The Nomadic Alternative – Page 63

stench of oil. "Let no one mistake the issues of war in the
Twentieth Century. Economic ideologies are now subservient to
mineral beds.

Civilization thrives on the great fallacy, "In surplus is
salvation." But the storehouses of surplus are the arsenals of
insufficiency. Civilizations eat raw materials and at present
rivals battle to confer their doubtful benefits on the cheap
labour of South-East Asia. Here is what happened to a desert
people who did not request - yet received - the benefits of
Egyptian civilization:

His Majesty imposed a punishment on the Asiatics who live
on the sands. The army returned victorious after it had hacked
up the land of the Sand-Dwellers ... after it had thrown down
their enclosures, its fig-trees and vines, had cast fire into
its dwellings, killed troops in it by many ten thousands, taken
a multitude of living captives ... The soldiers divide up the
property of their enemies. Their hearts are gay.

The troops are in good shape. Their morale is in good shape. A
satisfactory body count and kill-ratio is reported.

Mediaeval Samarkand was a city of half a million people, the
wonder of its age. A golden road led to it. Golden peaches grew in
the gardens that surrounded it. Poets rhapsodized its topiary,
parterres, fountains and canals. The arpeggios of ultramarine and
white tiled inscriptions that encircled the domes of the mosques
transported worshippers into mindless reverie. Yet in the slums acres
of iridescent slime and rotting vegetables silted the streets. Fly-
blown children played in stinking alleys, the breeding grounds of
cholera that periodically decimated the people. "The inhabitants",
a historian wrote, "use the streets as latrines and collect filth
in pits when it is carried out into the fields in sacks ... strangers
can walk about the town only by daylight." Neighbouring Bokhara
had no fairer reputation. "Bokhara is the anus of the world, and
we have rushed headlong into it", exclaimed a contemporary. "It is
excrement pure and simple", said another, "and its people are like
birds imprisoned for ever in its cages." During garbage strikes in
New York, authorities fear outbreaks of typhoid.