The images of the starving of Sudan now fill our television screens. This year Sudan, last year Rwanda, the year before Sierra Leone, the year before that Burundi, the year before that Ethiopia, the year before that, oh who's counting? And now we hear of the possibility of war between Eritrea and Ethiopia with a mixture of complete and utter incredulity and complete and utter credulity. Ethiopia: wasn't that where the re-engagement of the west in Africa really began? And now they think they should have another little war there? Yes? And after that little war, we can bail them out again, yes? Is that the idea?
One of the most blood-curdlingly pious fallacies which is re-iterated in every school debate and from every state platform runs as follows: we in Ireland have a particular empathy with famine-countries because of our own history. But in fact the lessons which should have been learned - that famines, rather than food shortages, do not occur in free-market democracies, and pre-Famine Ireland was neither - are not applied. As the splendid young economist Gareth Davis has pointed in a couple of fine essays in the Edmund Burke newsletter, Reflections, the Irish economy before the Famine was highly dirigiste. Yet laissez- fairism has come to be blamed for the Famine, rather than the catastrophic and repeated failure of the potato crop, a chronic failure to attract or accumulate capital and dirigiste habits which were a direct contradiction of laissez-fairism.
Man-made famines
Unlike the Irish famine, African famines have without exception been man-made; what could have been localised shortages have been transformed into social catastrophes by the behaviour of genocidal barbarians - Marxist, Muslim or simply tribal. Yet far from this simple perception taking root, a reverse witlessness is parotted wherever the bien-pensant gather: it is that famine in Africa is the fault of "the West."
Now they don't mean that geographical entity, the West. They mean, sort of, whitey. So when people speak of the West, they mean Australia and New Zealand, but not Singapore or Malaysia or Taiwan. And according to bien-pensant thinking, the West helps cause famine in Africa because it over-consumes, as if it was sucking food and capital out places like Tanzania, which would otherwise be enormously prosperous and well-fed. In fact the West takes nothing from Tanzania because there is simply nothing to take.
The economic fallacy of West-hating is compounded by an extraordinary world-wide perception that a particular duty to rescue peoples of other continents falls upon the populations of Europe and areas dominated by Northern European settlement. Got a problem? "The West" will come to your aid - not Saudi, not Brunei, not Singapore, not Japan, not Nigeria, not Paraguay, not Brazil, but Northern Europe, North America, and Australasia.
The real new colonialism
The idea that "the West" is there to blame, and there to rescue, is the new colonialism, and it is no less colonising and no more ennobling than the imperialisms of the 19th century. It lifts the moral burden of responsibility from those who should feel it most acutely; it liberates from duty those who are most duty-bound, and makes perfectly possible the perfectly impossible: such as war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, because in the backs of the minds of so many of the warlords there, and no doubt in the middle and the forefront too, there is the belief that if things go wrong again, heigh-ho, the good old C-130 Hercules will be dropping food yet again. And they probably will, because there is no way of saying no.
"No" is probably the only way of convincing Africa's elites, if that is the right term to describe the rabble who govern so many countries on that continent, that the buck begins and ends at their desks. One can say that in the abstract: but who can say it in the face of more television pictures of naked, scrawny children, with flies in their eyes and only days to live? Yet by intervening yet again, are we not part of the cyclical disease? Does not our response to the sight of the starving child make it possible for his or her younger brother to repeat the whole horror in five years' time? And, just as deadly parasites have enormously complex life-cycles, is not one stage in the life-cycle of African famine the benign response of "the west"? In other words, it is not our consumerism which is part of the disease, but our charity.
Charity or vanity?
Of course, this seems like heartlessness. It certainly lacks the ethical altitude of the interventionists. But to what degree are donations to charity expressions of moral vanity rather than honest and practical charity? Is pride rather than goodness the reason for giving to African causes? And how many of those people who work in Africa do so, not because they can actually do good in the long-term, but because it makes them feel better?
But is not interfering in other people's countries because it makes you feel better a deeply insidious form of selfishness? For then a moral cancer transmutes the healthy tissue of concern for others into the lethal tumour of egotism. That tumour assures its host, and the African hosts of the host, that presence of outsiders is vital for Africa. It is not: it is one of the causes of Africa's woes.