Against tourism #2

Travel is being, getting, going at great distance, from the comfort of your mother’s womb to the loneliness of remote lands where everything is anew. 

A sailor, a documentarian, a hippy, a photographer, a businessman, an adventurer, a nomad, a passionate lover running away from the banality of a prearranged comfortable life in the suburbs; for them, there is no place called return. 

Home becomes a distant memory, it turns into an abstract past reality to be preserved only by guilt if any loved one left behind. The traveler knows no home, no reassurance, no pampering – only exploration and discovery.

Tourism dislocates; it seduces, it bribes, it coerces violently. It dispossesses ceaselessly as a necessary means for its endless reproduction. 

It automatically transcribes Greece as tzatziki, Italy as Pizza, Paris as Disneyland and Thailand as sex; it once had the arrogance to present Africa as a place where you solely hunt and kill wild beasts. 

Thus, tourism steals and deprives people’s past; it eliminates memory and depth, culture and taste, it falsifies reality once perceived as a collective civilizational effort to an economic transaction between two partners in crime. 

Tourism cannot, and should not, be abolished. It should be delegitimized, ridiculed, discouraged, mocked; it should be unwired from the norms of our imagination. 

False (mass touristic) consciousness must generate guilt in the global north and feelings of shame in the global south.

And that would be the beginning of the end for it.