http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2007/February/200702281636271EJrehsiF0.4002802.html
I guess your right. :shrug:
Congo Civil War still killing, 6 years after truce
- Thread starter Fraggle Rocker
- Start date
http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2007/February/200702281636271EJrehsiF0.4002802.html
I guess your right. :shrug:
Where did they implement it? Ah the ole raw products for manufactured goods. Like teh British did in India.
So again, it not the exploiting that upsets you, its what/ how the exploitation is being implemented. hmmmmmm?
Tell me, which African economy has become independent on the raw goods for manufactured products model?
I couldnt tell you. But theyare recieving come benefit are they not?
So which African country has benefited from trade with the US?
Do they not recieve compensation for their participation?
Of course their own lives of luxury was not made on the backs of the poor! No, of course not.
'oh daddy i want that diamond, i dont care if it came out of the ass of a pygmy'
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Yes, but it goes back more than two thousand years and includes all the "white" men such as the Muslim Arabs. Every nearby civilization going back to the Classical Era has treated sub-Saharan Africa as a source of slaves, raw materials and native trinkets. In general they have discouraged the development of native civilizations, either imposing their own (largely for their own benefit) or keeping the Africans in the Stone Age where they're easier to exploit.
If anything, the modern Western post-industrial nations are noteworthy for their increasingly large faction of citizens who regard the world as a single civilization and would like to find a way to help the Congolese, Bolivians and Cambodians out of the mess our ancestors helped get them into.
My wife was a social worker for much of her life. The vast majority of the "four million starving Americans" or "homeless Americans" or "discarded Americans" are in fact mentally ill Americans who retain just enough of their faculties to avoid being gathered up by the authorities and warehoused in institutions. They'd rather live outdoors, dependent on handouts, than be locked up with a bunch of other crazies, medicated into a stupor by bored civil "servants." Personally I don't blame them.
Your good-heartedness is commendable, but throwing money into these countries has never worked. Their despotic leaders manage to grab most of it and spend it on champagne, Land Rovers, hookers, and weapons to fight the despot in the next starving country.
The root of the problem in the Third World is that the people are still locked into the tribal stage of their cultural development, and the nation-state model doesn't fit them.
That's pretty much how they got to where they are, isn't it? The European colonial powers occupied them for centuries. They drew arbitrary lines on a map, tossing together fragments of various tribes that had nothing in common but their mutual hatred, then overlaid it with the infrastructure of a Western nation-state and an Industrial Era economic system. Unfortunately the local cultures were still in the Neolithic Era and the infrastructure meant nothing to them except as a reminder of the occupation.
They are indeed sick, but those particular four million people avoid the authorities and never show up in a welfare office where they'd be immediately hauled off to a public hospital and never let out. They get by off of handouts, which is a far more efficient system than funneling the money through the government and having thirteen layers of bureaucrats take their cut.
The Chinese have not exactly distinguished themselves in Darfur. Neither have your beloved Arabs. None of the more advanced nations have done very well by the sub-Saharan Africans.
I've seen op-eds by African scholars pleading with the rest of the world to just go away and leave Africa alone. To let them solve their own problems, no matter how many mistakes they make along the way, no matter how long it takes, and (sadly) no matter how many of their people have to die along the way.
I suspect this is the only answer. Isolating the continent so that no Western influence is allowed in, while it sinks back into the Stone Age and crawls out at its own pace in its own direction. And of course this strategy is impossible.
And of course to be fair we'd have to do the one thing that the Western nations don't want, which is to allow free emigration out of Africa so that anyone who wants to opt out can come and assimilate to our ways.
Since the primary determinant of how poor a man is is what country he lives in, the most powerful tool we have for ending his poverty is to let him come live in our country.
The 5500 dead in "palestine" are more important...
You have some very good points there. But there are several success stories within Africa suggesting that it might work in other African "countries". Maybe... just maybe
People are content to run around like idiots with AK47s, living lives of delusion. They sell us evolution but the reality is we are largely very primitive. And i dont see it getting much better. So, where am i wrong?
http://www.mkaku.org/articles/physics_of_et.php
Last edited:
You wouldn't recognize one if it fed you a pound of Ritalin.
Natural selection?
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Yeah. I'll settle for just one.
You're not looking at the big picture. Fifteen thousand years ago murder was not only the most common cause of death for adults, it was the cause of the majority of deaths. More people were killed by other people than by all other causes combined.
Now that is primitive! Today, every form of homicide combined, including war, is not even in the top ten. More people are killed in auto accidents than by deliberate acts of violence. More people are killed by frelling diarrhea or malaria than by deliberate acts of violence.
As for not getting better, it has gotten astoundingly better in my own lifetime. Just twenty years after WWII we had the luxury of being outraged over the Vietnamese civil war, which didn't even hit one million. Neither did Pol Pot, Kosovo, Palestine, Chechnya, Darfur, Tibet, the India-Pakistan partition, or Bush's entire war-of-lies in two countries. The reason this thread is about the Congo civil war is that with five million casualties (spread over twelve years!) it is the most deadly conflict that has occurred during the lives of three generations of human beings.
So yes, you're wrong. It is "getting much better." I'm not sure you could find another sixty-year period in recorded history, since the Iron Age made war as we know it possible, in which humans were so unlikely to be killed by violence.
Make way for the Eloi.
From http://www.fides.org/aree/news/newsdet.php?idnews=27988&lan=eng
AFRICA/CONGO DR - “General indifference to the continuing violence in the east of the Congo”, denounce missionaries
segnala invia articolo stampa printable version stampa preferiti
Kinshasa (Agenzia Fides) - “The tragedy in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continues, while the international community assists helplessly, indifferently, passively, or even knowingly,” said the newsletter sent to Fides by the “Peace Network for the Congo”, promoted by missionaries.
“Murders, rapes, armed attacks and looting are part of a long list of crimes perpetrated against a defenceless and exhausted civilian population. They are the evil consequences of shady arms trafficking and the illegal exploitation of mineral resources,” accuse missionaries. Recently Bishop Mélchisédech Sikuli Paluku of Butembo-Beni, together with all the local clergy complained that in North Kivu, “there is a genocide in the making” (see Fides 27/11/2010).
“We know that in the West politics is conditioned by the interests of finance and economics. For this reason, the international community, who are the beneficiaries of the mineral resources from the DRC, fear a clash with the multinationals, the real holders of power and silent in the face of the Congolese tragedy. It is true that, internationally, some initial proposals are being drafted to defeat the illegal trade of natural resources. In this sense, the U.S. Congress has passed a law to prevent imports of minerals supplied by armed groups, requiring U.S. multinationals to establish the source of the minerals in the DRC. This is a small step forward, but it is just the beginning,” says the Peace Network for the Congo.
The illegal exploitation of mineral resources also has, unfortunately, local accomplices: armed groups and Congolese military officers and politicians who easily allow themselves to be corrupted by foreign multinationals, in view of personal enrichment at the expense of the common good of the entire population.
AFRICA/CONGO DR - “General indifference to the continuing violence in the east of the Congo”, denounce missionaries
segnala invia articolo stampa printable version stampa preferiti
Kinshasa (Agenzia Fides) - “The tragedy in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continues, while the international community assists helplessly, indifferently, passively, or even knowingly,” said the newsletter sent to Fides by the “Peace Network for the Congo”, promoted by missionaries.
“Murders, rapes, armed attacks and looting are part of a long list of crimes perpetrated against a defenceless and exhausted civilian population. They are the evil consequences of shady arms trafficking and the illegal exploitation of mineral resources,” accuse missionaries. Recently Bishop Mélchisédech Sikuli Paluku of Butembo-Beni, together with all the local clergy complained that in North Kivu, “there is a genocide in the making” (see Fides 27/11/2010).
“We know that in the West politics is conditioned by the interests of finance and economics. For this reason, the international community, who are the beneficiaries of the mineral resources from the DRC, fear a clash with the multinationals, the real holders of power and silent in the face of the Congolese tragedy. It is true that, internationally, some initial proposals are being drafted to defeat the illegal trade of natural resources. In this sense, the U.S. Congress has passed a law to prevent imports of minerals supplied by armed groups, requiring U.S. multinationals to establish the source of the minerals in the DRC. This is a small step forward, but it is just the beginning,” says the Peace Network for the Congo.
The illegal exploitation of mineral resources also has, unfortunately, local accomplices: armed groups and Congolese military officers and politicians who easily allow themselves to be corrupted by foreign multinationals, in view of personal enrichment at the expense of the common good of the entire population.
countezero
Registered Senior Member
We don't.
Buffalo Roam
Registered Senior Member
Every bit of food we eat is genetically modified, either by selective breeding to accomplish the genetic modification desired, which takes generations, or as is much more economically feasable today, gene manupliation.