generalspeaking

Hope Springs Internal

There are altogether so many failed states in the world in which we live, that take our attention and impress upon us the need to do what we can to assist in whatever way we can. We embrace this collective attitude because in the Western democracies we like to think of ourselves as privileged - as indeed we are - and responsible to a larger world vision. We are enlightened and we have compassion for those who live elsewhere in the world, and whose opportunities in life simply do not exist.

We believe ourselves to be our brothers' keeper. And our sisters. And all their progeny. We are assailed by guilt, that we live well, and they do not. We are continually being bombarded by the advertisements of aid agencies exhorting us to be generous and become regular donors to all their humanitarian aid projects. It is our responsibility to help those who can nor or will not help themselves.

Living in developing countries whose governors are self-interested, and act as tyrants, violating their own peoples' human rights. Living in countries where tribal and clan-originated traditional antipathies ensure that unrest continues unabated. Living in countries where medical treatment is erratic at best, absent in the worst-case scenarios. Living where tropical diseases run rampant through the population.

International aid is a given as the advanced countries of the world are exhorted by the United Nations, by NGO humanitarian aid groups to advance the cause of improving life for the world's vast unfortunates by donating funds both through government auspices and private subscription. Humanitarian assistance is doled out and small advances are made with health clinics, education, small bank loans.

Slowly and steadily the world's billions who eke out their existence with subsistence farming, living in the edge of malnutrition, and whose children succumb to dread, easily treatable diseases with methods and medications unavailable to them unassisted, gradually improve. What does not improve is their condition relative to their governing bodies, the upper echelon of their society which has grown accustomed to siphoning off foreign aid to line their own pockets.

Because people naturally have compassion they are charitable and given to helping aid organizations. Those same aid organizations have become international corporations of power and repute whose focus is on the extraction of funding from sources that can be impelled to give, toward their own growing aid-corporate interests and the servicing of a clientele that has grown accustomed to aid.

In Africa, failed states whose maniacal, egotistical rulers milk the international community while failing to lift their people out of poverty, and where other states have completely lost control of government structure and all that is left is tribal, religious, ideological and criminal warfare, victimizing the most vulnerable, the women and the children; abducted, raped and mutilated.

We are exhorted to our duty to fund the aid agencies to lift the afflicted out of their miserable condition of squalid living conditions and starvation. We are told that if countries like Somalia where lawlessness and violent Islamism has run amok, are allowed to continue to fester, they will become a terror-producing cancer that will consume the free world. To save ourselves we must save Somalia.

And Sudan, and Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zimbabwe and so many other malfunctioning, malevolently-ruled countries. We must urge our governments to make those countries' futures our business, a foreign aid priority. While they, like the non-oil-profiting states in the Middle East are dependent on foreign aid, while deploring and detesting the hated democratic countries that prop them up, produce nothing of value for their populations.

When will it become time for these failed states intent on continuing to manipulate and to violate their own populations' human rights to be expected to be responsible to and for themselves? When will they be informed, unequivocally that if, like North Korea, the government continues to invest in nuclear arms and space projects their international aid will be cut off.

Why does it make sense for them to be willing to sacrifice their indigent populations to the oblivion of early and desperate deaths, but we must not be so cruel as to allow them to do this? Why is it that the United Nations eschews the whip and the cudgel, but gently chides these brutal regimes, while urging the democracies to maintain an open, understanding line of credit?

Labels: Africa, Chaos, Charity, Middle East, Misadventure, Political Realities, United Nations

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, August 24, 2011