When Dubai Sells Dates.

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Abu Dhabi, Currency, Curse of Oil, Dates, Dates selling, Dubai, Global Warming, Gold, Muslims, Oil barrel, Oil price 2014, Oil price collapse, Oil Price Projections, Property Market, Saudi Russia, Sex and the City 2, Skyscrapers, UAE, USA

Oil is a finite resource. It is also unevenly distributed, destructive to the environment and a wildly distortionary factor in the game of global influence. With these things conceded, it becomes easy to understand the impetus behind the search for a renewable replacement.

And while that search is now commonly regarded as a failure – Wind energy, solar power and nuclear technologies have all proven inefficient and if relied upon would ruin the global economy and collapse the Western standard of life – oil is quickly becoming less of a luxury than its producers (and pricers) are accustomed to.

The technology of shale gas extraction – though as environmentally destructive as any other form of fuel – will soon make America, Canada and much of Europe energy independent, free at last from those dubious and self-destructive alliances with the states of the Arabian Gulf.

What will happen to the producing nations when their precious resource no longer sets the pace of the global economy?

The answer will heavily depend on the country considered. Some oil-producing nations never needed to become as dependent on oil as they currently are. Russia for example, could have a modern diversified economy by now were it not for the meddling authoritarianism of the Putin Regime. Venezuela could be enjoying the same relaxed, tourist-driven tranquillity as Barbados or Dominica.

On the other hand, there are nations that have done far better with oil than they should have (or could have) without it. Among these, none risk a sharper and more dramatic fall than those states of the Gulf.

Dubai – that glistening Ballardian nightmare on the Indian Ocean – is the place to watch during this period. Dubai is the Manhattan of the United States of OPEC. And when oil goes down, so do those skyscrapers.

After all, other than tourism, oil and investment, what can Dubai offer? The only answer discoverable online is dates. Like Germany and cars, Japan and electronics, the UAE is apparently the go-to source for those annoying fruits often given as gifts but which nobody has ever liked.

As oil becomes plentiful and cheap, companies in the Gulf will desperately try to plough their funds into blue-chip companies in the West. Real estate within cities like Abu Dhabi and Dubai will be promoted as a piece of tropical paradise for wealth Westerners unimpressed with the sunshine in Monaco and Cannes.

The Gulf regimes themselves will begin to use a different tone in its diplomacy. Gone (or very moderated) will be the haughty superiority they have employed in the past, replaced over time with a panicky and tremulous pleading.

What should the world’s relationship with the Gulf in the long term be – that is, after the age of expensive oil?  In my view, it should be measured to match the scant disregard with which they have treated our own geopolitical security in their time of luxury. All the time that oil went for over $100 a barrel, the Saudis felt no anxiety in sponsoring groups dedicated to wiping out their clientele.

When Dubai is reduced to selling Dates, I suggest the West remembers this.

D, LDN.

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Dubai: Money Can’t Buy Civilisation.

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Abudhabi, American Liberty, Canada, Christianity and Islam, Christopher Caldwell, Civilisation, Civilization, Counter-Jihad, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Dubai, KFC, Middle East, Multiculturalism, No to Turkey in the EU, Qatar, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Rihanna Muslim, United Arab Emirates

What is ‘Civilisation’?

Some people, typically on the Political Left, claim (and presumably believe) that ‘Civilisation’ is fundamentally indistinct from ‘affluence’.

By implication then, ‘Civilisation’ is at base just a commodity, available for purchase to every culture and people the world over. The essence of a ‘Civilised country’ meanwhile isn’t Literature, Human Rights, Liberty, or Justice, but simply skyscrapers, fast cars, cable TV, and KFC Restaurants.

These people are wrong of course, and no better pursuasion of this can be found than the modern City-State of Dubai.

This blog is called ‘Defend the Modern World’. I should probably clarify then, exactly what I classify as ‘Modern’.

Imagine if you met an apolitical simpleton and showed him two photographs, the first of the small town of Fleming, Saskatchewan in Canada, and the second of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

If you then asked him which city of the two is more ‘ modern’, the simpleton would almost certainly pick the latter.

He’d be wrong.

Modernity for me, has little to do with technology or convenience. While I would gladly live in a Scandinavian village without electricity, I could never live happily in Abu Dhabi or Qatar. This is because the first would doubtlessly be more ‘modern’ and Civilised than the latter (with the first term here qualified by the criteria above).

Every year, Great hordes of Westerners (permanent settlers among them) travel to Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Their reasons for doing so (and this needs clarifying) have only a little to do with tax, and a lot to do with immorality.

In Dubai, after-all, you can not only exercise the mod-cons of a millionaire, but the cruelty of a medieval King.

Dubai has an entire class (by some estimates making up a majority of those resident in the country at any given time) of East and South Asian slaves. Yes, that’s right, slaves…

But maybe that’s unexeptional. Many African countries – after-all – still operate systems of slavery and then there’s the ‘caste system’ of India etc….

Where Dubai is different is in the way the slaves are treated by their masters, and by the laxity of the law in protecting them.

Regard the words of the Guardian’s Tanya Gold:

“There are 250,000 foreign workers in Dubai, drawn mostly from India and Bangladesh. They are indentured servants, in other words, slaves. The usual way to recruit them is to draw them a picture of joy — great wages, fabulous working conditions — and charge them an enormous recruitment fee. Then, when they arrive, the construction companies often steal their passports, deny them their wages and say they must work endlessly to pay for their return home, while living 10 to a room and working in the terrible heat. In Dubai, they cannot change jobs, and they cannot strike; those who do face violence or deportation. Last year, 113 Indians committed suicide in Dubai, or one every three days.”

To return to the photo comparison thought-experiment, when was the last time a migrant worker jumped off an unfinished building in Canada?

Alongside slavery, Dubai also offers lengthy prison sentences for adultery, kissing on the beach, homosexuality, transvestism, and possession of such horrific drugs of abuse as Benadryl. These prohibitions too, demonstrate a great lag in cultural time, perhaps (relative to the West) of more than a century.

Civilization, to conclude, is not a commodity. It cannot be bought. It develops inside the psyche of a population over many centuries. The desert Sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf then, skyscrapers and underwater hotels aside, have a long distance to travel.

D, LDN.