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Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Entertainment Moderators, Social & Fun Moderators Posts: 16,599 CMod ✭✭✭✭
Join Date:Posts: 15344
Before I start, I want to point out that I am not picking on Maximilian or SimpleSam in my comments, they have put more effort in their comments and are deserved of non personal debate.
Unfortunately Myers has been successful in prompting debate on his chosen topics.Maximilian wrote: »Hardly. My point was that the Belgians or the West didn't cause the genocide. That was the Africans themselves deciding to kill one another. Whether it was Hutus or Tutsis is beside the point.
Where have I said otherwise. Nobody disputes Africa is burdened with debt or what not. The point is that a lot of their problems are caused by themselves. Are you suggesting that exploitative multi-nationals and Western governments interfering serves to absolve the Africans of the horrors they inflict on themselves?
The simple point that you and others are determined to ignore is that the Africans share some if not most of the blame for their own troubles. It's as simple as that. Do not misinterpret my remarks as suggesting that we wash our hands of them.In fairness all you can do is repeat yourself. Aid is not all loans and the loans given were not forced upon them. About $600 billion in aid has been given to Africa in the last 40 years and yet there is virtually no increase in living standards with all of that. Whatever money they borrowed, they presumably spent themselves. We didn't do it for them
Africa was believe to have a population of approx 922,011,000 as of 2005. Can you please elaborate who you are referring to with your use of them, themselves and Africans?
When i lived in East Africa, my house cleaner worked 5 days a week cleaning and caring for our home. She travelled home a few hundred miles by public bus to see her family every weekend. She didnt have AIDS, her immediate family didnt have AIDS nor did she contribute to the spread of AIDS (by sleeping with truck drivers or otherwise!) Her tribe nor the 41 other tribes did have any sexual rituals that involved rubbing herbs anywhere. However she did say that her local village often had people who suffered from AIDS and often there was villagers who suffered other illnesses from drinking untreated water. Those unfortunate people may have triggered an action to bring on those illnesses, but its not their fault that a lack of education, a lack of cheap/free contraception, lack of water treatment plants assisted in their demise. So we must look at the people in each country that are responsible for those areas.Maximilian wrote:The point was that very little has changed despite all the aid given over the years. Perhaps we should be thinking about how better to utilise the money, .
Excellent point, and it remains a major issue in many African nations. E.g. when bono's "drop the debt" campaign (one of the most ill thought through charity campaigns IMO) saw Tanzania's debt written off, the government there invested heavily in their military. The nation hadnt been at war since their independence, nor was there any immediate threat from any of their bordering nations.European countries, this one included, were horribly poor yet with help and hard work we became successful. Throwing money at Africa hasn't helped. Canceling debt probably wouldn't either but couldn't hurt.
Yet you can't bring yourself to admit that even a fraction of Africa's problems are of their own creation. It's all somebody else fault. Truck Drivers, perhaps.
Cancelling debt with no provisions on how the government should apportion the freed up funds is a waste of time.
The Western world became successful (im not sure this is the right word, i would say less impoverished) through the right investment and assistance from other nations. Ireland is a great example.
Line up the people responsible for the problems in Africa nations and they wont all be native.Maximilian wrote: »So all the dictators, all the corruption is the West's fault?
No, but the West has a part to play. The US invaded Iraq to remove a nasty dictator because there were vested interests there. So why hasnt Mugabe been removed?SimpleSam06 wrote: »One of the primary reasons AIDs spread in Africa was the widespread practice among tribal peoples of using herbs to dry out the woman's vagina, which apparently provided a more pleasurable experience for the men. This lead in turn to tearing of the vaginal wall, causing the blood to intermingle with the semen, and so on and so forth. It had nothing to do with your ludicrous "white truckers", of which there may be forty or fifty in the entire continent. Which brings us neatly to the next point...
Take Kenya as an example. There are 42 tribes in the country. not one of them practises the ritual you speak off yet there is a high rate of AIDS in the country.Your continued references to the continent of Africa as a single country are the same. Some places in Africa are very poor and impoverished, some places aren't that badly off at all. And while we're at it, we, the Irish, bear exactly zero guilt for institutional colonialism, and in fact were one of the most charitable countries in the world during our last downturn in the 80s. We are also a "Western country". So less with the generalisations, it just makes you look uneducated.
I agree. You cant put all African nations in the same basket. Newstalk did a survey on the streets a few weeks back and the amount of Irish people who thought Africa was a country was shocking!You see the thing is, continental Africa is absolutely rotten with resources. Oil, diamonds, gold, precious metals, and more. But rather than use these resources to buy their way out of poverty (and they handily could) many countries have just signed deals with China to export their wealth in exchange for piffling sums, or sometimes just arms and ammunition.
Many of the companies involved in the industries you mention are non native. same goes to tea and coffee too.0 -
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