All those things are fantastically expensive. Usually, it’s
governments that order the clearances and relocations, which are usually farmed
out to private contractors who – if they have their wits about them – will have
bribed the politicians and bureaucrats for the privilege.
Security is a big factor, from start to finish. After all,
evicted slum-dwellers aren’t moving to a new slum, but to a whole new community
– designed by middle-class architects, and supervised by middle-class
community-organisers. The new accommodation is not intended to be any kind of
concentration-camps: quite the contrary. It's intended to
upgrade the quality of life for the beneficiaries.
Of course it takes a lot of time – one generation, two,
maybe longer – to persuade the newcomers to abandon their customary
slum-habits. Until that happy day arrives, the inmates may pose a threat to
their new neighbours and those neighbours’ possessions. So special policing is
only common sense, employed either by the government or by experienced private
security companies.
Progressively, the slums have to be physically destroyed,
and that’s also costly. Specialised labour and equipment doesn’t come cheap.
Special demolition machinery keeps specialist manufacturing companies paying generous
dividends. When there’s no demolition in the offing, the companies’ dividends
drop out of sight, and one wonders (a bit unkindly) if the companies don’t
sometimes put political pressure on governments to hurry up and plan further
demolitions. Or monetary pressure, in the form of bribery.
It crosses my mind, from time to time, that the gratuitous
wars-of-choice waged against the people of the Middle East might be motivated
for the specific purpose of making money. Apart from the obvious motive of
access to the local nations’ oil revenues, there are boatloads of money to be
made both in destroying the nations’ infrastructure and in replacing it when
the dust clears.
It’s slum-clearance on a massive scale. They may not have been slums before the bombs and drones hit them, but they certainly were afterwards.
Wars have always been fought for loot – land, persons, gold,
and other assets with rich potential… What’s not to like about war, if you’re
on the winning side? The soldiers – the cannon-fodder – don’t get all that much
out of it. The pensions aren’t bad, although the medical care isn’t as good as
advertised. But private contractors make out like bandits. The generals and colonels
also do well, through consultancy deals with TV companies and the corporate
members of the military-industrial complex.
Modern weapons cost billions of dollars, and so do security
guards and caterers. There is only the faintest risk of being held accountable
for unauthorised use, price-gouging and extortion. Families in defeated nations
have always had to buy their freedom from imprisonment and torture; only rarely
in history has that practice been frowned upon. It wasn’t supposed to happen in
the enlightened age that began with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
in 1948, but human rights have never been held in respect outside the
Goody-Two-Shoes brigade.
The latest wheeze is the mass trafficking of the newly
homeless and the soon-to-become homeless from their bombed neighbourhoods in
the villages and towns of the Middle East to safer refuges in the destroyers’
European domiciles. It doesn’t take much of a leap of faith to recognize the
standard slum-clearance pattern, exercised on a larger-than standard scale.
Destruction of homes – check. Temporary accommodation of the
homeless in tents in the deserts – check. Transport to the vicinity of the
greenfield site reserved for them – check. Temporary accommodation there, with
the necessary policing – check. Constructing permanent accommodation there –
check. Reconstructing the originally destroyed homes – check. Rinse and repeat.
Have I missed anything? Paying off all the nominal
principals, of course, but that’s routine. Slotting the generals and senior
politicians into the remunerative lecture-circuits, and arranging lesser
rewards for lesser personalities. New Toyotas for the local sub-agency, that
sort of thing…
But all that goes without saying. After all, you’ve got to
spend money to make money, right? Everybody knows that.
