Vienna - Internationally well-known Swiss personality and ex-UN envoy Jean Ziegler spoke on Wednesday evening of finance capitalism as "an absurd, murderous world order".
The result was "mountains of gold in the West" and "mountains of corpses" in the South, he said in a lecture in the Vienna Volkstheater presenting his new book "Hatred of the West".
"This evening there is no longer any objective shortage on this planet. Each child dying of starvation is murdered." The people in the South were up in arms against the world order, said the former UN envoy against hunger, and ex-Swiss parliamentarian.
Ziegler took a look at the West through the eyes of the South. He spoke of a "wounded memory", and its gradual development to new awareness.
Taking over a thesis by Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, he explained that if something terrible happened in the life of a person, rationality became paralyzed. Only three or four generations later did the "wounded memory" become political awareness.
For the peoples of the South, the terrible things were slavery and colonial massacres. Slavery was 120 years back, and colonial massacres in Algeria took place in the 1960's.
Today the "wounded memory" was being transformed into a "historical power of resistance", and there was "a renaissance of collective identity", with damands for apologies and restitution.
A new historical force was emerging among the peoples of the South, where more than two-thirds of humanity lived. There was an urge to "break the cannabalistic world order".
At present, the 500 biggest firms in the world produced 52 percent of the global gross domestic product. In 15 years world trade had increased three times over. But by the end of 2009, 17 million children would have starved to death.
"We're living under the dictatorship of globalized financial capital, which is seen in the South as the West's final instrument of oppression."
Ziegler was fiercely critical of the world neoliberal economic system. The "neoliberal lunacy" had poisoned everyone, even European Social Democracy.
The growing hatred of the West by the poor and dispossessed was not only paralyzing the United Nations, but also blocking international negotiations.
"Only when we understand what traumatizing wounds were left in the collective memory of the peoples by colonialism, slavery and exploitation, linked with arrogance and moral superiority complexes, will we succeed in overcoming the hatred by concrete action", said Ziegler.
