collapseofindustrialcivilization | Over the ages, a number of empires have exploited and looted the
resource-rich lands of Africa. At its height, the Roman Empire stretched
from Scotland in the northern hemisphere to the deserts of Africa in
the south. The Romans stripped their North African territory of its
trees, making it their breadbasket of grain production. Originating
in central Africa, malaria was likely spread to the center of the Roman
Empire on their cargo ships. Passengers on their boats could have
carried malaria in their bloodstream before becoming symptomatic, and
water barrels on board could have harbored mosquito larvae. In fact, the
DNA work of Dr. Robert Sallares has proven that the most lethal form of malaria helped topple ancient Rome. Fast
forwarding to today, the blow-back from industrial agriculture and
transnational corporate land grabs in Africa has now reached the shores
of the hegemonic American Empire in the form of a deadly tropical
disease called Ebola.
The Roman Empire seized fertile African land by brute force, but in
modern times capitalist industrial civilization takes over Third World
countries with the stroke of a pen. Structural adjustment loans by such
tools of western power as the IMF and World Bank are signed requiring
privatization of the economy and government cuts in social spending.
Vast tracks of forests are cleared for mining or monoculture crop
production such as palm oil. Subsistence farmers are dispossessed of
their ancestral lands and forced to migrate to cities in search of work.
Deprived of adequate healthcare and the opportunity to earn a livable
wage, these urban poor live in squalor and are driven to hunt in the
surrounding forests for a cheap source of protein known as bushmeat.
Fruit bats, a keystone environmental species, have been identified as an
Ebola virus host that has spread the disease through bushmeat
consumption, habitat destruction, and human encroachment. Thus the
neoliberal agenda of ‘developed’ nations has acted to create the
atmosphere from which this pandemic arose.
Due to the long history of exploitation by outside powers, native
Africans are justifiably wary and prone to conspiracy theories
involving intervention by Western institutions as well as their own
governments which have been, to a great degree, corrupted by the resource curse.
These unpleasant facts are, of course, never mentioned by the MSM
because it might spark a flicker of moral compunction in the ‘developed’
world which has ended up with so much of Africa’s wealth in the form of
rare earth minerals used inside electronic devices, gold and diamonds in jewelry, or petrol pumped into vehicles. The horrific realities behind conflict minerals are always kept out of sight and out of mind by the next consumer diversion.
