Posted on 08/28/2002 3:37:46 PM PDT by knighthawk
Six thousand journalists are in Johannesburg to cover the World Summit on Sustainable Development. The BBC team alone is rumored to number at least 100. Never have so many traveled so far to report so little: The meeting will likely produce nothing except the same tiresome effusion of anti-Western rhetoric we heard from last year's "World Conference Against Racism" in Durban. Already, both South African President Thabo Mbeki and the summit's secretary-general have accused Western leaders of presiding over a system of "global apartheid." Not to be outdone, Friends of the Earth International declared Canada, the United States and Australia to be part of an "axis of environmental evil."
Newspapers, naturally, splashed these charges across their front pages. This is, after all, the narrative readers have come to expect since the disastrous 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle: North versus South, rich versus poor, black versus white, people versus profits. In fact, most observers seem to find the rational discourse that goes on among government officials a tedious distraction from the real business of slamming whitey. To quote a CBC Newsworld host covering this year's G8 summit in Kananaskis, Alta.: "If there's a protest anywhere across the country, we'll be covering it, throughout the day."
This preoccupation with class warfare is not only shallow, it is deceptive. The majority of ordinary people in the Third World want nothing to do with the anti-Western agenda that dominates the "sustainable development" movement. Whenever a sweatshop is closed, well-fed graduate students at Berkeley send up a rousing cheer. But the poor workers who get thrown out of their jobs find little reason to celebrate. Africans desperately want more trade opportunities and incoming investment -- and have sensibly used the current summit as a platform to demand that Western nations cut back on their farm subsidies. Yet most NGOs see corporate involvement as anathema to eco-acceptable development. Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, who is in Johannesburg to lead protests, insists "the Canadian delegation should be rejecting the corporate brainwashing that is happening here." Tragically, some African leaders are listening to her message. Even as three-million people in Zambia face the risk of starvation, that country's government is rejecting donations of perfectly safe genetically modified food -- in deference to the Council of Canadians' false warning that GM technology is "imprecise and very unpredictable."
What is at the root of this perverse campaign? Why do Western activists fly halfway around the world to prevent the world's poor from building a better life with the same tools -- technology and capitalism -- that are the source of our own wealth? Mr. Mbeki's accusation of "global apartheid" gives us a clue. Opposition to colonialism and its alleged modern reincarnations is a bedrock component of the modern Western worldview. Thus do our universities pump out a steady stream of activists who see neo-colonial plots meant to perpetuate racial disparities behind every Western initiative, trade deal and investment in the Third World.
The bias affects the news coverage we see. If a Third World mob burns down a Pizza Hut or some other corporate American consulate, you can bet CNN will be there within minutes. But how many Western media outlets covered the recent Jamaican poll in which more than half the people said they'd be better off if they were still under British rule? And how many readers know anything about the tiny force of British marines and paratroopers who occupied Sierra Leone's capital two years ago, took control of the country's military and saved the nation from a band of deranged rebels? I don't hear anyone in East Timor complaining about neo-colonialism -- even though the West has run the place since the Indonesians left in 1999. Nor do most Afghans seem upset that their president is now being protected by U.S. bodyguards.
Of course, Noam Chomsky and his acolytes have lots of theories that ascribe sinister motives to every strand of Western foreign policy. But most of these theories date to the Ronald Reagan era and have little applicability to the post-Cold War period. We know why the United States invaded Grenada. But what kind of ulterior motive did the West have in Sierra Leone? And why is it we care about building a democratic Afghanistan? If not out of concern for the locals' welfare, why not just hand the keys to a friendly warlord and fund him to the gills providing he wiped out al Qaeda? And then there's Zambia. Why, absent humanitarian motives, would we send food (of any variety) to a country 99% of us couldn't place on a map?
The Western do-gooders who would like to keep Africans hoeing organic maize in their ancestral villages should wake up. We have come a long way since the days of King Leopold's Belgian Congo. It is not "global apartheid" or corporate "neo-colonialism" that is the greatest threat to Third World development, but rather the risk of economic stagnation, a risk that is only compounded by the interhemispheric suspicion stoked by the West's activist class.
Ahhh...Noam, Ed Zinn and the rest of the Merry Pranksters who survived the 60's.
Yeah, but I've been hearing that that there's good eating, and the rupies that the hookers give you, only hospitalize
you, not kill you. If you're lucky, rupies will be the only thing they give you.
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