Let Africa Sink

When it comes to any analysis of the problems facing Africa, Western society, and particularly people from the United States, encounter a logical disconnect that makes clear analysis impossible. That disconnect is the way life is regarded in the West (it’s precious, must be protected at all costs etc.), compared to the way life, and death, are regarded in Africa. Let me try to quantify this statement.

In Africa, life is cheap. There are so many ways to die in Africa that death is far more commonplace than in the West. You can die from so many things--snakebite, insect bite, wild animal attack, disease, starvation, food poisoning… the list goes on and on. At one time, crocodiles accounted for more deaths in sub-Saharan Africa than gunfire, for example. Now add the usual human tragedy (murder, assault, warfare and the rest), and you can begin to understand why the life expectancy for an African is low--in fact, horrifyingly low, if you remove White Africans from the statistics (they tend to be more urbanized, and more Western in behavior and outlook). Finally, if you add the horrifying spread of AIDS into the equation, anyone born in sub-Saharan Africa this century will be lucky to reach age forty.

Darfur: Why I Dont Give a Damn

There are so many reasons I could care less about Darfur and there are so many problems with the logic of the “save Darfur crowd” that it’s hard for me to find a place to begin. But let me essentially say that I don’t care because the crisis neither involves nor affects me. I feel no connection to the people who live there—they are not my “brothers and sisters,” their fate has nothing to do with me; don’t pretend they have anything to do with you. I don’t care if a bunch of Arabs want to kill a bunch of indiginates, it happens all the time, and it happens because their society is primitive and uncivilized.

Do I like the fact that 400,000 people have been killed there? No. Do I wish that Africa as well as the whole world would live in freedom and (thus) prosperity? Yes. But wishing it true won’t change its reality. And to fix Darfur will change a real and concentrated effort. And that effort will cost a price. The question that remains is, why should we engage in this effort?

The efforts that exist as is—the initiatives of the bleeding hearts and Darfur-is-the-in-thing-to-do teenagers—only involve money. But in all their infinite self-righteousness they failed to recognize that the nature of the issue cannot be solved by money. Dollars don’t stop bullets—bullets stop bullets. The only way to stop government genocide is to do it by force. Someone must intervene militarily for any genocide to be stopped.

But for intervention to occur at least one nation must take responsibility. But whom? Is there any nation, any person who is obligated to help? No, of course not. Not the US, not any nation—save the Sudan itself—is guilty of the crimes committed there, so they have not responsibility to invest themselves to alter the course. Nor do these nations have a responsibility to themselves to intervene in Darfur because the Sudan is not by any stretch of the imagination a threat to the security of their country.

Of course this does not say that anyone is not morally justified in attempting to fight—Sudan is a murderous regime that perpetually violates the rights of their citizens and systematically operates on a premise larger than death. But if you do chose to fight for Darfur then you must fight yourself. You cannot and may not drag anyone else into this fight. What do I mean by this? I mean that you can donate as much money as you want but you cannot take my money and donate it (i.e. international aid via taxes…duh). I mean that you can go fight in Darfur as part of an ad hoc vigilante militia but you cannot deploy US military—who I pay and whose job is to protect me—and waste their efforts and their lives on a problem irrelevant to American security.

As far as I’m concerned my government exists to protect my rights—just as other governments exist to protect their citizens. So the only time my government should wield its foreign policy is when my rights are threatened by foreign belligerents. Anything more is a waste of my money, which the government confiscated from me, and thus tramples on my rights. So if the United States government endeavors to fix the shit pie that is the Sudan—a nation whose government in zero ways threatens American freedom—it does so at my expense. And quite frankly we have enough people in the world trying to kill us already to begin worrying about people who aren’t.

I think the most childish thing about the save Darfur crowd is that for all their labors they have never actually enumerated a plan or even a general strategy for solving it. Most of the efforts have concentrated around “awareness”—we hear that word a lot with them—well guess what? We’re aware; surely, all of our policy makers know about it; so is the UN. But awareness does not come close to solving the problem. As I said, someone’s gonna have to wage war. But the problem is that the save Darfur crowd is the type of crowd hardly willing to fight a war and face up to the harsh realities of it. They are the type who thinks that they can live outside of reality, where you can stop a bomb by holding hands, contradicting values can live in harmony, and there is no objective concept of evil.

The only proper roll of a foreign policy is self-defense—in the same way that government is created for the purpose of defending the individual rights of its citizens. Privately donating and striving for Darfurians is wonderful, but no one has an obligation to Darfur which is why employing our government—using the tax money and lives of Americans—to fix the problem is an unjust option. Simply it seams like the bleeding hearts of the world have been following each other without ever looking where they are heading. They don’t seem to be willing to defend our country from a belligerent like Iran, but when the fate of the primitive and irrelevant are brought to the table everyone starts running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It’s about time we got a hold of ourselves and allow rationality to enter the debate. Someone has got to have the balls to say it: Darfur just doesn’t matter.

Zach

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