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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Timesonline reports that Llewellyn Werner, chairman of C3, a Los Angeles-based holding company for private equity firms, is dumping $500 million into The Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience – an American-style amusement park featuring a skatepark, rides, a concert theatre, and a museum.
The park is being designed by the same firm that developed Disneyland.
Werner will retain exclusive rights to the development project. He told the Timesonline:
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t making money,” he said. “I also have this wonderful sense that we’re doing the right thing – we’re going to employ thousands of Iraqis. But mostly everything here is for profit.”
Petraeus is a “big supporter” of the park, according to the Timesonline.
Does a Disneyland-style amusement park in a volatile, war-torn country reek of cultural hegemony and yet another excuse to privatize more of Iraq’s resources for US profit? It does to me.
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As for privatizing Iraq's resources, what a theme park has to do with that, I do not know... but in general, this would probably be to Iraq's benefit. Any country in a volatile region with significant natural resources usually ends up devolving into warring factions fighting over those resources (Or ending up highly authoritarian, with one side having such a monopoly of power nobody can challenge their hold. Either way, not much of an opening for pluralistic democracy). The only sustainable path to development is building up human capital.
Again, if nobody likes it, they'll go out of business.
Those values were ALREADY there, buried beneath the surface, as evidenced by the financial success of the project and people *wanting to go there*.
If those values were suppressed until now, that's not culture, that's force. The word 'culture' is meaningless when what you're really describing is violence by another name. The ONLY culture that is worth protecting is the culture that's freely chosen. Otherwise, you're endorsing *actual* imperialism of a different sort, the imperialism of men with guns and authority over their own nation's inhabitants.
""When hundreds of millions of dollars of effort gets poured into an area, it's going to have an impact, whether or not "nobody likes it."""
There are plenty of theme parks that have had that much money pumped into them and failed miserably because nobody was interested.