The Live 8 Concerts are all over the media and the blogosphere. Josh Trevino over at local outlet Politics from Left to Right gets it just about spot on:

It is instructive to look back twenty years to Live Aid, Geldof’s original bright idea for mass mobilization in Africa’s service. That concert was meant to focus attention upon, and bring donations to, the cause of Ethiopian famine relief. In this, it was an immense success: but where it failed was in its assiduous avoidance of the very causes of the famine in question. It is not enough to say that we now know that the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s was a classic terror famine purposefully perpetrated by Haile Mengistu Mariam’s communist regime; this much was known then. Mengistu’s forced resettlements, population transfers, and manipulation of food stocks was in the long communist tradition of genocide by starvation, and would be instantly familiar to its past masters Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. All the aid in the world, in the absence of a change in a government policy explicitly meant to inflict such suffering, had the moral quality of a care package to Auschwitz. [...] Surely ending famine would have been preferable to merely feeding its victims? Surely feeding its victims is best done without aiding its perpetrators?

Read the whole thing.

July 3rd, 2005 | Economics, International Institutions

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