The future is here, and not the one with jetpacks

[major_clanger]

Read this article on the current situation in Dubai, and tell me if you too get the feeling that this is a J G Ballard story from Interzone some fifteen years ago? (Or feel free to nominate another author/magazine/era this feels like).

Nothing in this piece is news to me. But it's sobering to read it all put together.

Comments

[flick.livejournal.com]

It could so easily be a skiffy story. Which is incredibly depressing.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

That is an article that should be circulated as widely as possible; thank $deity that this type of journalism still survives.

[epocalypse.livejournal.com]

Wonderful writing, Thank you for bringing this to light.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

That's a fantastically depressing piece. Not just for the content, but because the whole situation was completely ignored by the press until the money ran out.

[unwholesome-fen.livejournal.com]

Sounds like in a few years it will be more like early Ballard - deserted city full of drained swimming pools.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Ballard by way of Ozymandias. A strange and terrible place..

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

That's grim.

Note to self - never go to Dubai......

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Thanks for linking to this. It really is appalling. No surprises, alas, but as you say, seeing it all in one piece is sobering. We have a customer who works in Dubai and might be going out later this year (he's with one of the airlines, if it survives). He's very cynical about the whole enterprise.

[robthefish.livejournal.com]

I think that this is just the first of many

[fjm.livejournal.com]

we have a campus out there. One of my colleagues was deported. The one who has to go there now grits per's teeth.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Nothing in that piece is news to anyone who reads Freakonomics and the Independent; curiously, it's not news to anyone who reads a paper taking advertising from the Dubai Tourist Board and related real-estate companies. Or rather, not in the news and never likely to be.

They fear an Islamic revolution - and with good cause, because a fundamentalist takeover in the Kingdom of Saud will roll over all the trucial states of the Gulf - but they have a blind spot over the danger of a slaves' revolt.

The Kingdom is more careful - their slaves are in isolated camps and in manageable numbers, controlled in their day-to-day infractions and escapes by a Police force who are competent in their corruption (if, indeed, it is 'corrupt' to carry out an unacknowledged policy of the state in taking payments from the slaveholder); and a widespread insurrection in any or all of the camps would be cordoned off and massacred by a mobile, well-equipped and well-drilled army.

This is not the case in Dubai, nor in any of the Trucial states of the United Arab Emirates: they aren't big enough to sequester the slaves in isolated desert camps, miles from the cities. Rather, the locals and the Western expats are surrounded and outnumbered and unarmed.

More to the point, the Emirates can't really help each other the way that Abu Dhabi did by bailing out the neighbouring Exchequer; none of them have military forces good for anything bar stopping (or conducting) a palace coup, and the dismal thuggery of their Police forces is the frontage for a chaotic backlot of corruption and incompetent command-by-nepotism. Isolated beatings and the occasional murder are the limit of their capabilities.

Would the Saudis help them out? The Emirates are vehemently independent - it's their national identity that they are not vassals of the Kingdom and accepting Saudi troops would be, in effect, capitulation to annexation. We won't help - not, at least, in any sense of direct action, although we're happy to train their officers and supply equipment - and I can't see any other country flying in troops... Not unless the insurrection is presented as an Al-Qaeda operation.

Which seems all too plausible: and I'm sure that there are troops from the Southern USA who would be delighted to take arms in defence of slave-holders... Only, not all of them.