Everything Else
newleftreview.org87 points by speckx a day ago
87 points by speckx a day ago
I lived in Dubai for a while. Whenever anyone asks me how it was, I have two main conclusions that line up very well with what Doherty has to say here:
1. It's all so clean and shiny. Coming home through New York City was a wild experience because I had never noticed how utterly filthy NYC is. It only became obvious to me after spending so long immersed in the very clean streets of Dubai. The luxury-as-default was something I had heard about but I wasn't prepared for how true it was.
2. You're waited on all the time, everywhere. You shouldn't take your tray to the garbage bin at the mall food court because someone needs that job, for example. My job provided me with a driver and housing and a crew to clean my house. They were as close to slaves as it gets. Her observation that "Being served makes us cruel infants" really hits me hard. The exploitation was not just unavoidable, it was virtually mandatory.
I would never go back, not to visit, and certainly not to live there again. Her statement "...in Dubai there is nothing to do, and I mean nothing, other than to feel rich and be waited upon." is incredibly true.
I went to Dubai and other Emirates around 2018 as part of a work related Mid-East trip. There are definitely problems but this woman has an ax to grind that's so large it makes her commentary unreliable.
First - Dubai is notable having grown from a fishing village to making money on oil to - wisely - finding a way to move beyond oil into something that's sustainable and beneficial. That's admirable even on its own.
It is notable that very few people you see in Dubai are "natives." Most people you see are either foreigners there on business/vacation, or imported labor. The author takes issue with something related to that in a weird way - the more straight forward story would be that without the opportunities created in Dubai, both the business folks and the laborers would be doing something else - in both case less appealing to them. So whatever judgement you have on it, in practice everyone involved is better off than they would have been.
The author then can't avoid but take a dig at Israel and Zionism - her point/connection is a bit hard to understand but also feels warped. The Emirates being part of the Abraham accords was one of the greatest signs of the possibility of cross-religious existence and cooperation in the region - symbolic that mutual benefit can be a stronger motivator than historical division. This should be celebrated.
> First - Dubai is notable having grown from a fishing village to making money on oil to - wisely - finding a way to move beyond oil into something that's sustainable and beneficial. That's admirable even on its own.
I think one of the main points of the article is that what they are doing is only sustainable because it is sustained on the backs of exploited, disposable, imported labor. Just because it's slightly better than not being employed at all doesn't make it right.
>The author then can't avoid but take a dig at Israel and Zionism - her point/connection is a bit hard to understand but also feels warped. The Emirates being part of the Abraham accords was one of the greatest signs of the possibility of cross-religious existence and cooperation in the region
It's a sign of little more than that the United States will throw its weight around on behalf of the Israeli regime, no matter how racist it is, even when doing so is diametrically opposed to the interests of the United States (which these days is almost always the case).
In the case of the Abraham accords, Trump's son in law traded normalization of ties with the regime for an (empty as it turns out) promise to the UAE that further colonial annexation of the West Bank was off the table. The accords led to a dramatic uptick (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/11/un-experts-a...) in colonialist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in the run up to Oct 7th.
As someone who grew up in Dubai, the tourism industry everywhere breaks the soul of the place. Dubai, especially the places where people actually live and set up a livelihood, is a place like any other.
What a terrible day to be literate and be able to read into the ugly belly of self-righteousness disguised as morality.
I don't think the author was talking shit about Dubai, she was sticking up for the people who are being exploited there.
Obviously there's humanity and real lives everywhere, she's just advocating for those lives to be valued. With, ya know, human rights protected by the government.
Many of her critiscisms of Dubai have been well documented. Is she utterly wrong? Educate me
The problem is not factuality. The problem is assuming that the entire World should now and forever be judged through the moral lens of post-war America.
Whose morality counts?
Are there moralities worth entertaining that place no value on human life or its enslavement?
Dubai seems like the peak of inequality and ostentatious luxury even to those of us who don't live in America (I assume you mean "the US", not the Americas).
There are genuinely bad places in the world even factoring out "American exceptionalism/egocentrism". Dubai seems to be one of them.
I'm going to assume based on the authors name, and the sources name that this is all very "western". We have gotten very good at exporting all the misery elsewhere while we medicate and entertain ourselves and pretend that the savagery and the suffering do not exist.
The take here is very much Brave New World, going to visit the savages, and complaining about it. And then contrasting it with the "normal" sterilized life that the author leads.
It is neither self righteousness or morality: It is an abject lack of self awareness and of sheltered existence.
When I got to "There are hells on earth and Dubai is one" I scrolled back, thinking I had missed where they described that. Either it was left out of this book excerpt or the author has a prior revulsion at people being employed for tourism that makes their examples seem self-evidently awful to them only.
There's people working in Dubai who make very little money, have crowded, cramped, hot living quarters, will be jailed if they try to start a union, and have to do dangerous construction work in one of the hottest places on earth. When they die, their employers don't care. If one of these people described Dubai as "hell on earth", would you tell them they were being hyperbolic?
> If you try to humanise the place you will lose your mind. If you ask yourself what the woman at the hair-braiding stand left behind to be here, and why, you will lose your mind. If you accept the kindness of the staff with whom you make a paltry effort to speak each morning as they clear your dirty breakfast plate, you will lose your mind, because your tip is the only kindness you can meaningfully offer in return. Trying to attend to your own towel by the pool might cause the man who stands for hours in the ferocious sun to do so for you to lose his job. Being served makes us cruel infants. It demeans us all.
I understand this passage and can relate, "self-evidently awful to them only" seems a bit of a stretch. There are places on Earth where "being employed for tourism" means job security, worker rights and social protections, where staff is treated with respect and are allowed dignity.
> I scrolled back, thinking I had missed where they described that
The explanation of that phrase is in... the very next three sentences.
Oh, that makes sense. If the excerpt had started with that paragraph, I would have been expecting the next sentences to explain it. By being halfway through and starting with "I learnt nothing and left nauseated", I thought its function was to sum up what she had seen over her whole trip. Thanks for explaining how to read it.
I haven't been to Dubai but I went to Cuba, seemingly the opposite kind of state, and I think some things described in this post would apply there, too. But can't really judge.
I would think, however, that there is no rich cultural heritage to be expected from a relatively new city of the rich.. it's not Paris or Rome after all.
And finally, anecdotal, I know a family that went there with their kids and they loved that holiday.
Shortly put: she meant slavery. So I totally agree that the slave masters can have lovely holidays.
I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated.
She arrived on Friday evening, caught the performance on Saturday, and presumably left a day or two after?
I find it a bit condescending because most of the things you cite are also present in europe just more subtly, this is just human nature that nobody can change
There's inequality and inequality.
Dubai seems at the extreme of inequality, corruption, and ostentatiousness of the few ultra-rich. Also an extreme caste system with very few citizens (about 92% of Dubai is non-citizens, and you cannot obtain citizenship either as far as I know: you're born into it). It's a luxurious place built on the labor and exploitation of a second-class of people that can never become citizens, by design.
It's not "just human nature" that "nobody can change".
Being "condescending" against the ultra-rich is not something that should make anyone lose their sleep. It's punching up, not down.