Posted on 08/24/2005 3:05:32 PM PDT by Lorianne
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Symposium: Africa: Nightmare Continent By Jamie Glazov FrontPageMagazine.com | August 19, 2005
Beset by poverty, tribalism, war, disease, genocide and dictatorship, Africa is a tragic and failed continent. What went wrong? Why have so many “solutions” failed? Is there any hope? To discuss these questions with us today, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests today are:
Theodore Dalrymple, who worked as a doctor in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tanzania and Nigeria. He travelled across Africa by public transport and published a book called Zanzibar to Timbuktu as a result;
Ralph Peters, the author of New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy as well as of 19 other books and hundreds of columns. A retired military officer with experience in more than 60 countries, he has conducted extensive research in Africa over the past three years;.
John Eibner, the head of the Sudan program of the human rights organization Christian Solidarity International (CSI). He is one of the pre-eminent anti-slavery campaigners of modern times. Dr. Eibner has traveled deep into Sudan over 50 times since 1995 to document the revival of jihadism and slavery, and to support local initiatives to free Christian and traditionalist slaves;
Paul Marshall, a Senior Fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom. The author and editor of twenty books, he has written extensively on Islam in Africa and has been an advisor to the South African government. His latest books are Islam at the Crossroads (2002) and God and the Constitution: Christianity and American Politics (2002);
and
Michael Radu, a senior Fellow and Chairman of the Center on Terrorism at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He has a degree in African Studies from Columbia University, has taught African politics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and is the author/editor of three books on African affairs.
All they have to do is GET RID OF THE DICTATORS!!!!! duh!
I don't know if it is still there, but Kim DuToit had an excellent essay on Africa (he's from there) on his website...worth a quick read.
We all know what is wrong in Africa but PC wont allow us to say it.
Yes, very interesting discussion.
"What went wrong? Why have so many “solutions” failed?"
- Becuase the west turned Africa into the worlds largest welfare state. Stop playing nanny and let Africa figure out its own problems and it will improve.
SHHHHH! Don't speak the truth or you'll be shunned as a "you-know-what". Sad how the elephant in the room gets ignored.
There is a solution, and that is to kill the Islamic jihad.
And for god's sake, get rid of the French and UN from there.
Eliminate the dictators, arm the Christians and let them take care of the rest. Send food and ammo.
In case you don't know, they aren't doing that well these days, because of ISLAMIC JIHAD, and the UN NGO'S which take all the food and give it to the JIHADISTS to distribute. Guess who doesn't get food aid. Guess who isn't allowed into regions to give aid. Yea, the missionaries can do a great job IF THEY WERE PROTECTED. Volunteer for a trip sometime.
I am in agreement with the proposition that "Africa" hasn't a single set of problems - diversity isn't always strength, and that continent is more diverse in terms of nearly all sorts of cultural and economic development as any other on the planet.
Marshall made a point that caught my eye:
...post-colonial regimes in theory adopted some form of socialism, since they regarded this as the antithesis of colonialism.
That they did, and a later reference to a Western-educated "liberation generation" tells us a good deal about Lumumba, Mugabe, Amin, bloody-handed old Joe Slovo and their contemporaries, and why they felt that Africa must be placed on the Marxist road to an inevitable socialist future. They went, and are still traveling, a very good distance down that false path and have paid for it in blood and diamonds.
This observation by Peters I found amusing:
What we're seeing in southern Africa is African imperialism--but of an innovative form, focusing on economics and culture, rather than physical conquest. In fact, South Africa's approach to empire rather resembles that of the United States.
I hope for the sake of the other southern Africans that they succeed, but the form of that exported culture is still very much in flux. South Africa is certainly much more successful than Zimbabwe, but that does not make it successful. The last cultural imperialism that blew through that area wasn't even Western, but Zulu, and it was married to an expansionist military. That probably won't happen this time. It's been tried too many times since Lumumba and it has never succeeded.
Ask Charles Murray.
They ever heard of the saying "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, Teach a man to fish and he'll eat forever"
what's wrong? enlighten us!
[...]Africa is a tragic and failed continent."
As a continent, Africa one of the three most successful, along with North America and South America. It's more distinct than Europe and Asia (why these are considered separate continents I'll never understand), more unified than Oceania, more hospitible than Antartica. Its status as a continent remains unchallenged.
;)
well, what?.....there's so many factors I don't know if any one factor is the reason.....
IMO....its tribalism.....the herd mentality.....not trusting others, seeking to rule others by destroying them.....
the more important questions would be WHY DOES AMERICA WORK?????
I mean, really, America is the greatest country in the world....Canada close behind, and Australia...
its western civilization , I guess, with warts and all, that seems to give the best prospects to everyone......
God Bless America!
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