Paul Shanahan, the owner of a yacht delivery business in Belgium, now lives a peaceful existence after a terrorist-active life. An old colleague’s
36. NASRUDDIN AND THE STRANGER
A stranger approached Nasruddin as he was standing at the crossroads.
“Which way to town?” the stranger asked.
Nasruddin pointed to the right.
“And how long will it take to get there?”
Nasruddin stared at the stranger intently and shrugged.
“I know you can hear me!” the stranger shouted. “How long will it take me to get to town?”
Nasruddin shrugged again, and the stranger stomped off angrily.
A minute later, Nasruddin shouted, “About half an hour.”
The stranger turned and shouted back, “Why didn’t you say so?”
“I had to see how quickly you were walking,” Nasruddin replied, smiling.
This Tale is from “Tiny Tales of Nasruddin” by Laura Gibbs. The book is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-2022 Laura Gibbs.
One of the things that we discussed was the role of the World Bank, especially with regards to developing countries, and how it recklessly pushed its agenda of capital accumulation that ultimately hampered the struggle for land rights, struggle for collective ownership of concentrated wealth. One of the statements that you made was “the World Bank has always been an arm of the US military.”… [T]hey look at the World Bank as a key to the US strategic control of other countries’ economies. And there are two basic spheres economically that the United States uses as the buttress of its balance of payments and its ability to impose sanctions on other countries. The first is oil, which explains why the United States has blown up the Nord Stream pipelines and why it’s isolated Venezuela. It used oil to be able to control the energy of foreign countries. And the second point is agriculture. And that is probably the most serious and most negative, destructive element of all of the World Bank’s policies. And I have a chapter on that in my Super Imperialism. —Perfecting Imperialism by Michael Hudson