AbacusNow, who could possibly hate the ‘Asian Destruction Bank’ so much?

New book purports to tell the story of the ‘Asian Destruction Bank’, a Manila-based supranational whose logo, location and palatial headquarters all look remarkably like those of the real ADB

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The front cover of Cesspool Kamikazes. Photo: Handout

Published: 8:30am, 24 Jul 2017Updated: 8:48am, 24 Jul 2017

The world’s supranational financial institutions have drawn a lot of flack over the years. The International Monetary Fund has been called a neo-imperialist tool of US economic hegemony, and has often been blamed for causing, rather than curing, financial crises. The World Bank has been criticised for wreaking environmental and social devastation with its development projects. And the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was famously slammed for spending more lavishly on its own headquarters than on any actual reconstruction or development.

But none of those institutions has ever attracted anything like the astonishing invective aimed at the Asian Development Bank in the bizarre new book Cesspool Kamikazes by Peter Lee and Wei Zhang.

Styled as a manga-type cartoon comic, Cesspool Kamikazes purports to tell the story of the “Asian Destruction Bank”, a Manila-based supranational whose logo, location and palatial headquarters all look remarkably like those of the real ADB.

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The book bills itself as “a shocking exposé into the corrupt underbelly of a dysfunctional financial institution and the severe environmental and social consequences of its unchecked greed, arrogance and pride”. In reality it is an overwrought piece of low propaganda that aims to portray the ADB as the direct spiritual, political and financial successor to Japan’s expansionist military government of the second world war, perpetuating its dream of Asian domination, but through development finance rather than invasion and war crimes.