On February 6, huge earthquakes struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, inflicting ghastly injury throughout a geographic area that has already borne a substantial amount of earthly devastation in current a long time. The continuing battle in Syria has produced tens of millions of refugees, a lot of whom have now discovered themselves victims of seismic exercise within the Turkish south.

The loss of life toll from Monday’s quakes rapidly jumped into the 1000’s and can little question soar to way more macabre heights. An untold variety of folks stay buried beneath the rubble. Traumatised survivors deal with frigid temperatures and aftershocks; refugees deal with the lack of any semblance of refuge.

The pure catastrophe has served to underscore what ought to hardly be earth-shattering information: that life for the worldwide poor is extraordinarily precarious and tormented by a number of, simultaneous crises from which restoration is commonly futile.

To make certain, the dwellings inhabited by the have-nots of the earth will be structurally much less dependable and probably extra weak to tectonic tumult – as was seen, for instance, within the Peruvian earthquake of 2007, when properties collapsed throughout poor neighbourhoods within the province of Ica. However in a world structured upon capitalist foundations, precarity goes a lot deeper than shoddy development supplies or disregard for constructing codes.

For starters, capitalism’s insistence on acute inequality and the tyranny of an elite minority means there are main international fault traces between wealthy and poor – ones which might be turning into ever extra pronounced within the period of local weather change and attendant ecological calamity. And whereas help pledges inevitably come pouring in after high-profile disasters, they usually solely exacerbate the divide by lining the pockets of the help trade reasonably than benefitting the disaster-stricken themselves.

There may be additionally the truth that, for a lot of the world’s precarious inhabitants, life constitutes a roughly steady catastrophe, however one which generates no consideration. In June, The New Humanitarian information company famous gross disparities in catastrophe aid, with nearly half of all emergency funding for 2022 “going to solely 5 protracted – and largely conflict-driven – crises”. Citing a current United Nations estimate that the variety of annual disasters will improve to some 560 by the yr 2030, the company described how victims of under-the-radar disasters are sometimes compelled to stay in unsafe places – thereby setting the stage for brand new crises.

Take the case of Afghanistan, the place an ongoing dependence on help has completed nothing to make the nation secure. In August, floods killed greater than 180 folks, simply two months after an earthquake had killed greater than 1,000. In Might, the NGO Save the Youngsters reported that the nation was struggling its “worst starvation disaster on document”, with almost 50 p.c of the inhabitants going hungry on account of a raging drought and persevering with financial breakdown.

Such are the poisonous legacies of 20 years of a United States-led “battle on terror” that devastated the lives, livelihoods and futures of tens of millions of Afghans and sucked in billions of {dollars} of “restoration funds”.

For one more illustration of how politics, greed and mismanagement overlap with and compound environmental disaster, we’d like look no additional than the Caribbean nation of Haiti, the place in 2021 a devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake was adopted by a lethal storm and landslides. Greater than 2,200 folks have been killed and 130,000 properties destroyed, along with a lot of colleges and hospitals.

This got here simply over a decade after a 2010 earthquake killed some 220,000 folks and rendered 1.5 million homeless. Solely a smidgen of the billions of {dollars} that flowed in to “rescue” Haiti truly reached poor Haitian earthquake victims, going as an alternative to assist organisations, worldwide safety forces, and different supposedly competent of us – just like the UN peacekeepers who promptly unleashed a cholera epidemic upon the nation.

In ensuing years, US assist for official corruption in Haiti would make the terrain further fertile for political disaster, whereas additional eroding the nation’s capacity to reply to earthquakes and different disasters.

As for me, my very own private expertise with earthquakes features a tremor in southwestern Turkey in 2010 and the magnitude 7.4 earthquake that rocked Mexico’s Oaxacan coast in June 2020. I can safely say that the latter episode was akin to feeling my world combust – however solely momentarily, because it entailed no lasting injury to my home or particular person. In different phrases, it was a far and privileged cry from the expertise of the newest earthquake victims in Turkey and Syria, a lot of whom – displaced by battle – had undoubtedly already felt their respective worlds combust even previous to the quake.

Following the information of Monday’s cataclysm, I spoke right here in Oaxaca with a working-class Mexican man who, in September 1985, assisted in extracting our bodies from the rubble of the Mexico Metropolis earthquake that formally resulted within the deaths of 10,000 folks however in all probability killed many extra. Shaking his head, he professed to nonetheless suppose often of three our bodies specifically: a humble mom hunched in useless over her two kids, dressed in class uniforms.

And as if the poor wanted any extra reminders as to the negligible worth assigned to their lives, the perennial tremors of the earth in Mexico imply that earthquake-related psychological trauma is well revived.

As for issues not simply revived, in September 1986, one yr after the Mexico Metropolis quake, the Washington Put up reported that no fewer than 80,000 folks remained homeless. Certainly, the town by no means fairly totally recovered from both the bodily injury or the catastrophe mismanagement. Precarity is nothing new.

And but issues are getting extra precarious by the minute, as capitalism breaks new floor within the area of obliterating any and all aspirations towards a typical humanity or planetary wellbeing – and the “catastrophe aid” trade considerations itself with sustaining its personal viability whereas poor communities lurch from one catastrophe to the following.

Whereas the wealthy insulate themselves from the fallout, the poor bear the brunt of army battle, financial upheaval, climate-related havoc, and the coronavirus pandemic – which has left the earth’s have-nots on even shakier floor.

As with all different current earthly afflictions, Monday’s quakes in Turkey and Syria will hit the poor the toughest. And the one means out of a world the place revenue for the few means precarity for the various could be a complete seismic shift.

The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.