Posted on 09/14/2010 1:45:30 PM PDT by fightinJAG
[snip]
The chapter on aid (the charities at work in Africa) is a must-read section in itself. Mills says that the bleeding hearts who surge into the continent under various auspices undermine the self-confidence of sovereign states to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. On this topic, Mills (usually measured and courteous) allows himself a caustic tongue.
Mills also discusses South Africa’s resistance to globalisation and generally Africa’s eagerness to attend the myriad international events to which its leaders are invited, instead of submitting strategic and detailed execution plans at these events.
“Africa has the biggest voting bloc in the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other such organisations,” Mills notes. “But what does it ‘trade’ its vote for? Help for Cuba and the Palestinians, blocking UN managerial reform, and manoeuvring around tougher action on Burma and Iran. None of this does one bit for Africa or for Africans outside of the New York diplomats, who revel in such posturing, or those leaders overwrought by their own anti-colonial complexes. Africa is often the subject of these meetings, but its leaders generally miss the point.
(Excerpt) Read more at witness.co.za ...
“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools.” - Herbert Spencer
I hate to say it but “charities” get off on ENSLAVING countries like Africa to their organization just as government does. When you have a government or a “charity” ALWAYS DOING FOR YOU and GIVING YOU things, what is the INCENTIVE to DO FOR YOURSELF?
It’s not there. Helping them get started is fine but whether it be a “Christian charity” or the government, they more often than not, don’t STOP enslaving them. Each, the government and the “charity” like the power and control they have over those enslaved to them. It is a situation of a charity going HUMANISTIC even though they claim to be “Christian”. There must be a line where each backs off and lets the people DO for themselves.
There is NO REASON in the world why Africa can’t be a prosperous nation. It’s these “social do gooders” that prevent that from happening. They have the ELITE LIBERAL MINDSET that assumes these people can NEVER function without them. Of course, people respond to that too!
The problem with Africa is black Africans. The white Africans brought order and prosperity out of chaos. Since Africa has been given back to black Africans, it has returned to the jungle. This should be a lesson for America. Obama lives like an African tribal chief with one party after another and more vacation than work. I know that this is not politically correct, and many will say that I am being racist, but observe the actions and words of Obama. You make the judgment for yourself.
Let them die; helping them over all of these years only allows them to postpone their demise as a culture and to do the same self-destructive things over and over.
**************
Also it spreads the decline and rot to the foolish benefactor.
What you give to a wastrel does not go to your own family.
Agreed. I also heard an African missionary saying “No more aid for God’s sake!”.
Our leftwing Government agencies are PAUPERISING these people.
Plus they also have their own problems, which some of my fellow FReepers have touched on.
Let’s remove some of the external pressures at least, and stop drowning Africa with free stuff.
Because as a whole it is not very productive and doesn't produce as much as economies that are not poor.
Too true. My uncle was a pilot for World Vision, flying aid into the central part of Mozambique, at the time the poorest nation on earth. It would take them 4 hours to load up a Dakota, and about 30 minutes to unload once they touched down on the remote airstrip.
The navigator then had to use a crowbar to beat off the local villagers so that they could close the door and take off. After a few months of bi-weekly flights, they noticed that the whole village had moved in next to the airstrip, and no longer tended to their own crops. When they asked the chief what would happen if they stopped bringing food, he answered that they would all die.
Such a sad story, yet so common across Africa.
“didn’t feel bad about being 4f because he already starved his chinaman to death. Feed ‘em now shoot ‘em later.”
The last Korean War vet I was close to died three years ago; he’d have loved that line. He was a big guy named Bahr, so his squad always made him hump the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR).
“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools.” - Herbert Spencer.
Ironically, the very people who tend to believe that the entire world was created by "evolution," through "survival of the fittest," are those most dedicated to interrupting whatever manifest processes there are for those who can prosper socially (economically, etc.) to do so and for those who cannot to suffer "the effects of their folly."
The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.
One thing I can say for the Obama Administration: it has been the beginning of the end of political correctness on many levels.
The U.S. cannot and will not have a President, any President, that the people are not “allowed” to criticize. And the direction of the country has become so dire, the liberal “luxury” of being P.C. can no longer stand in the way of Americans plainly figuring out how to save the country.
Word!
Hey, how about this, y’all?
Let’s start with a more basic question (or two).
Why should Africa strive to be rich rather than poor? Is rich better? Or, aren’t we told, that rich is worse?
Is there something immutable about the “standards” to which peoples and nations should adhere or strive for or aspire to?
Who is the West to even think that Africans want or need the type of lifestyle and material “comforts” as defined by the West?
Who is the West to think that, for example, running water in every home is “superior” to a more natural lifestyle of walking across your homeland countryside to obtain water at a community-accessed river?
Ding, Ding, Ding we have a winner.
As I brought up elsewhere, it’s ironic, isn’t it, that the people who most trumpet Darwin are at the same time the most intrusive into the process of survival of the fittest.
Likewise, those most for state-sanctioned suicide and murder (of the unborn, but more relevantly here of the born) are at the same time the most insistent that all our blood and treasure be expended to ensurve the “life” of peoples on whom otherwise nature would take its course.
When I hear you say “let them die,” I do not hear “turn your back on human suffering, let individuals die.” I hear the realistic sentiment that, just as some species go extinct for natural causes, so do some civilizations and their peoples.
The answer seems to be recognizing that if a society wants a certain level of prosperity and security it has to follow certain models. It is what it is.
And if it doesn’t want that, then it is free to take another course and (from the Western point of view) suffer the consequences. Of course, a tribe, for example, may not view its state of affairs as “suffering” at all, but as just how life is and part of the way their community is.
IOW, maybe we need to start asking why are we, the West, even worrying about whether Africans “change”? Might we instead be “imposing” our image of success upon them without warrant?
If, having been offered over and over again the opportunity to find ways out of the bush and the tribal ways, people choose their tribe and their way of life, regardless that it looks horrible to outsiders, who are we to sit around asking why?
Is this not valid, too?
Just to key in on your comment again--
So why doesn't the West accept this and move on?
It is like Islam keeping its people in utter backwardness. At some point, what can we say? They prefer their religion and, from the West's point of view, backwardness to modernity. The only problem there is that they are trying to impose that on us.
That's really not such a big whoop. I could create a larger bloc in my back yard, I just need to subdivide it into 250 tiny squares and declare each a country. The UN would admit them, and I have more power than the entire rest of the world.
Ahhhh, if only it worked that way. But that's how Africa got so many countries.
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.