The Next Genocide – Timothy Snyder
October 13, 2015 Yale University history professor, Timothy Snyder, argues that the pressure to obtain resources is the main cause of conflict. Like Hitler in the thirties who renounced agricultural technologies like irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers and believed Germany could only feed itself by conquering Eastern Europe through starvation and mass murder, today’s resource wars are being fuelled by ecological panic as climate change affects food supplies in Africa, the Middle East and even China where fears about its ability to feed itself has led to leasing 10 percent of Ukraine’s arable land.
Snyder and Robert Klare (who coined the term “resource wars”) follow in the footsteps of Nikolai Kondratieff who concluded that wars are the result of massive economic disequilibrium between consumption and production the first requirement of both being adequate resources. While today’s market economy facilitates resource wars by civilized means, Rwanda, Sudan and Syria clearly illustrate the extremes to which resource wars can escalate. Trough wars like these are a feature of the Kondratieff Winter; similarly, we can fully expect resources to be at the heart of the next global conflict. These usually arrive at the top of the upswing or Summer of the K-cycle. In the next K-wave, this will occur around 2030.
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