Clare Short attacks environmentalists and anarchists. Surprise surprise! (I think not)

As the self congratulatory, patronising, neo-colonial types slapped each other on the back yesterday at the Create Centre (Bristol) at the ‘fair trade’ (bad joke?) gathering, Clare Short (minister responsible for ‘Development’) spoke to some people present.

In a short conversation with a couple of people Clare Short attacked ‘environmentalists’ and anti-globalisers accusing those concerned with the continuing destruction of the planet and the rapid deterioration of all life, including ours, of ‘setting back development’ and ‘stopping us from implementing our system in other less developed and privileged areas of the world’.

Inherent in this attack is the racist belief that ‘these poor people are useless without our help’ and that the ‘Third World’ is ‘backward’. The nightmare which is technoindustrial society, Short and her cohorts advocate, must be implemented in full in every corner of the world. Every element of humanity must be tied to the machine. All life must be viewed as ‘resources’ for the service of the machine. There must be no escape from it and we all ‘must share in the advancement and progress of industrial society’. The destruction of all life on this planet is imperative and perhaps an afterthought. The main aim must be to keep the all consuming nightmare of this society on track. The priority is the preservation of the technoindustrial society.

This of course would come as no surprise to those of us who want the abolition not just of the worst excesses of the system but work for the complete abolition of the totality. The patronising and down right reactionary mentality that creates horrendous missionary organisations such as the ‘World Development Movement’ or ‘Jubilee 2000’ are simply outcrops from the neo-colonial mindset. The mindset that sees the Northern Hemisphere as ‘advanced’ and that wants to implement our ‘advancement’ on to the rest of the world. Groups/organisations such as these (and there are a few of them) aim to smooth out the rough edges of this society and make its chains and its monocultural death march seem like a wish fulfilment. The race is on for the complete domestication of us all into acquiescent cogs existing in a sterile world unable to see outside our cages and made to feel that these acts of ‘charity’ bestowed by our betters were really what we wanted after all. Meanwhile we will have failed to see our beautiful diverse world turned into an agribusiness, industrial wasteland.