2.
THE WAR AGAINST TOURISM
by
Anthony Weir
The bomb attack on a night-club
in Bali in October 2002 was the first signal to the Western world
of a huge resentment against the tourist industry, which, like
the British Empire which paved the way, operates on a network
of collaboration with the local rich and powerful, to the increasing
impoverishment of the poor. But whereas the British Empire also
produced networks of missionaries attempting to ameliorate its
arrogant exploitation, tourism (following in the footsteps of
the anthropologists) is the "soft side" of the global
exploitation of (mainly) the great extraction companies which
have removed most of the rain forests of Indonesia and other parts
of the world, and committed secret genocides against the peoples
who lived in them and around them.
The tourist industry
destroys the 'exotic' not just by marketing it, but by imposing
its own environment upon it. The tourist industry builds horrible
and expensive hotels - from which locals are excluded by one means
or another. These hotels often include hideous, vulgar, noisy
and essentially unwholesome night clubs where the tourists claim
to "enjoy themselves" by drinking themselves stupid
or buying sexual enticement. Night-clubs are great money-spinners,
and so they proliferate more successfully than the hotels which
actually have to provide services.
These cancers
on indigenous cultures fly in almost all the food and drink which
the tourists fly in to consume. They encourage prostitution, and
inevitably attack local societies by promoting the unsightly,
alcoholic Anglo-Saxon culture of false bonhomie - which, incidentally,
has devastated more than one quiet and beautiful island of the
Mediterranean. What white Australians did to the Aboriginal peoples
- most of whom now have even lost their languages - they are doing
rather more subtly to the peoples of Indonesia. The poor of Nepal
have not benefited from the Coca-Cola trail up the high Himalayas
- which is why a Marxist rebellion continues there. The forests
of Nepal have largely disappeared, thus causing terrible erosion
- and famine. The sex-tourism in Thailand and Cambodia is a scandal
that the West has done very little to discourage. AIDS has been
spread in Asia almost entirely by tourists.
Though modern
tourism is a terrorism of 'globalisation', it is heir to (and
has ineluctably influenced) the ancient tradition of pilgrimage
to shrines all over the world, around which whole service-industries
grew from early times: hostels, hospitals, food-booths and funerals
- as well as the sale of amulets and souvenirs. Most of these
old places of pilgrimage, like most places on mainland Europe
and North America, can withstand huge influxes of modern visitors
- because they are already 'globalised'. It is the traditional
societies which are prey to the proxy-terrorism of tourism - as
to the other aspects of 'globalisation': notably the removal of
cultural and bio- diversity except where they can be tamed and
commodified. The destructive compartmentalisation of Northern/Western
life into work and leisure, for example, (or working mothers and
Filipina baby-sitters and nannies) requires much labour and total
socio-cultural disruption among the poor to serve the alcohol-laced,
fashion-led leisure of the rich. Rural economies collapse and
people flood into the tourist areas. In Europe, Spain has suffered
grievously from this, especially its fragile islands. (See Voices
of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis.) And, as for the Greek islands,
one need only read Durrell's Prospero's Cell to understand
what crimes against nature and humanity have been committed in
Corfu in order to provide vulgarity for the vulgar.
The quiet and
varied Hindu culture of Bali has been seriously eroded, leading
to a vacuum which is all too quickly filled by intolerant forms
of Islam, one of whose cornerstones has become a hatred of alcohol
and its accompanying public misbehaviour, which in the West has
taken many centuries to be controlled. Alcohol has (with church-bells
and the sign of the cross) for long been for Muslims (and most
non-Christians) the paramount symbol of the now-paramount West,
but only recently has it become a nexus of anti-Western resentment.
(Needless to say, the car-bomb on Bali - far from liberating people
already drawn into the supply-and-demand culture of 'globalisation'
- further threatens Balinese society.)
As long as Muslims
- many of whom live in artificial states created by the French
and the British - feel that they and their culture have been trashed
by triumphalist, alcohol-fired (or -swamped) Western (or, rather,
Northern) capitalism and its championing of a particularly aggressive
form of Zionism in Israel, there will be more and increasingly-violent
reaction. Even were al-Qaeda to be disabled, other groups would
form. But al-Qaeda is growing in support as a result of the 'War
on Terror' and a perceived American ignorant arrogance.
The Bali bomb
may have been only the first shot in a desperate war against the
world-trashing - but essentially fragile - tourist industry. If
so, tourism, depending as much on the silence and subjection of
the local poor as on the enthusiastic collaboration of the rich,
will largely disappear from many countries. The means of discouragement
may not be pleasant, but, as al-Qaeda and Hamas (and the Irish
Fenians before them) have shown, violence is the only weapon available
to the humiliated. Despite our much-vaunted 'Western Liberal Values'
we go on humiliating people as much as we ever did.
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