Home
Previous letters
Subscribe
Useful links
About me
Contact me
|
WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 503
View full list of previous letters
Receive future letters by email
WCL 503 November 2005
Generosity and calculation
A Canadian friend has reproved me for appearing less than generous in my comments on Making Poverty History. That is not too surprising, for Canadians have a superior position in many ways in tackling the problems of our unequal world and despite their own privileges, have done a great deal to strengthen international law and relations with poorer countries over many years. But my firm belief is that the world needs hard thought and calculation even more than it needs generosity.
The generosity that led people in Europe and America to support "aid" to poor countries in Africa and elsewhere was largely unaccompanied by the necessary analysis of the policies of their governments. As a result, not only was a great deal of the money disbursed as aid swallowed up by administrators more fond of their own careers, but the twin devils of corruption and military enhancement made certain that much of the aid contributed to worsening, not ending problems.
The total effect of much of the outpouring of wealth from the treasuries of the western powers since 1945 has not been to end the evils of poverty, malnutrition, ignorance and ill-health, which, if employed systematically in the right way, could have happened. Instead it often strengthened governments like the military dictatorships of Pakistan and Indonesia, or built up the military strengths of rivals like Israel and Egypt or Ethiopia and Eritrea. In Africa such policies have created a maelstrom of petty states often quarrelling like ferrets in a sack or feeding continuous civil war as in Sudan, where it has been topped off with a succeeding period of genocide in another region of the country.
What we can say in defence of the generosity that has been apparent in the work of UNESCO, WHO and other UN agencies is that they have saved the United Nations from total collapse. By their limited successes they have held up a beacon of hope, showing the world how open-handed aid can do great good. They have indicated paths to the better future that the world was supposed to create from 1945 by inaugurating the UN and above all those agencies. The social betterment of global conditions could and should have followed those lines of action.
But we need to fact reality. 60 years for a task that should have taken no more than a generation is not only too long, but it is a travesty of what should have been done. As President Eisenhower pointed out - the expenditure on weapons was a theft from the poor of the world who needed and deserved much better. The principal villains responsible for that theft have been the permanent members of the Security Council. Their governments bore - and bear - a heavy burden of guilt for the way they have perverted the generosity of their own peoples - intermixed as it has been with nationalist selfishness - into a devil's brew of politically-slanted giving that has perpetuated global division.
Those governments have charted a course on the verge of world war, usinglocal conflicts as testing-grounds for the main weapons of destruction brought into the armouries of the greatest powers. So generosity is now enough. We need hard thought, honest words and a refusal to allow supposedly generous policies to go unexamined. The continuing warfare in Iraq - the direct and shameful responsibility of the American and British governments shows that we are no nearer those needs being satisfied than we were 50 years ago. In some ways further away. We know what is needed and it is not more generosity, except of spirit. It is less nationalism and more world citizenship.
John Roberts
Comment on this letter
View full list of previous letters
Receive future letters by email
Comments on this letter
|
|