Kevin Myers: Harsh as they were, my views on Africa had to be expressed

 

Via comment by Daniel on An Irish perspective on Africa

Dated

As promised, the follow up article by Kevin Myers. You can just drop any pretense at racism: Africa is a problem. No need to resort to the K or the N word. Facts are facts, and it takes a brave man like Kevin Myers to say it straight into the blast of a hot furnace of misplaced white guilt and hypocrisy...Drop the racist rhetoric and let the facts speak for themselves...

This futilitarian is soldiering on...For today...

Last Friday week, with famine approaching yet again, I wondered about the wisdom of forking out yet more aid to Ethiopia.

Since the great famine of the mid-1980s, Ethiopia's population has soared from 33.5 million to 78 million. Now, I do not write civil service reports for the United Nations: I write a newspaper column, and I was deliberately strong in my use of language — as indeed I had been when writing reports from Ethiopia at the height of that terrible famine.

Since dear old Ireland can often enough resemble Lynch Mob Central on PC issues, I braced myself for the worst: and sure enough, in poured the emails. Three hundred on the first day, soon reaching over 800: but, amazingly, 90%+ were in my support, and mostly from baffled, decent and worried people. The minority who attacked me were risibly predictable, expressing themselves with a vindictive and uninquiring moral superiority. (Why do so many of those who purport to love mankind actually hate people so?)

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