Skip to comments.

Posted on 10/04/2001 3:17:15 AM PDT by Colosis

Of all of our native varieties of wildlife, I suppose we should not be too irritated by the lesser-spotted trite. On the scale of things, lesser-spotted trites are not the worst kind of beast to have grazing on one's epidermis. They certainly don't compare with other, far more venomous species such as the Indigenous Rabid Animal or the morally incontinent 32-County Bowel Movement. Yet even though the lesser-spotted trite is a danger to no-one, it nonetheless irritates enormously, especially because it e merges in its most virulently pious form at times of world crisis.

Two recent letters to this newspaper typified the irksome qualities of the trite. One letter asked why the West hadn't had a War on International Hunger, which (said the letter-writer) kills 1,000 times more innocent people than terrorism.

Freeze assets

The other letter suggested that if governments were going to freeze the assets of terrorists, should they not start with the arms manufacturers? And by heaven, I can see every headgirl, every school prig, every neo-hippy, and every sad individual who thinks the words of John Lennon's song Imagine constitute a sound political blueprint for the world, nodding their heads in agreement with the trite.

Why, perhaps they're all even quoting from that glutinous poster from the 1960s and which ran something like: "War is bad for flowers and children and other living species." Do not mock these sentiments. Words such as those should be all in first aid-packs, to be recited to people who have just swallowed some lethal poison which will prove fatal unless instantly expelled from the stomach.

But back to the letters: why doesn't the West feed the starving of the world, and abolish guns and arms, and live in peace, man? Well, as it happens, the West has fed the hungry of the world. Repeatedly. And by doing so, it has turned much of Africa into a donor junkie with its aid packages. Thus it is that the "elite" around that criminal madmen Robert Mugabwe assume that no matter how much damage his murderous kleptomania inflicts, the West will always bail the country out, and that food aplenty is around the corner, come what may.

There is barely an African country which is feeding itself, and Rwanda and Burundi and Sierra Leone have now almost become European protectorates again. The certainty that the West would come to the aid of the hungry actually prolonged the wars in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Tigre, where food was used as a weapon by the combatants.

And as with guns, the more food that was pumped into the conflict zone - and it was: Western food - the longer the war continued.

Green revolution

The US-led green revolution has enabled chronic net-importers of food such as the Indian sub-continent to become food exporters. How much richer and fatter the peasants of India and Pakistan would be if those two states did not squander so much of their resources on the wickedest arms race in the world, I cannot imagine. But it is their arms race, not the West's, and to blame the US or Britain or Údurás na Gaeltachta or anybody else in the West for the unending dispute over Kashmir is tritery at its most infantile.

And to judge from the letters to this newspaper from so many lesser spotted trites, Ireland must be the last major refuge for Rousseau's belief in the virtuous savage; but here this notion has adopted a particular dialect form to accord with the Irish tritological world-view. This declares that it is not society which corrupts a hitherto innocent mankind, but it is Western society which does so. Without Western society, declare the tritologists, the world would be a happier, simpler, and no doubt arms-free paradise.

If these lesser-spotted trites were capable of following the logic of their basic premises through to an obvious conclusion, they would know this world-view requires the creation of an imperially condescending moral order in which blameless but unproductive native peoples all over the world depend on the West for the supply not merely of sin, but of sustenance too. Alms and arms.

Arms sales

The truth is that throughout the 1990s, expenditure on armaments fell across the Western world, but it rose steadily in Japan, China, Pakistan and India. The continent most at risk from nuclear proliferation and a conventional arms race is not Europe, but Asia. Moreover, stand at the airport of any African capital and you will see food-aid arriving from the EU and the US, but none from Asia. And up until September 11th, Afghanistan's largest aid-donor was the US.

Trites do not understand one certain central principle. Aid is only useful to an economy in famine or as an economic primer. It is almost no use when the famine is induced artificially, because its instigators will then use hunger as a tap for fresh aid, as we have seen repeatedly in Africa. And aid is useless as a means of sustaining the economically indigent. All it achieves it to reinforce the indigence. It doesn't solve problems but compounds them.

Not complex; but quite beyond the small brains of the lesser-spotted trites, whose present dawn chorus of fluting moral superiority reminds us that a world crisis is once again upon us. It could be worse, to be sure: but have you ever tried telling someone who is being nibbled by a flea how lucky they are that it is not an alligator? The flea is more than enough, thank you. And so is the trite.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.