No Smoke Without Fire

HERE in Portugal, there is a widely-held conspiracy theory that many of our summer fires are being started deliberately and one of our neighbours has even seen a small plane go up into the hills and drop some kind of inflammatory material which, itself, eventually contributed to one of the annual conflagrations. A number of people have been arrested for these activities and one wonders who put them up to it.

Moving on, after discovering a link about the Consolidated Land & Rail Australia (CLARA) company's desire to “undertake a re-balancing of [Australian] settlement and deliver new ways of imagining, planning and building cities, transport and infrastructure,” I began to consider what really lies at the source of the current Australian fires. CLARA also tells us that its

“privately-funded plan will address the widely recognised issue of over-crowding that faces Sydney and Melbourne [and] we will build new regional, compact, sustainable, smart-cities and connect them by most advanced high speed rail.”

This is no idle speculation on my part, as leading individuals involved in the capitalist accelerationist group, Extinction Rebellion (ER), already have connections to global taxation agencies in Africa that wish to develop the continent in accordance with 5g attempts to branch out into new exploitative markets. If disaster capitalism is also driving the Australian crisis then ‘accidental’ land clearance of this kind would certainly avoid a lot of inconvenient red tape. In addition, one wonders if proposals to create smart cities on the periphery will lead to the gentrification of Africa? Perhaps, with so many African migrants heading to Europe, those who stay behind will eventually find themselves complaining about the next ‘great replacement’? Regardless, the twofold strategy of depopulation/repopulation is going to make some people very wealthy indeed.