Jo du säger det biggen. Ord står mot ord så låt oss lämna det till läsaren att avgöra. Jag vet sanningen om hur det gick till. Ja just. Var har du ditt forum nu? Blev det lite för mycket att hålla koll på? Svårt att styra? :) Jag är inte upprörd över hur du inskränkte yttrandefriheten för de som inte hade samma åsikter som dig biggen. Det var bara att vänta.
Venezuela och yttrandefriheten? Stänger inte Hugo ned radiokanler just ju? Fast från vänstern hävdas väl då den vanliga teserna: dessa styrs av kapitalet, en nödvändig åtgärd för att utjämna och ge möjlighet till arbetarklassens röst att osv. Ungfär samma retorik som från fd Sovjet.
Ska vi gissa på när Hugo avskaffar de fria valen. Vad tror du biggen? 2 år? 3 år?
Nattväktarstaten - liberal dröm eller totalitär realitet
Moderator: Moderatorgruppen
Kallekula skrev:Zokrates skrev:
Ja se vilka äckelas det finns för jag har extremt svårt att tro att de verkligen skämtar.
Si så nu har du helt plötsligt svårt att se om folk skämtar. Så hur sätter vi detta i dagern av ditt framförada judehat igår Zok?. Du är en liten människa du.
Återkom gärna med synpunkter på innehållet i det jag framförde, EFTER ATT DU TAGIT DEL AV DETSAMMA!
Som det är nu gör du dig bara löjlig då du sprider osanning om mig utifrån din egna förutfattade mening om innehållet.
Men du tyckte tydligen att det inte behövdes läsas, synd för det var ett mycket bra verk med utgångspunkten i att dem som tittar där de inte borde, lär upptäcka saker de inte gillar.
Jag tror förvisso att det inte finns särskilt många människor än idag som skulle klara av att nagelfaras och det oavsett etnicitet.
Förtydligande,
Kalle jag skämtar inte.
Tips till kalle
Använd gärna något rättstavningsprogram, dina texter innehåller så många stavfel att de blir svårlästa, alternativt så kan du ju säga att du har dyslexi, så att vi andra får en ökad förståelse till varför det förekommer så många skrivfel, handikapp är ju inget att skämmas över.
Okej Zok. Sakinnehållet vilken av dessa punkter, som du förde fram, vill du att jag ska kommetera. Ja varför inte även låta biggen, som ogillar judar, kommentera:
- yes, Jews are a corrupting and disruptive element in society;
- yes, Jews lend money at 40% and seem to do little else;
- yes, Jews buy and sell justice with huge bribes;
- yes, Jews pull off all sorts of fraudulent bankruptcies and swindles;
- yes, Jews resort to poisoning and assassination when thwarted;
- yes, Jews are obsessed with hatred for Christians and the Christian religion;
- yes, Jews kidnapped and castrated Christian boys on a large scale and sold them into slavery in Islamic Spain for centuries;
- yes, Jews used [and still use?] human blood in all sorts of quack remedies, despite the Biblical prohibition, even for minor complaints;
- yes, Jews [and still use?] Christian human blood in their matzoh balls at Passover;
- yes, Jews [and still use?] Christian human blood in their wine at Passover;
- yes, the blood had to be from Christian boys no more than 7 years of age;
- yes, the blood had [has?] to be certified kosher by a rabbi;
- yes, there was [is?] a large and profitable trade in fake blood products and animal blood, which was [are?] unsuitable to the purpose;
Rättstavningsprogram hava jag icke just nu. Det har fuckat ur. Dylexi har jag kämpat med. Fast det blir klart bättre när man koncentrerar sig på det man skriver, om det är något av vikt som man jobbar med.
- yes, Jews are a corrupting and disruptive element in society;
- yes, Jews lend money at 40% and seem to do little else;
- yes, Jews buy and sell justice with huge bribes;
- yes, Jews pull off all sorts of fraudulent bankruptcies and swindles;
- yes, Jews resort to poisoning and assassination when thwarted;
- yes, Jews are obsessed with hatred for Christians and the Christian religion;
- yes, Jews kidnapped and castrated Christian boys on a large scale and sold them into slavery in Islamic Spain for centuries;
- yes, Jews used [and still use?] human blood in all sorts of quack remedies, despite the Biblical prohibition, even for minor complaints;
- yes, Jews [and still use?] Christian human blood in their matzoh balls at Passover;
- yes, Jews [and still use?] Christian human blood in their wine at Passover;
- yes, the blood had to be from Christian boys no more than 7 years of age;
- yes, the blood had [has?] to be certified kosher by a rabbi;
- yes, there was [is?] a large and profitable trade in fake blood products and animal blood, which was [are?] unsuitable to the purpose;
Rättstavningsprogram hava jag icke just nu. Det har fuckat ur. Dylexi har jag kämpat med. Fast det blir klart bättre när man koncentrerar sig på det man skriver, om det är något av vikt som man jobbar med.
Socialism or Barbarism
Gillar titeln på tråden och bigj berättelse av historien för nattväktarstater. Passar perfekt för jag läser just nu Mike Davis skildringar av dagens totalitära realitet
i Dubai, Hong kong, Beijing, Johanesburg, Egypten, Brasilien men även Iran
där dagens superclass byggt djävulska paradis mha extrem fattigdom.
Vågar man läsa historien + se dagens realitet i vitögat förstår man R. Luxenburg och Trotsky ödesmättade förutsägelse Socialism or Barbarism
This is nothing less than a utopian frenzy, and the early twenty-first century, with its global vogue for evil paradises (of which Dubai may be both the most re-markable and sinister) recapitulates many of the same mythic, impossible long-ings that Walter Benjamin discovered in his famous excavation of Baudelaire's Paris. With Marx's theory of commodity fetishism as his Rosetta stone, Benjamin unraveled the mystery of the bewitched capitalist city where human collectivity, overwhelmed by its own colossal productive powers, hallucinates its social beings a swirling "dream-life of objects." But the inverted realities and false conscious-ness of the Victorian era have now grown to Himalayan, life-threatening propor-tions. If the iron-and-glass arcades of the 1850s were the enchanted forests of early consumer capitalism, today's luxury-Chemed environments—including city-sized supermalls, artificial island suburbs, and faux downtown "lifestyle centers"—function as alternative universes for privileged forms of human life. On a planet where more than 2 billion people subsist on two dollars or less a day, these dream-worlds enflame desires—for infinite consumption, total social exclusion and physical security, and architectural monumentality that are clearly incompati-ble with the ecological and moral survival of humanity.
Monstrous paradises, indeed, presume sulfurous antipodes. In his dense, al-most brutal critique of the 1935 second draft of Benjamin's Arcades Project (the ex-pose known as "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century"), Theodor Adorno chastised Benjamin for "discarding the category of hell found in the first sketch." "Hell," emphasized Adorno, was key both to the "luster" and "dialectical coher-ence" of Benjamin's analysis. "To revert to the language of the splendid first sketch of the Arcades," Adorno scolded, "if the dialectical image is nothing but the mode of apprehension of the fetish character in the collective consciousness, then the Saint-Simonian conception of the commodified world as utopia might well be disclosed, but not its obverse—the dialectical image of the nineteenth century as hell. But only the latter could put the image of the Golden Age in its proper place......"
The same dialectical injunction applies to the paradises of our new Golden Age. Brecht, "contemplating Hell" (in the tradition of Shelley confronted with the staggering wealth and squalor of London) decided that Hell "must be even more like Los Angeles." Many of the "dreamlands" described in the pages that follow are, in fact, iterations of Los Angeles, or at least "California lifestyle," as a global phantasmagoric ideal, which the nouveaux riches pursue with the same desperate zeal in the desert of Iran and the hills of Kabul as they do in the gated suburbs of Cairo, Johannesburg, and Beijing. But, as in autochthonic Los Ange-les, Hell and the Mall are never more than a freeway drive apart. Thus The Real Housewives of Orange County, like their counterparts in Hong Kong's tong-phony
"Palm Springs" or Budapest's neo-Hapsburg gated communities, exploit the labor of maids who themselves live in slums or even chicken coops on the roofs of mansions. The Metropolis-like phantasmagoria of Dubai's super-skyscrapers or the Olympic megastructures in Beijing arise from the toil of migrant workers whose own homes are fetid barracks and desolate encampments. In the larger perspective, the bright archipelagos of utopian luxury and "supreme lifestyles" are mere parasites on a "planet of slums."
And precisely because the price of "paradise" is human catastrophe, we can share little of Benjamin's optimism about historical redemption through the "genuine" utopian aspects of such fantasies. Let's not kid ourselves: these studies map terminal, not anticipatory, stages in the history of late modernity. They ex-pand our understanding of what Luxemburg and Trotsky had in mind when they warned of "Socialism or Barbarism." Indeed, viewed as an ensemble, these idle redoubts stand as testaments to the resignation with which humanity squanders the borrowed time on which it now lives. If Benjamin evoked a society that "dreamed itself waking," these gilded dreamworlds have no alarm clocks; they are willful, narcissistic withdrawals from the tragedies overtaking the planet. The rich will simply hide out in their castles and television sets, desperately trying to consume all the good things of the earth in their lifetimes. Indeed, by their very existence, the indoor ski slopes of Dubai and private bison herds of Ted Turner represent that ruse of reason by which the neoliberal order both acknowledges and dismisses the fact that the current trajectory of human existence is unsustainable.
i Dubai, Hong kong, Beijing, Johanesburg, Egypten, Brasilien men även Iran
där dagens superclass byggt djävulska paradis mha extrem fattigdom.
Vågar man läsa historien + se dagens realitet i vitögat förstår man R. Luxenburg och Trotsky ödesmättade förutsägelse Socialism or Barbarism
This is nothing less than a utopian frenzy, and the early twenty-first century, with its global vogue for evil paradises (of which Dubai may be both the most re-markable and sinister) recapitulates many of the same mythic, impossible long-ings that Walter Benjamin discovered in his famous excavation of Baudelaire's Paris. With Marx's theory of commodity fetishism as his Rosetta stone, Benjamin unraveled the mystery of the bewitched capitalist city where human collectivity, overwhelmed by its own colossal productive powers, hallucinates its social beings a swirling "dream-life of objects." But the inverted realities and false conscious-ness of the Victorian era have now grown to Himalayan, life-threatening propor-tions. If the iron-and-glass arcades of the 1850s were the enchanted forests of early consumer capitalism, today's luxury-Chemed environments—including city-sized supermalls, artificial island suburbs, and faux downtown "lifestyle centers"—function as alternative universes for privileged forms of human life. On a planet where more than 2 billion people subsist on two dollars or less a day, these dream-worlds enflame desires—for infinite consumption, total social exclusion and physical security, and architectural monumentality that are clearly incompati-ble with the ecological and moral survival of humanity.
Monstrous paradises, indeed, presume sulfurous antipodes. In his dense, al-most brutal critique of the 1935 second draft of Benjamin's Arcades Project (the ex-pose known as "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century"), Theodor Adorno chastised Benjamin for "discarding the category of hell found in the first sketch." "Hell," emphasized Adorno, was key both to the "luster" and "dialectical coher-ence" of Benjamin's analysis. "To revert to the language of the splendid first sketch of the Arcades," Adorno scolded, "if the dialectical image is nothing but the mode of apprehension of the fetish character in the collective consciousness, then the Saint-Simonian conception of the commodified world as utopia might well be disclosed, but not its obverse—the dialectical image of the nineteenth century as hell. But only the latter could put the image of the Golden Age in its proper place......"
The same dialectical injunction applies to the paradises of our new Golden Age. Brecht, "contemplating Hell" (in the tradition of Shelley confronted with the staggering wealth and squalor of London) decided that Hell "must be even more like Los Angeles." Many of the "dreamlands" described in the pages that follow are, in fact, iterations of Los Angeles, or at least "California lifestyle," as a global phantasmagoric ideal, which the nouveaux riches pursue with the same desperate zeal in the desert of Iran and the hills of Kabul as they do in the gated suburbs of Cairo, Johannesburg, and Beijing. But, as in autochthonic Los Ange-les, Hell and the Mall are never more than a freeway drive apart. Thus The Real Housewives of Orange County, like their counterparts in Hong Kong's tong-phony
"Palm Springs" or Budapest's neo-Hapsburg gated communities, exploit the labor of maids who themselves live in slums or even chicken coops on the roofs of mansions. The Metropolis-like phantasmagoria of Dubai's super-skyscrapers or the Olympic megastructures in Beijing arise from the toil of migrant workers whose own homes are fetid barracks and desolate encampments. In the larger perspective, the bright archipelagos of utopian luxury and "supreme lifestyles" are mere parasites on a "planet of slums."
And precisely because the price of "paradise" is human catastrophe, we can share little of Benjamin's optimism about historical redemption through the "genuine" utopian aspects of such fantasies. Let's not kid ourselves: these studies map terminal, not anticipatory, stages in the history of late modernity. They ex-pand our understanding of what Luxemburg and Trotsky had in mind when they warned of "Socialism or Barbarism." Indeed, viewed as an ensemble, these idle redoubts stand as testaments to the resignation with which humanity squanders the borrowed time on which it now lives. If Benjamin evoked a society that "dreamed itself waking," these gilded dreamworlds have no alarm clocks; they are willful, narcissistic withdrawals from the tragedies overtaking the planet. The rich will simply hide out in their castles and television sets, desperately trying to consume all the good things of the earth in their lifetimes. Indeed, by their very existence, the indoor ski slopes of Dubai and private bison herds of Ted Turner represent that ruse of reason by which the neoliberal order both acknowledges and dismisses the fact that the current trajectory of human existence is unsustainable.
When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai
Japp och vi fortsätter väl med den 
Jag tyckte Las Vegas var vulgärt men det överträffas tydligen av Dubai med råge.
Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai By Mike Davis
As your jet starts its descent, you are glued to your window. The scene below is astonishing: a twenty-four-square-mile archipelago of coral-colored islands in the shape of an almost-finished puzzle of the world. In the shallow green waters be-tween continents, the sunken shapes of the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Colosseum are clearly visible. In the distance, three other large island groups are configured as palms within crescents and planted with high-rise resorts, amuse-ment parks, and a thousand mansions built on stilts over the water. The 'Palms' are connected by causeways to a Miami-like beachfront crammed with mega-hotels, apartment skyscrapers, and yachting marinas.
`As the plane slowly banks toward the desert mainland, you gasp at the even more improbable vision ahead. Out of a chrome forest of skyscrapers soars a new Tower of Babel. It is an impossible half-mile high: taller than the Empire State Building stacked on top of itself. You are still rubbing your eyes with won-derment as the plane lands and you are welcomed into an airport shopping emporium where seductive goods entice: Gucci bags, Cartier watches, and one-kilogram bars of solid gold. The hotel driver is waiting for you in a Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph. Friends had recommended the Armani Inn in the 170-story tower, or the seven-star hotel with an atrium so huge that the Statue of Liberty would fitting inside it, and service so exclusive that the rooms come with personal butlers; but instead you have opted to fulfill a childhood fantasy. You always have wanted to play Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
"Your jellyfish-shaped hotel, the Hydropolis, is, in fact, exactly sixty-six feet below the surface of the sea. Each of its 220 luxury suites has clear plexiglass walls that provide spectacular views of passing mermaids and of the famed underwa-ter fireworks: a hallucinatory exhibition of water bubbles, swirled sand, and carefully deployed lighting. Any initial anxiety about the safety of your sea-bottom resort is dispelled by the smiling concierge. The structure has a multilevel fail-safe security system which includes protection against terrorist submarines as well as missiles and aircraft.
Although you have an important business meeting at Internet City with clients from Hyderabad and Taipei, you have arrived a day early to treat yourself NJ one of the famed adventures at the Restless Planet theme park. After a sooth-ing night's sleep under the sea, you board a monorail for this Jurassic jungle. Your first encounter is with some peacefully grazing brontosaurs. Next you are at-taked by a flock of velociraptors, the animatronic beasts—designed by experts from the British Natural History Museum—so flawlessly lifelike that you shriek in fear and delight. With your adrenaline pumped up by this close call, you round off the afternoon with some snowboarding on the local indoor snow mountain (outdoors, the temperature is 105 degrees). Nearby is the world's largest mall- the altar of the city's famed Shopping Festival, which attracts millions of frenetic s consumers each January—but you postpone the temptation. Instead, you indulge fit some expensive Thai fusion cuisine. The gorgeous Russian blonde at the resturant bar stares at you with vampirish hunger, and you wonder whether the local sin is as extravagant as the shopping.
Jag tyckte Las Vegas var vulgärt men det överträffas tydligen av Dubai med råge.
Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai By Mike Davis
As your jet starts its descent, you are glued to your window. The scene below is astonishing: a twenty-four-square-mile archipelago of coral-colored islands in the shape of an almost-finished puzzle of the world. In the shallow green waters be-tween continents, the sunken shapes of the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Colosseum are clearly visible. In the distance, three other large island groups are configured as palms within crescents and planted with high-rise resorts, amuse-ment parks, and a thousand mansions built on stilts over the water. The 'Palms' are connected by causeways to a Miami-like beachfront crammed with mega-hotels, apartment skyscrapers, and yachting marinas.
`As the plane slowly banks toward the desert mainland, you gasp at the even more improbable vision ahead. Out of a chrome forest of skyscrapers soars a new Tower of Babel. It is an impossible half-mile high: taller than the Empire State Building stacked on top of itself. You are still rubbing your eyes with won-derment as the plane lands and you are welcomed into an airport shopping emporium where seductive goods entice: Gucci bags, Cartier watches, and one-kilogram bars of solid gold. The hotel driver is waiting for you in a Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph. Friends had recommended the Armani Inn in the 170-story tower, or the seven-star hotel with an atrium so huge that the Statue of Liberty would fitting inside it, and service so exclusive that the rooms come with personal butlers; but instead you have opted to fulfill a childhood fantasy. You always have wanted to play Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
"Your jellyfish-shaped hotel, the Hydropolis, is, in fact, exactly sixty-six feet below the surface of the sea. Each of its 220 luxury suites has clear plexiglass walls that provide spectacular views of passing mermaids and of the famed underwa-ter fireworks: a hallucinatory exhibition of water bubbles, swirled sand, and carefully deployed lighting. Any initial anxiety about the safety of your sea-bottom resort is dispelled by the smiling concierge. The structure has a multilevel fail-safe security system which includes protection against terrorist submarines as well as missiles and aircraft.
Although you have an important business meeting at Internet City with clients from Hyderabad and Taipei, you have arrived a day early to treat yourself NJ one of the famed adventures at the Restless Planet theme park. After a sooth-ing night's sleep under the sea, you board a monorail for this Jurassic jungle. Your first encounter is with some peacefully grazing brontosaurs. Next you are at-taked by a flock of velociraptors, the animatronic beasts—designed by experts from the British Natural History Museum—so flawlessly lifelike that you shriek in fear and delight. With your adrenaline pumped up by this close call, you round off the afternoon with some snowboarding on the local indoor snow mountain (outdoors, the temperature is 105 degrees). Nearby is the world's largest mall- the altar of the city's famed Shopping Festival, which attracts millions of frenetic s consumers each January—but you postpone the temptation. Instead, you indulge fit some expensive Thai fusion cuisine. The gorgeous Russian blonde at the resturant bar stares at you with vampirish hunger, and you wonder whether the local sin is as extravagant as the shopping.
When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Hejsan!
Jepp, fullständigt sjukt, hela rasket. Dessutom förstörde man de korallrev som fanns i vattnen, fisket kolapsade och hela denna strand är idag förstörd tack vare detta monstruösa skrytbygge. Efter oljan står de där som tomma monument över en hybrisekonomisk vansinnesfärd, och det lär ta århundraden att återskapa det naturliga igen, eller så låter man det förfalla och då tar det tusentals år.
Sjukt är namnet.......
MVH
bigj
Jepp, fullständigt sjukt, hela rasket. Dessutom förstörde man de korallrev som fanns i vattnen, fisket kolapsade och hela denna strand är idag förstörd tack vare detta monstruösa skrytbygge. Efter oljan står de där som tomma monument över en hybrisekonomisk vansinnesfärd, och det lär ta århundraden att återskapa det naturliga igen, eller så låter man det förfalla och då tar det tusentals år.
Sjukt är namnet.......
MVH
bigj
Den goda sidans försvarare
Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai
Fantasy Levitated
Welkome to a strange paradise. But where are you? Is this a new Margaret Atwood novel, Philip K. Dick's unpublished sequel to Blade Runner, or Donald Thrumph on acid? No. It is the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai in 2010. After Shanghai (current population 15 million), Dubai (current population 1.5 million) is the planet's biggest building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consump-tion and what the locals boast as "supreme lifestyles." Despite its blast-furnace climate (on typical 120-degree summer days, the swankier hotels refrigerate their swimming pools) and edge-of-the-war-zone location, Dubai confidently predicts that its enchanted forest of six hundred skyscrapers and malls will attract fif-teen million overseas visitors a year by 2010, three times as many as New York City. Emirates Airlines has placed a staggering $37 billion order for new Boeings and Airbuses to fly these tourists in and out of Dubai's new global air hub, the vast Jebel Ali airport.' Indeed, thanks to a dying planet's terminal addiction to Arabian oil, this former fishing village and smugglers' cove proposes to become one of the world capitals of the twenty-first century. Favoring diamonds over rhinestones, Dubai has already surpassed that other desert arcade of capitalist de-sire, Las Vegas, both in sheer scale of spectacle and the profligate consumption of water and power.'
Dozens of outlandish megaprojects—including the artificial "island world" (where Rod Stewart has reportedly spent $33 million to buy "Britain"), the earth's tallest building (Burj Dubai, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill), the un-derwater luxury hotel, the carnivorous dinosaurs, the domed ski resort, and the hypermall are already under construction or about to leave the drawing board.' The seven-star hotel, the spinnaker-shaped Burj Al-Arab—looking much like the set of a James Bond film—is already world-famous for its $ 5,000-per-night rooms with one-hundred-mile views and an exclusive clientele of Arab royalty, English rock stars, and Russian billionaires. And the dinosaurs, according to the finance director of the Natural History Museum, "will have the full stamp of authority of the Museum in London, and will demonstrate that education and science can be fun"; and profitable, since the "only way into the dinosaur park will be through the shopping mall."'
The biggest project, Dubailand, represents a vertiginous new stage in fantasy environments. Literally a "themepark of themeparks," it will be more than twice the size of Disney World and employ 300,000 workers who, in turn, will entertain fifteen million visitors per year (each spending a minimum of $100 per day, not including accommodation). Like a surrealist encyclopedia, its forty-five major "world-class" projects include replicas of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the I A I Mahal, and the Pyramids,' as well as a snow mountain with ski lifts and polar tears, a center for extreme sports, a Nubian village, Eco-Tourism World, a vast Andalusianspa and wellness complex, golf courses, autodromes, race tracks, Fantasia, the largest zoo in the Middle East, several new five-star hotels, a modern art gallery, and the Mall of Arabia.
Welkome to a strange paradise. But where are you? Is this a new Margaret Atwood novel, Philip K. Dick's unpublished sequel to Blade Runner, or Donald Thrumph on acid? No. It is the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai in 2010. After Shanghai (current population 15 million), Dubai (current population 1.5 million) is the planet's biggest building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consump-tion and what the locals boast as "supreme lifestyles." Despite its blast-furnace climate (on typical 120-degree summer days, the swankier hotels refrigerate their swimming pools) and edge-of-the-war-zone location, Dubai confidently predicts that its enchanted forest of six hundred skyscrapers and malls will attract fif-teen million overseas visitors a year by 2010, three times as many as New York City. Emirates Airlines has placed a staggering $37 billion order for new Boeings and Airbuses to fly these tourists in and out of Dubai's new global air hub, the vast Jebel Ali airport.' Indeed, thanks to a dying planet's terminal addiction to Arabian oil, this former fishing village and smugglers' cove proposes to become one of the world capitals of the twenty-first century. Favoring diamonds over rhinestones, Dubai has already surpassed that other desert arcade of capitalist de-sire, Las Vegas, both in sheer scale of spectacle and the profligate consumption of water and power.'
Dozens of outlandish megaprojects—including the artificial "island world" (where Rod Stewart has reportedly spent $33 million to buy "Britain"), the earth's tallest building (Burj Dubai, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill), the un-derwater luxury hotel, the carnivorous dinosaurs, the domed ski resort, and the hypermall are already under construction or about to leave the drawing board.' The seven-star hotel, the spinnaker-shaped Burj Al-Arab—looking much like the set of a James Bond film—is already world-famous for its $ 5,000-per-night rooms with one-hundred-mile views and an exclusive clientele of Arab royalty, English rock stars, and Russian billionaires. And the dinosaurs, according to the finance director of the Natural History Museum, "will have the full stamp of authority of the Museum in London, and will demonstrate that education and science can be fun"; and profitable, since the "only way into the dinosaur park will be through the shopping mall."'
The biggest project, Dubailand, represents a vertiginous new stage in fantasy environments. Literally a "themepark of themeparks," it will be more than twice the size of Disney World and employ 300,000 workers who, in turn, will entertain fifteen million visitors per year (each spending a minimum of $100 per day, not including accommodation). Like a surrealist encyclopedia, its forty-five major "world-class" projects include replicas of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the I A I Mahal, and the Pyramids,' as well as a snow mountain with ski lifts and polar tears, a center for extreme sports, a Nubian village, Eco-Tourism World, a vast Andalusianspa and wellness complex, golf courses, autodromes, race tracks, Fantasia, the largest zoo in the Middle East, several new five-star hotels, a modern art gallery, and the Mall of Arabia.
When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Re: Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai
Gigantism
Under the enlightened despotism of its emir and CEO, fifty-eight-year-old Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbnism. Multibillionaire Sheikh Mo—as he is known to Dubai's expats—has a straightforward, if immodest, goal: I want to be number one in the world."' Althrough he is an ardent collector of thoroughbreds (the world's largest stable) and super-yachts (the 525-foot-long Project Platinum, which has its own submarine and flight deck), his consuming passion is over-the-top, monumental architecture inded, he seems to have imprinted Scott and Venturi's bible of hyperreality, Learn-ing From Las Vegas, in the same way that pious Muslims memorize the Qur'an. One of his proudest achievements, he often tells visitors, is to have introduced gated communities to Arabia, the land of nomads and tents.
Thanks to his boundless enthusiasm for concrete and steel, the coastal desert has become a huge circuitboard upon which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertain-ment zones, artificial islands, glass-domed "snow mountains," Truman Show Surburbs, cities within cities, whatever is big enough to be seen from space and bursting with architectural steroids. The result is not a hybrid but an eerie chimera: a promiscuous coupling of all the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jon Jerde, Steve Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Although compared variously to Las Vegas, Manhattan, Orlando, Monaco, and singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation and mythologization: a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly.
The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days (including Dubai's envious neighbors, the wealthy oil oases of Doha and Bahrain),' but al-Maktoum has a distinctive and in-violable criterion: everything must be "world class," by which he means number one in the Guinness Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world's largest theme-park, the biggest mall (and within it, the largest aquarium), the tallest building, the largest international airport, the biggest artificial island, the first sunken hotel, and so on. Although such architectural megalomania is eerily reminiscent of Al-bert Speer and his patron's vision of imperial Berlin, it is not irrational. Having "learned from Las Vegas," al-Maktoum understands that if Dubai wants to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle East and South Asia (its officially de-fined "home market" of 1.6 billion people), it must ceaselessly strive for visual and environmental excess. If, as Rowan Moore has suggested, immense, psychotic as-semblages of fantasy kitsch inspire vertigo, then al-Maktoum wants us to swoon.
From a booster's viewpoint, the city's monstrous caricature of futurism is simply shrewd branding for the world market. As one developer told the Financial Times, "if there was no Burj Dubai, no Palm, no World, would anyone be speak-ing of Dubai today? You shouldn't look at projects as crazy stand-clones. It's part d building the brand."" And its owners love it when architects and urbanists, like George Katodrytis, anoint it as the cutting edge:
Dubai is a prototype of the new post-global city, which creates appetites rather than solves problems.... If Rome was the "Eternal City" and New York's Manhattan the apotheosis of twentieth-century congested urbanism, then Dubai may be consid-ered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over the land and sea.
In its exponential quest to conquer the architectural record books, moreover, Dubai has only one real rival: China—a country that now has 300,000 millionaires and is predicted to become the world's largest market for luxury goods (from Gucci to Mercedes) in a few years. Starting from feudalism and peasant Maoism, respectively, both have arrived at the stage of hypercapitalism through what Trotsky called the "dialectic of uneven and combined development." As Baruch KneiPaz writes in his admirable precis of Trotsky's thought:
In appending new forms the backward society takes not their beginnings, nor the stages of their evolution, but the finished product itself In fact it goes even further; it copies not the product as it exists in its countries of origin but its "ideal type," and it is able to do so for the very reason that it is in a position to append instead of go-ing through the process of development. This explains why the new forms, in a backward society, appear more perfected than in an advanced society where they are approximations only to the "ideal" for having been arrived at piecemeal and within the framework of historical possibilities.
In the cases of Dubai and China, all the arduous intermediate stages of commer-cial evolution have been telescoped or short-circuited to embrace the "perfected" synthesis of shopping, entertainment, and architectural spectacle on the most pharaonic scale.
As a sweepstake in national pride—Arabs versus Chinese--this frantic quest for hyperbole is not, of course, unprecedented; recall the famed competition be-tween Britain and imperial Germany to build dreadnoughts in the early 1900s. But is it an economically sustainable strategy of development? The textbook an-swer is probably not. Architectural gigantism has always been a perverse symp-tom of economies in speculative overdrive, and each modern boom has left behind overweening skyscrapers, the Empire State Building or the former World Trade Center, as its tombstones. Cynics rightly point out that the hypertrophic real-estate markets in Dubai and urban China are the sinks for global excess profits--of oil and manufacturing exports, respectively—currently being pyra-mided by rich countries' inability to reduce oil consumption and, in the case of the United States, to balance current accounts. If past business cycles are any guide, the end could be nigh and very messy Yet, like the king of the enigmatic
floating island of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels, al-Maktoum believes that he has dis-covered the secret of eternal levitation.
The lodestone of Dubai, of course, is "peak oil" and each time you spend fifty dollars to fill your tank, you are helping to irrigate al-Maktoum's oasis. Fuel prices are currently inflated by industrial China's soaring demand as well as growing fears of war and terrorism in the global oil patch. According to the Wall Street journal, "consumers will [have paid] $1.2 trillion more in 2004 and 2005 together for oil products than they did in 2003."'1 As in the 1970s, a huge and disruptive transfer (d wealth is taking place between oil-consuming and oil-producing nations. Already visible on the horizon, moreover, is Hubbert's Peak, the tipping point, when new petroleum reserves will no longer offset global demand, and thereafter I oil prices will become truly stratospheric. In some utopian economic model, perhaps, this windfall would become an investment fund for shifting the global econ-omy to renewable energy while reducing greenhouse gas output and raising the environmental efficiency of urban systems. In the real world of capitalism, how-ever, it has become a subsidy for the apocalyptic luxuries that Dubai is coming to epitomize.
Under the enlightened despotism of its emir and CEO, fifty-eight-year-old Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbnism. Multibillionaire Sheikh Mo—as he is known to Dubai's expats—has a straightforward, if immodest, goal: I want to be number one in the world."' Althrough he is an ardent collector of thoroughbreds (the world's largest stable) and super-yachts (the 525-foot-long Project Platinum, which has its own submarine and flight deck), his consuming passion is over-the-top, monumental architecture inded, he seems to have imprinted Scott and Venturi's bible of hyperreality, Learn-ing From Las Vegas, in the same way that pious Muslims memorize the Qur'an. One of his proudest achievements, he often tells visitors, is to have introduced gated communities to Arabia, the land of nomads and tents.
Thanks to his boundless enthusiasm for concrete and steel, the coastal desert has become a huge circuitboard upon which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertain-ment zones, artificial islands, glass-domed "snow mountains," Truman Show Surburbs, cities within cities, whatever is big enough to be seen from space and bursting with architectural steroids. The result is not a hybrid but an eerie chimera: a promiscuous coupling of all the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jon Jerde, Steve Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Although compared variously to Las Vegas, Manhattan, Orlando, Monaco, and singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation and mythologization: a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly.
The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days (including Dubai's envious neighbors, the wealthy oil oases of Doha and Bahrain),' but al-Maktoum has a distinctive and in-violable criterion: everything must be "world class," by which he means number one in the Guinness Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world's largest theme-park, the biggest mall (and within it, the largest aquarium), the tallest building, the largest international airport, the biggest artificial island, the first sunken hotel, and so on. Although such architectural megalomania is eerily reminiscent of Al-bert Speer and his patron's vision of imperial Berlin, it is not irrational. Having "learned from Las Vegas," al-Maktoum understands that if Dubai wants to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle East and South Asia (its officially de-fined "home market" of 1.6 billion people), it must ceaselessly strive for visual and environmental excess. If, as Rowan Moore has suggested, immense, psychotic as-semblages of fantasy kitsch inspire vertigo, then al-Maktoum wants us to swoon.
- World's Tallest Buildings
Building Location Height in feet Year
1. Burj Dubai Dubai 2600+ 2008
2. Al Burj Dubai 2300 ?
3. Taipei 101 Taiwan 1667 2004
4. Shanghai World China 1613 2008
5. Fordham Spire Chicago 1550 2010
6. Petronas Tower Kuala Lumpur 1483 1998
7. Sears Tower Chicago 1451 1974
8. Jin Mao China 1381 1999
9. Freedom Tower Manhattan 1362 2012
- World's Largest Shopping Malls
Building Location Area in mill sqft. Year
1.Dubai Mall Dubai 12.0 2008
2. Mall of Arabia Dubai 10.0 2010
3. Mall of China China 10.0 ?
4. Triple Five Mall China 10.0 ?
5. South China Mall China 9.6 2005
6. Oriental Plaza China 8.6 ?
7. Golden Resources China 7.3 2004
8. West Edmonton Canada 5.3 1981
9, Panda Mall China 5.0 ?
10. Grandview Mall China 4.5 2005
From a booster's viewpoint, the city's monstrous caricature of futurism is simply shrewd branding for the world market. As one developer told the Financial Times, "if there was no Burj Dubai, no Palm, no World, would anyone be speak-ing of Dubai today? You shouldn't look at projects as crazy stand-clones. It's part d building the brand."" And its owners love it when architects and urbanists, like George Katodrytis, anoint it as the cutting edge:
Dubai is a prototype of the new post-global city, which creates appetites rather than solves problems.... If Rome was the "Eternal City" and New York's Manhattan the apotheosis of twentieth-century congested urbanism, then Dubai may be consid-ered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over the land and sea.
In its exponential quest to conquer the architectural record books, moreover, Dubai has only one real rival: China—a country that now has 300,000 millionaires and is predicted to become the world's largest market for luxury goods (from Gucci to Mercedes) in a few years. Starting from feudalism and peasant Maoism, respectively, both have arrived at the stage of hypercapitalism through what Trotsky called the "dialectic of uneven and combined development." As Baruch KneiPaz writes in his admirable precis of Trotsky's thought:
In appending new forms the backward society takes not their beginnings, nor the stages of their evolution, but the finished product itself In fact it goes even further; it copies not the product as it exists in its countries of origin but its "ideal type," and it is able to do so for the very reason that it is in a position to append instead of go-ing through the process of development. This explains why the new forms, in a backward society, appear more perfected than in an advanced society where they are approximations only to the "ideal" for having been arrived at piecemeal and within the framework of historical possibilities.
In the cases of Dubai and China, all the arduous intermediate stages of commer-cial evolution have been telescoped or short-circuited to embrace the "perfected" synthesis of shopping, entertainment, and architectural spectacle on the most pharaonic scale.
As a sweepstake in national pride—Arabs versus Chinese--this frantic quest for hyperbole is not, of course, unprecedented; recall the famed competition be-tween Britain and imperial Germany to build dreadnoughts in the early 1900s. But is it an economically sustainable strategy of development? The textbook an-swer is probably not. Architectural gigantism has always been a perverse symp-tom of economies in speculative overdrive, and each modern boom has left behind overweening skyscrapers, the Empire State Building or the former World Trade Center, as its tombstones. Cynics rightly point out that the hypertrophic real-estate markets in Dubai and urban China are the sinks for global excess profits--of oil and manufacturing exports, respectively—currently being pyra-mided by rich countries' inability to reduce oil consumption and, in the case of the United States, to balance current accounts. If past business cycles are any guide, the end could be nigh and very messy Yet, like the king of the enigmatic
floating island of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels, al-Maktoum believes that he has dis-covered the secret of eternal levitation.
The lodestone of Dubai, of course, is "peak oil" and each time you spend fifty dollars to fill your tank, you are helping to irrigate al-Maktoum's oasis. Fuel prices are currently inflated by industrial China's soaring demand as well as growing fears of war and terrorism in the global oil patch. According to the Wall Street journal, "consumers will [have paid] $1.2 trillion more in 2004 and 2005 together for oil products than they did in 2003."'1 As in the 1970s, a huge and disruptive transfer (d wealth is taking place between oil-consuming and oil-producing nations. Already visible on the horizon, moreover, is Hubbert's Peak, the tipping point, when new petroleum reserves will no longer offset global demand, and thereafter I oil prices will become truly stratospheric. In some utopian economic model, perhaps, this windfall would become an investment fund for shifting the global econ-omy to renewable energy while reducing greenhouse gas output and raising the environmental efficiency of urban systems. In the real world of capitalism, how-ever, it has become a subsidy for the apocalyptic luxuries that Dubai is coming to epitomize.
When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Re: Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai
Miami of the Persian Gulf
According to his hagiographers, Dubai has arrived at its blessed state thanks largely to the entrepreneurial vision that al-Maktoum inherited from his father, Sheikh Rashid, who "committed himself and his resources to turning his emirate into a modern world-class entropy where free enterprise flourished." In fact, Dubai's irresistible rise, like that of its parent, the United Arab Emirates, owes as much to a sequence of fortuitous geopolitical accidents. Dubai's chief regional advantage, paradoxically, has been its modest endowment, now rapidly being exhausted, of offshore oil. With a tiny hinterland lacking the geological wealth of Kuwait or Abu Dhabi, Dubai has escaped poverty by a Singaporean strategy of becoming the key commercial, financial, and recreational hub of the Gulf. It is a postmodern "city of nets"—as Brecht called "Mahagonny"—where the super-profits of the international oil trade are intercepted and then reinvested in Arabia's one truly inexhaustible natural resource: sand. (Indeed, megaprojects in Dubai are typically measured by volumes of sand moved: one billion cubic feet in the case of the "island world.") If the current megaproject blitzkrieg, exemplified by Dubailand, succeeds as planned, Dubai will derive all of its GDP from non-oil activities like tourism and finance by 2010."
The platform for Dubai's extraordinary ambitions has been its long history as a haven for smugglers, gold dealers, and pirates. A late-Victorian treaty gave Lon don control over Dubai's foreign affairs, keeping the Ottomans and their tax collectors out of the region, but otherwise allowing the al-Maktoum dynasty to exploit their ownership of the only natural deepwater port along four hundred miles of what was then known as the "Pirates' Coast." Pearl fishing and smug-gling were the mainstays until oil wealth began to generate increased demand for Dubai's commercial savvy and port services. Up to 1956, when the first concrete building was constructed, the entire population lived in traditional barastri homes made from palm fronds, drawing water from communal wells and tethering their goats in the narrow streets. 18
After the British withdrawal from East of Suez in 1968, Sheikh Rashid joined with the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, in 1971 to create the United Arab Emirates, a feudal federation bound together by the common threat of the Marx-ists in Oman and, later, the Islamists in Iran. Abu Dhabi possessed the greater share of the UAE'S oil wealth (almost one-twelfth of the world's proven hydro-carbon reserves), but Dubai was the more logical port and commercial center. When the city's original deepwater "creek" proved too small to handle burgeon-ing trade, the UAE's leadership used some of their earnings from the first "oil shock" to help Dubai finance construction of the world's largest man-made port, completed in 1976.
Following Khomeini's revolution in 1979, Dubai also became the Persian Gulf's Miami, providing refuge to a large community of Iranian exiles, many of whom specialized in smuggling gold, untaxed cigarettes, and liquor to their puri-tanical homeland, and to India. More recently, Dubai, under the tolerant gaze of Tehran, has attracted large numbers of wealthy Iranians who use the city—more like Hong Kong than Miami as a base for trade and binational lifestyles. They are estimated to control as much as 30 percent of Dubai's current real-estate de-velopment." Building on such clandestine connections, Dubai in the 1980s and early 1990s became the Gulf's principal dirty-money laundry as well as a bolt-hole for some of the region's most notorious gangsters and terrorists. As the Wall StreetJournal recently described the city's underside:
Its gold and diamond souks, houses of barter and informal cash-transfer storefronts
have long formed an opaque business world based on connections and clan allegiances. Black-market operators, arms dealers, terrorist financiers and money laundreners have taken advantage of the freewheeling environment, even if the vast bulk of business is legitimate."
In the early 2006 the U.S. Congress erupted in a furor over Dubai Port World's im-minent takeover of the London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation company, which operates docks from New York to Miami. Despite support from the Bush Administration, Dubai was forced to withdraw from the deal after a firestorm of accusations on cable news programs and radio talk shows about the supposed dangers of ceding control of American commercial ports to a Middle Eastern government. Much of the controversy was unquestionably fueled by anti-Arab bigotry pure and simple (U.S. port operations are already largely under management of foreign-owned firms), but Dubai's "terrorist connection," an
outgrowth of its role as the Switzerland of the Gulf, has been well documented.
Indeed, since 9/ 11 a huge investigative literature has explored Dubai's role as the financial hub for Islamic militant groups," especially al-Qaeda and the Tal-iban: "all roads lead to Dubai when it comes to [terrorist] money," claims a for-mer high-ranking U.S. Treasury official. Bin Laden reportedly transferred large sums through the government-owned Dubai Islamic Bank, while the Taliban used the city's unregulated gold markets to transform their opium taxes, paid in gold bullion, into laundered dollars.' In his best-selling Ghost Wars, Steve Coll claims that after the al-Qaeda car-bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, a CIA scheme to target bin Laden with cruise missiles while he was falcon hunting in southern Afghanistan had to be aborted because he was in t lie company of unnamed Emirati royalty. Coll adds that the CIA "also suspected that C-130s flying out of Dubai carried weapons to the Taliban.""
In addition, al-Maktoum for almost a decade provided luxurious sanctuary for Bombay's A] Capone, the legendary gangster Dawood Ibrahim. His presence in .he sheikdom in the late 1980s was hardly low-key "Dubai," writes Suketu Vlehta, "suited Dawood; he re-created Bombay in lavish parties, flying in scores of he city's top film stars and cricketers as guests, and took a film starlet, Mandakini,
as his mistress. In early 1993, according to the Indian government, Dawood, working with Pakistani intelligence officials, used Dubai as a base for organizing the infamous "Black Friday" bombings in Bombay that killed 257 people." Al-though India immediately requested Dubai to arrest Dawood, he was allowed to flee to Karachi, where he is still sheltered by the Pakistani government; his crim-inal organization, D-Company, meanwhile, has reportedly continued to be active in the sheikdom.
According to his hagiographers, Dubai has arrived at its blessed state thanks largely to the entrepreneurial vision that al-Maktoum inherited from his father, Sheikh Rashid, who "committed himself and his resources to turning his emirate into a modern world-class entropy where free enterprise flourished." In fact, Dubai's irresistible rise, like that of its parent, the United Arab Emirates, owes as much to a sequence of fortuitous geopolitical accidents. Dubai's chief regional advantage, paradoxically, has been its modest endowment, now rapidly being exhausted, of offshore oil. With a tiny hinterland lacking the geological wealth of Kuwait or Abu Dhabi, Dubai has escaped poverty by a Singaporean strategy of becoming the key commercial, financial, and recreational hub of the Gulf. It is a postmodern "city of nets"—as Brecht called "Mahagonny"—where the super-profits of the international oil trade are intercepted and then reinvested in Arabia's one truly inexhaustible natural resource: sand. (Indeed, megaprojects in Dubai are typically measured by volumes of sand moved: one billion cubic feet in the case of the "island world.") If the current megaproject blitzkrieg, exemplified by Dubailand, succeeds as planned, Dubai will derive all of its GDP from non-oil activities like tourism and finance by 2010."
The platform for Dubai's extraordinary ambitions has been its long history as a haven for smugglers, gold dealers, and pirates. A late-Victorian treaty gave Lon don control over Dubai's foreign affairs, keeping the Ottomans and their tax collectors out of the region, but otherwise allowing the al-Maktoum dynasty to exploit their ownership of the only natural deepwater port along four hundred miles of what was then known as the "Pirates' Coast." Pearl fishing and smug-gling were the mainstays until oil wealth began to generate increased demand for Dubai's commercial savvy and port services. Up to 1956, when the first concrete building was constructed, the entire population lived in traditional barastri homes made from palm fronds, drawing water from communal wells and tethering their goats in the narrow streets. 18
After the British withdrawal from East of Suez in 1968, Sheikh Rashid joined with the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, in 1971 to create the United Arab Emirates, a feudal federation bound together by the common threat of the Marx-ists in Oman and, later, the Islamists in Iran. Abu Dhabi possessed the greater share of the UAE'S oil wealth (almost one-twelfth of the world's proven hydro-carbon reserves), but Dubai was the more logical port and commercial center. When the city's original deepwater "creek" proved too small to handle burgeon-ing trade, the UAE's leadership used some of their earnings from the first "oil shock" to help Dubai finance construction of the world's largest man-made port, completed in 1976.
Following Khomeini's revolution in 1979, Dubai also became the Persian Gulf's Miami, providing refuge to a large community of Iranian exiles, many of whom specialized in smuggling gold, untaxed cigarettes, and liquor to their puri-tanical homeland, and to India. More recently, Dubai, under the tolerant gaze of Tehran, has attracted large numbers of wealthy Iranians who use the city—more like Hong Kong than Miami as a base for trade and binational lifestyles. They are estimated to control as much as 30 percent of Dubai's current real-estate de-velopment." Building on such clandestine connections, Dubai in the 1980s and early 1990s became the Gulf's principal dirty-money laundry as well as a bolt-hole for some of the region's most notorious gangsters and terrorists. As the Wall StreetJournal recently described the city's underside:
Its gold and diamond souks, houses of barter and informal cash-transfer storefronts
have long formed an opaque business world based on connections and clan allegiances. Black-market operators, arms dealers, terrorist financiers and money laundreners have taken advantage of the freewheeling environment, even if the vast bulk of business is legitimate."
In the early 2006 the U.S. Congress erupted in a furor over Dubai Port World's im-minent takeover of the London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation company, which operates docks from New York to Miami. Despite support from the Bush Administration, Dubai was forced to withdraw from the deal after a firestorm of accusations on cable news programs and radio talk shows about the supposed dangers of ceding control of American commercial ports to a Middle Eastern government. Much of the controversy was unquestionably fueled by anti-Arab bigotry pure and simple (U.S. port operations are already largely under management of foreign-owned firms), but Dubai's "terrorist connection," an
outgrowth of its role as the Switzerland of the Gulf, has been well documented.
Indeed, since 9/ 11 a huge investigative literature has explored Dubai's role as the financial hub for Islamic militant groups," especially al-Qaeda and the Tal-iban: "all roads lead to Dubai when it comes to [terrorist] money," claims a for-mer high-ranking U.S. Treasury official. Bin Laden reportedly transferred large sums through the government-owned Dubai Islamic Bank, while the Taliban used the city's unregulated gold markets to transform their opium taxes, paid in gold bullion, into laundered dollars.' In his best-selling Ghost Wars, Steve Coll claims that after the al-Qaeda car-bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, a CIA scheme to target bin Laden with cruise missiles while he was falcon hunting in southern Afghanistan had to be aborted because he was in t lie company of unnamed Emirati royalty. Coll adds that the CIA "also suspected that C-130s flying out of Dubai carried weapons to the Taliban.""
In addition, al-Maktoum for almost a decade provided luxurious sanctuary for Bombay's A] Capone, the legendary gangster Dawood Ibrahim. His presence in .he sheikdom in the late 1980s was hardly low-key "Dubai," writes Suketu Vlehta, "suited Dawood; he re-created Bombay in lavish parties, flying in scores of he city's top film stars and cricketers as guests, and took a film starlet, Mandakini,
as his mistress. In early 1993, according to the Indian government, Dawood, working with Pakistani intelligence officials, used Dubai as a base for organizing the infamous "Black Friday" bombings in Bombay that killed 257 people." Al-though India immediately requested Dubai to arrest Dawood, he was allowed to flee to Karachi, where he is still sheltered by the Pakistani government; his crim-inal organization, D-Company, meanwhile, has reportedly continued to be active in the sheikdom.
When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
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