Saturday Commentary and Review #120
Macron Touts EU "Strategic Autonomy" in Beijing, De-Dollarization is Far Away, Israeli Judicial Reform & Its Models/Enablers, Golden Age of Aerospace, Camps for Witches
“Micron” won a huge battle yesterday, as France’s constitutional court approved the bulk of the legislation championed by his administration that would see, among other reforms, raising the age of retirement for French workers from 62 to 64. This proposal has led to massive demonstrations by the French people across the country, some of them violent, such as when protesters set fire to Bordeaux’s city hall. Pouring fuel on the fire, Macron sidestepped French parliament altogether, ramming through the changes using executive privilege.
From the first link above:
Macron has repeatedly called the change “necessary” to avoid annual pension deficits forecast to hit 13.5 billion euros ($14.8bn) by 2030, according to government figures.
“I’m proud of the French social model, and I defend it, but if we want to make it sustainable we have to produce more,” he said on Wednesday during a trip to the Netherlands.
“We have to re-industrialise the country. We have to decrease unemployment and we have to increase the quantity of work being delivered in the country. This pension reform is part of it.”
French leaders have been trying to reform the country’s economy to make it more productive for at least three decades now, and Macron looks like he has finally succeeded where his predecessors have failed. At what cost, though? That remains to be seen.
Macron is happy to embrace the role of ‘maverick’, whether domestically or abroad. This past week, he ruffled many feathers when during an interview with Politico Europe he stated that America’s allies should not be its “vassals”:
Macron also argued that Europe had increased its dependency on the U.S. for weapons and energy and must now focus on boosting European defense industries.
He also suggested Europe should reduce its dependence on the “extraterritoriality of the U.S. dollar,” a key policy objective of both Moscow and Beijing.
“If the tensions between the two superpowers heat up … we won’t have the time nor the resources to finance our strategic autonomy and we will become vassals,” he said.
France has for some time now been pushing the notion of “strategic autonomy” for Europe, one in which the continent has its own say in global affairs, where it does not simply parrot US policy and where it actively pursues its own interests instead of subordinating them to US goals.
The Poles think differently, viewing European strategic autonomy as a non-starter, preferring instead a closer relationship with the USA, one in which the centre of gravity in Europe moves from Paris-Berlin to Warsaw:
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s meeting with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris contrasts greatly with French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to China. The message from Warsaw is clear — the U.S. does not have to worry about Poland’s loyalty.
The tense international situation has drawn America and Poland closer together than they have ever been in the past. Warsaw and Washington understand that they cannot count on either Paris or Berlin. Poland understands only too well that it has to have the backing of the world’s first superpower, as it cannot rely on the backing of Germany and France who run the EU.
The U.S. seems to understand that it needs a more reliable partner in Europe than Germany, and with Russia and China increasingly in alliance, the U.S. wants partners it can trust in Europe. Thanks to the relentless efforts of both Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, there is now a common understanding of mutual interest between Poland and the U.S. that is far more important than any ideological disagreements between Polish conservatives and U.S. Democrats.
Note: Poland is buying itself time on the question of “the rule of law” i.e. its battle with Brussels over judicial reform at home.
Most important, however, was Morawiecki’s bold assertion that Europe does not need less America in Europe but for it to strengthen its transatlantic alliance. “I see no alternative to building a closer alliance with America,” said Morawiecki, adding that “Poland wants a strategic partnership with the U.S. on all possible levels.”
Warsaw is in the middle of a major diplomatic offensive. This is a result of the shift towards it both in NATO and the EU. It is clearly offering an alternative to Macron’s pipe dream of European strategic autonomy and the German ambitions to turn the EU into a new European Reich.
Poland has a strong alliance with the U.S. in these dangerous times. Morawiecki’s visit to Washington merely underlined that this alliance is getting stronger and deeper all the time.
Germany, the US Poodle par excellence, also poured cold water on Macron’s rejection of vassalage:
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on Thursday, April 13, criticized French President Emmanuel Macron's warning against Europe being a "vassal" of the United States as "unfortunate."
Asked on a visit to Mali by German public broadcaster ZDF about Macron's controversial remarks, Pistorius said: "I found this comment unfortunate but I think the Elysée Palace has corrected it somewhat. We have never been in danger of becoming or being a vassal of the United States," the minister added.
He said this while placing a shiny red apple on the teacher’s desk.
Back to the interview:
Europe must reduce its dependency on the United States and avoid getting dragged into a confrontation between China and the U.S. over Taiwan, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview on his plane back from a three-day state visit to China.
…..
He said “the great risk” Europe faces is that it “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy,” while flying from Beijing to Guangzhou, in southern China, aboard COTAM Unité, France’s Air Force One.
…..
“The question Europeans need to answer … is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” he said.
Macron left Beijing in a good mood:
While sitting in the stateroom of his A330 aircraft in a hoodie with the words “French Tech” emblazoned on the chest, Macron claimed to have already “won the ideological battle on strategic autonomy” for Europe.
By the time he landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris the condemnations were already flooding in:
Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, called them “embarrassing” and “disgraceful,” while Norbert Röttgen, a German Christian Democrat MP and former head of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, tweeted that Macron had “managed to turn his China trip into a PR coup for [Chinese President Xi Jinping] and a foreign policy disaster for Europe.”
Macron’s comments “not only disregard the vital place of Taiwan in the global economy, but undermines decades-long commitment of the international community to maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait,” the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) said Monday in a statement.
“It should be emphasized that the president’s words are severely out of step with the feeling across Europe’s legislatures and beyond,” read the statement, which was signed by lawmakers including 15 MPs from national legislatures in the EU — including one from Macron’s own party in France, as well as three MEPs and 13 U.K. parliamentarians.
The statement notes that Macron’s remarks are particularly ill-timed, amid ongoing military exercises by the Chinese military in the Taiwan Strait.
It’s okay, though. Europe’s most stupid woman, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, flew to Beijing afterwards to lecture and threaten China on behalf of Europe (read: America):
"It is good that China has signalled its commitment to a solution, but I have to say frankly that I wonder why the Chinese position so far does not include a call on the aggressor Russia to stop the war," Baerbock said Friday, while Borrell said it would be "helpful" in that regard if Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke to his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
and
China's Qin also used Friday's press conference to urge Germany not be too critical in its upcoming China strategy, which is planned for later this year and included a significant hardening of Berlin's position vis-à-vis Beijing in a first leaked draft.
"We should avoid strategic misunderstandings or misjudgments. We are partners, not opponents," Qin told reporters, according to the translation. "If you develop a China strategy, you should be guided by the very own interests of our two countries."
The tense press conference, during which Baerbock and Qin also clashed over human rights and trade issues, ended with the Chinese foreign minister urging his German counterpart to act reasonably and avoid “historical tragedies” – a comment that could be understood as a thinly veiled threat to Berlin.
“Our politicians and diplomats should always keep sobriety and reason,” Qin said. “Historical mistakes must not be repeated, and historical tragedies should also be avoided."
Cutting yourself off from Russia, your traditional supplier of cheap oil and gas that powers your export-driven manufacturing economy, wasn’t enough, I guess. It’s vital to also upset and enrage China too. This is masterful statesmanship that displays brilliant strategic thinking.
It’s one thing to announce a new approach to global and economic affairs, it’s another thing to actually launch and implement them.
For the past 25 years, I have never been able to go a week without seeing an article about the “death of the US dollar”, yet the Greenback remains king. Around a decade ago, I began seeing pieces insisting that the Greenback would lose its global reserve currency status thanks to challengers like the BRICS.
Moves have been made to try and use other currencies in global trade in order to weaken the Greenback’s reserve status, but so far they are fitful at best. The US Dollar as global reserve currency is one of the measurements of US power on the world stage, and if it can be knocked off of its perch, the USA would lose a significant source of that strength.
What is the status of “de-dollarization”?
For three decades, the currency has become a lever by which Washington imposes on other countries the respect of rules decided by the Americans alone. Like the embargo on Iran, following which the American authorities have severely condemned European firms that have continued transactions with Tehran via dollars (in 2014, BNP Paribas had to pay a fine of $9 billion).
Last year, the weaponization of finance took a new step. Following the invasion of Ukraine, the United States and Europe decided on unprecedented sanctions that affected not only the assets of the Russian Central Bank, but also the means of payment.
"The patent abuse of the role of the dollar as a global reserve currency will weaken it," retorted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Beyond Russia, the sanctions have caused a shock in many emerging countries, starting with China. If the United States can block a financial system with its Western allies, another financial system must be set up! Indonesian President Joko Widodo, for example, has recommended that local governments do without Visa and MasterCard.
The focus is on the dollar, both a tool and a symbol of U.S. financial dominance. Plans to pay for commodities in other currencies have been accelerated. India now pays for Russian barrels in rupees. China is multiplying agreements to pay for its purchases in yuan (nickel in Russia, oil in Iraq) and to facilitate currency exchanges (Brazil, Argentina). It could also use its digital central bank currency as a monetary spearhead. Brazil and Argentina dream of a common currency.
Early days:
And for now, the dollar remains at the heart of world finance. This is true in trade. It is involved in 88% of foreign exchange transactions, well ahead of the euro, which is at 31% (in these 2022 figures from the Bank for International Settlements, the sum is equal to 200% because each transaction involves two currencies).
Transactions involving the yuan have jumped by a whopping 70% in three years... but they represent barely 7% of the total.
This is also true for the other major function of money — reserve instruments. Nearly 60% of the world's foreign exchange reserves, which amount to some $11 trillion, are still denominated in U.S. currency.
China has held fewer U.S. Treasury bonds than at any time in the past 15 years, but it appears to be replacing some of them with US-issued real estate-backed bonds, purchased via Belgium or Luxembourg.
The de-dollarization will inevitably take place one day. But it will not happen any time soon.
Meanwhile, the USA continues to increasingly rely on sanctions regimes to get its way.
Israel is currently going through a politically tumultuous time thanks to Bibi’s efforts to reform the judiciary, a subject that I touched upon in this recent essay:
Towards the end of the essay, I linked to two articles on the subject of judicial reform in Israel, one on each side of the debate. It’s fascinating stuff with a lot of inside baseball.
For the bigger picture, the UK Guardian has provided us the service of outlining the western liberal take on what is happening: Bibi’s “assault” on the judiciary is “inspired by Poland and Hungary” and “enabled by far right American Jews”:
Netanyahu’s assault on the judiciary reminds many of the first steps taken by “illiberal” governments in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere. Legal experts say targeting the judiciary is the natural first step for modern would-be autocrats who want to dismantle the broader democratic framework.
“If you want to conduct a modern coup d’etat you no longer need to employ serious force and to kill people, you don’t need the army and blood in the streets. The first institution to destroy is the judiciary. Everything else can come afterwards,” said Eli Salzberger, the director of the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions at the University of Haifa.
When Viktor Orbán was elected prime minister in Hungary in 2010, he quickly enacted a constitutional amendment to change the nomination and election procedure for constitutional court judges, as well as changing the number of judges on the court from 11 to 15.
Orbán is still in power, and in the intervening years has moved to dismantle much of Hungary’s free media and make numerous other changes with the result that last year a group of European parliament members declared the country is no longer a full democracy.
“This playbook was written in Budapest back in 2010, and later used by the Poles, by [President] Sisi in Egypt and others,” said Gábor Halmai of the European University Institute in Florence.
Halmai noted that Israel and Hungary have no second chamber of parliament and no strong president who can act as a check to the executive, which makes the highest courts even more important.
There is also a sense that the examples of Hungary and Poland have served as a warning of where the country might be heading. Parts of the crowd at the protest were chanting: “Israel is not Hungary, Israel is not Poland,” according to one Polish television correspondent attending the demonstrations in Tel Aviv.
“The people in Poland and Hungary who were saying some years ago that this will go much further and have an impact on fundamental rights were considered to be fearmongers who were not giving the benefit of the doubt to these governments,” said Anna Wójcik, a Polish legal scholar.
“Israelis already know what has happened in other backsliding democracies – it’s such a big theme already,” she added.
Israel is plagued with an activist court, something that westerners are all too familiar with these days.
A prominent member of the Israeli parliament has a warning for America’s Jewish community: one of the greatest threats to Israeli democracy comes from within its own ranks.
On a visit to New York to rally opposition against the “judicial coup” by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, rabbi Gilad Kariv cautioned that “rightwing forces in the Jewish community in America and ultra-right players” were driving and financing the push toward a political takeover of Israel’s supreme court and nationalist policies to tighten control over the occupied Palestinian territories.
“There are major Jewish players here in America that are coming from the American far right who are deeply involved in pushing this reform. If liberal and progressive and democratic Jewish forces around the world will not stand together with us, other players will influence events in a much more serious way. That’s a real battle for the future of the Jewish state,” he told the Guardian.
The “culprits”:
“The Kohelet Forum, which is the main ultra-conservative thinktank that designed this judiciary reform, is fully supported by the leading Jewish donors of the American ultra-conservative camp,” said Kariv.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed two years ago that the organisation is partly funded by two Jewish American billionaires, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, who made their fortunes as founders of a global financial firm, Susquehanna International Group, including by investing in the invention of TikTok. Both have funded rightwing causes and politicians in the US.
more:
The Haaretz investigation said American donors have given tens of millions of dollars to Kohelet through US-based organisations that shield their identities. Yass and Dantchik have also been influential through their ties to leading Republicans in shifting US policy on Israel including in providing the Trump administration with legal justifications for recognition of settlements in the occupied territories.
The moves to weaken the Israeli supreme court are also influenced by another US organisation, the Tikvah Fund led by Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative former senior official under several Republican presidents who played an important role in the US’s bloody involvement in Central America in the 1980s and one of the intellectual architects of the invasion of Iraq 20 years ago.
I thought NGOs were a “force for democracy”?
Six or seven years ago, I met a Canadian couple from Calgary here in Split. This part of Europe was the last leg of their year-long trip around the world. Both were in their late 40s, and both were teachers at a private school.
I got to chatting them up as we were on a ferry from Split to one of the islands, and asked them what most impressed them during their travels. “China!”, they both enthusiastically exclaimed. These two, very moderate types, described to me at length all the modernization that they had seen while there, particularly infrastructure such as trains and train stations.
This stuck with me, because it made me understand just how important tangible technological progress is in the minds of most. We in the West have grown accustomed to being the world’s leaders in practically everything, but China is surging ahead in many fields. This leads us to pose both practical and existential questions.
I’m old enough to have watched The Jetsons on TV when I was kid. It’s an old trope, but yes, we were promised flying cars. Instead, we got Uber. The America of the 50s, 60s, and even the 1970s was coloured in part by its technological leadership and mastery, with the Apollo 11 mission the most emblematic of all. America was THE leader of the Jet Age, and it could build anything that it wanted to.
A little over two generations later and the USA can no longer build on a grand scale. Where China continues to lay train tracks by the thousands of miles, California can’t even get a bullet train past bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles. With an aging and decrepit national infrastructure for all to see, it’s little wonder why so many people see America’s best days in the rear view mirror.
Brian Balkus has written a wonderful essay on the “Golden Age of Aerospace”, a time when the “can-do” spirit still drove America and Americans. The combination of human knowledge, dedication of resources, and concentration led the USA to make massive advancements in technology, from jet propulsion through to plane design.
The importance of human knowledge vs. reliance on inherited technical knowledge:
A 28-year-old Stanford-educated mechanical engineer, Major Robert Staver, was placed in charge of Special Mission V-2 to capture intelligence about the rocket’s design. When he had been working in London before the assignment, a V-2 missile had nearly killed him when it exploded above the building he worked at. Staver led searches through underground weapons factories built into mountains and interviewed prisoners, including Walther Riedel, the Nazi’s top scientist in its rocket design bureau. Riedel talked to Staver for hours, detailing his obsession with outer space vehicles he dubbed “passenger rockets,” as well as “space mirrors which could be used for good and possibly evil.” Riedel told Staver he could provide the names of at least 40 other scientists who should be brought to America to complete this important work, noting that if the U.S. did not act the Soviets certainly would.
Staver’s superiors became convinced through his interviews and others that the true prize for the U.S. wasn’t technical drawings or even intact planes and rockets—it was the people who conceived of them. Operation Overcast became Operation Paperclip, which brought over 1,600 German scientists and engineers to work for the United States.
Among these scientists was the physicist and engineer Wernher Von Braun, who was the central figure in the V-2 program. In 1960, Von Braun and 120 Germans who came to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip were transferred to the newly-formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where they would develop the Saturn rockets that brought astronauts to the surface of the moon. Another 86 German researchers and test pilots were placed at an Army Air Force base in Ohio as part of Operation Lusty (i.e., LUftwaffe Secret TechnologY), where they helped the Americans exploit the secrets of German jet technology.
By then the American company Lockheed had already built and flown a jet fighter plane, but the Germans helped to improve future jet aircraft designs, build supersonic wind tunnels to test experimental planes, and advanced America’s aeronautical engineering research and development by four or more years.
As for FIAT, which stuck to gathering German technical data, the intelligence proved of almost no value and the operation was considered a failure. The contrast between the outcomes of Operations FIAT and Paperclip tells us something about the nature of technical knowledge. There are huge chunks of technical knowledge that cannot be acquired by reading texts. And history has shown that it is only possible to access this knowledge through the humans who possess it.
Los Angeles as aerospace hub:
While lacking the technical sophistication of Germany, Los Angeles was an aerospace manufacturing hub with over 20 airframe and aircraft manufacturers in the surrounding area during the 1930s. The sector exploded over the course of the war, employing over two million people in the production of over 300,000 planes. American strategists began wondering what was possible if the country’s manufacturing capabilities were paired with an aerospace R&D function that could match or exceed the Germans.
In 1944, Von Karman met with Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Force, for a series of talks held mainly during long rides in the general’s staff car at an air base outside of New York City. Arnold told Von Karman the outcome of the war had already been decided. It had been won by airpower.
He was now focused on the future; he asked Von Karman to form a SAG, or scientific advisory group, and oversee the production of a series of reports that would look at every element of the future of aerospace. Entitled Toward New Horizons, it included analyses of the technology that would “secure us the conquest of the air over the entire globe.”
The legendary Skunk Works at Lockheed Martin:
While rocket research was stalling, jet aircraft research and development was of paramount importance to a newly independent U.S. Air Force. One organization stands out as the best of the companies who specialized in this work: Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects group, better known by its nickname—Skunk Works.
The history of Skunk Works can be traced back to 1943 when German fighter jets first appeared in the skies over Europe. A 33-year-old American engineer, Kelly Johnson, was tasked with building a jet fighter prototype in 180 days to match the new German fighter planes. He selected around 50 design engineers and shop mechanics and rented out a circus tent because space was limited at the Lockheed factory. The tent was set up next to a smelly plastics factory—hence the Skunk Works nickname.
Johnson’s team delivered the plane, the P-80 Shooting Star, 37 days ahead of schedule. Lockheed would go on to manufacture nearly 9,000 of them after the war. The plane would prove itself in the Korean War during dogfights over “MiG Alley” in the skies above North Korea; the first all-jet dogfight in history ended with a U.S. pilot flying a P-80 downing a Soviet-made MiG-15.
The capabilities of Skunk Works were eye-opening to its government clients and the CIA in particular. The agency had an interest in aerial reconnaissance capabilities that would enable it to peer deep into the Soviet Union. The circumstances created the conditions for an entirely new type of organization designed by and for engineers with one abiding passion: building the fastest and highest-flying military aircraft ever built.
Skunk Works developed a track record of delivering planes that were far ahead of their time on incredibly short deadlines. Its projects were frequently initiated at the presidential level and involved building planes for top-secret missions at the height of the Cold War. They were known as the “CIA’s unofficial toy-makers” as they built the experimental Air Force fighter planes that tipped the technological balance of power in favor of the United States. Some of Skunk Work’s most famous planes included the F-104 Starfighter, the first supersonic attack jet; the SR-71 Blackbird, which could fly more than three times the speed of sound; the U-2 Spy plane; and the F-117 Nighthawk, the first plane able to operate with stealth technology.
The culture there:
The atmosphere at the Skunk Works facility was both intense and informal, with the men clustered together in a big barn-like room. Many had been working with machines their whole life. Ben Rich, who succeeded Johnson as head of Skunk Works recounted that he built his first airplane, a Piper Cub, in his backyard when he was only 14 years old.
It was an unusually tolerant workplace when it came to homemade projectiles. One engineer converted a piece of a jet’s tailpipe into a fourteen-inch blowgun and would occasionally fire clay pellets at the necks of others when they got on his nerves. Another engineer built a square cannon in his spare time to prove the concept could work, then accidentally launched the square shells he built for it through a neighbor’s house.
Those that remained at Skunk Works were a self-selecting group; you had to love the job because of what it demanded from you. Meeting a deadline for a project could mean working 14-hour days for seven days a week for months on end. And because many of these projects were classified your work couldn’t be discussed at home.
Then and now:
But even if aerospace progress didn’t stop when this generation retired, it certainly seemed to slow. Projects have become more expensive, bureaucratic overhead has increased, and industrial capabilities have eroded since then. The cost of developing a fighter plane increased by a factor of 100 from the 1950s to the 1980s, which resulted in fewer new planes being built. In the 1950s the American aerospace industry developed 49 planes; in the 1980s that number had dropped to seven. Instead of working on 20 or more plane designs over the course of a career, an engineer who started his career in the post-Cold War era could be expected to work on one.
A few years after the Cold War was over there would be only five “prime” aerospace and defense contractors left, and wide swathes of aerospace industry employees left the field completely. Instead of building multiple new planes, the Pentagon tried to save money by building one 5th generation fighter plane that could do it all. This plane became Lockheed Martin’s F-35, which began development in 1995. Nearly three decades later, it is still suffering from a long list of production issues. As of publication, the number of “open deficiency reports” on the fighter plane sits at over 800.
The F-35 as emblematic of US industrial decline:
The problem with the F-35 is the problem with the current American aerospace industry writ large. It has retained its research and development expertise while sacrificing its manufacturing excellence in a multi-decade deindustrialization process. The plane’s complex supply chain includes 1,800 companies stretched across 48 states and Puerto Rico. The spread-out structure of the supply chain, a stark contrast from Johnson’s philosophy of putting the engineering team in the same physical room as the production line, ensures political support for the F-35 program but exacerbates a series of supply chain and production issues. Due to these issues, Lockheed Martin delivered fewer than 50 percent of the planes it targeted to deliver in 2022.
The erosion of the U.S.’s aerospace manufacturing base that began in the 1990s is only set to worsen. The small manufacturers spread across the country that make up the supply chain of companies like SpaceX and Lockheed Martin are staffed by machinists who are near retirement age. This geographic dispersion causes major problems in the design phase of aerospace projects because the lead time to receive products is so lengthy it makes it difficult to iterate designs. Instead, engineers have to take even more time to double-check and carefully simulate their designs before committing to the long wait for prototypes. The tight connection between engineering design and manufacturing seen at Skunk Works during the Blackbird era is gone.
We end this weekend’s Substack with a look at Ghana’s concentration camp for witches, the existence of which continues to frustrate many observers.
The shift towards social gossip, rumour, exorcism, therapeutic interventions and confession is a legacy of colonial rule, although lethal violence does still occur from time to time. A meningitis outbreak in 1997 killed nearly 550 people across northern Ghana and led to vigilante attacks on older women. Several were lynched and others beaten and stoned to death. Outraged NGOs and journalists began investigating the conditions for women, particularly in northern Ghana, and discovered a shocking reality. Not only were women being killed as witches in higher numbers than expected, but many thousands of women were fleeing to makeshift camps - witch’s camps. Pieces appeared in the international cosmopolitan press, decrying the conditions, particularly at the largest such camp - Gambaga - in the north east region of the country.
Between the 60’s and the 90’s there was a feeling amongst scholars that African witchcraft would simply ‘go away’, under the combined pressures of modernisation and globalisation. But this didn’t happen. Researchers such as Jean and John Comaroff and Peter Geschiere began pointing out that witchcraft and the fears surrounding it intensified and morphed as different African nations began to develop, both politically and economically. Fears of zombies, evil factories, possessed politicians, ambulances roaming at night stealing blood, Satanic murders, ritualistic killings for company profit, the international trade in body parts, digital curses and hexes, penis-snatching, killer mobile phones and more proliferated under what scholars called ‘occult economies’. Success and failure in this new world took on the extra dimension of witchcraft, and whoever might be jealous enough to hold you back could be using magical powers against you.
Fascinating stuff!
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“Not only were women being killed as witches in higher numbers than expected...”
“Than expected” caught my eye. I wonder how many “witch-killings” we were expecting?
Lots of great stuff to read here, thanks for posting!