by Pietro Villari, 2023. All rights reserved.
Article posted in Italian language on 19 June
2023 and in English language on 23 June 2023.
Claude Levi Strauss, Sad
Tropics and the epilogue of globalist anthropocentrism
My generation of paleoethnologists from
naturalistic studies, formed between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, had the
fortune to be nourished not only by strong ideals, by teaching and associating
with excellent scholars, by conducting archaeological explorations in most
fascinating and remote sites known at the time, but also to participate
constructively in the debates that generated the new methodological and
doctrinal approaches of our profession. For me and some other colleagues
specialized in Prehistory at the Special School for Archaeologist of the
University of Pisa and later at the Laboratory of Quaternary Ecology of the
Dept. of Anthropology, University of Florence, among the most intriguing
fundamental texts were those of Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009), father of the
structural anthropology. Every time I reread them, new ideas popped up that
were useful for my researches.
Among his writings we all preferred "Sad
Tropics" (1), a brilliant work: diary 1935-1939 of passionate
scientific research carried in the Brazilian rainforest, autobiographical
novel, poignant ethnographic account, testimony of the irreversibility of the
loss of archaic and traditional cultures of the planet, and last but not least
a philosophical work, in some points with prophetic latencies. I was struck by
the aseptic lack of truly spiritual references, as if the author's experience
had precluded all hope. And yet, for anyone who wants to hear it, the “sacred”
hovers in every page of his books, despite being of a rationalist orientation.
As already among the Bedouins of the Southern
Jordanian desert, in the remote villages of the Peruvian Andes, and even in
Rapa Nui, the most isolated of the Polynesian islands, in those years I had
understood all the bitterness of Lévi-Strauss in the last two decades of his
centenary life: every possibility dreamed of as a young man to be able to live
and study the fascinating, exotic and remote "primitive" communities
was now precluded as they were extinct. I could only see the sad consequences,
having been deeply corrupted and engulfed in comparison with the massive
destructive work carried out by the power of modernity, neocolonialism and
globalism with the aim of inducing an all-encompassing planetary monoculture.
At the end of the 1970s, the majority of Italian
scholars still could not grasp the profound meaning of that sort of mournful
affliction, strongly perceptible especially among French anthropologists, for
the disappearance of the last "primitive" populations and their very
rich cultural heritage. A Humanity that for hundreds of thousands of years had
lived in harmony with the ecosystem in which it felt part and not the master,
dissolved in the face of realities harbingers of new pejorative disasters,
epilogue of the anthropocentric behavioral drift.
Rapadisneyland
Annihilation of the fundamental values of the
indigenous culture, overpopulation, insufficient livelihood activities,
depletion of available food resources, disposal of solid waste, coastal and
groundwater pollution, effects of the decrease in the annual amount of rain,
erosion of the entire coastal perimeter, soil washout, constant annual presence
of arson, ethnic conflicts, represent for Rapa Nui the problems currently
identifiable to face its future. They would require immediate political and
economic choices, some certainly unpopular, to the point that it will be
difficult to work effectively to resolve them within the current decade.
What is happening today can instead be defined
as a demanding operation of political interest, the purpose of which is to set
up an imposing technocratic-led bureaucratic administrative apparatus on the
island, capable of guaranteeing a system of total control by the Chilean
government of the activities carried out therein. It constitutes a dangerous
double-edged sword for all the players sitting at the table in this match, as
the stake is the formation of the dominant local power, as part of the Chilean
national one which is in turn a component of the pro-Western South American
group.
Scholars today have the rare opportunity to be
able to observe, in a geographically circumscribed economic and political
system such as Rapa Nui, the dynamics of development of the pyramid of public
administration and, as always happens in these circumstances, the local Deep
State group as a reference for the national one and therefore for the
transnational powers to which it is connected (2). Ultimately,
today's choices will underpin responses to international events that will
happen throughout much of this century.
What we can see today is that, on the one hand,
there is the rapid progress of the government program, aimed at strengthening
control of the island through a local technical-administrative pyramid, which
goes alongside the presence of the Chilean army and police forces. In the next
few years, it will be made up of a large group of young natives indoctrinated
on the Continent and well paid, with the role of management class of the
governing bodies of the island, and at the lower levels, employees with minor
roles. The local body of "rangers", part of the Nature &
Monuments department, will soon be considerably reinforced with new personnel
for the control functions, to safeguard the park and in general the heritage
spread throughout the island. It will constitute a kind of police force
well-vehicled, and equipped also with technologies internationally used in
natural parks.
On the other hand, it is obvious to predict that
this pro-government pyramid will involve very high management costs for the
community, starting with salaries, means and technologies, which will
necessarily absorb a lot of electricity, a precious asset for a small island in
the middle to an ocean. All this could become incompatible with the system, in
the event of a long crisis in the island's economy, as it is currently based on
the precarious sustainability of tourist activities, this depending above all on
the capacity of air transport and the travel freedoms granted by the countries
of origin, which thus keep the flows of huge masses of tourists recorded in the
last decade constant. However, the intense exploitation for tourism purposes is
the main cause of the physical and cultural wear of the island and its
population, a problem of growing gravity that sooner or later will present the
bill.
It is also understandable how much this
bureaucratic pyramidal construction, which can be defined as a sort of robust,
but weakly elastic knitted sheath which in theory should guarantee good
governance, constant monitoring and maintenance of the community, can at the
same time undermine the foundations of coexistence and indigenous independence
aspirations. It is not at all rare that in a westernized region, the presence
of a mass of administrative entities in a territory with a special statute,
such as Rapa Nui for example, can lead to the emergence of a particular social
caste whose roles go beyond the purposes of interest pro-government.
In fact, even if little known in the news
reports, a fact in itself highly disturbing, its main "parallel"
activity is destined to soon become that of a multifunctional logistic
structure, more or less secretly connected to structures of the dominant
transnational power, to its multinational lobbying business subsidiaries, to
pro-Western service clubs such as Rotary and the Freemasons (3). A
logistic apparatus whose ramified dense presence in the territory, generally
characterized by self-referential authorities, corporate connivance and
omertous behavior, is capable of corrupting government purposes, creating
profound hostility in the population, reaching the point of favoring the
atavistic aspiration for independence based on the return to ancient Polynesian
way of life.
We can see a similar situation in many other
places (especially islands) of the planet, which subjected to the “Western”
hegemonic system have assumed the characteristics sadly known as banana
republics, where the absence of social justice reigns alongside a wide
range of corrupting possibilities of the public administration. From direct
experience, I can refer to what represents a classic example of the results of
the Westernizing manipulation operation: Sicily.
There too a population has an historically
strong pro-independence vocation, a fact that made easy to manipulate
politically and economically the lower classes, and to satisfy the ambitions of
the new middle and upper social classes, that renounced to claim the
independence rights to have a status in the Italian society thru the Autonomous
Statute grant to the Island by the government. At the same time, the operation
was accompanied by the establishment of a mammoth bureaucratic apparatus of
control (the "knitted sheath" mentioned above), also building up
several important US military bases. Nowadays is a highly strategic site of the
hegemonic system of the so-called Western Bloc.
Over half of the Sicilian population has now
lost a large part of its linguistic heritage, the main element of the cultural
identity that characterized it until the 1960s, replaced by the Italian one.
But in the last decades a consistent part of student got a PhD in USA, England
and other Anglo-Saxon Countries to and soon they will constitute the management
class of island. In this way, deprived of the profound existential meanings of
the Sicilian cultural identity, the scientific research and enhancement of its
archaeological, monumental and naturalistic heritage, and of popular
traditions, have become only a container of elements useful for tourist
exploitation. So, Sicilian people, are becoming an example of cultural
alienation. As estranged from themselves, today only the worst characteristics
remain, being by now a society that has made in its own way, an ape of the flat
standardization of the American lifestyle, moreover financed with a huge
quantity of funds that the Italian government has obtained in loan from the
European Union. In the impossibility of returning them on the agreed date, they
will make the State insolvent and therefore totally at the mercy of the
transnational powers that represent the real dominant power within the European
Union (4).
The Rapanui pyramidal establishment formed by
the Chilean government, is a way of guaranteeing the Island to the pro-Western
system in the event that in a few decades (that is, at least a new Rapanui
generation) could be decided useful to make the island independent. At that
time the Rapanui culture will be already deeply modified by manipulations aimed
at determining the phenomenon of ethnolysis. In fact, the recent enormous
number of crossings of indigenous people with allochthonous elements and the creation
of a quantity of government jobs, essential for "naturalizing" and
therefore making stable the future belonging of the island's population to the
Western cultural sphere, can be attributed to this.
The comparison with the dissolution of the
ancient Sicilian independentism (5), although different actors
appear, brings us back to what is happening to Rapanui independentism, to the
causes of the impossibility of a full restoration of the values of indigenous
sovereignty.
The problem facing the Rapanui today is how to
deal with the promises of immediate well-being, supported by the creation of an
impressive dislocation of stable and well-paid jobs, and the access to modern
technologies, accepting the offer in exchange of the conversion to the Western
model of life. Even knowing that, in the future, they could lead to accepting
participation in those ravenous operations of territorial exploitation,
conducted by the various power groups that make up the dominant system in that
pro-Western area of the international geopolitical chessboard.
The characteristics of the independentism
present in Rapa Nui have legitimate foundations, being internationally
recognized the right to self-determination of a culturally and territorially
identifiable ethnic group. Consequently, so is the aspiration to re-establish
the ancient subdivision of the island into areas occupied by clans; the right
of the Council of clan chiefs to elect a ruler of the Isle; and last but not
least the right to refuse to lead a daily lifestyle dominated by the stressful
rhythms of Western culture.
In short, the indigenous Rapanui cultural model
is totally incompatible with the project of exporting "democracy made
in America" to the island, that unacceptable disguise of the
capitalist summit, fundamentally anarchist but devoted to the system imbued
with patriotism. A free-market created to control the classes subordinate to
it, seriously drugged by consumerist well-being. An expansionist project, half
narcissistic and the other half business, where everything must change so that
nothing changes at the top of the system, professed as the New World Order and
the bright future of the planet. A cynical plan, poised between the choice of a
bankruptcy catastrophe of the Western system, made to take place in slow
motion, and what it begins to consider its only alternative for salvation,
represented by the activation of a world war of total plundering of resources
in areas today outside its hegemony.
The response of the pro-Western summit to the
legitimate Rapanui requests was apparently one of opening, granting regional
administrative autonomy, but in reality it is of a totally opposite sign. For
more than a decade, the population has already been a sort of laboratory for
the cultural transformation of the younger generations. Some of these are fully
aware of what is happening to frustrate a return to ancient traditions, but
they no longer have the political and economic tools to oppose them. Slow and inexorable,
ethnolysis is underway.
The presence of operations aimed at the cultural
adaptation of indigenous communities to the needs of the Western hegemonic
summit can now be found in any area of the Western Empire. We find,
standardized, the effects of the partly alienating process of traditions not
suited to the needs of hard liberalism, with the exception of that part of them
modified by absurd Westernizing revisionisms of an ethical nature. As if
culture could be detached from the most disparate educational influences, all
irreproducible in the laboratory, among which certainly not least are the
environmental ones. Imposing forced and sudden changes to a cultural tradition
is tantamount to seriously crippling it, making it unstable in the long term.
Even in Rapa Nui we are witnessing a phenomenon
that affects small areas destined for mass tourism, where to survive the
population finds itself engaged in daily folkloric appearances. In this case,
we are halfway between a sort of Polynesian Disneyland and an operation
conceptually similar to Jurassic Park-style commercial aspirations.
Again, as in other similar places under the
hegemony of the three-dimensional network of multinational capitalism, one has
to ask whether a good portion of the earnings remains on the island or ends up
elsewhere. Whether it is sustainable tourism or rather exploitation made even
fatter by the presence of the indication "UNESCO site", which even
marks the indigenous community, a cultural unicum that should have been
protected in a much different way. It will never be possible to intervene effectively
on the consequences of the current level reached by overtourism, and in
particular on the maintenance not only of the natural and monumental heritage
of Rapa Nui, but of the cultural foundations of its community (6).
Despite the media reporting declarations of the
opposite sign, the New World Order cannot afford to protect all the rights to
the existence of ethnic typicalities, even if it really wanted to, and in fact
it works to eliminate them through the process of cultural standardization. In
cases of resistance, the irresistibility of its power appears in the
annihilation of anything that hinders its geopolitical and commercial purposes.
This has been seen for example in Italy also in the clash with national political
parties, or with criminal organizations of the mafia or Camorra type, causing
profound changes both in their top management and in their doctrines, in order
to make them functional to the hegemonic needs of the New Order Western world,
prevailing over the local ones.
What else could one expect knowing full well
that the very birth of the driving force of the current Western system, the
United States, is linked to the annihilation of indigenous populations,
starting with those who were present on what became its national territory. A
Union of States based on the progressive conquest and a huge massacre of
peoples and the disappearance of entire cultures, concluded with the
confinement of the survivors in reserves where it was impossible to continue
carrying out the traditional indigenous subsistence activities. They were also
in that case, like the “traditional” Rapanui, incompatible with the American
way of life.
The European discovery of the
existence of Rapa Nui and the end of an archaic Polynesian civilization
1722. Admiral Jacob Roggeveen, sixty-four years
old, is in command of a small naval fleet sent on an exploratory mission in the
waters of the Southern Pacific Ocean (7). He is trying to fulfill
the dream that has inspired him since he was a child: to discover the
legendary Terra Australis Incognita. After years of studies and
professional preparatory activities, he managed to convince the leaders of the
powerful West-Indische Compagnie (W.I.C., West India Company) to finance the
enterprise, in the hope of discovering new rich lands to exploit
commercially (8).
After leaving the Chilean coast and passing the
Fernandez Islands, he sails in a northwesterly direction for thousands of
kilometers, surrounded by the immense unknown expanse of oceanic waters. Thus,
it seems almost a miracle when, on the evening of April 5, 1722, on Easter
Sunday (Paaszondag in Dutch), the ships arrive in sight of an
unknown island. The admiral will then call it Paaseiland, or Easter
Island.
The Dutch discover with deep surprise that
although it is a small outcrop of volcanic origin isolated in the middle of the
ocean, it is inhabited by a few thousand indigenous people and that its coasts
are dotted with groups of huge lithic statues. The presence and quantity of
these statues (over 1100 have been recorded to date), their construction and
the difficulty of transporting them led to the assumption of technological
knowledge not attributable to those "savages". The mystery was revealed
only a few years ago, but initially the megalithic works generated hundreds of
the most disparate hypotheses, such as the attribution to a civilization of
giants that had been extinct since ancient times.
The landing on the island takes place only on 10
April. The exploration was conducted by the Admiral accompanied by 134 men,
sailors and soldiers well equipped with firearms, unknown to the islanders
until then, as were also metallurgy, weaving, uniform manufacturing, ceramics,
language and racial characteristics of what, with concern, they noted to be an
alien culture, of mysterious and potentially dangerous origins.
Having briefly visited the island and gathered
information locally with the help of a Polynesian interpreter who was part of
her crew, she probably learned of other islands present after a few weeks of
navigation in a north-westerly direction, Roggeveen continued her exploratory
journey reaching the northwest edge of the Tuamotu Archipelago, i.e. first the
atoll of Takaroa (May 18), and later the island of Makatea (June 2) (9).
Here perhaps he collects further information from the natives who definitively
convince him of the non-existence of a continent in those seas and of the
futility of continuing the exploratory mission in search of the "Terra
Australis Incognita", of which rumors have been persistently chasing
since the beginning of the sixteenth century (10).
The admiral heads for Indonesia, encountering
the archipelago of Samoa, New Guinea and the Moluccas on the way. Thus, after
having lost contact with the other ships of his fleet, he arrives in the city
founded by the Dutch, Batavia (nowadays the capital Jakarta, which from 1619 to
1799 was the seat of the offices of the West-Indische Compagnie), where
he will find officials mocking him of the failure of the mission and the
economic damage caused to the WIC, involved in the "crazy" search for
the legendary Continent.
The historical importance of the event,
immediately understood by Jacob Roggeveen during his discovery of the remains
of an ancient civilization in Easter Island, and the mystery of the presence of
megalithic statues, mattered nothing to those bureaucrats, who had counted on
the discovery of a new continent to resurrect the power Dutch. The explorer
died a few years later, but not before leaving a book in which he recounts his
adventurous life, his travels to exotic lands, his veiled deep disappointment
before the lack of gratitude for his geographical discoveries by the Dutch
state administration.
The account that Roggeveen wrote of his brief
exploration of Easter Island, with remarkable clarity for the purposes of
knowledge even though it was a document drawn up within the
bureaucratic-administrative, military and economic-commercial competence of the
Dutch state, attracted the attention of Europeans for almost four centuries.
Even today it is the oldest and most precious testimonial source available for
palethnological, paleoecological and historical studies.
This is how we learn, in contrast to what was
described by subsequent travelers starting from about half a century later, the
island was fertile and agricultural activities flourished (emphasizing the
presence of crops of different species of bananas, tubers and various other
vegetables) and to the breeding of a Polynesian subspecies of domestic rooster.
By calculating and mapping the exact position of
Paaseiland (Jacob was the son of Aarend Roggeveen, one of the best Dutch
cartographers and astronomers of the seventeenth century), he provided the
coordinates useful to other sailors who, in the same and subsequent centuries,
used it for supply of water and fresh food. Thus it was that, in the following
years, the island was reached by whalers or by ships of slave hunters coming
from the American coasts causing, within little more than a century, the
reduction of the population from about 3,000 to only 110 inhabitants and the
destruction of the precarious balance of the island ecosystem.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century the
descendants of the native survivors, also as stimulated by scientific studies
conducted by learned foreign personalities who have lived part of their life on
the island, have developed a strong awareness of what happened to their culture
and the need to protect what remained of the past. There is no doubt that the
maintenance of notions of the animist faith, in particular the cult of
ancestors, was in part tolerated and protected within the Catholic cult until
it evolved into a syncretism which has survived until today (11).
Rapa Nui and the terminal
crisis of American-style globalism
Thirty-two years have passed since the time I
lived on Easter Island (12). At that time, both the inhabitants and
the few tourists, who came there out of a spirit of adventure, could not have
imagined that within a few years the island would enter the vortex of the
global market, experiencing its immediate advantages and sad consequences.
To focus on the problems that, within this
decade, could begin to cause profound cultural, geopolitical and economic
changes in Rapa Nui, we need to understand what is happening in the countries
to which the island owes the prosperity of its current economy.
A phenomenon that exploded in the early 1990s,
globalism was based on a project of integration of the world population, eight
billion human beings, into the purely consumerist North American model of life.
Inspired by neoliberal economic doctrines that professed the establishment of a
universalist free market without customs barriers, it was touted as capable of
generating the rapid diffusion of greater well-being and social justice on a
global level. A bankruptcy ideological model, which from the beginning revealed
that its inability to extend freely in different areas of the world through
flows of capital, goods and work.
It was empirically ascertained that it required
synchronisms that were often impossible to obtain, as they found application
difficulties due to incompatibilities existing in the places where they
intended to take place (such as, for example, the protectionist government bans
on the importation or exportation of particular goods, the difficulty of
obtaining permits to conduct international commercial activities, bureaucratic
customs control times). Thus, while participating for convenience in the global
market - and having profited abundantly from it by exponentially increasing
their economic growth - the leaderships of tendentially hegemonic-competitive
powers such as China and Russia, operated in such a way as to prevent the
spread of the American cultural model.
This choice made it possible to avoid a profound
and irreversible cultural contamination, which would have led their own
populations to become an active part in the project of the global market as an
expansionist phenomenon of American hegemony.
In the case of the Russian Federation, it is
difficult to establish whether the law enforcement intervention will be
effectively successful in its western portion, as demonstrated by what has been
happening in Ukraine for several decades. On the other hand, it currently
appears rather unlikely that the populations of eastern North Asia could make
their own, in terms of free submission, the typicalities of the lifestyle
pursued by the dominant power of the "Western bloc". The situation
seems designed to wear down the Russian Federation to the point of
disintegration and create the conditions for its replacement by a western area with a group of pro-European/NAVO
states and a group of pro-Chinese states in the Eastern area.
By failing to achieve this fundamental goal of
the US-led Western hegemonic design, the negative effects caused by the
globalist operation on the American economy began to manifest themselves,
already weighed down by a public debt of catastrophic dimensions. The first to
be hit hard were employees and small businesses, belonging to the lower and
middle classes. Since the free market caused the disrupt of the internal
structure of the Western bloc's labor market, the wealthy classes linked to
large multinational companies were favored.
Undoubtedly one of the most disturbing aspects
of the whole affair – although the heads of state powers were well aware of the
tragic consequences that, in the medium term, on the basis of that liberal plan
would punctually derive from the economy of the Western bloc – very few public
figures had the will or the strength to try to oppose the manipulations
entrusted to the media machine of the dominant power. That summit of power,
made up of a mass of representatives of public and transnational private entities,
which conditioned all the political and economic choices of the pro
"Western bloc" Countries.
Thirty years later, the disastrous effects of
the globalist attempt now weigh on the future of Europe. North America has
managed to arm itself in protectionist terms in its economy, strong in its
natural resources, continuing close relations with the Anglo-Saxon countries of
what remains of the British Commonwealth. However, there is a dangerous
identity crisis, particularly in the United States, which could create an
implosion of the federal system, characterized by the centralization of wealth
and powers held by the states of the two coasts, eastern and western, to the
detriment of that part of the American territory which lies in the middle. That
traditionalist Midwest that progressives considered home to masses of
communities, characterized by low and crude culture, from which to obtain
cannon fodder, low ranked soldiers and good-mouthed consumers. This is a
situation which, if not resolved in the coming years, could escalate into civil
war.
If in sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia
there are large territories of influence probably by now considered
sufficiently exploited by the ravenous European colonialism - in some areas up
to the impoverishment of wealth driven to cause the destruction of local
ecosystems, undermining the chances of survival populations – there is also the
current situation in North Africa.
Here the energy resources of the oil wells are
destined to pass to the control of highly militarized local governments, which
are progressively moving away from the American and Western hegemonic model.
The same phenomenon, albeit in different terms, is being recorded in Western
Asia, and both continents at this rate could emerge from American hegemony by
the end of the middle of the current century.
In the worst case, parts of them will become,
together with areas of central-western Europe, places to fight a war for
hegemonic control for which several Asian countries are candidates. First India
and China and the beginning of their competitive naval expansion in the Pacific
Ocean. For its survival, China will have to secure its coasts and open the
central-western trade routes - up to the Indian Ocean, Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf countries, and last but not least the countries of the central-southern African
coast - and for this operation is essential for the occupation, annexation and
enhancement of Taiwan as a military and commercial base (13).
Without prejudice to the unknown factor
constituted by India, if China manages to prevail it will be a further blow
towards the decline of American naval hegemony, progressively replaced in the
maritime routes on which more than 90% of the planet's raw materials travel.
If it succeeds in annexing Taiwan as an integral
part of its territory, China will be able to expand its area of political and
economic influence also on the countries of the Pacific Ocean (with the
exception of Australia and New Zealand), militarily controlling the crucial
points of those rich commercial routes which, through Oceania, will make
possible the second phase of the hegemonic projection, preceded by partnerships
in areas of Central and South America.
This period of increasingly violent clashes in
many areas of the planet is already in its initial phase, and could
theoretically continue for decades, first leading to the advent of serious
governmental instabilities determined by collapses of economic chains of
international importance due to the interdependence of financial systems. A
period of global disorder dominated by constant uncertainties, determined by
the onset of a fragmentation of power into multiple coexisting hegemonic
powers. At the next level of the consequential chain, the worst of the
scenarios is the degeneration into a devastating chaos in large areas of the
planet, characterized by the disappearance of any form of territorial control,
and by the advent of wars between local militias, as has been happening for
some time in several African countries.
The current beginning of the entrenchment of the
economy of the North American area within its own borders, seems to endorse the
hypothesis that the possibility that these scenarios could materialize is
considered a real danger in the not distant future, to be placed around the
middle of the century.
It is very probable that at that time new
weapons of mass destruction, calibrated on racial genetic typicalities, and
capable of leading to the immediate and non-polluting disintegration of bodies,
leaving the environment intact. Their beneficial side effect will be to cause a
drastic solution of overpopulation and the return to a sustainable human
presence.
The start of this phase was announced in the now
distant 2001, with the brutal violence of the case, by an action charged with
symbolism as a contrast to American hegemony: by striking the United States in
the financial heart of New York, the intention was to put end to the binary
system on which until then the division of world power had been based,
West-East, symbolically represented by the Twin Towers.
An attack that can hardly still be considered as
a work designed and carried out with the sole participation of one or more
terrorist groups, being destined to represent the beginning of a new level of
confrontation between military powers in the context of the establishment of a
different hegemonic order to control the world's energy resources.
This long introduction, to contextualize the
disturbing uncertainties of the future of the Rapanui community, as the long
period of the Pax Americana ends, already within the second half of the current
decade no population, even the most remote on the planet, will be immune from
the consequences of the games of power that will come true on the international
geopolitical stage, in a progressive aggravation that could be accompanied by
the appearance of catastrophic war events (14).
It seems evident that in the long term, the fate
of the Rapanui is linked to its resilience to chaos and sudden vacuums of
hegemonic power in southeast Oceania, to the decisions of new powers that will
occupy fragmented areas of the collapsed world order and will decide how , when
and for what purposes to use the island: large open-air mining quarry, forced
emigration of a large part of the population, important logistic upgrade of the
military aeronautical base as it is located at a medium distance between South
America and New Zealand. Prolonged periods of lack of clean water, food and
medicines could lead to serious social unrest. The collapse of economic and
cultural relations with the American continent could be followed by a period of
cooperation with other powers.
If the competition between the great world
powers were to soon degenerate into an all-out war, the survival of the current
bureaucratic pyramid and the overpopulation of Rapa Nui could in a short time
be seriously compromised by the collapse of the subsistence economy, having
been based on tourism and activities connected to it, ignoring the fundamental
need to enhance the productive activities of the food chain and to remedy the
current overpopulation.
Globalism and mass tourism in
Rapa Nui
In the last decades, the mysteries concerning
the construction and transport of moai have been largely
revealed, but the island remains a center of global attraction not only for the
cultural peculiarities of its native population, the abundant megalithic
archaeological remains and the large Parque Nacional Rapa Nui which makes up about
a third of its territory.
Today there are also dozens of restaurants
specializing in recipes based on fish and shellfish (15), a dozen
excellent hotels and a number of bed & breakfasts and residential homes
offered for rent, which make a stay pleasant for those who frequented it for a
decade, also as one of the most exclusive places for international surfing and
diving.
Its coasts are dotted with specialized centers
that offer guides and instructors of a valid level, such as Papa Tangaroa, Mata
Veri, Viri Iuga O Tuki, Tahai, Huareva, Vaihu, Koe Koe, Akahanga, Motu Hava,
all mentioned in surf forecasts. com, the largest online specialist site on the
planet (16). Consulted by the international elite of surfing, the
site offers free real-time support as a "global big wave finder, with
powerfull swell with light or offshore wind".
A datum that provides a clear idea of the level
now reached by satellite monitoring in real time of the planet's surface, even
of the ocean, is that this online site provides forecasts of wave height, wind
power and direction, and temperature of the water. They have highly reliable
weekly value even for this remote place.
In 1991, at the time of my stay on the island,
the total number of residents, including the few tourists, amounted to a
maximum of about 3,000 individuals. Today the island has a stable human
presence of over 8,000 inhabitants to which over 90,000 tourists are added
annually. There is a paved road that leads from the Mataveri airport to Hanga
Roa, the small Polynesian village over the course of a few decades has become a
modern town, with the citizens who also suffer from periodic traffic jams of
tourists and vehicles, well equipped for tourism also with accommodation
facilities of a high international standard.
Rights and aspirations of the
native population in a community that has become multi-ethnic
In remote Rapa Nui, about half of the residents
have Polynesian ancestry. It is a very active part of the population, which
claims the rights to the expropriated or extorted lands (in the total absence
of legal rights) from their ancestors over the last two centuries. With
tenacious pride they defend, and pass on to the new generations, what was
preserved in the last century of the oral tradition of the ancient Rapanui
culture. A community that, among other things, places as a primary necessity a
truly functional application of the recent sustainable tourism plan, as the
pitfalls deriving from globalism have become pressing, in particular the
serious negative consequences of invasive tourism.
It is not easy to reconcile the sovereign
political and socio-economic expectations of the Chilean government – which,
let us remember, together with other South American countries seeks to confront
the rapacity of certain multinational powers – with the right-necessity to
safeguard the traditional lifestyle not only of natives, typically Polynesian,
having now extended to a large part of the entire island community. It is very
different from the American Way of Life by now ideologically identifiable as
"Western", characterized by values on which even a good half of
Americans themselves today find themselves reflecting in a profoundly critical
way. Furthermore, it cannot be kept silent that on the island there is a
minority convinced that it is possible to restore the conditions prior to the
arrival of the Europeans, the traditional economic activities consisting of
fishing, agriculture and small cattle, sheep and poultry farms, in order to
live harmoniously the days, marked out in respect of the rhythms of Nature and
in the animistic faith.
To make this lifestyle effective, the indigenous
community has long been asking for the reintegration of the original system of
division of lands, returning them to the care of family clans, the appointment
of a ruler supported by the council of clan chiefs, and to reintroduce the
ancient practice collective to devote himself to public works. The basis of
this society would therefore be constituted by the relationships of strong
emotional ties and mutual assistance, typical of family clans and of the unity represented
by the syncretic Christian-animistic religion, in which respect for the bond
with the ancestors exerts a strong social aggregation.
Despite these excellent intentions, it is
undeniable that the impressive presence of tourists during the year, mostly
belonging to European or American cultures standardized in the current form
dictated by the group of powers at the top of the "Western bloc",
constituting its "dominant system”, has become a powerful source of a
destabilizing paradigm due to the attraction that those consumerist lifestyles
exert on native youth. These are influences with corrupting consequences on the
estate of family clans and of the daily practices expression of profound
spirituality, on which Polynesian cultures base their survival.
See, for example, the effects of the diffusion
of addiction to drugs and alcohol on individual psychophysical integrity and
community activities, while the wealth deriving from tourist commercial
activities has led to the emergence of powerful social classes no longer
necessarily linked to the most appreciated by traditional Polynesian culture,
or even at odds with its values.
It is one of the methods developed to try to
reach the New World Order dominated by the Anglo-Saxon cultural model in an
American sauce. It therefore seems to be a manipulation constituting the
primary purpose of the globalist intent, carried out so that mass tourism could
become the main Western means of exporting its liberal ideology, that
consumerist lifestyle source of devastation in areas where traditional culture
still reigned, sabotaging their harmony with the ecosystem that hosted them.
Overtourism: how to create the
unsustainable ecosystem
The current human overpopulation of the island
constitutes a clearly definable danger with devastating, unsustainable effects,
in the event of total isolation, starting with food needs. The serious reality
of the effects of the depletion of marine resources follows; problems related
to the disposal of waste produced daily; ocean pollution from plastic materials
with large quantities of microplastic particles, in continuous deposition not
only in the coastal strip of the island, but also on the hills due to the
effect of winds and rains; sea level rise over the next few decades and related
coastal erosion; the worsening of extreme atmospheric phenomena; the danger and
duration of future pandemics and the evolution of current ones, such as
hemorrhagic dengue in its Polynesian variant.
Each of these problems represents a constantly
pending danger to the capacity of the sustainable economy project, recently
launched by the Chilean government and strongly desired by the local community
and the international scientific one, to curb the damage caused by the mass
exploitation of the natural and cultural attractions of the Island. However, as
can be deduced from the above, most of the problems have causes that are not
attributable to local factors and therefore uncontrollable if drastic changes
are not made, which are possible only if brought about by decisions implemented
at an international political level. A mere hope, distant and not very
credible, today considered difficult to implement for political and economic
reasons.
In the distant future, all these problems could
be accompanied by further emergencies such as uncontrolled demographic growth,
serious energy crises, destabilization and replacement of the island's
government system, racial unrest, forced transfer of part of the population,
transformation of the island into a open cast mining area, desertification.
Today tourism constitutes the pivot of the
driving activities of the local economy, to the point of creating serious
environmental problems to support it, such as the increase in deep-sea and
coastal fishing activities, and the impossibility of locally disposing of the
enormous mass of waste, generated annually by the use of materials imported
into the island for the needs of tourists and consumed for their needs.
About twenty years ago, the exploitation of the
fish fauna by deep-sea fishing by fleets of large specialized ships belonging
to large multinational companies caused a dramatic decrease in tuna fishing,
which traditionally constituted one of the main food resources of the island
population. The local fishermen were forced to resort to the intensification of
fishing along the coastal strip, with the consequent impoverishment of its
marine fauna.
An attempt has been made to stem this
destruction of the ecosystem with the issue of new protective laws and the
establishment of marine parks. The interventions are late considering the
conditions of impoverishment of the Pacific Ocean, which until the 1970s had
been preserved very rich in life, which had long since reached alarming levels.
The situation was also made worse by the massive pollution of the entire
coastal strip of the island due, among other things, to the growing problems
associated with the enormous presence of waste derived from plastics in the
Pacific Ocean. The latter constitutes an onset with highly alarming pejorative
forecasts, as the world production of non-disposable waste and highly harmful
to living conditions on the planet is on the rise. The quantities of this waste
dispersed throughout the seas also have devastating consequences for the entire
food chain of the planet, even in remote locations such as Rapa Nui (17).
Hand in hand with the explosion of the tourist
phenomenon, there has been the emergence of phenomenologies that should have
been addressed before allowing the arrival of the hordes of visitors generated
by globalizing consumerism: 1) the population's awareness of their rights of
distant autochthonous origins, also in a sovereign sense and therefore strongly
protective of their own culture and religion. In particular, it was necessary
to understand the magnitude of how much the latter is inseparable from respect
for monuments, settlements, and as a whole all the sacred places that
animistically bind the population with their ancestors, considered protectors
of the harmonious development of life in the natural island environment; 2) the
disproportionate presence of visitors on the island has led to the production
of huge quantities of waste, for the disposal of which there are very high
costs in terms of transport to Chile or Peru for their disposal; 3) the
enormous pollution of the coasts and the diffusion of microplastic powders due
to problems not dependent on local activities; 4) the need to strengthen the
hospital service, adapting it to the needs due to the coexistence in limited
areas of the island of thousands of allochthonous individuals, coming from various
areas of the world and constantly being replaced by new arrivals.
Currently, the resident population is constantly
and massively exposed to pathologies imported by travelers from their countries
of origin, some of which are presumed to be serious and transmissible,
potentially capable of determining the emergence of cases of
treatment-resistant bacteria or pandemic viral forms with high lethal impact.
The local economy is based on mass tourism,
while little practical importance is given to traditional forms of subsistence,
typically Polynesian. What would happen to the islanders in the rather probable
case that in the next few years the planet was shaken by a new pandemic, far
more aggressive than the one experienced at the time of COVID? How could they
try to survive in the absence of food self-sufficiency and strong social
cohesion, among other things capable of bringing out old grievances and transforming
themselves into a clockwork device, made up of different racial and cultural
components?
With this in mind, a government intervention
took place in 2018, in order to limit the duration of the residence permit to
thirty days (which previously granted a maximum of 90 days) citing social and
environmental reasons, and to better preserve the monumental heritage. However,
this solution seems not only merely specious, but counterproductive with
respect to the intentions, as the space created for new arrivals multiplies the
possibilities of importing diseases, especially those inherent in the spread of
epidemic infections generated by microorganisms resistant or totally refractory
to antibiotic treatments.
Yet, this seems very clear to the Chilean
government institutions, which in fact in the case of the COVID pandemic,
imposed the closure of the island to tourists in advance and severely limited
civilian air traffic from 17 March 2020 to 4 August 2022, thus trying to
prevent catastrophic consequences for the island population.
According to data from 2014, an average of 20
tons of waste is produced on the island a day, or 7,300 tons a year, including
440,000 plastic bottles. The creation of an adequate thermal waste disposal
plant on the island must come to terms with the reality of the facts. Only a
small part can be disposed of or recycled, the rest is to be allocated to an
indefinite storage area. And this represents a significant problem in terms of
environmental pollution and the occupation of large storage areas on the island,
which are also destined for constant expansion. In fact, think of the
consequences if suddenly there were no possibility of continuing to
periodically send this particular toxic waste to Chilean blast furnaces and
Peruvian industrial plants specialized in their treatment in complete safety.
For health and environmental reasons, the treatment cannot be carried out on a
small island overpopulated for tourism and home to a natural park.
The problem of waste could also compromise the
conditions for the development of reforestation, since there is a relationship
between waste disposal by combustion, which leads to environmental pollution.
In particular atmospheric conditions, also concerns the formation of clouds
with toxic potential and, last but not least, the compromise of the aquifers
which mostly end up in the sea, thus interacting with the coastal ecosystem.
Even if they were small quantities, it is the continuity of their production, diffusion
and deposition that would constitute a danger for the ecosystem and, last but
not least, the subsistence activities linked to it and the consequent damage to
the health of the population.
Mass media and globalist
manipulation: the "Burning of Rapa Nui" of October 2022
By curious coincidence, once the 2020-2022
epidemic period ended, about two months after the reopening of the island to
tourists, the drumbeat of the international press attracted the attention of
the world masses, reporting with an escalation of alarming news. A gigantic
fire has developed threatening the village of Hanga Roa, the national park and
hundreds of moai, the famous ancient megalithic statues (18). The
ways in which these narratives were created and disseminated, and then
dissolved in a predictable happy ending, shows some aspects that, at least from
a journalistic point of view, should have been appropriately focused by adding
a good dose of self-criticism.
I summarize this story as it seems to be a
typical Deep Event (19), in this case an event that I don't think
would surprise anyone if it were planned in some office. What we can see from
the work of the media, it is certainly manipulated with inflating, choosing and
concealing the truth, in order to attract public attention to a topic. We can
see how it is possible to package news in such a way that the narrative is able
to excite world public opinion, and can also be useful for accompanying or
diverting attention from other news. But the primary purpose is to favor
cascading effects of an economic nature in a given area of geopolitical
interest.
Firstly, even if it was not proven, the dynamics
of the fire led the mayor of Hanga Roa to declare, two months later, i.e. at
the beginning of December 2022, not only that it had been arson, but that as
such it is a usual phenomenon, literally specifying "like all those
that have previously developed on the island". It is interesting to
note that the declaration was immediately only partially taken up by the
international media, omitting the truly alarming fact that fires and arson
events in general are common on the island (20).
After that, in a few days we witness the
fattening of the news in other newspapers, transformed to the point of heading
it by inserting the disturbing term "attack", or fearing a real
attack on the island's environmental and cultural heritage. It is also declared
that "about four hundred moai", or monumental stone statues,
i.e. just over a third of those present on the entire island would have been
affected by the fire. Without specifying what is meant by this term, given that
those to be cleaned of blackening are about eighty and only one has suffered
irreparable damage to its surface. Again the true extent of the problem is left
vague. What was really the damage to the environment and monumental assets?
What are the chances of a complete cleaning of the area and restoration? Repairing
and restoring are two distinct types of intervention with considerably
different costs and times.
The manipulative interest of the Western media,
orchestrated on an international scale, appears to highlight the importance of
the island's natural and cultural heritage, reminding the masses of it,
stripped of any problems deriving from rampant globalism, and above all
arousing in public opinion a strong desire to reach and enjoy Rapa Nui,
paradise island, before it disappears. And to legitimize government measures
for the strengthening of the bureaucratic pyramid of control of the island.
Despite the great national and international
media intervention that fears a fire of impressive dimensions, it is good to
bring the alarm back in its real terms, not having affected a large part of the
island, but an area of about 100 hectares of the 7,150 that make up the Park
Rapa Nui National Park, which occupies about 44% of the entire island
territory.
Initially the media reported a fire that broke
out, for unknown reasons, in a cattle farm located near the border with the
national park, northwest of Rano Raraku. From here, due to the wind, it would
have extended in a south-easterly direction, surrounding the northern area of
the ancient volcano. According to local news, the spread of fire inside the
crater would have been prevented thanks to the work of firefighters and local
volunteers, the latter equipped only with spades, sticks and stones. Of the hundreds
lapped by the flames, only one statue would have suffered irreparable damage.
However, six months later, on March 20, 2023, an
article that appeared on the official UNESCO website reveals (without
mentioning the Chilean government source) that it is not one, but a "series
of fires", all of which occurred in month of October 2022 (21).
This circumstance, if confirmed, would seem to eliminate the randomness of the
event.
Whether it is really an arson, or deliberately
set in several places to aggravate the balance, to date still remains an
unsolved question. There is no news of the existence of any suspects, nor of
the reasons behind the gesture, in this case if the causes are to be found in
local disputes or in the context of activity connected to an intervention of a
higher criminal level, with mandates and interests external to the Rapanui
community. It is therefore presumable that the investigations are still ongoing,
and that due to their complexity they could at best take a few years (22).
Instead, we need to ask ourselves how it was
possible that a fire originating in a farm could have spread to a natural park
of international importance and placed under the protection of UNESCO. From a
report published by the United Nations Organization, we learn of the existence
of a problem of illegal occupation of land and that the encroachment of
livestock into the natural park is a recurring fact (23).
It would have been useful for reporters to
personally visit the area affected by the fire, to ascertain whether the
so-called firebreaks had been built at the edge of the park, such as, for
example, cleared pasture land, such as to constitute an impediment to the
spread of the fire. Furthermore, a visit to the competent public offices of
Hanga Roa, to possibly view the fire prevention plan of which I assume the
island was already equipped in that year, to know the level of training of the
population in anticipation of natural disasters, teams of volunteers to be
employed in these cases to assist the tourists and to support the work of the
firefighters. But let's leave the data provided in early May 2021, before the
fires occurred, by the fire brigade itself to speak.
We thus discover that in the last decade on the
island there have been an average of about 90 forest fires, 10 structural
fires, 20 interventions associated with motorized vehicles, 40 associated with
people, 20 with animals, 10 vertical interventions or with ropes, 10 escapes of
gas. Other than an idyllic, peaceful Polynesian island largely uninhabited: on
average about one fire to put out a week, in addition to the more or less
definable routine daily interventions.
The bomberos barracks is
equipped with 6 professional firefighters and 40 trained volunteers, and an
availability of four intervention wagons, one of which with latest generation
4x4 traction to reach areas that are difficult to access and equipped with a
pump with a 3000 liters of water per minute. A marvel of technology, costing
over 270,000 US dollars, arrived on the island in May 2021 (24).
If the emergency response system, according to
what was declared to the media by the Authorities, is therefore validly
operational, and since it is impossible that more than 5 of the 100 fires a
year (5%) could have originated by self-combustion, what is it that determines
them? Careless tourists, illegal food cooking activities, arson (and here we
get lost in a vast range of very different motivations, from private interests
to political ends). The problem is therefore socio-cultural and must be solved
at the family clan level, with greater control of the masses of tourists,
without prejudice to the need for a sharp reduction in their daily quantity and
to equip the whole island with an adequate number of well-trained vigilantes.
Tourism has not returned to the figures of the
economic boom of 2018, when the island was stormed by over 100,000 visitors who
resided there for a minimum of a week each, resulting in a turnover of over 70
million dollars. However, the beacon of the media circus aimed for about two
months on this island following the fire, has allowed a good recovery of its
economy based on the multiple work activities linked to mass tourism. A
coincidence that has helped keep a vital annual income going, amounting to about
$1 billion over twenty years. Not bad for a remote islet in the middle of the
Pacific Ocean.
The Western-like
socio-economic standard of living of the natives of Rapa Nui has grown
considerably in recent decades, thanks to the possibilities offered by tourism
and the constant work carried out - also with the important support of
international environmental organizations - by local authorities such as the
Ma'u Henua indigenous communities. Among other things, this is assigned the
administrative management of the Parque Nacional de Rapa Nui, which occupies
about a third of the island.
The rescue of the monumental
heritage as a breaking of the ancient magical-religious balances
The Rapa Nui that I had the pleasure of
contributing to its scientific exploration over thirty years ago has been
slowly disappearing for more than a quarter of a century now. It is painful to
take note of this, and this is true for all the other places on the planet that
were still intact at the time and which today are in an alarming condition,
amid senseless exploitation of economic resources, overpopulation and
pollution. These are the consequences of the latest ideological madness of
liberalism, globalist consumerism, which, passed off as a source of global
well-being and cultural progress, is now proceeding in an exponential and
unsustainable expansion, probably already beyond the point of no return.
As if that weren't enough, the problems
generated by the rise in sea level, attributed to global warming and the
consequent melting of polar ice, are also hanging on Rapa Nui. Within the
current century part of the sea coast will be subject to erosion causing, if
time is not taken, the ruinous fall and submersion of the statues (moai) and
their sacred megalithic bases, of which the island is scattered throughout its
coastal perimeter (25). There is a real possibility that within the
next century, the expected worsening of the current climatic conditions will
drastically reduce the surface of Rapa Nui until it becomes an uninhabitable
rocky islet.
This process of destruction is already present
in the case of some monumental areas, aggravated by the effect of storm surges,
and others will probably be within the next few decades. Starting today, it is
necessary to decide whether to move them to higher altitudes, transport a part
of them to museums located on other continents, or leave them to their fate to
be swallowed up by the ocean abysses. In any case, these are operations that
require considerable funding, particular mechanical means, specialized manpower,
and a few decades of work.
It is perhaps the most dramatic of the
short-term interventions to be made on the island, as the problem affects the
population in its strong animist magical-religious bond with the ancestors.
It is a form of animism widespread throughout
Oceania, characterized by a close relationship with nature and its forces, the
cult of spirits and the pantheon of deities. Failing to impose the Christian
religion on the natives, the missionaries managed to convince them both with
protection against the violence of foreigners, agreeing to replace animistic
places of worship with churches, the typicality of spirits with those of saints
even in religious ceremonies. However, throughout Polynesia, the work of the
missionaries has not managed to erase the presence of animism, resulting in a
very evident religious hybrid (syncretism), for example, in the course of
festive celebrations with dances and music, and in the strong spiritual with
nature (26).
If the authorities will decide to move the
monuments to another location, they should keep in mind the respect of the
rights, exercisable by the Rapanui population who has recovered the ancestral
animist faith, to request the government authorities to activate the
magical-religious ceremonial procedures. The monuments were erected with
particular ceremonial rituals, and the breaking and new affixing of their
magical "seals" in another location must be carried out by animistic
priests, so as not to seriously alter the will and the harmony evoked and
induced in those places.
It is not a problem to be underestimated, as it
involves religious beliefs and the strong spiritual bond of the population with
the island.
Footnotes
1) Lévi-Strauss
C., 1975, Tristi Tropici, Il Saggiatore ed. (translation by Bianca Garufi), Milan, pp. 441. The first edition was
published in 1955.
2) I
have written extensively about it in articles published on various online
sites, and since 2020 all of them can be consulted in this blog. In particular,
I refer to the article of 27 July 2018 “Operative transnational structures
and the Supranational Deep States network. A criminologist on Noah's Ark",
first edited on The Reporter’s Blog, and since 19 June 2020
available at The Reporter’s Corner:
https://www.thereporterscorner.com/2020/06/operative-transnational-structures-and.html and in the seven articles of the series "La
Tecnocrazia e il Sistema di Potere in Sicilia", Parts I-VII, published
from 2018 to 2023.
3) reference
to the indications in note 2. As regards the phenomenon of self-referential
state authorities, read what is expressed in the article published on this blog
on 12 August 2022 “La Tecnocrazia e il Sistema di Potere in Sicilia. Parte V: il Feestschrift, il cerchio magico, e la costruzione del mito
dell’Intellighenzia tecnocratica ") https://www.thereporterscorner.com/2022/08/la-tecnocrazia-e-il-sistema-di-potere.html
4) 27
July 2018 “Transnational operational structures…” op. cit. in footnote
2, also for the relevant bibliographical notes regarding the description of the
European Commission provided in 2017 by Basil Coronakis in his monograph The
Deep State of Europe: Requiem for a Dream: “the most sophisticated and
corrupt administrative machine in the world… devoted of any political
legitimacy”.
5) it disappeared during the nineteenth century due to the advent of the
purely Masonic national unitary ideology, and the geopolitical interests of the
great powers of Western Europe of that time, which finally in the twentieth
century led to the establishment of the Italian Republic and the construction
of US military bases on the island.
6) Many
interesting works have been dedicated in recent years to the unsustainability
of the presence of large tourist flows, known with the technical term
overtourism, to the overpopulation of small islands, and to the socio-cultural
problems associated with these. I point out in particular:
Ahmad F., Draz M.U., Su L.,
2018, Taking the bad with the Good: The Nexus between Tourism and
Environmental Degradation in the Lower-Middle Income Southeast Asian Economies,
Journal of Cleaner Production, doi: 10.1016/J.Jclepro. 2019.06.138
Angel P., Bergamini K.,
2020, Sociocultural-Carrying Capacity: Impact of Population Growth in
Rapa Nui, in G. Cirella (ed.) Sustainable Human - Nature Relations.
Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements, Springer ed., Singapore, pp. 23-47
Cinnaghi E., Mondini G., Valle
M. (edited by), 2017, The tourist carrying capacity. A tool for the management of cultural heritage, Quaderni
della valorizzazione. New series 5, Direzione Generale dei Musei, Rome, pp. 130
Cristino C., Recasens A., Vargas
P., 1984, Isla de Pascua: Procesos, Alcances y Efectos de la
Aculturación, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universitad de
Chile: https://www.academia.edu/19391005/Isla_de_pascua_proceso_alcances_y_efectos_de_la_aculturacion_pdf_
2159_kb_1
Lima M., Gayo E.M., 2020, Ecology of the Collapse of Rapa Nui society,
Royal Society Publishing, 287, pp. 1-10
Palombi M., 2020, Il
fenomeno dell’overtourism nelle realtà insulari: il caso studio dell’Isola di
Pasqua, Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Degree thesis, pp. 136
Telfer D.J., Sharpley R., 2016, Tourism
and Development in the Developing World, Routledge, 2nd ed., London and New
York, pp. 462
7) at
that time called simply Great Sea. The term Polynesia was instead coined about
a quarter of a century later, in 1756, by the Frenchman Charles de Brosses to
indicate all the islands of the Great Sea, including those of Malaysia. In 1832
the term was restricted to the islands present in the current geographical
circumscription of the Polynesian Triangle, with Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter
Island at the top.
8) Gelder v. R., 2012, Naar het paradijs, het rusteloze leven
van Jacob Roggeveen, ontdekker van Paaseiland (1659-1729), Uitgeverij
Balans, pp. 336
9) Gelder
v. R., 2012, Naar het paradijs, op. cit.; Heyerdhal T., 1958, Aku-Aku:
The Secret of Eastern Island, Rand McNally & Co., Chicago, pp. 384
10) of this land refers to a map compiled in 1513 by the Turkish Admiral
Piri Reis, discovered in 1929 in the library of Topkapi, the Sultan's Palace in
Istanbul.
11) Of great importance were the efforts of European and American
scholars, including the Bavarian Anton Franz Englert, born Sebastian, a
polyglot Catholic missionary who from 1935 to 1968 dedicated part of his life
spent on the Island to recovering the memory of the past, sensing how much the
ethnic resilience and cultural flourishing of that tormented population
depended on it.
Mulloy W.T., 1969, Sebastian
Englert 1888-1969, in American Anthropologist 71: 1109-1111
Englert S., 2004, La tierra de Hotu Matu'a. Historia y
etnologia de la Isla de Pascua: gramática y dicionario del antiguo idioma de
Isla de Pascua, 9th ed., Editorial Universitaria, Santiago de Chile, pp.
361
12) Villari P., 8 April 1993, I giganti dell’Isola di Pasqua,
in La Sicilia, p. 32 (full page with several of my articles dedicated to the
topic);
Villari P., 1997, Saggio
di scavo nell’area di un "hare moa" sito in localita Puna Marengo
(Isla de Pasqua, Chile), Ultramarina Occasional Papers, Ortiz Troncoso R.
ed., Number 3 (November 1997), pag . 1-12, Amsterdam;
Villari P., 20 December
2000, Eindpunt, Tokerau e la vecchietta, in Grifone, bimonthly
issue of the Ente Fauna Siciliana, year IX, n. 6 (file 48), pp.6-7.
Villari P., 10 April
2023, Easter Island (Chile), 1991. Not ordinary experiences (N.O.E.)
phenomenology during the archaeological excavations at Puna Marengo. The
Reporter's Corner https://www.thereporterscorner.com/2023/04/easter-island-chile-1991-not-ordinary.html
Villari P., May 4, 2023, Toroko, 1991. A memory of the first Easter
Island disco (Rapa Nui, Chilean Polynesia). The Reporter's Corner. https://www.thereporterscorner.com/2023/05/toroko-1991-memory-of-first-easter.html
13) the ancient Ceylon seat of important sacred places and monasterial
centers of Buddhist worship.
14) conducted with weapons of mass destruction with a selective
biological target, which do not involve infrastructure and cause very limited
damage to the ecosystem.
15) at the time of my stay, in 1991, the only two activities of this kind
used exclusively local fish, not compromised by pollution and taken in
negligible quantities compared to what has happened in the last twenty years.
In this way the sustainability of the island's coastal ecosystem was still
active.
16) at https://www.surf-forecast.com
17) research conducted by the Institute of Ecology of the Católica del
Norte University, UCN, Chile. The researchers ascertained that the mass of
plastic waste beached on the coasts of Rapa Nui comes mainly from Australia,
New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, but which also include origins from other
areas of the planet. For example, read the article published online on December
19, 1919: https://www.noticias.ucn.cl/especies-invasoras-utilizan-basura-plastica-para-llegar-a-las-costas-de-rapa-
nui/
A UN report refers to a
floating mass of rubbish off the Chilean coast, largely made up of plastic
debris that had reached an area three times that of Chile and is expected to
increase annually. Research suggests that at the current rate, by 2050 there will
be more plastic waste than fish in all of the planet's oceans. Regarding the
Chilean situation and that of Rapa Nui:
https://www.mondonuevo.cl/isla-de-basura-frente-a-chile-ya-es-tre-veces-el-tamano-del-pais/
https://moevarna.com/en/plastic-contaminates-the-coast-of-rapa-nui
Also read the striking results
of the research of scientific missions carried out since 2015 in the remote
Henderson Island, an atoll belonging to the Pitcairn Islands Group whose
ecosystem remained untouched until 1985. Its coral beaches were literally covered
by a quantity of plastic fragments of concentration among the highest on the
entire planet. Even more disturbing, the amount found doubled in the seven
years between the measurements carried out by the two scientific missions. The
consequences on the health of marine fauna and birds related to it for food use
are still being studied in the laboratory, but since the preliminary
observations have already been published, it is clear what tragic consequences
the world ecosystem will face in the coming decades, being most of the plastics
non-disposable.
Last summer the entire beach
of that atoll, now considered the former last paradise of the South Seas,
declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988, was covered by a mass
estimated at around 70 billion plastic fragments, associated to a quantity of faunal
specimens that died due to their presence, and themselves a source of death for
the species that feed on them. That vision is a preview of what will happen, in
a few decades, to the beaches and seas of the entire planet if solutions are
not found at an international level.
Lavers J.L., Bond A.,
2017, Exceptional and rapid accumulation of anthropogenic debris on one
of the world's most remote and pristine islands, in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, Edited by Karl D.M., University of Hawaii,
Honolulu. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1619818114
18) read for example https://apnews.com/article/rapa-nui-easter-island-fire-e27ed4f03fa67e2ftdae10341efdc151
19) for the notion of Deep Event reference to: 27 July 2018 "Transnational
operational structures..." op. cit. in note 2
20) from The Guardian newspaper, 7 October 2022, Easter Island fire
causes “irreparable” damage to famous moai statues; and from the online US
site https://apnews.com/article/rapa-nui-easter-island-fire-e27ed4f03fa67e2f7dae10341efdc151
22) from a criminological point of view the story could reveal an
interesting sequel. In fact, if the arson is the result of an operation
conceived and carried out by specialists, such as a blitz accompanied by a
series of diversions, the chances of tracing the investigators will be
practically nil. We could therefore reach the classic situation in which, due
to political necessity, it becomes necessary to circumscribe the problem
locally by covering it up, and if this is not possible, trivializing it. Here
we enter the field of mass manipulation techniques, creating what is needed to
incriminate an individual or a small group of the racial minority, of
characters with a borderline character, or in any case unpopular with the local
and national dominant power. The meal served to the beasts of the media circus,
which amuses and reassures the public, and eliminates the annoying presence of
opponents.
23) https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/715 I quote the following passages: "An increase has
been observed in cattle that wander illegally inside the Park limits”… “Additional
staff and resources are needed for the administration and care of the site, to reinforce
the number and training of the park rangers team, and to increase the operating
budget. There is constant pressure on park lands; the State
must prevent its illegal occupation").
24) Paula Rossetti, May 4, 2021, New
forest wagon for the bombers of Rapa Nui. https://www.elcorreodelmoai.com/?p=2697 The author, of Italian origins, is the editor of El Correo del
Moai, an independent periodical founded on the island in 2009.
25) Casey N, Haner J., in https://nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/14/climate/easter-island-erosion.html
26) Even the concept of family nucleus has remained broader than that of
the European and North American Christian populations. In addition to the
married couple and their children, there are also grandparents, uncles, cousins
and "adopted relatives".
Chile, Claude Levi Strauss, Easter Island, global market hegemonic crisis, Rapa Nui, Rapanui language, Sad Tropics
