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@ 2009-03-27 02:12:00
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BBC Newsnight
Eurocrash: How Latvia's boom turned to bust

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[info]helvetica
2009-03-27 02:52 (saite)
In june 1999, the United nations Food and Agriculture organization (FAO) reported that thirty countries – six of them in Africa – were suffering serious food shortages. One of the countries on the list was ... Yugoslavia. The desert is spreading they say. Yet it is not the desert that is spreading over the planet, but the urban wasteland – the place where, without ever mixing – the multitude of ethnic microcosms survive – in the shanty towns, the half-way hostels, the sink estates...
Recently when some young North Africans were asked why they did not want to stay in Maghreb and preferred to emigrate, they replied with the simplicity that comes of stating the obvious: “Because there is nothing here to take!” They could as well have said “because it already looks like a desert here!” The 'deportees' in the 'camps' of our urban wastelands are not, as our ministers go on joyfully repeating 'savages' or even 'new barbarians'. In reality, they are merely indicating the irresistible emergence of a previously almost unknown level of deprivation and human misery. They are waste-products of a military-industrial, scientific civilization which has applied itself for almost two centuries to depriving individuals of the knowledge and skill accumulated over generations and millenia, before post-industrial upsurge occurred which now seeks to reject them, on the grounds of definitive uselessness, the zones of lawlessness where they are exposed defenceless to the exacations of kapos of a new kind.
It is no use, then, speculating on the regional aspects of the Yougoslav conflict when you understand that it is not the world-city but the great urban wasteland which now extends to the eastern portals of Europe. The great urban wasteland with its bands of predators – such as UCK or Serbian irregulars – whose methods and excesses (kidnaping, extortion, torture, murder, arms and drug trafficking) shade dangerously into those of the mafia families and other 'honourable societies' of Europe, America and Asia.[..]
Etc. Etc. Etc.


Virilio, Paul. Strategy of deception. Verso, London, NY – pp. 61,62

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