Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

Review ebook Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

Once I read this true crime account of this serial killer and they didn’t find the bodies, I think they got him on dna, and so they ask him what did you do with the bodies. They were wondering what genius plan of disposal the guy had come up with to make ten corpses disappear without trace. And he says I cut em up and put them out with the trash. If I couldn’t get em in the bin I put em in black bags. They just took em away, every Thursday morning.

Well, you really shouldn’t laugh, but –

Once I Once I read this true crime account of this serial killer and they didn’t find the bodies, I think they got him on dna, and so they ask him what did you do with the bodies. They were wondering what genius plan of disposal the guy had come up with to make ten corpses disappear without trace. And he says I cut em up and put them out with the trash. If I couldn’t get em in the bin I put em in black bags. They just took em away, every Thursday morning.

Well, you really shouldn’t laugh, but –

Once I saw this programme, I can’t remember what, it’s hard to keep track what with this and that and the other, but they were talking about earthquakes and they showed this huge plain somewhere, like Iran I think, and there was a little river in the middle, and so that was the only place there was a village, everywhere else on this plain was deserted. So when the earthquake hit, it crushed the village and killed everyone there. Because of course the river was the fault line. So the only place the people could live was on the fault line.

This is to show the complete fucked-up-ness of the human condition.

This book goes into some considerable detail about this fuckedupness. As for instance Africa. You hear a lot about the legacy of slavery and colonialism but hah, that ain’t it. It’s harbours and rivers is your problem. Africa has got a lot of famous long rivers but they don’t join up and so you can’t sail your goods down them because every 20 miles there’s a waterfall. Very pretty but it puts the kibosh on trade. Then below the Sahara you have the tsetse fly which bites any animal you might think of as a beast of burden, like donkeys or bullocks or zebras for all I know, so they go down and die and there’s your trade gone down with them. As for the coast, it’s smooth not jagged, and that’s really a bad thing because that means hardly any natural harbours, so that means no sea trade either.

This is solid stuff but not so solid when other countries are examined like Russia. Because then we are straying from geography and getting into the United States of Paranoia which is the real name of Russia, according to Tim Marshall. It’s mental geography he is now talking about. There is a North European Plain which has been the route from Europe into Russia since time began and the guy in the Kremlin is obsessed with not being invaded via this plain. And this explains the Russian buffer state thing, they have to have their buffer states or they get really frazzled. So – you’re ahead of me – this in turn explains the current hoohah in Ukraine, and the previous switcheroo in Crimea. This latter has a warm water port and this may not mean much to you personally, but that’s because your ships aren’t frozen up in Murmansk for 8 months of the year. You can’t do nothing with cold water ports, you need a warm water one. All of the vastness of Russia and they don’t have a single one (ah geography), except now they do.

In Europe we had WW2 and the message Europeans took from that is that was the last one, no more European wars – which has almost but not quote been true for 75 years. The Russians see that as a blip. An uncharacteristic, suspicious blip.

This geography thing gets a bit repetitive – plains, mountains, rivers, plainsmountainsrivers, portsportsports, and when he gets to The Middle East (he asks the first 2 questions : Middle of what? East of what? to point out how ingrained is the eurocentricity of our western brains and maps) he is reduced to saying they all hate each other! You wouldn’t believe! which he has some strong data to back this up, like all of the current horror show from Morocco to Waziristan. But again, not really geography, this is psychohistory.

Leonard Cohen wrote a song about the entire and increasing fuckedupness of the world called “The Future” : Gimme back the Berlin wall, gimme Stalin and St Paul, I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder. That is the theme song for this book, which is hard to rate because it allows for no chink of hope to get through. The message is : there will be more of the same, but it will be different enough for you not to get bored. So, for instance, beheading videos – you have to admit that was old (13th century) but new (on Twitter).

I must stop trying to understand the human race. It passeth all understanding.
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