Savages

This, from the Times:

Nigeria's security forces have been put on high alert after a new burst of sectarian violence left over 500 people dead, most of them women and children hacked to death by machete wielding gangs.

Please, nobody try to tell me that Africans in general have achieved the same degree of civilisation that we in Western Europe have. Please, nobody try to tell me that Colonialism was evil. Post Colonial Africa has done what all post colonial societies do, including ours; they revert to type. The continent is wracked by tribalism, genocide and ignorance. Boy, do they have a long way to go, about four to five hundred years more of social evolution. Let's just remember that when we next "celebrate multiculturalism", or get an out of hours doctor who believes that HIV can be cured by eating carrots.

7 comments:

Jim Baxter said...

The continent is wracked by tribalism, genocide and ignorance.

Yeah, not like us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Babi_Yar

Wrinkled Weasel said...

There is a big difference, Jim, between acts such as the one in your link, and what is going on in Africa today. For a start, no head of State in Europe would or could do anything other than condemn the action described in your link, whereas, in Africa, they are all in it together. See South Africa and this:
http://wrinkledweasel.blogspot.com/2010/03/president-zuma.html

Millions are dying because of basic ignorance of health issues. Billions of money in aid is being spend on fattening the leaders, and their wives, and their security services.

There is no comparison, and you know it.

Jim Baxter said...

no head of State in Europe would or could do anything other than condemn the action described in your link

No? Mussolini? Antonescu, Horthy, Farnco... Stalin...?t

There's no diiference. We handed the Cossacks over to Beria. We bombed Dresden. Churchill advocated gassing the Kurds.

Poliicians condemn when it dioesn't cost them and shut up at other times.

We just use more powerful weapns from a greater distance.

Richard said...

Babi Yar was an atrocity of such magnitude that it has echoed down the years as an example of brutal, inhuman behaviour. It is notable because it is exceptional. In Africa, sadly, the kind of butchery that WW describes is common, and not confined to one country or region. And the more 'advanced' leaders find it very hard to bring themselves to condemn it. Besides, Babi Yar occurred during a major war, when such atrocities might be expected to happen. In Africa, it is routine behaviour for some.

onward christian soldiers said...

I think the barbarism of the West is more subtle and is hidden by a compliant media. 500 hacked to death in Nigeria is small fry. Heck the 'shock and awe' over Baghdad at the opening of GW2 is estimted to have killed about 10,000 civilians. Imagine if the media had been allowed to film the body parts strewn everywhere rather than shown an 'awesome' display of precision bombing '. The birth defects in children born in Fallujah will continue for generations. The same as in Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Cambodia etc..
Our death and destruction is cowardly and is dropped from 10,000 feet in an air conditioned cockpit. Or from a sub out in the ocean somewhere. At least the Nigerians get up close and personal. It was 500 christians murdered by muslims this time but revenge will be swift no doubt. An endless pointless massacre.

Wrinkled Weasel said...

When was the last time there was civil war in England? What about those mass acts of genocide in Potters Bar and Scotch Corner?

There is no equivalence. We have our problems, we certainly do, but they do not extend to the physical annihilation and torture of our own citizens, or mass starvation or lack of basic health care.

The only people running around with spears in this country for the past 400 years were on the stage, playing Shakespeare.

This is not an argument you can win by citing what we do in Western Europe as anything like what happens in Africa. None of its territories has fared better under independence and most of them have gone backwards. They have become reliant on Western technology, Western education and Western Aid, most of which does nothing to help and a lot to prolong the agony.

It is time they were left to their own devices and people stopped pretending that we are to blame.

Jim Baxter said...

Richard said:

'It is notable because it is exceptional.;

I think not. I think mass murder was entirely routine, even mechanised. How many Soviet civilans were massacred by the invading armies of Barbarossa, if not murdered immediately then robbed of their food and burnt out of their houses to freeze on the steppe? Milions, is the answer. Exceptional? And I'm sure there's something else - some other major series of mass atrocities committed by Europeans against each other (as if it matted whom they were committed against) that I haven't even mentioned.


Ged said: 'It is time they were left to their own devices and people stopped pretending that we are to blame.'

That's a different argument.

Staying with savagery, is it only savagery when applied to your own citizens or in a civil war but not in a wider war? Many - most - African countries are not countries at all in the sense of any kind of communal feeling or shared history - many are made up of very different peoples thrown together by political decisions in which they took no part.

Ask the Irish about civil war and atricities committed against people by 'their own'. To echo what OCS says, ask the Cambodians, or the civilians of Hanoi. Various aboriginal peoples. Were the people of the Belgian Congo really better off under the Belgians?

Yes, it's abhorrent what happens in Africa sometimes, abominable past words. But don't try to make out that the Europeans are any better. Or I'll mention Yugoslavia.