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African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

siliconafrica.com

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Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#31

Post by dang »

fchollet wrote: post #21
alain94040 wrote: post #8

That articles looks bogus. For instance: It’s such an evil system even denounced by the European Union, but France is not ready to move from that colonial system which puts about 500 billions dollars from Africa to its treasury year in year out. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France , that's pretty much equivalent to the budget of the French government. If that number were true, France finances o…

$500 billion is roughly 25% of the entire GDP of all of sub-saharan Africa. It is more than the entire GDP of the countries mentioned here. Of course it is bogus. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... I must say I am quite surprised to see a poorly written propaganda hoax article make the frontpage of HN. It is linked to the general decline in quality of HN? Is it a voting ring? Or is it because the…

I looked at the data and it doesn't seem to be a voting ring, though it's hard to exclude that for certain. Also the new accounts posting in this thread seem to disagree with each other.

As far as I can tell, it is mostly that a lot of users thought the article was interesting. Presumably it wasn't obviously a hoax to them.

In the end, flags defeated upvotes on this story.

Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#32

Post by electromagnetic »

alain94040 wrote: post #8

That articles looks bogus. For instance: It’s such an evil system even denounced by the European Union, but France is not ready to move from that colonial system which puts about 500 billions dollars from Africa to its treasury year in year out. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France , that's pretty much equivalent to the budget of the French government. If that number were true, France finances o…

It's definitely bogus. I can't dig up anything on this except reblogs of it.

The Chirac video is taken out of context, from a television interview where he says the current state of France as a first world country, and a G8 country comes directly from its former past as a colonial power.

Hmm, looks like I can dig something up:

http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Afro...

> In relation with that is the translation of declaration of Mr Chirac is consciously shortened to serve the objectives of Mr. Koutonin. Chirac said ""Some of the wealth we have in our coffers, I do not say all of it, come from the exploitation of Africa. Therefore, it is only normal that we give back that money. It is not only normal, it is more sensible if we want to avoid the emergence of all kinds of social difficulties in the continent" Indicating the context of this declaration was a must that Mr Koutonin did not seem to appreciate

Not a single quote in the article is actually linked back to its source, just to wikipedia pages or websites and not even to a context in the article. His quote from Leopold Sedar Senghor comes up with 9 results in a google search, all linking back to this article. Even translated into French, the quote comes up with translations of this article.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is failing to even provide sub-par evidence.

Billions, nay near-trillions of dollars do not just magically float around the globe with no one noticing or accounting for them.

Sorry, but in a year none of this has been cited or sourced, just reposts. It's bullshit, it just got dredged up because everyone's been googling about France and Charlie Hebdo.

Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#33

Post by electromagnetic »

fchollet wrote: post #21
alain94040 wrote: post #8

That articles looks bogus. For instance: It’s such an evil system even denounced by the European Union, but France is not ready to move from that colonial system which puts about 500 billions dollars from Africa to its treasury year in year out. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France , that's pretty much equivalent to the budget of the French government. If that number were true, France finances o…

$500 billion is roughly 25% of the entire GDP of all of sub-saharan Africa. It is more than the entire GDP of the countries mentioned here. Of course it is bogus. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... I must say I am quite surprised to see a poorly written propaganda hoax article make the frontpage of HN. It is linked to the general decline in quality of HN? Is it a voting ring? Or is it because the…

It's a year old, I tried searching a lot of the quotes it uses and they're bunk, even in French they're bunk, all linking back to this article and its reposts.

I mean the goddamn copyedit should have flagged everyone on this to begin with. Just looking at it I'm 90% sure I just bought a sham-wow. The article is linkbait copyediting 101.

Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#34

Post by finid »

toyg wrote: post #27
finid wrote: post #2

> We often accuse African leaders of corruption and serving western nations interests instead, but there is a clear explanation for that behavior. They behave so because they are afraid the be killed or victim of a coup. They want a powerful nation to back them in case of aggression or trouble. But, contrary to a friendly nation protection, the western protection is often offered in exchange of these leaders renounci…

The choice of Iraq over Saudi as Great Enemy has little to do with size or power; back before the Iraq-Iran war, Iraq wasn't a poor country. In fact, if Saddam hadn't misread US responses when he hinted at the possibility of taking over Kuwait, he would probably still be in charge and I bet he'd have developed a great friendship with King Abdallah by now. The Saudis are safe because they will "do the right thing" whe…

In other words all that noise about "our values" is just hot air.

Btw, if by "a drunk Russian bear" you 're referring to Putin, the guy does not dring, or at least, he does not get drunk, unlike most Russian men of his age. That's one reason Russian women like him.

Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#35

Post by deodorel »

The problem might be that, during most of history, The majority of African groups either didn't have enough resources in order to accumulate enough wealth to afford working organized structures/states or were too fragmented. Most European states were also plundered countless times but the lands are richer so they were able to recoup. The French have a complicated history with franceafrique but you can say the same thing with any great power at some moment in time.

Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#36

Post by jacques_foccart »

jacques_foccart wrote: post #9
alain94040 wrote: post #8

That articles looks bogus. For instance: It’s such an evil system even denounced by the European Union, but France is not ready to move from that colonial system which puts about 500 billions dollars from Africa to its treasury year in year out. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France , that's pretty much equivalent to the budget of the French government. If that number were true, France finances o…

The money does not appear on official counts, it mostly sits in offshore accounts and structures. Cf the Clearstream affair.

Interesting that this got 4 downvotes (6, since it had 2 upvotes before everything in the thread started going down - by far the most downvoted of all my posts!). This comment is a bit pointless since the thread has been flag-killed, anyway.

Clearstream (1, not 2) is the one case where we DO have evidence, thanks to lengthy and numerous lawsuits and plenty of publicly available documents, including some taken from the safes of the companies involved.

As a French citizen, I used to be somewhat adamant that there was no way my government was ever capable of doing Bad Things, a few hundred books later and exposure to the people in these groups (including working for an Elf-like company, and family in management in Total), I think differently.

Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#37

Post by jacques_foccart »

vinceguidry wrote: post #15
pavlov wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds simplified. Mali, Chad and Niger are inland desert countries whose enormous total land area consists mostly of Sahara. They would still be desperately poor even if their official language were English, Dutch or Danish instead of French. Conversely we could look at African countries that haven't had to suffer meddling from a colonial parent, and they don't seem to be much better off. Liberia has been indep…

Ethiopia fought off Italy, had some really bad times, but is doing well now. They actually had something like a state with which to fight off European aggression. The French really were terrible at colonial administration. They had a way of letting emotions guide their decision-making and no compunctions whatsoever about asserting how morally superior they were to the locals. This led to truly horrific massacres on b…

It is amusing to note that Ethiopia's victory against the Italians was in (some say, large) part due to a Brit. Cf the Gideon Force.

Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#38

Post by jacques_foccart »

notahacker wrote: post #28
jacques_foccart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half a trillion is not unrealistic. Take one of the numbers we know with a bit more certainty, Nguesso in the Republic of Congo (not the DRC!) takes only a little over 17% of the oil revenue locally - the rest is "exported" (this low price incidentally is how he has managed to remain in power for so long despite some pretty drastic attempts at changing that). Africa's GDP is around USD 2.4 trillion so seeing a fifth…

OK, lets take something we do know with some more certainty. Combined GDP of all CFA Franc countries (both blocs): ~$170bn Do you honestly think that France is taking 3x this per annum and hiding it in offshore accounts? Certainly France (and the US) meddled with successions in Africa (and even when they didn't have France's blessing, most elite soldiers in the immediate post-colonial period had served in the French…

I didn't notice the amount was referring to the CFA Franc specifically. I'm referring to Francafrique generally, whose means of extractions go way beyond monetary policy. If he claimed half a trillion just from CFA countries, it is indeed a taller claim.

Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#39

Post by toyg »

finid wrote: post #34
toyg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The choice of Iraq over Saudi as Great Enemy has little to do with size or power; back before the Iraq-Iran war, Iraq wasn't a poor country. In fact, if Saddam hadn't misread US responses when he hinted at the possibility of taking over Kuwait, he would probably still be in charge and I bet he'd have developed a great friendship with King Abdallah by now. The Saudis are safe because they will "do the right thing" whe…

In other words all that noise about "our values" is just hot air. Btw, if by "a drunk Russian bear" you 're referring to Putin, the guy does not dring, or at least, he does not get drunk, unlike most Russian men of his age. That's one reason Russian women like him.

"Drunk" was a joke playing on Russian stereotypes in the West and on the expression "drunk with power" (the Russian military is currently making a spectacle of itself all over Scandinavia and the Baltic, not to mention the little issue of Crimea).

Re: African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax

#40

Post by saikaisi »

jacques_foccart wrote: post #36
jacques_foccart wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money does not appear on official counts, it mostly sits in offshore accounts and structures. Cf the Clearstream affair.

Interesting that this got 4 downvotes (6, since it had 2 upvotes before everything in the thread started going down - by far the most downvoted of all my posts!). This comment is a bit pointless since the thread has been flag-killed, anyway. Clearstream (1, not 2) is the one case where we DO have evidence, thanks to lengthy and numerous lawsuits and plenty of publicly available documents, including some taken from th…

The same happened to all my replies on this post. it Seems like a french cyberteam crushed all debate with flagging, down voting and scripted attacks.

Where is the defense of freedom of speech beloved by #ImCharlie folks?

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