I was doing some foreign relations research with this book last night. I was reading, specifically, about a 26-year bloody civil war in Sri Lanka. But I wasn’t looking at it in an isolated sense, but rather as it being emblematic of a template that has been playing out over and over, in various ways, worldwide, because of the modern phenomenon of “globalization.” The British colonized Sri Lanka in the early 1900s, primarily because they found the upland areas suitable for lucrative growing of coffee, tea and rubber plants. In turn, this greed fueled the importing of large numbers of Tamil workers from southern India. These people were turned into “indentured servants (read: slaves).” And they quickly became about 10% of the population in Sri Lanka. Time passed. In 1948, Colonial Sri Lanka ended. But the Tamil were now discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese government. This included several mass killings/genocide of the Tamil. The Tamil, in turn, formed a rebel group to fight the government. As mentioned at the outset, the civil war lasted 26 years, and as of 2009 there is a tenuous peace. Now here’s the kicker, and how it relates to, say, the U.S. We don’t go in and forcibly colonize these smaller, poorer countries, and plant a flag. No, we ‘plant’ corporations. We then pay sweatshop wages (read: slave labor). And the corporations work behind the scenes to pay governments for favorable tax rates, access to natural resources, and so on. We just don’t call it colonization. We call it doing business in a global market economy. This, in turn, continues to perpetuate poverty loops in these countries, continued class tensions, and a constellation of other sociological problems.
