Convergence of Catastrophes, page 5
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The demographic explosion in Third World cities can no longer be controlled and constitutes a new line of catastrophe. The situation of Manila, capital of the Philippines, is an emblematic case, which is also found in Mexico City, Lagos, Bombay, and others. In Manila, with 16 million inhabitants by 2010, as a result of the uncontrolled exodus from the countryside, ecological disaster is beginning to handicap the economy and threaten the health of its inhabitants.
The nine public drains, which are open to the sky, are overflowing. The 5,900 tons of garbage produced every day increases by 4.5 per cent a year. Wildcat drains pollute the water supply and poison the fish in Manila Bay, which is disappearing under the 800 tons of garbage that pour into it every day. Although legally prohibited, the incineration of wastes is growing and generates toxic emissions. The administration of water is catastrophic: 54 per cent of the water supply is unregulated. In the ever-growing shantytowns, when there are floods, which are more and more frequent, everything overflows and water that has been used mingles with garbage, contaminating drinking water and generating appalling sanitary conditions.
The Philippines’ population growth is going to give an even more dramatic seriousness to these problems. In 2001, in the Tondo shantytown, a cholera epidemic was barely averted after killing nearly fifty inhabitants. Unhealthy conditions and poverty ceaselessly increase the gap between rich and poor and multiply the chances of social upheavals. The shantytowns, which are not connected to the water supply, are served by ‘water carriers’, who charge eight times the price paid by those who are connected to the water network. The groundwater is drying up or becoming polluted, making ‘blue gold’ increasingly rare and expensive.
The effect on neighbouring agriculture is that irrigation can no longer be practiced and rice has to be imported from Thailand. The Philippine government is totally powerless, overwhelmed by the scale of the problems.
All these facts are the same in a score of enormous cities that have grown too large in the countries of the South. They encourage all sorts of internal destabilisations, not to mention the temptations to emigrate en masse to the West.
And Let’s Not Forget Epidemics
Where is AIDS in all of this? It is doing quite well, thank you. The pandemic is not slowing down, but speeding up. Here are the figures for 2001: 5 million new cases were reported, 66 per cent in Africa. 3 million infected are dead. There are 40 million HIV-positive cases reported worldwide and this number is likely lower than in reality. The number of HIV-positive cases and true AIDS cases should perhaps be doubled, since in the Third World it is often impossible to get an accurate count of AIDS victims. In Asia, the epidemic is rapidly increasing: 7.1 million are sick and more than a million are infected; in Western Europe, there are 560,000 sick and 30,000 recently infected; and in the United States, there are 940,000 sick and 30,000 infected, and AIDS is taking off again, since people are taking fewer precautions because of ‘tritherapies’, and because the use of intravenous drugs is on the increase. In Russia the epidemic is exploding: there are 800,000 infected and a rate of increase of 15 per cent.
In Paris the number of HIV-positive patients is beginning to increase, after falling for a number of years, increasing by 25 per cent for the last three years. 0.86 per cent of the population of Paris who were tested were found to be infected. This number is lower than the reality since subjects who are at risk get themselves tested more than others. The number of those who are infected without being aware of it and believe that they are protected from danger is probably high. The increase is greatest among women from 29 to 49 and men from 30 to 49. In the Île-de-France,[33] the ‘rate of risk-taking’ (sexual contacts that are unprotected or with multiple partners, or intravenous drug use) has increased dramatically, especially among the young: 31 per cent among those younger than 25 years old! Almost one young person in three engages in unprotected sex . . .
The annual report of the United Nations program UNAIDS says, ‘AIDS stands a good chance of unequivocally becoming the most devastating disease that humanity has ever known.’ Since 1982, the AIDS epidemic has already killed 22 million people, but, according to Dr. Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS, ‘the worst is yet to come’.
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A new hyper-resistant form of the HIV virus has appeared. The HIV retrovirus is much more likely to mutate than the virus we already know. Medical treatments (the famous ‘tritherapies’) have allowed the lives of those with AIDS to be prolonged to a very significant degree, as well as to combat the three known forms of the retrovirus, HIV I, HIV II and HIV III, and therefore, along with the regular use of condoms, this has slowed the epidemic in the West. However, researchers at the American National Institute of Health (NIH) and the University of California have discovered in San Francisco, in early July 2003, the appearance of a new form of HIV that is resistant to all treatments.
The explanation is that the enormous homosexual ‘community’ in California is no longer taking precautions in the belief that AIDS has been ‘vanquished’ by tritherapies. Those who are HIV-positive, who no longer take care of themselves or use condoms, are ‘over-infecting’ their partners, who are also HIV-positive. The HIV virus then mutates, getting stronger and becoming invincible. This situation is already affecting heterosexuals, who are developing the fatal illness at an alarming rate, without any way to slow down the spreading contagion, as at the beginning of the 1980s. This news should be related to the accelerating spread of AIDS in the entire world, of which we have already spoken. The NIH report concludes, ‘All this means that America will probably never see the end of the virus by herself, unless a breakthrough is made by the discovery of a vaccine or a definitive treatment, two highly unlikely hypotheses. . . . The conclusion of the studies made in San Francisco is that the HIV infection has become endemic in the United States.’
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The International Conference on AIDS that took place in Barcelona at the beginning of July 2003 has shown that AIDS may well cause life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa to sink to a level lower than in the Nineteenth century. In Botswana, 39 per cent of adults are HIV-positive and life expectancy is 26.7 years, as opposed to 75 years in the worst period of colonialism . . . Several African countries are about to disappear from the map or return to the Stone Age. Of course, we Europeans should take the blame and hold ourselves ‘responsible for this holocaust’, in the words of the ethnomasochist[34] Simon Carr in The Independent. The problem is that the endangered populations all dream of fleeing to Europe. In France, for example, the principal carriers and spreaders of the virus are Africans: according to the Public Assistance of Paris, 79 per cent of those recently infected are of sub-Saharan origin.
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The return of syphilis will not astonish anyone but the naïve. We used to believe that it had been definitively eradicated. It has come back, just like tuberculosis and mange and, perhaps very soon, cholera and the plague. The causes are always the same: a decrease in the use of prophylactics and anti-venereal precautions and the absence of medical check-ups in a very large foreign population, whose state of health and hygiene leave much to be desired. According to the Centre for ‘Refugees’ of Sangatte, in the Pas-de-Calais, several cases of mange (a contagious skin disease) have been observed in April 2002. Firemen who enter the Centre have to wear a TPUU.[35]
Here are the figures for France: 1990: 0 cases; 1999: 9 cases; 2000: 29 cases; 2001: 139 cases; since January 1, 2002: 240 cases, of which 199 are in Paris. 90 per cent of the infected are male homosexuals or bisexuals and 50 per cent are suffering from AIDS. Mange is a sexually transmitted disease caused by a type of bacteria called treponemes. It was a serious problem until the discovery of penicillin in 1945. But is there any way to guarantee that new, mutated forms of bacteria that will be resistant to antibiotics will not appear, as we have seen with other diseases?
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And let us not forget that according to the Ministry of Health tuberculosis, which had once been eradicated thanks to antibiotics, is again spreading in France. The principal victims (and spreaders of the disease) are immigrants. 65 per cent of reported cases involve foreigners.
2. Toward the Clash of Civilisations
The Globalisation of War
Already subject to a terrible degradation of the ecological state of its earthly environment, humanity, from the beginning of the Twenty-first century, is simultaneously going to experience large confrontations whose intensity will be much worse than the last two ‘world wars’. At any rate, they were not ‘world wars’ in the strict sense, since they were fought over very limited areas of the face of the Earth.
On the other hand, what we are going to experience will be a real ‘worldwide’ crisis and, in addition to wars in the classic sense, there will be civil wars and terrorism involving criminal organisations. Everything is beginning to be sketched out, but the logic of these conflicts has not yet reached a serious level. We have not seen anything yet. We are feeling the breath of the gentle, unhealthy breeze that precedes the devastating cyclone by a few hours.
The Cold War that opposed the West to the Communism led by the USSR was a sort of shadowboxing, a confrontation resting on artificial polarities, that is, ideologies. Creating fear became a game and, obviously, nothing happened and Russian Communism sank (or imploded) without a sound. What is coming differs in its nature. We are returning to the archaic, that is, the eternal condition of mankind, which the brief parenthesis of ‘modernity’ made us forget, in other words, the rivalry of peoples, of ethnic and cultural blocs and of civilisations.
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In fact, despite or because of the techno-scientific homogenisation of the world, despite or because of the Western attempt to unify humanity culturally, local traditions and ethnic identities are becoming stronger in response. The speed of travel and communication, like the world’s demographic density that makes the Earth seem like a crowded subway station, makes a potentially explosive situation out of the very ancient propensity for ‘the clash of civilisations’ — the title of Samuel P. Huntington’s essay,[36] whose sound idea echoed around the world because it designates a real threat that all decision-makers perceive very clearly.
This ‘clash of civilisations’ will take different forms. It will bring together all the forms of war and conflict. Here are the principal fault lines:
1) A global confrontation with Islam.
Whether we like it or not, Islam has entered its third phase of conquest, towards the ‘Universal Caliphate’. The first two phases happened in the Seventh to the Eleventh centuries, as well as in the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth centuries. It is a question of a groundswell that the governments of Islamic countries, which are pro-Western out of temporary calculation, cannot disguise for long. Islam’s principal weapon is its demographic vigour, in the face of Western countries that are experiencing depopulation. This confrontation will cover the planet and will usually take the form of civil war, with episodes of classic war.
2) The risk of a war between China and the USA.
The causes of such a war will be tied not only to the question of Taiwan, but also to rivalry over the status of superpower, especially economic superpower. China is a much more serious challenger for the USA than the defunct USSR.
3) The serious opposition between India and Pakistan.
Two nuclear powers opposed in every respect (from religion to harnessing water resources and territorial claims) are permanently on the threshold of open war. A lasting reconciliation is unimaginable. The contest will take place between Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims.
4) The conflagration in the Near East.
The infected wound in the world’s heel is the Israeli-Palestinian question that is only going to get worse, since nothing can stop the protagonists of this inextricable situation, which opposes Judaism to Arab Islamism, from moving to extremes. By invading nearby Iraq, Washington and the ‘neo-conservatives’ followed an absurd perception of geopolitics and have only succeeded in making the infected wound a bit worse. Since the fall of the USSR, unilateral American imperialism has not stopped destabilising the world’s equilibrium, especially in the Near East. This region will soon catch fire, with an intensity that we cannot yet imagine.
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The world is threatened by the conflagration of war, at this paradoxical moment when there is endless talk of ‘human rights’ and ‘peace’. The United Nations, a first draft of world government, has shown its impotence everywhere. From the Near East to the Balkans, including the suburbs of Europe and even Africa, we meet the logic of ethnic and nationalist confrontation, which belies the dominant ideology inspired by the pious hopes of Christian universalism.
Nothing will halt nuclear proliferation among states and terrorist groups. In all the countries of the Third World (the opposite of an emasculated Europe) ethnic and nationalist passions are strengthening the people. The general atmosphere of this humanity, this planet, this civilisation near its end is a generalised brawl. There is no way to prevent it, just as nothing will halt the conflict discussed above, because it is too late and we have reached the point of no return.
Toward the Most Bellicose Century in History
In the face of war, a certain number of contradictory paradoxes are revealed:
1) Pacifism, the universal lay religion of the Americano-centric West, along with the doctrine of tolerating zero casualties in war, is accompanied by an intensification of planetary violence, provoked, of course, by Islam, but also by America’s ‘collateral’ strikes almost everywhere in the world since 1991 and by the murderous embargo against Iraq.
2) After the end of the Cold War, a belief was proclaimed in a ‘New World Order’, an ‘end of history’, world peace characterised by democracy and trade (Pax Americana). Now the Twenty-first century is preparing for us perhaps the most bellicose situation in the entire history of humanity. The enormous wars of the Twentieth century will be smaller than those that we and our descendants are going to experience.
The factors are well known: the de facto conquest by massive Third World immigration into the North with the accompanying ethnic civil wars that immigration will provoke; the revival of Islamic jihad on a worldwide scale from Gibraltar to Indonesia, with a will ten times more bellicose, because it is archaic, than the will of the defunct USSR; the chance of a confrontation between China and the United States for control of the Pacific; but also, on a planet that has become crowded, and has seen the spread of nuclear weapons, multiplying conflicts of every sort between states; without forgetting that since 9/11 we are in the era of macro-terrorism and that we shall very probably see acts of nuclear terrorism, with devastating destabilising effects.
3) In spite of a publically proclaimed desire for world peace under its aegis (or that of NATO), the hypocritical United States has a vital economic need to develop its military-industrial complex and therefore to maintain fronts everywhere, like wounds that are always open.
4) In addition, two of the major figures at the beginning of this century, the United States and Islam, are two rival universalisms, two Manichean messianic cults, aggressive but related. Both function under a mode of religious fanaticism (the Bible and the Qur’an), both posit an absolute Good and Evil, a paradise and a hell, large or small Satans, and, in addition, function according to an imperialist logic that is direct and violent (not muffled like the former USSR). The ‘warrior crusade for the Good and for expansion’ appears in their two visions of the world.
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Thus everything leads us to believe that, rather than a peaceful globalisation (the dream of the ‘world state’), we are going to experience a bellicose globalisation in the Twenty-first century. Having passed through the era of continental wars that became world wars, and which returned from time to time, we are now going to see it followed by the era of a globalised war, endemic and protean in form, which will oppose states to other states, Islam to other civilisations — the Americano-centric West, and so on. War will assume the masks of classic wars, civil wars in the streets, terrorist wars, economic wars, and other types.
We should have expected it. Human nature is martial and this trait cannot be eradicated, since it is innate. In the past, when civilisations and peoples were relatively separated and intermingled only occasionally, conflicts were necessarily limited. In our day, in this first global century, when civilisations, ethnic identities and diverging interests have not disappeared by dissolving into a general melting pot, but, on the contrary, have been affirmed and exacerbated, and when technology gives a greater ability to wage combat, one can predict an all-out brawl in the heart of humanity. We are going to experience a permanent state of conflict that will assume many forms, of which we see only the beginning, and which will automatically lead to the collapse and the breakdown of the current world order, as the result of serious perturbations linked one to the others — taking into account the extremely fragile character of the globalised economy.
