The tourist and the terrorist - those twin ghosts of the airports of abstraction - suffer an identical hunger for the authentic. But the authentic recedes as they in their inauthenticity approach it. ... To their secret misery, all they can do is destroy. The tourist destroys meaning and the terrorist destroys the tourist.

Tourism is the quintessence of Commodity Fetishism. It is the ultimate Cargo Cult - the worship of goods that never arrive, because they have been exalted beyond the stench of mortality - or morality.

You buy tourism and you get nothing but images. Tourism, like Virtual Reaity, is a form of Gnosis, of body-hatred . The ultimate tourist "trip" will take place in Cyberspace...

 

 

 

In his other persona of Peter Lamborn Wilson, he writes:

"In America and Europe "activism" has retreated - to such an extent that people equate an appearance on the World Wide Web with political action - just as the activists of the 1960s were seduced by their "fifteen seconds of fame" on television. Out of 600 channels - the bright promise of the near future - surely one or two can be devoted to "revolution", and a few more to "alternate life-styles".

The old Internet of techno-anarchy and "free information" will become just another channel of WWWTV, a kind of slum where the poor old original hackers can still congregate and fritter away the empty hours, while the great virtual city of Cyberspace grows up around them, dwarfing their pitiful huts and making a mockery of their "culture".

The anthropologists are probably already lining up for grants to study this quaint survival: affairs move quickly when both space and time have been abolished."

_________________

from Escape from The Nineteenth Century, Autonomedia, N.Y., 1998,
pp.132-133.

 

2.

THE WAR AGAINST TOURISM

by

Anthony Weir

The bomb attack on a night-club in Bali in October 2002 was the first signal to the Western world of a huge resentment against the tourist industry, which, like the British Empire which paved the way, operates on a network of collaboration with the local rich and powerful, to the increasing impoverishment of the poor. But whereas the British Empire also produced networks of missionaries attempting to ameliorate its arrogant exploitation, tourism (following in the footsteps of the anthropologists) is the "soft side" of the global exploitation of (mainly) the great extraction companies which have removed most of the rain forests of Indonesia and other parts of the world, and committed secret genocides against the peoples who lived in them and around them.

Apart from the search for a brief and concentrated 'good time', tourism promotes the negative side of aimlessness, the ugly reverse of the aspiration which is the creed of the West, imposed with totalitarian efficiency.

The tourist industry destroys the 'exotic' not just by marketing it, but by imposing its own environment upon it. The tourist industry builds horrible and expensive hotels - from which locals are excluded by one means or another. These hotels often include hideous, vulgar, noisy and essentially unwholesome night clubs where the tourists claim to "enjoy themselves" by drinking themselves stupid or buying sexual enticement. Night-clubs are great money-spinners, and so they proliferate more successfully than the hotels which actually have to provide services.

These cancers on indigenous cultures fly in almost all the food and drink which the tourists fly in to consume. They encourage prostitution, and inevitably attack local societies by promoting the unsightly, alcoholic culture of false bonhomie - which, incidentally, has devastated more than one quiet and beautiful island of the Mediterranean. What white Australians did to the Aboriginal peoples - most of whom now have even lost their languages - they are doing rather more subtly to the peoples of Indonesia. The poor of Nepal have not benefited from the Coca-Cola trail up the high Himalayas - which is why a Marxist rebellion continues there. The forests of Nepal have largely disappeared, thus causing terrible erosion - and famine. The sex-tourism in Thailand and Cambodia is a scandal that the West has done very little to discourage. AIDS has been spread in Asia almost entirely by tourists.

Though modern tourism is a terrorism of 'globalisation', it is heir to (and has ineluctably influenced) the ancient tradition of pilgrimage to shrines all over the world, around which whole service-industries grew from early times: hostels, hospitals, food-booths and funerals - as well as the sale of amulets and souvenirs. Most of these old places of pilgrimage, like most places on mainland Europe and North America, can withstand huge influxes of modern visitors - because they are already 'globalised'. It is the traditional societies which are prey to the proxy-terrorism of tourism - as to the other aspects of 'globalisation': notably the removal of cultural and bio- diversity except where they can be tamed and commodified. The destructive compartmentalisation of Northern/Western life into work and leisure, for example, (or working mothers and Filipina baby-sitters and nannies) requires much labour and total socio-cultural disruption among the poor to serve the alcohol-laced, fashion-led leisure of the rich. Rural economies collapse and people flood into the tourist areas. In Europe, Spain has suffered grievously from this, especially its fragile islands. (See Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis.) And, as for the Greek islands, one need only read Durrell's Prospero's Cell to understand what crimes against nature and humanity have been committed in Corfu in order to provide vulgarity for the vulgar.

The quiet and varied Hindu culture of Bali has been seriously eroded, leading to a vacuum which is all too quickly filled by intolerant forms of Islam, one of whose cornerstones has become a hatred of alcohol and its accompanying public misbehaviour, which in the West has taken many centuries to be controlled. Alcohol has (with church-bells and the sign of the cross) for long been for Muslims (and most non-Christians) the paramount symbol of the now-paramount West, but only recently has it become a nexus of anti-Western resentment. (Needless to say, the car-bomb on Bali - far from liberating people already drawn into the supply-and-demand culture of 'globalisation' - further threatened Balinese society.)

As long as Muslims - many of whom live in artificial states created by the French and the British - feel that they and their culture have been trashed by triumphalist, alcohol-fired (or -swamped) Western (or, rather, Northern) capitalism and its championing of a particularly aggressive form of Zionism in Israel, there will be more and increasingly-violent reaction. Even were al-Qaeda to be disabled, other groups would form. But al-Qaeda is growing in support as a result of the 'War on Terror' and a perceived American ignorant arrogance.

The Bali bomb may have been only the first shot in a desperate war against the world-trashing - but essentially fragile - tourist industry. If so, tourism, depending as much on the silence and subjection of the local poor as on the enthusiastic collaboration of the rich, will largely disappear from many countries. The means of discouragement may not be pleasant, but, as al-Qaîda and Hamas (and the Irish Fenians before them) have shown, orchestrated violence is the only weapon available to the humiliated. Despite our much-vaunted 'Western Liberal Values' we go on humiliating people as much as we ever did.

"...I was ambiguously positioned between Turkey and the exasperating twentieth-century discourse of 'shoestring travel' : the quest for an idyll where, for three US dollars, Mustafa would serve you with a home-cooked meal and tell you about his hair collection. The worst part of this discourse was its specious left-wing rhetoric... ...everywhere I found the same atmosphere of distrust. The travelers lived in terror of getting ripped off, or of missing an 'authentic' experience. The locals were terrified lest they miss some 'opportunity' afforded by the foreign visitors." - Elif Batuman