The BBC goes too far (?)
We read:
"During the Beeb's normally sedate and contemplative Thought For The Day, journalist Clifford Longley mused on the subject of Africa. The problem with the continent was: "African culture has always lacked a developed sense of common humanity," before going on to claim that Africa suffered from a propensity to "turn to massacre and genocide".
Of course, no genocide has ever occurred in Africa. The mass murders in Rwanda, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and countless other African countries are actually our fault, and the West must take all the blame.
Quite rightly, such insensitive comments led to the BBC's Black and Asian Forum to complain that the comments were "racist and xenophobic" as well as the usual rot about Longley being insensitive to other people's hurt feelings.
There's just one flaw -- Longley wasn't making these points himself. He was actually quoting a Nigerian theologian who has long bemoaned the refusal of African countries to take responsibility for their own actions. Ooops...
Source
6 comments:
What the hell makes it our fault that Africa is a hell hole? Sure we could do something about it but as we Americans learned in Somalia there are no quick fixes in Africa. Western powers would have to be prepared for the long haul in Africa because once in it would take years to accomplish a lasting peace if it's possible. In addition to military action it would take a fast track solution to social problems, malnutrition and the lack of education. No matter how successful the effort the world would call you imperialists and fight you at every turn.
I look for the US to be out of Iraq inside of 10 years with at least some sort of political stability left behind. I think the same thing in most African countries would take 50 to 100 years. In my opinion
most of the mess was made by Europeans so let them fix it.
Dave,
"What the hell makes it our fault that Africa is a hell hole?"
It's not reaaly our (Americans) fault. The European countries that decided to colonize & exploit sub saharan Africa figured out that it was way to expensive to maintain colonies there, so they left and left the stone-age natives to their own devices which lead to the violence that is still prevalent today. As for what America has done there, we and the russians figured that since the Africans were going to kill each other anyway, whay not sell them the weapons to do it and then we could have real field tests of of our own weaponry. So in essence the stone age people of Africa have been given modern weapons and told to go at it with each other.
white man bad, black man good
B. Hussein
Yes Africa was used for proxy wars in the Cold War led by the US and the USSR - and the various african leaders tried to take advantage by playing off the "West" against the "East" so that western so-called democracies hypocritally supported cruel dictators (as they also did elsewhere around the world) so long as they appeared to be pro-western/pro-american.
You all sound like Africa was a peaceful place before the big, bad, white man set foot on the continent. I seem to remember from history class that there were wars between groups of Africans and they enslaved each other before the white man arrived. The early slave traders exploited that to gather slaves to take to America. We may have given them better weapons, but Europeans didn't start it.
Time to give the whole place back to the wildlife. At least they have respect for it and do serve a good purpose, which is far more than can be said of the people.
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