white Western World. Indeed, the icon and spiritual leader of this culture Pope John Paul II, has traveled extensively throughout Third World countries since the discovery of AIDS with the messianic fervor of a true Christian missionary. His purpose is to prevent the native people of the world from using rubber condoms, which he claims are ``evil`` as they are a form of birth control. And yet, condoms are the only known protection against AIDS.

In fact, the Roman Catholic Church is already deeply implicated in the spread of AIDS since 1975. The scientific community accepts that the initial Big Bang spread of HIV in Africa was caused by the re-use of unsterilized needles during inoculations in missionary hospitals. While sexual transmission amplified the rate of infection, it was not the major factor that caused the initial explosion of infections. The widespread re-use of ``dirty needles`` in the Congo/Zaire by Catholic missionary hospitals was vehemently opposed by American CDC scientists who urgently warned against the spread of disease. At Christmas 1976 virus specialist Dr. Peter Piot personally visited the headquarters of the Catholic ``Sisters of the Holy Heart of Maria`` in Antwerp, Belgium and warned the Mother Superior that her hospitals should either be closed or staffed by certified physicians.

This advice was clearly ignored as the Big Bang of primary HIV infections in fact did occur and continue unchecked until the discovery of the HIV virus eight years later in 1984. The first isolates of HIV were pin-pointed to have emerged simultaneously at the Belgium Catholic missionary hospital of Yambuku, Zaire, and at the Italian Catholic missionary hospital of N`zara, Sudan, which is over 700 miles away. According to CDC ``virus hunter`` Dr. Joe McCormick, HIV levels in blood taken from these locations in 1976 was at 0.7 percent (5 of 659 samples). Indeed, these virus samples are considered the prototype strain of the many subsequent mutations. By the early 1980`s HIV levels were around 4 percent, having been spread mainly by the re-use of unsterilized needles.

However, there is no explanation for today`s Big Bang-like spread of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa, as a sterilized needle policy has been in place since the harsh lessons of the 80`s. In fact, prior to the end of the apartheid regime cases of AIDS in South Africa were one of the lowest on the continent, yet now it is the highest. In 1990 HIV infection was at 0.76 percent, and mainly restricted to gay, white males. Within a year of the 1994 ``end of apartheid`` elections, the rate was up to 10 percent, predominantly amongst black hetrosexuals. This rate of infection is unprecedented, surpassing even the original Big Bang of the late 70`s.

Now heading the United Nations AIDS unit, Dr. Peter Piot is unable to sufficiently explain this new and more widespread epidemic. Dr. Piot admits that sexual transmission alone does not explain this disaster. ``People just do not have that much sex. We have to admit we do not understand it completely`` said Piot, who has battled AIDS in Africa since its discovery. As ``Truth & Reconciliation`` hearings and the trial of Wouter ``Dr. Death`` Basson reveal the terrifying extent of the biological weapons program aimed at the black population, including ``freeze-dried HIV infected blood for use against enemies``, perhaps this new AIDS epidemic would be seen as a blessing by the white supremacists who controlled South Africa through their murderous military regime.

Most African countries still find themselves struggling for true independence against the white colonial powers that once controlled them overtly, and now control them covertly through the World Trade Organization (WTO), transnational corporations, and the enormous dept owed to the World Bank. The independence that was granted most African nations in 1960 completely undermined the vice-like grip of the European aristocratic powers who had controlled all of Africa`s natural resources through their various companies. Minerals, rubber, wood, crude oil, tin, copper, diamonds, gold, etc. are riches not to be given up lightly. It may be no coincidence that the former colonialists` interests are no greater than in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, precisely the countries hardest hit by the recent rapid and unusual spread of AIDS.

A more disturbing fact is that the vast mountain range covering most of South Africa is named after the Imperial and Royal Dragon Court sovereignty - the Drakensberg Mountains.

Many Africans believe that AIDS is a Western-backed conspiracy. ``It`s important we don`t just dismiss these theories as rantings in Africa, because many of the problems they point out have valid roots``, said Lisa Jacobs, spokeswoman for UNAIDS, headquartered in Geneva. Zimbabwe`s minister of Health, Timothy Stamps, who is white, said in a BBC interview last year that there was ``no doubt in my mind that South African apartheid agents had inoculated our population with diseases such as anthrax, Ebola, and even bubonic plague in the 1970`s during Zimbabwe`s liberation war``.

According to recent disclosures by Britain`s The Guardian newspaper American anthropologist Prof. James Neel, on behalf of nuclear & biological weapons designers, intentionally introduced by inoculation a virulent strain of measles into the Yanomami Indians of Venezuela in the mid-60`s. His team then monitored the spread of the disease, which killed thousands, and refused to give medical assistance to the sick and dying. Cornell University`s Professor Terry Turner believes that Neel ``was trying to test controversial eugenic theories like the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele``.

The 1960`s also saw the Knights of Malta-controlled CIA reaching its most heady heights of power within the American Government system. This was when the CIA began creating propaganda about overpopulation in developing countries, particularly Africa and its possible consequences for Western economic stability and comfort.

In the light of these facts a solution to all of the unanswered questions in the mysterious case of AIDS would become obvious to our fictional policeman.

The European power elite find themselves losing control of their most important assets. Through their Rosicrucian secret society connections, Freemasonry and the Knights of Malta, they find their strongest allies in the American CIA, a secretive body who is still largely unaccountable to the democratic American Congress.

During World War II Nazi physician Dr. Josef Mengele studied the effects of viruses and bacteria on thousands of Auschwitz imprisoned twins to analyse the relationship between disease and racial type. Indeed, being a highly regarded anthropologist, it is known that Mengele spent a period of time in Africa collecting blood and exotic viral samples. Like his mentor and collaborator Dr. Otmar Verschuer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Mengele was obsessed with finding racial differences in human blood. As well as attempting to prove the biological basis of eugenics theories, Mengele`s Auschwitz research was done on behalf of the Nazi hierarchy to serve their bizarre occult beliefs. Pseudo-scientific studies included searching for anti-ageing properties in the blood of virgins, before and after coitus. These studies have been documented in letters to Hitler`s leading occultist and SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

Mengele`s commercial backers were not only the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity, but also German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, as highlighted by a recent lawsuit against Bayer by surviving victims. Revealing the ``business as usual`` mentality of the war years, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and Bayer Phamacuticals were owned by the J.D. Rockefeller/I.G. Farben oil/petro-chemical corporate alliance. Hence modern pharmaceutical companies are directly involved in the development of biological weaponry from its earliest stages, and have subsequently benefited from the appalling research carried out in the Death Camps. Bayer`s massive profiting from the use of its patented drug Cipro during the American anthrax attacks is a recent example of this. After escaping to South America Mengele supposedly drowned in Brazil in 1985, and his terrifying medical research has officially never been found.

According to Russia`s ex-deputy head of biological weapons Ken Alibek, now working for the US military, during the 1950`s US pharmaceutical company Merck and Co. ``was incubating lethal viruses on the lung tissue of human fetuses, while their Russian counterparts were clumsily using chicken eggs``. At the end of the war Bayer Phamaceuticals was temporarily seized by the Allies, and many Nazi scientists were recruited to work for Merck & Co. to advance America`s biological weapons capability. As a result of this recruitment, the US military and the CIA had the lead on the Russians, and ``viral cancer`` was always a major objective, as declassified documents have shown.

In 1969 the US military asked for 10 million dollars from Congress to further its cancer studies by developing:

``A new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organism. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease``.

Quoted from the Dept. of Defense Appropriations Hearings, 91st Congress, July 1, 1969, Washington DC regarding the Special Virus Cancer Program (SVCP).

The HIV virus, a mutation of the monkey leukemia virus SIV, could not be a better fulfillment of this brief. Following DNA tests, leading AIDS scientist Dr. David Ho placed the common genetic ancestor of the modern AIDS viruses somewhere around ``the 1940`s or early 50`s`` - the exact time that Mengele and his Nazi backers, then the CIA and its numerous military contractors were conducting their revolutionary genetic engineering research. The recent discovery of the Special Virus Flow Chart by AIDS investigators Dr. Len Horowitz and Dr. Boyd Graves supports the growing belief amongst the medical community that HIV is a man-made lab creation. Not surprisingly, Israeli scientists led by Dr. Alexander Kalinkovich at the International AIDS Conference 2000 in South Africa announced that their latest research shows that HIV may be race-specific to black Africans.

It is accepted that HIV/AIDS was initially spread in Africa by Roman Catholic missionary hospitals and their re-use of ``dirty needles``. These hospitals regularly get donations of medical supplies/vaccines directly from the Roman Catholic order of the Knights of Malta, via its members within the pharmaceutical industry. Since the 1970`s Knights of Malta-supported aid organizations such as AmeriCares or Knightsbridge International have provided medical supplies to needy countries including South Africa, Haiti, and Cambodia - countries which are now hardest hit by HIV/AIDS.

When historians/journalists Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln were investigating their book ``The Messianic Legacy`` about the political links between secret societies, the Vatican and intelligence agencies, they based much of their study upon the Catholic secret society ``The Priory of Sion``. From 1963 to 1981 the Grand Master of Sion was a Catholic abbot, Francois Ducand-Bourget, who prior to this appointment was the Magistral Chaplain of the Knights of Malta. Michael Baigent`s contact within Sion was its new Grand Master Pierre Plantard de St. Clair, of the Sinclair ``Grail family`` of Roslin, Edinburgh, which coincidentally is the global center of genetic engineering. Starting in 1982 Plantard indicated that 1984 was to be a critical year in the plans of Sion. In 1984 he said ``everything was in place, nothing could stop it now, the time had come to move on, and nothing could now stop it``. When asked was the present Pope a potential ally or adversary in whatever schemes were afoot, Plantard replied ``a rapprochement had been reached with the Vatican. Rome would cooperate. Certain concessions had been necessary in return, but they were essentially nominal``.

Nothing unusual occurred in 1984, apart from in April when the discovery of the HIV virus that causes AIDS was announced to the world.

Also at this time Plantard de St. Clair suddenly announced his resignation from Sion, not only as its Grand Master but from the order itself, after 41 years a member. He did so because he could not approve ``certain maneuvers`` performed by his ``English and American brethren``. The Priory of Sion is a secret order of the European Holy Grail bloodline families, and authors of the infamous ``Protocol of the Elders of Sion`` that was directly responsible for inciting anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Its members include prominent figures of the Knights of Malta, and neo-Nazi organizations with links to South Africa`s apartheid regime. Africa is of prime importantance to Sion`s members - a 1959 article written by Plantard de St. Clair in Sion`s internally circulated publication ``Circuit``, stresses the need for a solution to the African independence movement, and proposes a ``United States of Euro-Africa... this being the sole stable foundation on which peace can be constructed``. Obviously his elite brethren didn`t agree, as recent documentation proves Knight of Malta/CIA chief Allen Dulles ordered the assassination of the Congo`s first democratically elected President. The Anglo-American contingent, the Knights Templar/Dragon Court and the Knights of Malta/CIA within the Order of Sion, swiftly deposed Plantard de St. Clair when they found out about his loose-tongued meetings with journalists Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln at such a crucial time in their covert endeavors.

Taking into account all these facts, our fictional policeman might ask himself what the motive for such devilry could be. He would soon discover it was the same motive that the ``Secret Church`` and the orthodox Roman Catholic Church have always pursued.

According to the white supremacist dogma of the Rosicrucian ``Secret Church``, the ``Negro and other sub-races`` must die and be reincarnated to allow for the evolution of Man`s consciousness.

Rosicrucian beliefs date back to ancient Egypt, and ironically its influence can be seen in the recent proclamation by Israel`s ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who said ``the Holocaust victims were reincarnations of the souls of sinners... they had to be reincarnated in order to atone``.

Initiated Rosicrucian Adolf Hitler said ``The greatest and most ruthless decisions will have to be made. A barbaric measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it, but a blessing for his fellow man and posterity, the passing pain of a century can and will clearly redeem millenniums from sufferings``. Though talking about the Jewish Holocaust, Hitler could well have been speaking of the African AIDS Holocaust. During the late 70`s and early 80`s the Vatican announced various warnings attributed to the ``Virgin Mary`` from a variety of sources. She constantly repeated that a ``Great Warning would come from God that would be good for some, and bad for others``. Perhaps the Virgin Mary and Adolf Hitler had the same speechwriters, so similar is their outlook. For how could the suffering endured by anybody be good for others?

Like the deceptive use of the ``Protocol of the Elders of Sion`` that Hitler used to ``prove`` a fictitious ``Jewish conspiracy``, the majority of the scientific community, while ignoring their own obvious culpability, is similarly blaming the victims of AIDS in Africa for having created the disease through their irresponsible behavior i.e. ``eating or having sex with a monkey``. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf ``If you tell a lie long enough, eventually it will be believed as truth... and the greater the lie, the more people will believe it``.

As regards the orthodox Roman Catholic Church, it is merely continuing its policy of genocide against Shamanism and the indigenous peoples of the world, as the history of Christianity & Racism clearly demonstrates.

Ultimately, the AIDS epidemic in Africa and throughout the developing world prevents these nations from achieving economic stability. This would have given them the power to control their own natural resources, and ultimately have affected the wealth and power of the Western corporate-aristocratic-military-industrial complex.

The Pentagon`s retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Colonel Jack Kingston, currently Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board in Washington DC intends to take the AIDS issue before a Congressional Hearing.

He recently said ``In my estimation, AIDS is a covert operation run amok that is bigger than any secret operation in U.S. history. It is more momentous in its implications to humanity than the atomic weapons Manhattan Project of World War II``.

Any experienced detective will tell you, a killer always leaves a trail of incriminating evidence, and Man`s history is not so dissimilar. In the context of everyday life, the sordid thoughts and actions of a murderer are difficult to grasp and seem unbelievable. As individuals we are unlikely to consider the causes and effects of such malevolence, unless through fate it touches our own lives. Similarly, the demonic manifestations of History are rarely faced until it becomes unavoidable. While the suggestions of a calculated genocide seem fantastic, a brief glance at perhaps the worst century in Man`s history shows this crime to be only another murderous act by the same historical predators.

It is perhaps, if we have the courage to look it squarely in the face, only equal to the unbelievable facts of recent European slaughter - the shipment of men, women and children in railway carriages, to over five hundred purpose-built camps, where they were put into shower rooms, and gassed with Zyklon B. Their bodies were placed into purpose-built ovens where the evidence of their existence was destroyed - why? Because they were Jews. If somebody had knocked upon your door pointing to the train and telling you this bizarre story, it would it have been easier to believe they were lying, than to try and stop the train.

The only hope is the fact that our fictional policeman can use the law of a democratic and free country, and stand before elected political representatives in the ancient struggle against feudalism and evil.

They may find that like a puzzling murder mystery, several hands were clutching the dagger.

Of China, the Frenchman Francois Quesnay wrote in 1767: ``No-one can deny that this state is the most beautiful in the world, the most densely populated, and the most flourishing kingdom known.`` Scientific discoveries in China reached a remarkable level.

When Portugal first established itself as a colonial power in what is now famine-stricken Mozambique, the local Arab-African city states there, with their ``fine stone houses and the air of elegance in the local courts and markets`` were ``a world comparable, if not superior, in material culture to Portugal`` (James Duffy). In Zimbabwe, when the 19th century white colonists found the ruined buildings after which the country is now named, they assumed that they must have been built by previous white invaders. They could not believe that black Africans were capable of such achievements.

In Ethiopia, in the Middle Ages - so Walter Rodney, a black Marxist historian murdered in 1980 as he tried to build a working class party in his native Guyana, wrote - ``The kings distinguished themselves by building several churches cut out of solid rock. The architectural achievements attest to the level of skill reached by Ethiopians as well as the capacity of the state to mobilise labour on a huge scale. Fine illuminated books and manuscripts became a prominent element of Amharic culture. Equally fine garments and jewellery were produced for the ruling class and for the church...``

The European powers had certain advantages over the peoples of Africa and Asia - a more dynamic economic system, more centralised state power, and better military technology. But overall there was no great superiority. The economics of colonialism are responsible for today`s economic gap between the average living standards in Britain and in India. At independence in 1947, the conditions of the Indian peasantry were roughly the same as they had been 200 years earlier. The colonial era which had enriched thousands of British investors and administrators had left the Indian peasants stuck in absolute poverty.

Underdevelopment is not due to lack of talent or energy by the people of the country. Like modern industrial development, it is the product of an economic system, capitalism. Before the 18th century or thereabouts, economic differences between parts of the world were much smaller than they are today. Or, to be more accurate, they were differences of a different sort. Some societies - ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient China - reached a much higher level of culture than others. But that was a difference that mostly concerned the ruling class. The ruling class might have literature, baths, roads, great temples and palaces, a varied and delicate diet, beautiful clothes and jewels - or not. Whatever happened in the wealthier spheres of society, the mass of the people did nothing more than scratch a bare living from the land.

Today we have the inverse situation. The wealthy have much the same technology, culture and luxury at their disposal in every country. But the standard of living of the working people ranges from the Western worker`s material comfort and relatively easy access to culture to the African peasant`s poverty and illiteracy. A luxury hotel in Africa provides similar service to a luxury hotel in New York. Even in the world`s most underdeveloped countries, such industry as there is can use recognisably similar technologies to those used in the advanced countries.

Capitalism has created - for the first time in history - the productive potential to free humanity from want. It has created freely-moving international technology and wealth. In the richer capitalist countries, strong trade unions have won greatly improved living standards for many workers. Yet even in the USA millions are destitute. And the average worker`s wage in Indonesia, for example, has, on a generous estimate, one tenth the buying power of a US wage. For millions of people in Africa, in India, and even in Latin America, life is as harsh and as precarious as it was 500 or 1000 years ago, if not more so.

The story of development and underdevelopment is the story of how capitalism`s drive to expand production has worked its way through unevenly, creating huge material advances in some areas while simultaneously creating ruin elsewhere.

The white man as cannibal

The decisive turning point in producing the present pattern of the world came in the 16th century. A new economic system - capitalism, the system of wage labour and of continuous accumulation and reinvestment of profits - emerged decisively from the neo-feudal societies of Western Europe. As yet, it was not industrial capitalism. The Industrial Revolution and large-scale factory production were still in the future. But this earlier capitalism - commercial capitalism - had its own technological revolution, with printing, more developed firearms and ocean navigation.

For centuries until then the central networks of trade had been the coastal shipping routes of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. But now the cities of the Arab world - until then the greatest on earth after China`s - and those of Italy were eclipsed. As ships began sailing the open seas regularly and relatively easily, the new centres of trade were the seafaring powers of the Atlantic - Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England - who also established themselves in the Indian Ocean. Karl Marx summed this up as follows:

``The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production [in the 16th century]... The colonies provided a market for the budding manufactures, and a vast increase in accumulation which was guaranteed by the mother country`s monopoly of the market. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back into the mother-country and were turned into capital there.``

The rise of capitalist civilisation in Western Europe thus went together with the destruction of previous civilisations in other parts of the world. Black Africa`s particular blight was the slave trade. ``To discuss trade between Africans and Europeans in the four centuries before colonial rule [i.e., from the late 15th to the late 19th century] is virtually to discuss slave trade,`` as Walter Rodney puts it. Millions of Africans were forced into the status of human cattle and shipped overseas. Probably more than 10 million arrived alive in the Americas or Europe; maybe as many again died en route. The population of Africa stagnated from 1650 to 1850, while Europe`s nearly tripled and Asia`s more than doubled. Africa had handicraft industries, and trade based on them. But the handicrafts could not compete. They were displaced by the new trade in human beings against European manufactured goods. The African peoples were split up into small warring groups and statelets, as rival chiefs would make war on each other in order to capture prisoners for the slave trade. With the European traders, from their coastal forts and bases, also encouraging these divisions, the African peoples had no chance of establishing relatively strong, large states such as had arisen in Europe.

The slave trade was also the underpinning of modern anti-black racism. Suspicion and fear of strangers dates back long before the 16th century, and anti-Jewish discrimination was already well established in Europe. Systematic, widespread prejudice and discrimination based on skin colour started with the slave trade (though it did not reach full pitch until the late 19th century). The white slave traders and slave owners, adjusting the ideology of the ``rights of man`` to fit in with their economic activity, declared that black people were naturally primitive and inferior. Even worse, some black people were bludgeoned into accepting this, or half-accepting it. Racism itself in turn became something of an economic factor in the underdevelopment of black Africa.

The slave trade declined in the first half of the nineteenth century, as industrial capitalism developed, creating a wider and more universal need for the more flexible and elastic wage labour. A new chapter opened in Africa. In a sudden ``scramble`` at the end of the 19th century, practically the whole continent was divided up as colonies for the European powers.

The economic system established under colonial rule had three main features: limited capitalist enterprise, cash crop farming linked to European trading concerns, and forced labour. Mines - gold and diamond in South Africa, copper in Zambia, etc. - and capitalist farms or estates (especially in the areas where many whites settled, like South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya) employed wage labour. Railways and ports were also built. Rail networks were started in the 1880s and 1890s, and mostly completed by the early 1930s. Capital investment in black Africa was, however, much lower than elsewhere in the Third World. Up to 1930, for example, only 2% of British capitalism`s overseas investment was in Africa, while 14% was in India, 43% in the rest of the Empire and 22% in South America.

The wage labour was often casual labour, and the methods primitive. The great majority of the African population were still formally independent peasants. But they were driven increasingly from traditional subsistence agriculture (i.e., producing mainly for their own consumption) towards cash crops. ``The African peasant,`` as Walter Rodney records, ``went in for cash crop farming for many reasons. A minority eagerly took up the opportunity to continue to acquire European goods... Many others... took to earning cash because they had to pay various taxes in money or because they were forced to work... Examples of Africans literally being forced to grow cash crops by gun and whip were to be found in Tanganyika under German rule, in Portuguese colonies, and in French Equatorial Africa and the French Sudan in the 1930s.... The laws and by-laws by which peasants in British East Africa were required to maintain minimum acreages of cash crops like cotton and groundnuts were in effect forms of coercion by the colonial state...`` Forced labour was also used to build railways, roads and ports.

These elements were combined in different ways and in different proportions in different parts of the continent. But they meshed together in a single system - and one which had very little impetus towards raising productivity.

Force was required to tear Africans away from their traditional livelihoods and create a labour force for capitalist exploitation. But the forcible methods of the colonial regime did not completely destroy the traditional structures of the African economy, nor were they intended to. Collaboration with tribal chiefs provided the Europeans with a cheap method of administration. And the continuation of some subsistence farming allowed them to pay extremely low wages and prices for cash crops. Subsistence farming would keep the African workers alive, while wages or cash crops enabled them to pay their taxes and debts, and to buy a few European goods. The companies which controlled trade in the cash crops, like Unilever, brought huge profits back to Europe. Capitalist profiteers geared themselves into pre-capitalist forms of exploitation; they grabbed the proceeds of the peasants` surplus labour, done under pre-capitalist conditions, and, by selling the goods in Europe, transformed them into capital. The Africans suffered the evils both of capitalism and of pre-capitalist economic forms. They suffered the ruthless pressures and insecurity of the capitalist market economy, transmitted through the trading companies; and they suffered the isolation, primitive conditions, static technology and traditional hierarchies of pre-capitalist societies.

The Europeans brought little capitalist civilisation to Africa. Hardly any schools or hospitals were built for the black population until after the Second World War. In Nigeria in the 1930s, for example, there were 12 hospitals for 4,000 Europeans, and 52 hospitals for at least 40 million Africans. Although literacy was higher in Nigeria than in other colonies, still it stood at only 12% in 1952. There was a flurry of ``development`` spending after World War Two. Partly the colonial powers were responding to the fact that the old colonial economy was breaking down (under the impact of the drastic decline in primary-product prices in the 1930s) and something of a permanent wage-worker class had emerged. Also, they became convinced that independence was inevitable, and made efforts to create a reliable African middle class to which power could be transferred. But it was too little, too late, and not very useful anyway. After winning independence the new African states had a terrible heritage to overcome.

Gill Sahib: Thanks for providing a well researched, well written book review. You think perhaps one day a black man will have the courage to write a book on ``Stupid Black Men``, and talk about big-mouth Farrakhan or publicity-hungry Jackson or drug snorting would-be public figure Barry, or the millions of black women who head households where each child is born from a different father and each of the fathers is away on extended leave at an unknown address. And perhaps, some day we will have a book by a brown man on ``Stupid Brown Men`` and talk about the mobs of men that kill women and children in the name of God and Revenge in the subcontinent, about NS sitting in Saudi Arabia with his nihari-making cook. I bet the book would have to be in seven volumes.

The above is just to provide perspective to the book on white men. Your review was excellent, I should note. I may even read the book someday.

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Re : Who gave us the calculus? White man

I think not! This is factual inaccuracy at its best. Alegbra/calculus was invented by an Arab Mathematician Alkhwarizmi.

``In the 9th century, the Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi wrote one of the first Arabic algebras, a systematic exposé of the basic theory of equations, with both examples and proofs. By the end of the 9th century, the Egyptian mathematician Abu Kamil had stated and proved the basic laws and identities of algebra and solved such complicated problems as finding x, y, and z such that x + y + z = 10, x2 + y2 = z2, and xz = y2.``

Re : Who gave us the calculus? White man

Corection : Calculus is based on the fundamentals of Algebra. Without Algebra Calculus would not have been possible. Algenbra was invented by an arab, Alkhwarizmi.

a) Why does the first response always almost get its own page?

b) We (meaning Indians and Pakistanis) gave the world the concept of zero = shoonyaa. Such is the glory of this.

c) Linda Lovelace was white.

d) Who gave us the House of Saud? White man. Who gave us Pakistan? White man. Who gave us Indian Penal Code 420 also in Pakistani Penal Code (okok)? White man.

whatever.

Did anybody know that Glenn Turner`s wife was also a Gill from Amritsar? Now she is a Minister in New Zealand.

White man still can`t make a good kabab, however.

Dear Friends,

Tyranny that masquerades as an open soceity, skin colour that determines who goes to purgatory, let us reflect upon this quote from the holy Quran.

Black/White skin and Creation:

``Abu Darda reported that the HOLY PROPHET SAID: Allah created Adam when he created him (sic). Then He stroke (sic) his right shoulder and took out a white race as if they were seeds, and He stroke (sic) HIS LEFT SHOULDER and took out a BLACK RACE as if they were coals. Then He said to those who were in his right side: Towards paradise and I don`t care. He said to those who were ON HIS LEFT SHOULDER: Towards Hell and I don`t care. - Ahmad`` (Mishkat ul-Masabih, translated by Karim, v. iii, p. 117)

I do not know how much calculs does Mr. Hayat know but calculus is very much different from algebra. Never mind, our knowledge is limited; nobody knows every thing. Calculus was invented by Sir Isaac Newton and by Gottfreid Wilhelm Leibniz, around 1675. Algebra came into being in the ninth century as Mr. Hayat correctly observed. Algebra was not invented, per se, by Al-Khwarizmi, although the nomenclature owes its origination to Khwarizmi. Hindus were already doing algebra in India during Al-Khwarizmi`s time; Al-Khwarizmi introduced the symbolic expressions which indeed was a revolutionary concept in that time; in fact it still is. The symbol, la, for the unknown quantity that Al-Khwarizmi used made it possible to write down algebraic equations and relationships among the various quantities. Without this symbolic notation, it would have been difficult to do much of mathematics.

However, calculus is a different breed. It deals with infinitessimal quantities (also the infinte ones) and uses the concept of `limits`. There was a priority dispute between Leibniz and Newton and their respective supporters; history has decided it in favor of Newton but no body can ignore Leibniz`s contributions. The notation dy/dx was originated by Leibniz. Many of those, like me, who had read calculus at the college level and had used it extensively in the Engineering courses or in the courses of other higher degrees, later on, did not understand the intrinsic physical concepts of calculus. We knew how to use it mechanically, from one step to the next to produce the answer. I beg to differ with Mr. Hayat although I wish to God, a Muslim had created calculus. Calculs is indeed beautiful.

The Islamic world produced a great scientist, Abdus Salam, of the international caliber and stature after several centuries, in our time. The Muslims could have felt proud of him and his work and used him as a beacon for further work but unfortunately he was excommunicated from the fold of Islam. I am making this statement with a straight face and as a matter of fact; it is not my intention to start a religious or political debate. And I am not an Ahmadi. I am proud of Salam that he was my compatriot, a Pakistani. What he believed in by way of religion was his own concern.

It takes a lot of hard work to do research; even to discover a small mathematical or scientific truth. Unfortunately, there are not many Muslims and the Islamic people who are at the forefront of the scientific and mathematical research these days. At the same time, there are many who are contributing to science in their own small and significant ways. We should value those people. Those people are making sacrifices (there is little money in research) and they are praise worthy for their efforts. Research work does exert great strain on family life. Excuse me for this digression.

I want to take this opportunity to thank hobbyty, Saminashah, and tahmed for their kind appreciation. I`ll take time to read progressive`s postings and resrve my comments about DRUMZ`s post; but I respect him/her for his/her ideas.

Wishing well,

Mohammad Gill

Asim Hayat #11 Only trouble is...what is a white man? I recall a Lebanese gentleman, in the course of recounting some incident in Africa with him, matter-of-factly referring to himself as a white man among the natives in Africa. So, the white man (Arab-variety) discovered algebra too - damn.

But wait, there is hope...the brown man discovered zero, I have been learnt many times on chowk. But...by converting to islam, we lost bragging rights on that too, I understand. And our brotherly yellow man (they are not really yellow, of course, unless jaundiced) wont give us bragging rights to the printing press and paper and firecrackers either. damn! damn! damn!

You and I are in deep trouble, brother, or should I say ``Fellow no-invention Paki man``.

re: freethinker # 15,

Calculus is indeed one of the most beautiful devices ever invented by mankind...the whole idea of gradient and shape and movement and approximation...it leaves one dizzy to think of what blessings calculus has brought us (of course, somehow those blessings become apparent only after one leaves those calculus exams behind).

re: tahmed # 15,

You don`t need bragging rights! A person like you gives bragging rights to a society :)