Dubai - a modern day Babel

Remember Babel. A tower built to the sky. A people who had lost touch with reality, who thought to make themselves gods. So it is with Dubai – and the great tower is about to fall.

The Burj Dubai is 818m tall. It is reputed to be the tallest man made structure in the world and it is part of the most extraordinary expression of human ‘development’ that one could imagine. The city of Dubai may be named after the ‘daba’ or locust, the creature that consumes everything before it. And that is surely how it has behaved.

In defiance of the desert it has built an indoor ski resort. In a land with scarcely any rainfall, it has built a golf course that uses 4million gallons of water a day. On its coast it has built ‘a world’ – a set of islands in the shape of the earth’s continents, and now for sale to the world’s richest people.

The only problem is that with the global recession the bottom has fallen out of the property market, $3.66 bn have been wiped off the value of the assetts of one of the biggest developers known as Dubai world, and the whole economy is poised on the brink of collapse.

Of course the whole thing is sick. Foreign workers here have their passports removed, are paid appallingly low wages and cannot leave. In a fascinating insight into The Dark side of Dubai  Johann Hari says

‘This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.’

and that is the heart of it. Dubai is the rest of the world economic system writ large. It is the ultimate expression of the neoliberal dream. And it is about to collapse.

In the book of Joel we read about the days after the locust came. The people cried out to God, they called a solemn gathering, sanctified a fast…Dubai is a sign for us all.

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