COMMENTARY : THE TSUNAMI AS METAPHOR By Satya Sivaraman CHENNAI, India - It was a phenomenon with a Japanese name, produced by the undersea clash of the India and Burma tectonic plates and exported out of Indonesia. Hitting the shores of a dozen countries across two continents, it swept millions off their feet, turning their lives upside down within minutes, leaving a trail of tragedies in its wake.

This Sri Lankan woman peers at her papers to make sure they are intact after the tsumani.

If all that sounds depressingly similar to some continental financial crisis, you can be forgiven for thinking so. As metaphors for the process of corporate globalisation go, it just doesn’t get more evocative than the deadly quake and tsunami duo that hit parts of Asia and Africa in December.

Unleashing extremely powerful forces in short periods of time, multinational in its reach, unstoppable and utterly devastating in its consequences, the tsunami in particular provides an apt and evil parallel to the way globalisation impacts on the world’s poor.

Think about it. Except for its natural origins, the disaster of Dec. 26, 2004 was eerily similar to the catastrophes unleashed by the combination of neo-liberal economics and imperialist politics that dominate our world today.

For example, like the victims of corporate globalisation, most of the nations ravaged by the tsunami were developing countries already struggling with large impoverished populations, lack of basic amenities and lots of social strife. Even worse, within these countries, most of the tsunami-affected belonged to poor or low-income families just as in the case of the economic devastation caused by the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997.

Again, the tsunami -- imitating global flows of speculative capital -- showed scant respect for national boundaries or sovereignty, traveling at high speed to hit countries all the way from Sri Lanka to Somalia. And as if approved by the World Trade Organisation itself, the raging seawaters accessed and ravaged the coastlines of the countries they visited with complete abandon.

In fact, even in their sheer impunity, the quake and tsunami remind us only of the hedge funds and transnational corporations of our world which continue their pillaging immune to the laws of both Earth and Heaven.

Coming to the most horrific aspects of the Asian tsunami disaster -- the blood, gore and violence -- we have to seek a man-made equivalent not just in the processes of global economy but their political consequences: conflict and war.

And does one need look further than the bogus, global ‘War on Terror’ waged by the United States in recent times to find death and destruction on a scale similar to that wrought by the tsunami? Uncannily enough, even the numbers match -- the tally of those killed so far due to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are about the same as lives lost in tsunami-struck Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. George Bush Jr. may be a bit slow at times, but the destruction wrought by his policies compare well with the biggest natural disaster the world has seen for decades.

But, before we all drown in sorrow at the weird way in which the Asian tsunami mirrored current global realities, it needs to be pointed out that there are signs of great hope also in the other parallels that can be drawn from the response to the disaster.

In terms of scale and spontaneity, the funds, material aid and human volunteers mobilised worldwide to help victims of the Asian tsunami tragedy rebuild their shattered lives is simply unprecedented. The sheer generosity displayed by members of the ordinary public has shamed governments, corporations and big institutions of every kind into silently following suit.

In fact, so great has been the outpouring of international support that it has swept away petty attempts by the administration of George Bush Jr. to unilaterally claim ‘leadership’ over the global response to the Asian disaster.

This ‘tsunami of solidarity’, as it has been rightly dubbed, has shown that another world is not just possible but is alive and giving in our midst. It has also shown that, despite all the natural and manmade disasters the people of the world deal with, they have not lost their ability to reach out and help others in times of great sorrow and need.

It is from these deep, almost geological reservoirs of generosity, compassion and share