[BITList] CONUNDRUM INDEED.

[FA]

CONUNDRUM INDEED.

Article written by Kevin Myers, certainly a different point of view.

  Kevin Myers (born 30 March 1947) is an Irish journalist and writer. He 
writes for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, having previously been 
a columnist for the Irish Independent and a former contributor to The 
Irish Times, where he wrote the "An Irishman's Diary" opinion column 
several times weekly. Until 2005, he wrote for the UK Sunday Telegraph.
His articles criticise left-wing opinion and the "liberal consensus", 
sometimes incorporating hyperbole,sarcasm and parody. This essay 
recently appeared in The Irish Independent:

*Somalia* is not a humanitarian disaster; it is an evolutionary 
disaster. The current drought is not the worst in 50 years, as the BBC 
and all the aid organisations claim. It is nothing compared to the 
droughts in 1960/61 or 73/74. And there are continuing droughts every 5 
years or so. It's just that there are now four times the population; 
having been kept alive by famine relief, supplied by aid organisations, 
over the past 50 years. So, of course, the effects of any drought now, 
is a famine. They cannot even feed themselves in a normal rainfall year.

Worst yet, the effects of these droughts, and poor nutrition in the 
first 3 years of the a child's life, have a lasting effect on the 
development of the infant brain, so that if they survive, they will 
never achieve a normal IQ . Consequently, they are selectively breeding 
a population, who cannot be educated , let alone one that is not being 
educated; a recipe for disaster

We are seeing this impact now, and it can only exacerbate, to the 
detriment of their neighbours, and their environment as well. This 
scenario can only end in an even worse disaster; with even worse 
suffering, for those benighted people, and their descendants. 
Eventually, some mechanism will intervene, be it war, disease or starvation.
*
So what do we do? Let them starve?  What a dilemma for our Judeo/ 
Christian/Islamic Ethos; as well as Hindu/Buddhist morality. And this is 
beginning to happen in Kenya, Ethiopia, and other countries in Asia, 
like Pakistan. Is this the beginning of the end of civilisation?*

AFRICA is giving nothing to anyone outside Africa -- apart from AIDS and 
new diseases. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to 
restore something resembling civilization in Zimbabwe, the Begging bowl 
for Ethiopia is being passed around to us out of Africa, yet again. It 
is nearly 25 years since the famous Feed The World campaign began in 
Ethiopia, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 
million to 78+ million today.  So, why on earth should I do anything to 
encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country?  
Where is the logic? There is none.

To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count. One is 
my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another 
wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet 
again, captures the tragedy of children starving.

Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. 
Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have 
stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there.  The 
wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a low IQ, AK 
47-bearing moron, siring children whenever the whim takes him and 
blaming the world because he is uneducated, poor and left behind. There 
is no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and 
dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system but I do not know what 
it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column 
like this. It will win no friends and will provoke the self-righteous 
wrath of, well, the self-righteous hand wringing, letter writing 
wrathful individuals; a species which never fails to contaminate almost 
every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority. It 
will also probably enrage some of the finest men in Irish life, like 
John O'Shea, of Goal; and the Finucane brothers, men whom I admire 
enormously.

So be it. But, please, please, you self-righteously wrathful, spare me 
mention of our own Irish Famine, with this or that lazy analogy. There 
is no comparison. Within 20 years of the Famine, the Irish population 
was down by 30%. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the 
Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules plane, Ethiopia's 
population has more than doubled.

Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over 
the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, AK 47-toting, 
khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts and 
housing pirates of the ocean. Indeed, we now have almost an entire 
continent of sexually hyperactive, illiterate indigents, with tens of 
millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside 
world or allowances by the semi-communist Governments they voted for, 
money supplied by borrowing it from the World Bank!

This dependency has not stimulated political prudence or commonsense. 
Indeed, voodoo idiocy seems to be in the ascendant, with the president 
of South Africa being a firm believer in the efficacy of a little tap 
water on the post-coital penis as a sure preventative against AIDS 
infection. Needless to say, poverty, hunger and societal meltdown have 
not prevented idiotic wars involving Tigre, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, 
Somalia, Eritrea etcetera. Broad brush-strokes, to be sure.  But broad 
brush-strokes are often the way that history paints its gaudier, if more 
decisive, chapters.  Japan, China, Russia, Korea, Poland, Germany, 
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 20th century have endured worse broad 
brush-strokes than almost any part of Africa.  They are now -- one way 
or another -- virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, 
whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving 
almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

Meanwhile, Africa's peoples are outstripping their resources, and 
causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By 2050, the population of 
Ethiopia will be 177 million; the equivalent of France, Germany and 
Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly Protein-free 
wastelands of the Great Rift Valley. So, how much sense does it make for 
us actively to increase the adult population of what is already a vastly 
over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent 
country?

How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation 
today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, 
hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such 
wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them?

Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so 
much charity!

But that is not good enough. For self-serving generosity has been one of 
the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would 
otherwise have collapsed.  It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by 
nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the 
continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal 
self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of 
population-control now operating.  If his programme is successful, tens 
of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will 
survive to adulthood, he boasts.

Oh good: then what? I know, let them all come here (to Ireland) or 
America. (not forgetting Australia!)

And now, Ebola !






-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20140912/b30dba3f/attachment-0001.html>