So Many Truths. So Many Parallels.

"The Arabs, by their own testimony, have become spectators to their history. A struggle rages between the Iranian theocracy and the Pax Americana for primacy in the Persian Gulf and the Levant. The Arabs have the demography—360 million people by latest count—and the wealth to balance Iran’s power. But they have taken a pass in the hope that America—or Israel, for that matter—would shatter the Iranian bid for hegemony.

We are now in the midst of one of those periodic autopsies of the Arab condition. The trigger is the publication last month of the Arab Human Development Report 2009, the fifth of a series of reports by the by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on the state of the contemporary Arab world"

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"(A)ll Arabs combined had a smaller manufacturing capacity than Finland with its five million people, and a vast Arabic-speaking world translated into Arabic a fifth of the foreign books that Greece with its 11 million people translates. With all the oil in the region, tens of millions of Arabs were living below the poverty line."

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"Wily rulers, the men at the helm may have failed their peoples. They may have denied them decent educational systems. They may not have figured out a way into the modern world economy. But they have mastered the art of political survival....The economic dominance of the rulers, the absence of the countervailing power of property and the private sector, has increased the awesome power of the governments and their security establishments."

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"According to the UNDP’s report, government revenues as percentage of GDP are 13% in Third World Countries, but they are 25% in the Middle East and North Africa. The oil states are a world apart in that regard: the comparable figures are 68% in Libya, 45% in Saudi Arabia, and 40% in Algeria, Kuwait and Qatar. Oil is no panacea for these lands. The unemployment rates for the Arab world as a whole are the highest in the world, and no prophecy could foresee these societies providing the 51 million jobs the UNDP report says are needed by 2020 to “absorb young entrants to the labor force who would otherwise face an empty future.”

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"The simple truth is that the Arab world has terrible rulers and worse oppositionists. There are autocrats on one side and theocrats on the other. A timid and fragile middle class is caught in the middle between regimes it abhors and Islamists it fears.

Indeed, the technocrats and intellectuals associated with these development reports are themselves no angels. On the whole, they are unreconstructed Arab nationalists. The patrons of these reports are the likes of the Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi and the Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi, intellectuals and public figures whose stock-in-trade is presumed Western (read American) guilt for the ills that afflict the Arabs. Anti-Americanism suffuses this report, as it did the earlier ones."

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"One day an Arab chronicle could yet be written, and like all Arab chronicles, it would tell of woes and missed opportunities. It would acknowledge that brief interlude when American power gave Arab autocracies a scare, and when a despotism in Baghdad and a brutal “brotherly” occupation in Beirut were laid to waste. The chroniclers would have to be an honest lot. They would speak the language of daily life, and the truths that Arabs have seen and endured in recent years. On that day, the “human development reports” would be discarded, their writers seen for the purveyors of double-speak and half-truths they were."

Compare now to the third Aboriginal Governance Index published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg, where even the best First Nations governments are somewhat middling.

""To simply grant powers to any government does not ensure that elections are fairly run, that a government is transparent or that the administration is clean. And those are all critical factors as good governance benefits the entire community.”

More details on the survey:

* For the first time, the Aboriginal Governance Index included both a long and a short survey. The longer survey was used to gather more in-depth information about each First Nation.
* The sample size this year is 5,106, with 1,688 coming from Manitoba, 2,616 from Saskatchewan and 802 from Alberta. Of these, 4,635 are short surveys and 471 were long form.
* Overall, in all three provinces, 45.7 per cent of the respondents were male and 54.3 per cent female.
*Many communities either declined to participate or refused entry to our workers onto their reserve." (Emphasis mine)

Kinda makes you wonder what the bottom half would have been like had those "communities" participated. There's likely a good reason why they refused.

The thing is, the Indian Industry is very fond of quoting all sorts of sorry statistics about crime, poor quality health, school dropout rates, on and on and on ad nauseam when it is called upon to blame the "whiteman" or the Department of Indian Affairs or "internal colonialism", or some such cutesy bogeyman, all the while attempting to extract more money from said bogeyman. But let someone else point to the same sorry statistics and there's hell to pay. Not only that, but out come the denials that things are as bad as they claimed they are while in bogeyman mode.

It's a game that has been played for nearly forty years and which shows very little evidence of being over. As long as there is money to be made, pockets to be lined, cushy contracts or positions to be obtained with government or in guilt-ridden industry-funded enterprises the Industry will live on.

Will the day come that the "purveyors of double-speak and half-truths" in the Indian Industry will be exposed? We can see what happens when alternative views, such as those proposed by Tom Flanagan and Frances Widdowson are aired. The captains of the Industry go positively apoplectic and begin hurling desperately emotional scatter shot in all directions but the correct one.

Yup. Arab Nationalism and the Indian Industry. Always pointing the finger of blame somewhere else so as to protect the status quo and their own hide.

Peas in a pod.