Posted on 02/13/2008 4:44:04 PM PST by ventanax5
Paternalism was supposed to be finished. The belief that grown men and women are childlike creatures who can thrive in the world only if they submit to the guardianship of benevolent mandarins underlay more than a centurys worth of welfare-state social policy, beginning with Otto von Bismarcks first Wohlfahrtsstaat experiments in nineteenth-century Germany. But paternalisms centrally directed systems of subsidies failed to raise up submerged classes, and by the end of the twentieth century even many liberals, surveying the cultural wreckage left behind by the Great Society, had abandoned their faith in the welfare state.
Yet in one area, foreign aid, the paternalist spirit is far from dead. A new generation of economists and activists is calling for a big push in Africa to expand programs that in practice institutionalize poverty rather than end it. The Africrats enthusiasm for the failed policies of the past threatens to turn a struggling continent into a permanent ghettoand to block the progress of ideas that really can liberate Africas oppressed populations.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Pretty much the same thing US liberals have done to US blacks. Keep them poor, uneducated, and voting RAT.
Nothing in Africa will change until African culture changes.
And African culture can't change, so long as the developing nations continue to subsidize it.
There is only one way to defeat poverty. With individual freedom wielding the power of capitalism.
Don't tell a liberal that, though...
http://www.newschoolpolitics.com/objectivist-content/darfur-why-i-dont-give-a-damn/
http://www.theothersideofkim.com/index.php/essays/36/
What would be necessary to change the culture?
Say what you will about Bono, but he is totally committed to Africa. And that is why his statement is such a puzzler.
Interviewed on NBCs Meet the Press via video link from Dublin, Ireland, Bono had high praise for President Bush: “I think he’s done an incredible job, his administration, on AIDS. And 250,000 Africans are on anti-viral drugs. They literally owe their lives to America. In one year that’s been done...”
...Acknowledging that the U.S president is under great pressure in dealing with international terrorism and domestic finances, Bono said that if Bush in his second term is “as bold in his commitments to Africa as he was in the first term, he indeed deserves a place in history in turning the fate of that continent around.”
Having worked on Bush’s AIDS initiative and the Millenium Challenge Account, the rock star thinks Bush “deserves his place in history. He has the heart for it.”
bttt
Its amazing the things one can accomplish by freely giving away billions and billions of dollars of other peoples' money.
.
First, stop subsidizing it. There's no reason for a poverty-ridden thugocracy or an otherwise incompetent governing structure to change if they're being fed shovels full of money. Or for a subsistence agriculture to improve if the warehouse is full of bags of rice from the UN.
Second, as a legitimate, serious ruler comes to the fore, identify opportunities to plant seeds, rather than give welfare to, the people. You want to set an example that can be followed.
Usually, the primary problem will resolve itself as inadequate food production. If a nation can feed itself, it's in a position to generate a growing economy.
For example, after WW II, Harry Truman established the Point 4 program -- where the U.S. and its institutions would provide technical assistance to the undeveloped countries, upon invitation.
My university, Oklahoma State (then Oklahoma A&M) established a partnership with the local equivalent in Ethiopia. A School of Agriculture was formed at the Ethiopian college and it was initially staffed largely by professors and grad students from A&M's School of Agriculture.
The graduates of the school then formed the equivalent of an "extension service" throughout Ethiopia.
Modern land management and animal husbandry techniques were quickly dispersed throughout the country. Within 8-to-10 years of the partnership's founding, Ethiopia was not only feeding itself, it was a food exporter -- for the first time in its history.
Agricultural capitalism once again proved its value.
The regime at that time, led by the Emperor Haile Selassie, was an enlightened one -- and friendly to the West.
Unfortunately, a Communist revolution unseated the Emperor and undid all the good that has been done. Ethiopia is still struggling to recover its agricultural success.
It's not impossible. It can be done. Under the right circumstances.
But shoveling money (and food) down the African rathole won't get it done -- regardless of what Bono, Madonna and the politicians et al might think.
First, stop subsidizing it. There's no reason for a poverty-ridden thugocracy or an otherwise incompetent governing structure to change if they're being fed shovels full of money. Or for a subsistence agriculture to improve if the warehouse is full of bags of rice from the UN.
Second, as a legitimate, serious ruler comes to the fore, identify opportunities to plant seeds, rather than give welfare to, the people. You want to set an example that can be followed.
Usually, the primary problem will resolve itself as inadequate food production. If a nation can feed itself, it's in a position to generate a growing economy.
For example, after WW II, Harry Truman established the Point 4 program -- where the U.S. and its institutions would provide technical assistance to the undeveloped countries, upon invitation.
My university, Oklahoma State (then Oklahoma A&M) established a partnership with the local equivalent in Ethiopia. A School of Agriculture was formed at the Ethiopian college and it was initially staffed largely by professors and grad students from A&M's School of Agriculture.
The graduates of the school then formed the equivalent of an "extension service" throughout Ethiopia.
Modern land management and animal husbandry techniques were quickly dispersed throughout the country. Within 8-to-10 years of the partnership's founding, Ethiopia was not only feeding itself, it was a food exporter -- for the first time in its history.
Agricultural capitalism once again proved its value.
The regime at that time, led by the Emperor Haile Selassie, was an enlightened one -- and friendly to the West.
Unfortunately, a Communist revolution unseated the Emperor and undid all the good that has been done. Ethiopia is still struggling to recover its agricultural success.
It's not impossible. It can be done. Under the right circumstances.
But shoveling money (and food) down the African rathole won't get it done -- regardless of what Bono, Madonna and the politicians et al might think.
Some very serious terra-forming.
Nothing in Africa will change until African culture changes
Culture is not the problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
But guess what kills more people in Africa -- esp. children -- than AIDS. It's infinitely easier, and cheaper, to prevent and cure, blah,blah,blah; but it's icky, sticky, as no civil rights, and makes terrible photo ops. It is diarrhea.
Proper hygiene water will prevent it. A few spoonfuls of salt, baking soda, and sugar from a little packet -- costing maybe a nickle -- added to a liter of water will save a life.
This is why Bono and his ilk always strike me as speaking with a forked tongue. They want to be hailed as concerned citizen of the world -- with our money, of course -- so long as it isn't icky.
Let Africa Sink
Kim du Toit
May 26, 2002
2:40 PM CST
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 (its 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.
I lived in Africa for over thirty years. Growing up there, I was infused with several African traits—traits which are not common in Western civilization. The almost-casual attitude towards death was one. (Another is a morbid fear of snakes.)
So because of my African background, I am seldom moved at the sight of death, unless its accidental, or it affects someone close to me. (Death which strikes at strangers, of course, is mostly ignored.) Of my circle of about eighteen or so friends with whom I grew up, and whom I would consider “close”, only about ten survive today—and not one of the survivors is over the age of fifty. Two friends died from stepping on landmines while on Army duty in Namibia. Three died in horrific car accidents (and lest one thinks that this is not confined to Africa, one was caused by a kudu flying through a windshield and impaling the guy through the chest with its hoof—not your everyday traffic accident in, say, Florida). One was bitten by a snake, and died from heart failure. Another also died of heart failure, but he was a hopeless drunkard. Two were shot by muggers. The last went out on his surfboard one day and was never seen again (did I mention that sharks are plentiful off the African coasts and in the major rivers?). My situation is not uncommon in South Africa—and north of the Limpopo River (the border with Zimbabwe), I suspect that others would show worse statistics.
The death toll wasnt just confined to my friends. When I was still living in Johannesburg, the newspaper carried daily stories of people mauled by lions, or attacked by rival tribesmen, or dying from some unspeakable disease (and this was pre-AIDS Africa too) and in general, succumbing to some of Africas many answers to the population explosion. Add to that the normal death toll from rampant crime, illness, poverty, flood, famine, traffic, and the police, and youll begin to get the idea.
My favorite African story actually happened after I left the country. An American executive took a job over there, and on his very first day, the newspaper headlines read: “Three Headless Bodies Found”.
The next day: “Three Heads Found”.
The third day: “Heads Dont Match Bodies”.
You cant make this stuff up.
As a result of all this, death is treated more casually by Africans than by Westerners. I, and I suspect most Africans, am completely inured to reports of African suffering, for whatever cause. Drought causes crops to fail, thousands face starvation? Yup, that happened many times while I was growing up. Inter-tribal rivalry and warfare causes wholesale slaughter? Yep, been happening there for millennia, long before Whitey got there. Governments becoming rich and corrupt while their populations starved? Not more than nine or ten of those. In my lifetime, the following tragedies have occurred, causing untold millions of deaths: famine in Biafra, genocide in Rwanda, civil war in Angola, floods in South Africa, famine in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, famine in Ethiopia, floods in Mozambique, wholesale slaughter in Uganda, and tribal warfare in every single country. There are others, but you get the point.
Yes, all this was also true in Europe—maybe a thousand years ago. But not any more. And Europe doesnt teem with crocodiles, ultra-venomous snakes and so on.
The Dutch controlled the floods. All of Europe controls famine—its non-existent now. Apart from a couple of examples of massive, state-sponsored slaughter (Nazi Germany, Communist Russia), Europe since 1700 doesnt even begin to compare to Africa today. Casual slaughter is another thing altogether—rare in Europe, common in Africa.
More to the point, the West has evolved into a society with a stable system of government, which follows the rule of law, and has respect for the rights and life of the individual—none of which is true in Africa.
Among old Africa hands, we have a saying, usually accompanied by a shrug: “Africa wins again.” This is usually said after an incident such as:
a beloved missionary is butchered by his congregation, for no apparent reason
a tribal chief prefers to let his tribe starve to death rather than accepting food from the Red Cross (would mean he wasnt all-powerful, you see)
an entire nation starves to death, while its ruler accumulates wealth in foreign banks
a new government comes into power, promising democracy, free elections etc., provided that the freedom doesnt extend to the other tribe
the other tribe comes to power in a bloody coup, then promptly sets about slaughtering the first tribe
etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
The prognosis is bleak, because none of this mayhem shows any sign of ending. The conclusions are equally bleak, because, quite frankly, there is no answer to Africas problems, no solution that hasnt been tried before, and failed.
Just go to the CIA World Fact Book, pick any of the African countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi etc.), and compare the statistics to any Western country (eg. Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland). The disparities are appalling—and its going to get worse, not better. It has certainly got worse since 1960, when most African countries achieved independence. We, and by this I mean the West, have tried many ways to help Africa. All such attempts have failed.
Charity is no answer. Money simply gets appropriated by the first, or second, or third person to touch it (17 countries saw a decline in real per capita GNP between 1970 and 1999, despite receiving well over $100 billion in World Bank assistance).
Food isnt distributed. This happens either because there is no transportation infrastructure (bad), or the local leader deliberately withholds the supplies to starve people into submission (worse).
Materiel is broken, stolen or sold off for a fraction of its worth. The result of decades of “foreign aid” has resulted in a continental infrastructure which, if one excludes South Africa, couldnt support Pittsburgh.
Add to this, as I mentioned above, the endless cycle of Natures little bag of tricks—persistent drought followed by violent flooding, a plethora of animals, reptiles and insects so dangerous that life is already cheap before Man starts playing his little reindeer games with his fellow Man—and what you are left with is: catastrophe.
The inescapable conclusion is simply one of resignation. This goes against the grain of our humanity—we are accustomed to ridding the world of this or that problem (smallpox, polio, whatever), and accepting failure is anathema to us. But, to give a classic African scenario, a polio vaccine wont work if the kids are prevented from getting the vaccine by a venal overlord, or a frightened chieftain, or a lack of roads, or by criminals who steal the vaccine and sell it to someone else. If a cure for AIDS was found tomorrow, and offered to every African nation free of charge, the growth of the disease would scarcely be checked, let alone reversed. Basically, youd have to try to inoculate as many two-year old children as possible, and write off the two older generations.
So that is the only one response, and its a brutal one: accept that we are powerless to change Africa, and leave them to sink or swim, by themselves.
It sounds dreadful to say it, but if the entire African continent dissolves into a seething maelstrom of disease, famine and brutality, thats just too damn bad. We have better things to do—sometimes, you just have to say, “Cant do anything about it.
The viciousness, the cruelty, the corruption, the duplicity, the savagery, and the incompetence is endemic to the entire continent, and is so much of an anathema to any right-thinking person that the civilized imagination simply stalls when faced with its ubiquity, and with the enormity of trying to fix it. The Western media shouldnt even bother reporting on it. All that does is arouse our feelings of horror, and the instinctive need to do something, anything—but everything has been tried before, and failed. Everything, of course, except self-reliance.
All we should do is make sure that none of Africa gets transplanted over to the U.S., because the danger to our society is dire if it does. I note that several U.S. churches are attempting to bring groups of African refugees over to the United States, European churches the same for Europe. Mistake. Mark my words, this misplaced charity will turn around and bite us, big time.
Even worse would be to think that the simplicity of Africa holds some kind of answers for Western society: remember Mrs. Clintons little book, “It Takes A Village”? Trust me on this: there is not one thing that Africa can give the West which hasnt been tried before and failed, not one thing that isnt a step backwards, and not one thing which is worse than, or that contradicts, what we have already.
So heres my (tongue-in-cheek) solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.
Inevitably, some Kissingerian realpolitiker is going to argue in favor of intervention, because in the vacuum of Western aid, perhaps the Communist Chinese would step in and increase their influence in the area. There are two reasons why this isnt going to happen.
Firstly, the PRC doesnt have that kind of money to throw around; and secondly, the result of any communist assistance will be precisely the same as if it were Western assistance. For the record, Mozambique and Angola are both communist countries—and both are economic disaster areas. The prognosis for both countries is disastrous—and would be the same for any other African country.
The West cant help Africa. Nor should we. The record speaks for itself.
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