blessed britons

The East India Company's 'CEO' was Robert Clive. 'Clive of India' looted, literally, Bengal's treasury of all its gold and silver and loaded it onto a fleet of more than a hundred boats. The 'profit' to the company was £2.5 million (more than £200 million today), of which Clive's cut was £234,000 (£20 million). The 'multinational' was born, conceived by a breed known as speculators, who in 1784 drove up the price of food beyond the reach of India's poor. 'Estimates vary', wrote Robins, 'but up to ten million people may have died of starvation'. In a country which, in the seventeenth century, was the 'agricultural mother of Asia and the industrial workshop of the world.', where the weavers of cotton enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts in England, life under British rule became a lesser commodity.

mad world

[Wal-Mart's] CEO Lee Scott was paid over $17.5 million in total during 2004. This is roughly a thousand times the annual average for workers in Wal-Mart’s 3,600 US stores, where wages range from $7.92 to $9.68 an hour.

humanitarian intervention

human rights drum

Submitted by antarchi on September 30, 2007 - 23:37.

'Even admitting that human rights are both highly desirable and far more respected in 'our' countries than elsewhere, three fundamental conceptual problems remain. The first is the problem of transition. How can a society pass from a feudal or colonial situation, in which the very idea of human rights is not formulated, to a situation comparable to what we know in our societies today? And do we have something to teach the rest of the world in this matter? The second problem stems from the inclusion in the U.N.'s 1948 Declaration of two types of rights: individual and political rights on the one hand, and economic and social rights on the other. To what extent are these rights compatible with each other, and if they are not, are there priorities between them?

moral obligation to intervene

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 12:32.

Two years later, a Commons Select Committee would conclude: ‘Britain had a legal right to intervene [in the Turkish assault on Cyprus], she had a moral obligation to intervene, she had the military capacity to intervene. She did not intervene for reasons which the government refuses to give.’

antarchi's quotes

refusing to intervene

Submitted by antarchi on March 13, 2008 - 00:51.

In 1948, 500 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed. More than 70,000 Palestinian houses were demolished. In the Jaffa area, 96% of the villages were totally destroyed. As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the UN-allotted borders of the Jewish state, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

— Mike Marqusee

antarchi's quotes

Dayton 1994

Submitted by antarchi on March 13, 2008 - 01:14.

José Cutileiro [the Portuguese ambassador who led the first conference on Bosnia] had, long before the real horrors broke out, negotiated an agreement which appeared broadly to be what was arranged under the Dayton accords - except that Cutileiro arranged things better, and sooner, so that it would have been easier to enforce. All parties could find something in it, except the Americans, who told Izetbegovic that he shouldn't accept it, because it would be a recognition of ethnic cleansing in territorial terms by force. That's what the Americans said, I've seen the text with my own eyes. And as a consequence of that Izetbegovic then rejected the agreement.

— Lord Carrington

antarchi's quotes