[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about where the fight-against-poverty-as-a-HR-issue has gone wrong and points to a ray of hope. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
1. The ‘other wars’ focus only on the military making us forget that, historically, ‘the military’ has only ultimately been a means to petty ends, ends that have never been to favor the economic interests, the rights and the welfare of the have-nots –today, as forever, enormously damaged. Such ends have always primarily affected the popular classes rendered poor, i.e., the mass of women, men and children that, without end, live lives of quiet desperation in human rights (HR) limbo. (Vicente Navarro and Henry David Thoreau)
Fighting against poverty?
-Thomas Malthus, in his Essay ‘On the Principles of Population’ (1798), wrote: “Aid to the poor may be said to create the poor it helps.”
2. Europe is exporting not aid, but overall poverty. The same translates into energy, food and other forms of poverty so that it is actually exporting misery* to the rest of the world. The you-know-who have been doing this for hundreds of years; it is nothing new. …wither HR.
*: To the accumulation of misery, on the one hand, corresponds the accumulation of capital, on the other. (Marx)
3. Colonialism** began from European shores. European countries, relatively rich, can (and have) take(n) advantage to outbid the whole of the African continent and most of Asia and Latin America in international markets procuring food, energy, medicines… (Yanis Varoufakis) …not that Europe is alone in this, reminding us that poverty as a HR violation is a public policy¨choice. (Economic Policy Institute)
**: In the 1960s, after decolonization, President Sékou Touré of Guinee told President Charles de Gaulle: “We prefer poverty in freedom to wealth in slavery”. [Colonizers told the colonized that decolonization must still involve ‘interdependence’–clearly asymmetric, instead of between equals(!). …wither true national sovereignty].
Persistent hunger and poverty are not simply due to the presence of bad actors
4. Rich nation states, business owners and CEOs, stockholders and hedge funds… systematically benefit from the presence of hunger and poverty in the world. This can be expected in a world that is more about transactions than it is about caring for other people’s well-being. It is important to see how hunger and poverty morosely benefit people who are not hungry or poor. (George Kent)
5. Unfortunately, at the same time we see how so many young people dragged into politics with a moral relativism assume the same political practices of those who until yesterday they reviled and managed to defeat; today, paradoxically, they once again collude with the Right and the powers that be in Congress and elsewhere. …bad actors they become(!) and this begins to affect the hope that claim holders have had in the renewal of their leaders. (Juan P. Cardenas)
6. Those rendered poor are always left on the brink of economic hardship and looking ahead to an ever narrower and more uncertain future –or actually more certain– in which it will be impossible for them to recycle themselves. We are talking about those millions whose stomachs have lived for decades facing shortages that prevent them from starving, but do not allow them to live without hunger. They have almost never been able to choose, they have been deprived of the right to be wrong –or to be right… Dreaming without expectations can be painful or satisfying –if one has the possibility to choose. Does this portray a defeatist (or actually a defeated…) state of mind? (Leonardo Padura, La Transparencia del Tiempo)
Should you then be surprised that some people are beginning to resist and move to end persistent hunger?
-If the poor begin to reason, all is lost. (Voltaire) …or won (if looked from the HR perspective).
7. When poverty and underdevelopment begin to improve, at the same time, and in equal proportion, social discontent begins to increase. (Fernando Monckeberg). It should thus not surprise us that the dispossessed of the land seek to take justice into their own hands –hopefully with the politics of HR as their banner.
Bottom line
8. Sad is the poor man who, smelling dung, thinks he is the owner of the cows. (Eva Peron)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–The privileges of the haves are always encouraged by the impunity that favors the most powerful. Quite rightly, those rendered poor and indigent feel encouraged to commit petti-crimes in order to be part of the consumerist society glorified by all that TV advertising. It pains us to admit it, but all kinds of crimes move the world: Let us add here the usury of the banks, the disgrace of the pension fund administrators, as well as the scandalous profit of the private health and energy sectors. The justified social discredit and the lack of credibility this generates does not escape the population (a phenomenon that also reached pedophile priests). (J. P. Cardenas)