Slashdot Mirror
How the Syrian Games Industry Crumbled Under Sanctions and Violence
Fluffeh writes "Syria's games industry now looks like just another collateral casualty of dictator Bashar Al-Assad's struggle to hold power. 'Life for Syrian game developers has never been better,' joked Falafel Games founder Radwan Kasmiya, 'You can test the action on the streets and get back to your desktop to script it on your keyboard.' Any momentum Syria may have been building as a regional game development hub slowed considerably in 2004, when then-US President George W. Bush levied economic sanctions against the country. Under the sanctions, Syria's game developers found themselves cut off from investment money they needed to grow, as well as from other relationships that were just as important as cash. 'Any [closure of opportunity] is devastating to a budding games company as global partnerships are completely hindered,' said Rawan Sha'ban of the Jordanian game development company Quirkat. 'Even at the simplest infrastructure level, game development engines [from the US] cannot be purchased in a sanctioned country.'"
For all of their bullshit about human rights, the neocon Bush administration threw the religious and ethnic minorities of Iraq to the wolves in the name of "democracy." Iraq has lost half of its Christian population because of the violence and persecution they've faced since the fall of the Ba'athist regime. The US needs to stop meddling in these countries; the "freedom fighters" are often as bad as the regimes they want to replace. Hell, even now in post-Kadaffi Libya, the Berbers are getting mistreated even worse than before.
When this is what democracy means, I say "fuck democracy."
Smug satisfaction is enormously pleasurable; but there is an open line of argument about the question of the efficacy of economic sanctions, which this story serves as a case of(along with the not-really-news that serious violence usually drives off and/or kills off the local human capital)...
Depending on the local economy, how the local government is funded, how effective or ineffective a set of economic sanctions is, and probably enough other variables that only a hardened social scientist would be comfortable drawing conclusions, there is the potential for sanctions to hurt the local despot's local enemies more than his local allies and critical supply sources. It's also possible that you end up hurting both, or that your sanctions are so porous as to be irrelevant.