From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 07:21:47 MDT
Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
> Randy wrote:
> > On Sun, 23 Jun 2002 20:32:25 EDT, you wrote:
> > Someone wrote:
> >
> >>Its government, not technology.
> >
> >
> > It's (mainly) culture, not technology. After so many years, one must
> > conclude that a govt is derived from the dominant cultures.
>
> It is cultural. And much of the culture keeping hundreds of
> millions in starvation, disease and very dire poverty is Western
> culture. As long as Western culture is fundamentally based in
> scarcity, in the notion there is not enough for everyone, the
> West will act to secure as much as possible for itself. The
> best of us will believe we are doing so in order to create
> technology that fundamentally eliminates scarcity across the
> planet. But, in point of fact, we pour food into the ocean
> before we will give it to hungry nations. We sell them arms
> with far less stringent controls than we bring in food and
> medicine. Something is a bit wacky there.
>
Jewish World Review June 21, 2002 / 11 Tamuz, 5762
Robert W. Tracinski
The post-colonialist famine
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Today, more than a million people in
Zimbabwe are starving, and up to three million face the imminent prospect
of starvation. This has not yet excited much attention in the West.
Zimbabwe, after all, is far away from the centers of American interest; all
of our top reporters are in Kandahar and Karachi.
But this case is important, not because of any direct effect it may have on
the United States, but because it is a pure, distilled example of the
larger trend that is destroying the world: the West's loss of moral
confidence.
That loss of confidence is codified in the doctrines of the academic left.
The same folks who brought us "postmodernism" and "multiculturalism"
brought us another variation on the same theme: "post-colonialism." In
today's academic code words, "post-" really means "anti-."
"Post-colonialism" is the theory that every evil in the world is caused by
Western powers trying to assert control over non-Western countries. More
fundamentally, the post-colonialists condemn any attempt by the West to
assert the superiority of our ideals -- narrow notions like individual
rights and the rule of law -- over the primitive way of life of "indigenous
peoples."
Everything that is happening in Zimbabwe is being done in full accord with
the doctrines of post-colonialism.
If every evil is caused by colonialism, then the heart of the problem must
be the colonists themselves. In Zimbabwe, that means thousands of white
British farmers who settled in Zimbabwe's sparsely populated countryside
and built a prosperous agricultural economy. The settler's use of Western
agricultural techniques, combined with the benefits of British law and
order, made Zimbabwe into the breadbasket of southern Africa, an exporter
of grain on which all of its neighbors relied. But in accordance with
leftist philosophy, Zimbabwe's post-colonial ruler, Robert Mugabe,
denounced the white farmers and hatched a scheme for "land reform."
In the language of tin-pot dictatorships, "reform" means "theft." For
years, Mugabe has allowed armed gangs to occupy white-owned farms,
sometimes murdering the owners, as a precursor to a plan to seize the
farms, allegedly for redistribution to poor blacks. (In reality, the farms
are going to Mugabe's cronies.)
The result? People are starving in Zimbabwe, not because there is a
drought, but because hundreds of thousands of acres of crops have not been
planted. Some farms are fallow because they are occupied by armed thugs.
Others are unused because of a law threatening white farmers with two years
in prison if they plant without government permission, which has not been
given. Other farms are unplanted simply because no one in his right mind
would go to the trouble of planting crops that will be seized before he can
harvest them.
When you make war on the farmers, what can you expect but famine?
Mugabe's justification for this disastrous policy is pure post-colonialism:
"Land, being the most important natural resource of any country, must
belong to . . . the indigenous people." This is also, you might have
noticed, an explicit policy of racism: whites must have their farms seized
because they are not black.
Now Mugabe is following the playbook of history's more ruthless dictators:
using famine to liquidate his political opposition. But he is going one
better by getting the United Nations to help him starve his opponents. Here
is how Shari Eppel, the director of the African civil-rights group Amani
Trust, describes the process: "International food donors are setting up
feeding centers aimed at destitute families, but once the donors have moved
on, the bullies move in and decide who gets fed and who doesn't." Even the
relatives and children of opposition supporters are condemned to starvation.
How can the United Nations allow this? The U.N. and its Western donors are
just playing along with the post-colonialist ground rules. The West is
supposed to regard Africa's poverty as the product of our evil
interference, never mind the facts. So it's our duty to send buckets of
money and food -- but we are not supposed to enforce any rules on how the
money is spent or how the food is distributed, because that kind of control
would, after all, be colonialism.
In the middle of the famine he created, Mugabe had the effrontery this week
to attend a U.N.-sponsored World Food Summit in Rome. There,
representatives from African nations dined lavishly while they blamed their
famines on the West's failure to give more aid.
Welcome to the "post-colonialist" world, where Third World dictators blame
the West for their sins. The West caves in -- and lets the dictators keep
on sinning.
-- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/
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