[Bret L]

We Aren't the World

Resisting Liberal Imperialism

By Alex Kurtagic



We Aren't the World

"On March 3, the BBC reported that the millions raised by Bob Geldof's BandAid campaign and LiveAid concerts to relieve victims of famine in Ethiopia in 1984-1985 went straight to paramilitary rebels, who then used the money to buy weapons and overthrow the government of the time. The corporation informed us that '[f]ormer rebel leaders told the BBC that they posed as merchants in meetings with charity workers to get aid money.'

Here is how it worked:

Max Peberdy, an aid worker from Christian Aid, carried nearly
$500,000 in Ethiopian currency across the border in 1984.

He used it to buy grain from merchants and believes that none of
the aid was diverted. ...He insists that to the best of his knowledge,
the food went to feed the starving.

The only problem was that

... the merchant Mr Peberdy dealt with in that transaction claims
he was, in fact, a senior member of the Tigray People's Liberation
Front (TPLF).

"I was given clothes to make me look like a Muslim merchant. This
was a trick for the NGOs," says Gebremedhin Araya.

Underneath the sacks of grain he sold, he says, were sacks filled
with sand. He says he handed over the money he received to TPLF
leaders, including Meles Zenawi --the man who went on to become
Ethiopia's prime minister in 1991.

Mr Meles, who is still in office, has declined to comment on the
allegations. But Mr Gebremedhin's version of events is supported by
the TPLF's former commander, Aregawi Berhe.

Now living in exile in the Netherlands, he says the rebels put on
what he describes as a "drama" to get the money.

"The aid workers were fooled," he says.

It seems "$95m (£63m) -- from Western governments and charities
including Band Aid -- was channeled into the rebel fight." And "(s)ome
95 percent of it was allocated to buying weapons and building up a
hard-line Marxist political party within the rebel movement."

Much of the money that ended up in the TPLF's hands was channeled
through affiliated groups such as the Relief Society of Tigray.

Band Aid's accounts show that it gave almost $11m to the society
and other groups close to the rebels, but the charity has declined to
comment.

Well, well, well. What a surprise.

Right from the start, I sensed that not only was there something
profoundly dishonest about the high-flown rhetoric and odious guilt-
mongering surrounding the Bob Geldof's aid campaigns, but also that it
would fail to meet its objectives. After all, Sub-Saharan African
states had proven spectacularly dysfunctional and its political
leaders bewilderingly incompetent and corrupt, so to me it seemed
highly improbable that a handful of self-indulgent celebrities and
superannuated rock stars would transform the continent into a space
age utopia with just a concert and a charity shakedown.

What was obvious to me even as a teenager, however, evidently eluded
Geldof and the coterie of largely White, fashion-conscious, guilt-
ridden glitterati that like having their names linked to his crusades.
In 1985 he, in collaboration with Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson,
added insult to injury by inflicting upon us the insufferable single,
"We are the World" -- a vile intrusion into my psyche for which I
would still like to sue Ritchie and Michael Jackson's estate, as I
believe I am owed compensation for the intense annoyance the
repetitive playing of that ridiculous song caused me at the time.

In 1989 Geldof reprised with a new version of the original guilt fest,
Do They Know It's Christmas?

And in 2004 Geldof went on the offensive yet again, this time putting
his Live Aid campaign on steroids and spearheading a new crusade to
end poverty in Africa and elsewhere. This crusade culminated with the
Live8 concerts in July 2005, whose broadcasting around the world is
recorded as the biggest media event in human history. Geldof enjoyed
political backing from Gordon Brown, then the United Kingdom's
Chancellor of the Exchequer and now the unelected Prime Minister, who
promised to send our billions to Africa, even while war pensioners
here starved or freezed to death, hospitals had waiting lists running
into years, public services were in crisis due to underinvestment, and
the national debt -- already considerable back then -- that was
costing billions in interest.

Thankfully -- at least for my own sanity -- I was in a position to do
something about it in 2005. Even though I knew it was but a symbolic
gesture, I put together an "Anti-Geldof Compilation" double CD, if
only to leave it on record that there were some who actively opposed
Geldof's campaigns, and were indeed repelled by the very ideas
underpinning it. In a 7,000-word statement, which I included in the
booklet, I presented the case against Live8, and, for that matter, any
such effort.One of my arguments was that the premise behind aid
campaigns like Live8 was economically illiterate. I pointed out that
since 1950 nearly one trillion dollars have been sent to Africa in the
form of aid, 46 percent of all aid to the Third World; and that,
despite increasing rates of aid, particularly since 1975, the
proportion of people living in extreme poverty in the continent had
increased. I also pointed out that Fredrik Erixon, then former Chielf
Economist at Timbro (a Swedish think tank) and presently a director of
the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), had
stated on 11 September 2005 on the BBC News website that

GDP per capita growth in Africa decreased and was for many years
even measured in negative figures. The unfortunate fact is that most
African countries are poorer today then they were at the time of their
independence from colonial powers.

If the idea of aid had been true - in particular the alleged link
between aid, investment, and growth -- many of those countries would
today have eradicated extreme poverty and have a GDP per capita
similar to that of New Zealand, Spain or Portugal.

If nothing else, aid to Africa seems to have lowered rather than
increased economic growth.

I drew attention to the fact that, according to Erixon, aid recipients
have channeled aid money towards "current spending and public
consumption," boosting the public sector in the economy. And that,
also according to Erixon, the consequent strengthening of socialist
tendencies made of investment a government activity, fuelling fiscal
budgets and the growth of "parastatals and state-owned enterprise."

Largely supported by the donor community at the time, these soon
became arenas of corruption and this corruption spread like wildfire
to other parts of the society.

The tragedy of aid, as been shown in numerous evaluations and by
World Bank research, is that donors are part of the problem of
corruption; aid often underpins corruption, and higher aid levels tend
to erode the governance structure of poor countries.

Erixon's conclusion, which I share, was that the persistence of
poverty in Africa was not the result of a lack of aid, but rather
Africa's failure to make good use of it. I highlighted Erixon's
argument that "[i]nstead of focusing on the quality of aid and how to
raise the output through a more productive use of aid, donor countries
and others are solely occupied by increasing the quantity of aid." I
further highlighted the fact that it did not seem that world leaders,
"not to mention Bob Geldof and other campaigners, have any real idea
how the aid given can be made more effective."

Of course not.

And neither do they have any real idea of what kind of people exactly
they are trying help. This includes Erixon, of course, since, for all
his laudable criticism of the aid mentality, he still assumes that by
shifting away from aid and towards development, Africa can be brought
into economic convergence with Europe. My view is that this will never
happen, no matter what approach is taken, short of re-colonizing the
continent. Furthermore, my view is that it is wrong to even attempt
it: Africa does not need development; what it needs is complete de-
industrialization and non-interference from outside powers. If it has
gone to hell since the dismantlement of the European empires, it is
because it must - it is because Africa is, in fact, overdeveloped, and
needs to be brought into economic convergence with Africa as it was in
pre-colonial times.

If aid and development money is stolen to buy weapons in order to
replace one chief with another, or is pilfered by a corrupt chief and
his private army, it is because development -- the result of progress
-- was never important in Africa. The ideology of progress is a
European invention, and one that is associated with a specific subset
of Europeans, whom we call liberals. Liberals think of progress the
way they think of equality: it is good and right in its own right, and
needs no justification. If progress is good and all humans are equal,
then all humans will benefit from progress equally, given a level
playing field. The problem is that humans are not equal and, because
they are not equal, because they are diverse physically, mentally, and
spiritually, progress is a philosophical construct that is alien to
large swathes of humanity. Nowhere is this more the case, probably,
than in Sub-Saharan Africa, the part of the world we consider the most
dysfunction.

J. R. Baker, summarizing in 1974 the impressions of early explorers of
Sub-Saharan Africa, chosen for their accuracy and reliability,
describes a pre-Colonial situation that was tens of thousands of years
removed from the European reality: the aborigines were naked or semi-
naked; they practiced self-mutilation; they resided in small
settlements, in simple, single-story dwellings; they sailed in crude
canoes carved out of tree trunks; they had not invented the wheel;
they rarely domesticated animals or used them for labor or
transportation; they had no written script or recorded history; they
had no use of money, no numbering system, no calendar; they had no
roads; and they had no administration or code of law. Chiefs were
despotic, capricious, and cruel; slaughter was frequent; cannibalism
was sometimes practiced. Dialects were simple, with limited
vocabularies to express abstract thought. The average tribesman lived
for the moment and lacked foresight. Said early explorers were shocked
by their discoveries, obviously because they also thought in terms of
progress.

Is it a surprise, given this background, that sending aid money to Sub-
Saharan nations is as good as sowing seeds on stones? Consider that
much of Europe lay in ruins following the end of World War II. Some of
its cities, at least parts of them, had been bombed back to the Stone
Age; industrial production had been devastated, the economic structure
ruined, millions made homeless, foreign reserves and treasuries
exhausted. Like in Africa today, millions starved - many died or froze
to death in the brutal Winter of 1946. And while much of the
countryside was spared, the destruction of transport and
infrastructure had left rural communities isolated. Between 1948 and
1952, parts of Europe received aid from the United States through The
Marshall Plan: the money was transferred to European governments, who
were assisted by the Economic Cooperation Administration, an American
agency that was later succeeded by the United States Agency for
International Development. Three years into the program, output in the
participating European nations was 35 percent above pre-war levels.
Why was the 4-year, $13 billion Marshall Plan successful in Europe and
the 30-, 40-, 50-year, $1 trillion aid program unsuccessful in Africa?
I posit that it is because Europeans believe in building things --
because there is, in other words, a fundamental and deeply rooted
difference in temperament, outlook, and capability -- at least in the
areas that are important for maintaining a modern technological
civilization -- that makes all the difference.

When the European powers colonized Africa, they reconfigured the
continent in conformity with European values. They divided the
continent into nation states, built infrastructure, and developed
industrial economies, which were then put in the service of the
industrial economies of Europe. The natives, whom for a while
anthropologists thought to be less than human, were used as cheap
labour and otherwise marginalized. When the European empires were
dismantled, they did not leave Africa as they found it. Rather than
dismantle the legacy of empire, European political leaders handed it
over to the natives. The latter were left, therefore, with a legacy
that was - socially, culturally, economically, politically, and
technologically - tens of thousands of years ahead of anything their
ancestors had ever seen or even conceived. Even though many had by
then been taught to read and write and drive cars and even build
highways and skyscrapers, from a sociobiological point of view, the
cities and the stock exchanges and the universities constituted for
them a highly artificial environment, product of a sensibility, a way
of thinking, a way of seeing, even a biology, that was entirely alien.
This was the fatal mistake that European leaders made.

Had Earth been conquered by an alien race capable of telepathy and
time-travel, abilities evolved by the aliens over tens of thousands of
years, it would have no doubt been impossible for us humans to
continue to maintain the legacy of the alien civilization once its
creators had left the planet: on the one hand, we would have been
reluctant to return to our boring old ways, having experienced
immensity of alien power; on the other, we would rapidly find
ourselves in a terribly dysfunctional society, unable reliably and
consistently to match - even come close in certain areas to - the
aliens' performative minima. If Hesketh Pritchard's observations about
Haiti in 1900, found in Where Black Rules White, provide any
indication of what we could expect, we would, at best, be able to
emulate the outer form of the aliens' habits, institutions, and social
relations, but we would never be able to truly internalize their
substance -- not without being them. Were the aliens still in contact
with us, there is no doubt humans would be clamoring for aid, both
needy and resentful of their former rulers. Some would want them to
return, even at the cost of political power. Absent the political will
among the aliens to come and take it all away, this would go on for
centuries, until human civilization converged with the old human
baselines.

Of course, liberals will never accept this view, because admitting to
human biodiversity would necessitate renouncing one of the fundamental
tenets of what among them amounts to a secular religion: equality.
Therefore, as long as they are in power, in the guise of Democrat or
Republican, Labour or Tory, we will continue to see our billions, and
eventually our trillions, sent to Africa to fight a battle that will
never be won and should have never been fought. The irony is that for
all the liberals' denunciation of empire, for all their installing of
White-bashing postcolonial studies departments in Western
universities, development is nothing but a sublimated form of European
imperialism.

Should we just let Africa starve, then? This is a valid question, and
probably the main obstacle to a meaningful change in policy. Whatever
the mistakes of earlier and current European political leaders, the
situation in Sub-Saharan Africa needs to be resolved: if we do
nothing, the horror in the continent will multiply and the demographic
pressure emanating from Africa and into Europe will continue to
increase; the cost of containing it will be prohibitive, while the
cost of not containing it will be extinction.

Since empire seems no longer possible, since aid does not work, since
development is inappropriate, and since doing nothing is fatal, the
only remaining option is to accept that Africa will never be Europe
and to help Sub-Saharan African societies return to their indigenous
cultural baselines. Rather than encouraging the natives to emulate
Europe, we ought to dismantle and remove from the region any vestige
of European civilization: nothing that is not indigenous to the region
ought to remain. Rather than encouraging natives to maintain large
populations, we ought to assist them in reducing them to levels they
can themselves sustain, unaided by European influence or intervention.
The argument must be made that Black Africans had their own model of
social organization, which, because it developed over millennia in
harmony with their own specific suite of traits and in response to
their environment, was comparatively stable. Also, the argument must
be made that scaling the ecological footprint down to manageable
levels does not necessarily preclude the evolution of these societies:
it only clears the way for an evolutionary path that is established
organically from within, rather than artificially imposed from
without, the Sub-Saharan landscape.

The liberals would call us monsters, but what is more monstrous than
preventing millions from having a culture that reflects them, rather
than their conquerors? What is more monstrous than the imposition on
millions of a system that measures them precisely along the dimensions
in which they are most likely to register failure? It would be like us
living under Black hegemony and being evaluated, not on the basis of
traits where we are likely to excel, such as abstract reasoning,
capacity to delay gratification, and morality, but on those where we
are likely to under-perform in relation to our Black masters, such as
athleticism, aggression, and self-concept. Only the ignorant could be
so arrogant. If Africa has gone to hell, it is because liberals sent
it there.

Evidently, having experienced the conveniences of Western
technological civilization, Sub-Saharan peoples will be reluctant to
return to traditional tribal life. The transition, therefore, must be
gradual. Similarly, aware of the natural and, especially, mineral
resources in the continent, outsiders will be reluctant to leave them
to the natives. The region, therefore, must be declared a nature
preserve, or an anthropological preserve, outside the jurisdiction of
any given government. Perhaps Western and Asian nations could be
persuaded to sign up to something analogous to the Antarctic Treaty of
1959: a treaty that declares Sub-Saharan Africa off limits for
exploitation, development, and trade; the ancestral patrimony of all
humanity; and merely a field of world scientific research - there is,
after all, much we do not know about the origins and pre-history of
man, and much we can learn from observing traditional tribal
societies.

The deprecation of the present political consensus with regard to Sub-
Saharan Africa will probably take many additional decades of failure,
and perhaps a succession of catastrophes. Billions, if not trillions,
will need to be wasted on futile aid and imperialistic development
programs before these are finally given up. It is not unlikely that
economics, rather than a change in philosophy, will force their
abrogation first: after all, most Western nations are already
technically bankrupt, and the productive sections of Western
populations are either being taxed into oblivion or physically
replaced through low fertility and immigration, so the money will
eventually run out. I am glad, therefore, that the Band Aid campaign
has now proven a complete fiasco. Geldof will never change, of course,
and he will continue to throw away well-meaning folks' money on his
ill-conceived campaigns, irrespective of whether this money ends up in
the hands of hardcore Marxist propagandists and guerilla men. But at
least the need to re-examine aid has been brought back into the
agenda, and we can make a fresh call for a less ideological, and more
effective long-term solution to the problems that former and present
political leaders have caused through their appeasement to the Left
and their craven refusal to finish the job of dismantling the old
empires."

ERRATUM: A primitive version of this article was posted here on 8
April; the present version superceded the early one.

Alex Kurtagic is a cultural commentator, novelist, musician, and
artist. He is the author of the dystopian novel, Mister (published by
Iron Sky Publishing, 2009) and the founder and director of Supernal
Music.

http://www.alternativeright.com/main...n-t-the-world/

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Apr 18, 1:56*am, Bret L wrote:

For once Bratzi posts an honest headline.