Kony 2012 is the title of the latest video to have gone viral on the Internet. It is almost 30 minutes long, and it describes an ongoing situation in the central African nation of Uganda. The popular exposé is narrated by Jason Russell, who, in the opening minutes of his film, reminds us all that “humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect,” a factoid that Mister Russell sees exemplified by the huge numbers of people using the social media site Facebook.

Aside for coming across as a ham-handed endorsement of Facebook, Russell’s opening assertions seem to dehumanize the legions of earthlings whose lives are defined firstly by familial or esoteric concerns. From Russell’s view, if you don’t want to become a throbbing impulse in some global hive-mind, if you don’t strive to belong and connect, then you aren’t part of humanity.

What is Jason Russell’s case anyway? What is Kony 2012 all about?

Well, the objective of Kony 2012 is pretty clear. Namely, eliminate an African warlord named Joseph Kony in order to save African children. The case presented in support for this objective is, however, a little sketchy. It is an emotional narrative, full of assumptions and wholly devoid of context.

Kony 2012 begins with the provocative phrase “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” The words appear; stylishly grubby and center lit, and then flitter and morph to tell us that “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time is now.” Twits and beeps accompany a rapid fusillade of meaningless visual stimuli and then the chaos is replaced by serenity, a spaceman’s homeward view of a quiet earth.

Into the Cannibal’s Pot – Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa
Ilana Mercer, Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011, hb, 319pp

Ilana Mercer is a well-known controversialist on the American right, who writes a deservedly popular WorldNetDaily column and somehow finds time to maintain both a website and blog.

Her views are probably best described as paleo-libertarian. The book’s provocative title, which probably cost her potential readers, is borrowed from Ayn Rand, but the author tempers capitalist principles with respect for national identities and cultural traditions. Unusually amongst conservatives, she combines Israelophilia and dislike of Islam with trenchant opposition to American military adventurism. Unusually amongst libertarians, she is an outspoken critic of current US immigration policy as subversive of social order as well as fiscal responsibility. She has now turned her sights on her former homeland of South Africa – both for its own sake and because she feels its tenebrous present contains urgent indicators for America.

The author was born in South Africa, the daughter of a rabbi, but the family had to leave in the 1960s because of her father’s anti-apartheid outspokenness. They decamped to Israel, before the author moved back to South Africa in the 1980s to start a family. She was (and is) against apartheid; she recalls having tea with Desmond Tutu and being on the Grand Parade in Cape Town in 1990 to witness Mandela’s release. From there she went to Canada and eventually the United States.

Notwithstanding her anti-apartheid views, she feels duty-bound to show that the RSA reality was immeasurably more complex than the simplistic narrative which came to misinform the West’s policy towards its final African redoubt. In the old days, there were gross indignities and injustices, and yet in the African context the old SA compared favourably with its neighbours:

“When we departed, South Africa was still a country with a space program...gleaming skyscrapers, and department stores that rivaled Macy’s. The Central Business District in Johannesburg bustled. Crime was controlled, or at least confined. When mobs stoned cars en route to D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town…a tough and competent police sprang into action. An equally impressive Western system of Roman-Dutch law, and a relatively independent judiciary, dished out just desserts.” (1)

By contrast, the “Rainbow Nation” so revered by postmodern moralizers is largely dysfunctional and becoming more so, in accordance with what has become a sad post-colonial African tradition. The consequences for South Africans of all races range from the inconvenient to the lethal.

The country which carried on space programmes now suffers regular electricity shortages. Once-reliable government services have become a kind of lottery, with even the wealthiest suburbs experiencing interruptions in basic services like postal delivery, refuse collection and sanitation, while one third of budget-administering municipal councillors are functionally illiterate. There has been an explosion of AIDS, thanks to tribal prejudices against science—to the extent that an estimated 20% of adults have the virus. The overall unemployment rate rose from 19% in 1994, immediately before the end of apartheid and at the end of a long period of economic stagnation, to 31% in 2003. It has subsequently declined to 25%, but this is still very high for a country so well-endowed with natural resources, and with much lower levels of debt than many other countries. Black household income shrank by 19% between 1995 and 2000—although it had started to recover prior to the global financial crisis. This is despite – or because of—Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies which compel firms employing 50 or more staff to have a certain proportion of black employees and/or black investors. BEE has devastated whole industries, such as the mining sector (ironically, as Anglo-American was one of the chief instruments of ending apartheid) and have helped to force 10% of whites out of work and below the poverty line. Comparing past government performance with present, it seems as if the dearest wish of African National Congress MP Mario Rantho has already been realized:

“It is imperative to get rid of merit as the overriding principle in the appointment of public servants.”

There is less scope for wry humour when it comes to violent crime, although the author tries by entitling a section “Crime, The Beloved Country” in an allusion to Alan Paton’s classic anti-apartheid novel of 1948. Over 300,000 have been killed since the arrival of black majority rule as the erstwhile unjust but orderly regime became one which is theoretically just but with scarcely any order. Mercer cites BBC statistics from 2006 showing that on average, 65 people are murdered each day, 195 raped and 300 robbed with violence. Shockingly, she cites 2008 figures suggesting that more than 50,000 children under three years old are raped each year—10% of total rapes. By comparison:

“Few realize that during the decades of the apartheid regime a few hundred Africans in total perished as a direct and indirect consequence of police brutality. A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the death toll in ‘free’ South Africa where hundreds of Africans, white and black, die weekly” (author’s emphases)

So ungovernable are some places that private security firms have actually been hired by the police to protect…police stations. The South African Police Service’s acronym of SAPS seems highly appropriate. Even high-profile liberals, like writer Nadine Gordimer, historian David Rattray and former First Lady Marike de Klerk, are not immune from murderous assaults. Arguably more deserving of sympathy are poorer, apolitical Afrikaners, singled out for attack because some among them once oppressed and dispossessed blacks. Now all Afrikaners are being oppressed and dispossessed – except more rapidly and much more finally.

An economically and culturally significant subset, Afrikaner farmers (Boer of course means farmer), almost seems to be targeted for obliteration, with one tenth of them – over 3,000 – murdered since the end of apartheid, without anyone appearing to notice, let alone care. The author notes ruefully that “seals being clubbed to death on ice floes have garnered more attention” than what is widely accepted to be the actual genocide of these agriculturalists, often in circumstances of the most frightful cruelty. Statistically, farming in South Africa is more dangerous than mining. When Pretoria attorney Philip du Toit gallantly raised the unpleasant, unfashionable subject in his 2004 book The Great South African Land Scandal, he was brushed aside or condemned as the most verkrampte variety of bigot. The government, the semi-divine Mandela and the self-appointed “international community” all seem indifferent.

Many of the farmers who have survived thus far are quitting both the countryside and the country, defeated by physical assault, theft, sabotage and killing of livestock, incompetent police, corrupt officials and unjust land confiscations. By 2015, one third of farmers’ land will have been redistributed, and much of this acreage is already lying fallow or reverting to bush, because the new proprietors (often local tribal leaders or ANC party bosses) lack the interest or the skills to farm it. In 2009, South Africa became a net food importer for the first time. If or when famine strikes it will presumably be ascribed to the legacy of apartheid rather than the inadequacies of the nouvelle regime.

The white population decreased by 20% between 1995 and 2005, giving rise to the colloquialism of “packing for Perth” and causing even Mandela to snarl that they are “traitors”. Mandela’s Western worshippers may be surprised to learn that their demi-god would resort to such brusquerie, but after all he did lead the ANC’s terrorist wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) whose anthem contains the following un-neighbourly sentiment:

“We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them—kill the whites”

Even terrorists deserve a chance of redemption, but it is salutary to recall that Amnesty International—not generally considered a diehard conservative organisation—refused to recognize Mandela as a prisoner of conscience because of his continued commitment to violence, and that the country over which he hovers like some angelic presence early forged cordial links with the likes of Gaddafi, Castro and assorted Palestinian hardliners.

White flight has further skewed the imbalance between provider and provided for—today for every (disproportionately white) taxpayer there are no fewer than eleven (disproportionately black) voters. To add to this vast potential for class envy, many of these voters have been schooled to resent the whites on whom they depend. It is a volatile blend, fuelling radical redistribution policies and a sporadic ethnic intifada against whites—especially those who live on isolated farms far from police who might not come even if they knew what was happening, and would probably never catch the killers even if they did come.

I have used the word intifada because the Afrikaners always had an unusually intimate relationship with Israel. The author says of the Dutch Reformed Church to which most Afrikaners owe (or owed) allegiance—

“In their community they saw an extension of the covenant God formed with the Israelites.”

The material effects of this mysticism were decades of strategic co-operation between the two pariah-states, both hated for real or alleged racism, and both the objects of innumerable angry denunciations, UN resolutions and anguished editorials. Many in both condemned countries saw the situation as Mrs. Mercer describes it:

“It was SA and Israel against the world and against the forces of nihilistic liberalism intent on snuffing out civilized outposts at the tip of Africa and in the Middle East.”

Calvinist eschatological logic played a paradoxical part in South Africa’s trajectory—originally inspiring the Afrikaner expansion into the intoxicating-horrifying wilderness, then being used to justify and bolster apartheid before eventually turning in on itself, as the Afrikaners realized they

“…had become something they detested…the biblically blessed country became an Ishmael, an outcast.”

There was a consequent collapse of will in Afrikanerdom’s upper echelons. Big business always hated apartheid, there was little or no academic or artistic support, and when the church gave up in puzzled despair there was no more reason to resist—even though Afrikaners knew well that their quality of life would suffer. There is a revealing anecdote from the fraught final days of apartheid, when there were constant rumours of a military coup to forestall power-sharing. When General Constand Viljoen told General George Meiring that the army could take over the country in a single night, Meiring reportedly replied:

“Yes, that is so, but what do we do the morning after the coup?”

The author is particularly insightful on this subject, and en passant tells the little-known story of the slamse gevaar “(the Islamic threat”) in South Africa, as represented by the pro-Iranian revolution group known as People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, which almost unhindered carried out 80 bombings against civilians in 1999-2000 while the state security apparatus focused on a non-existent threat from white separatists.

The author’s father was against apartheid not out of Marxism or sentimentality but simply because he found the system to be inconsistent with the moral tenets he had imbibed from the Torah. Mrs. Mercer is at pains to explain his motivations, because it is her difficult duty to demonstrate that the country he and so many other well-meaning people helped create is in many ways inferior to the reviled Republic. Between the lines of the polemic there therefore crackles much unresolved tension, reflecting this balancing act between her loyalty to her father and her compulsion to attest to truths which will pain him. There is also a palpable sense of guilt—at fleeing from a once-beloved country, and leaving behind them fine people, black as well as white, who had not the Mercers’ good fortune of possessing a second passport and remittable funds.

“If only…” is her underlying refrain—if only the whites had insisted on minority safeguards—if only international opinion had supported the pro-Western Zulus rather than the pro-Third World “Xhosa Nostra”—if only the new reigning ideology had been capitalism rather than racial socialism—if only reform could have been achieved without this kind of miserable meltdown. She does not offer any SA solutions, although she quotes severally from the remarkable Afrikaner cultural activist Dan Roodt. She scarcely mentions contemporary Afrikaner parties like the Freedom Front Plus, or initiatives like the Afrikaner-only settlement of Orania in the Western Cape (which the new SA Constitution permits, and which Jacob Zuma visited last year).

Yet Cannibal is a klaxon of a kind—leaping frequently, if not always seamlessly, between the RSA and the USA. Mrs. Mercer seeks urgently to show how the perils of South Africa are being replicated in her new country of domicile. Both countries are roughly the same age, and both have frontier-taming, republican and Low Church traditions which are metastasizing into anxiety-utopian complexes. They also have large and mutually distrustful racial groups, a factor which militates against social cohesion and democracy because,

“A perquisite for a classical liberal democracy is that majority and minority status should be interchangeable and fluid.”

In America, as in South Africa, perplexed policymakers strive to address distrust through multiculturalism and affirmative action—perversely, because such policies all too evidently entrench rather than efface divisions. Both countries are wedded to what the author calls the “diversity doxology” and to globalisation; both are experiencing PC policy creep on social keystones like freedom of association (and dissociation), freedom of speech, strong families, self-reliance, fiscal rectitude, property rights and enforceable contracts. She feels that as some small recompense for America’s part in toppling the old balance of power, Washington should offer sanctuary to some of those whose livelihoods (and lives) they have ruined—one of her very few proposals, and one unlikely ever to make it into the US statute book.

The two countries’ situations are very different, and their destinies will therefore diverge—but there are strong similarities too, and she raises the powerful possibility what is happening now in South Africa is happening no less surely in her new beloved country.

NOTE

1. A rare and interesting cinematic idea of what the Cape Town of the 1960s looked and felt like may be found in the 1967 film The Cape Town Affair, starring Jacqueline Bisset and James Brolin

Recent discussion about the Royal Wedding here in the United Kingdom reminded me of a very different—and perhaps even more extraordinary—kind of wedding, about which I learned round about this time last year. It gave one much to think about, eliciting a wide range of feelings. I reproduce below the article that appeared in the Daily Mail:

My Masai Mr Right: Why is this middle-class woman giving up a life of luxury to live in a mud hut with an African warrior?

By Kathryn Knight

Like many young women in love, Colette Armand believes she was hit by a coup de foudre when she first saw her future husband. 'The attraction was instant,' she says. 'We had an immediate connection.'

Photographs testify to the strength of their bond, showing a beaming young couple clearly delighted by each other's company.

That, however, is where the conventional nature of their romance ends. For Colette's intended is a Masai warrior whose home is a mud hut on the vast African plains.

Meitkini's tribe have no possessions and no running water, and their food is either plucked from the ground or killed with a spear.

Nonetheless, after a courtship of three years, Colette, 24, is preparing to abandon all the comforts of her western lifestyle to join her life permanently with his  -  even though, to date, she hasn't shared so much as a kiss with her 23-year-old fiance, as Masai rules forbid physical contact between men and women who aren't married.

What's more, she has to accept that, in the future, she may have to share her husband with other women, as Masai tradition permits any number of wives.

'In time I may have to accept that he will marry again,' she says. 'I hope he chooses not to take another wife, but if not then I will compromise.'

Colette admits that she never expected her life to end up on such an unusual path.

The daughter of a nurse and a businessman, her father's job, as director of a large mining company, took the family all over the world.

Academically gifted, at 17 she was studying literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. At 21, disillusioned with her studies and with a failed romance behind her, she decided to take a gap year  -  'I realised I needed to have an adventure and try and find myself.

 

'I had always wanted to go to Africa, so I found a job working for an organisation that runs orphanages in Kenya,' she says.

 

'In the space of a week I quit my studies, withdrew all my savings and got on a flight to Nairobi. I didn't tell anyone what I was doing, except my mum, who was hysterical. She thought I was throwing away all my hard work. But I'd made up my mind.'

So, within 24 hours, Colette had swapped the comfort of her apartment for a rug on the
Meitkini's tribe have no possessions and no running water, and their food is either plucked from the ground or killed with a spear.

Nonetheless, after a courtship of three years, Colette, 24, is preparing to abandon all the comforts of her western lifestyle to join her life permanently with his  -  even though, to date, she hasn't shared so much as a kiss with her 23-year-old fiance, as Masai rules forbid physical contact between men  floor of the orphanage, which had no electricity nor running water.

'Yes, it was basic, but the funny thing was that I felt instantly at home,' she says. 'Working with the children helped give me perspective. Most of them had been abandoned because they were disabled, which was very humbling.'

Among them was Mumbe, a nine-year-old boy who, prior to Colette's arrival, had never spoken a word. 'One day, he turned to me and said "mummy",' she recalls. 'It was a huge shock, and everyone at the orphanage thought I had magical healing properties.'

So much so that word spread, and a few days later, one of Colette's supervisors told her that the head of a local Masai tribe wanted to meet her. The tribe lived several hours drive away over dusty, uneven terrain.

'When I got there I was taken to meet the chief, Kehmini, who was incredibly welcoming. I was lucky that the tribe spoke quite good English, so I could communicate well. Kehmini then invited me to stay, and showed me to a hut that would be my home while I was there,' she recalls. 

Even after the privations of the orphanage, her first night was spent in insomniac discomfort. 'There are no doors on the hut, so I was terrified a snake would slither in,' she recalls. 'I lay there listening to every movement.'

The next morning she was further shocked by the harsh realities of life in the Masai. 'The only water came from a small muddy tributary that's home to snakes and crocodiles,' says Colette. 'I was too scared to bathe, so I had to resort to having a makeshift wash in water boiled on the fire  -  which is what I ended up doing for months to come.' 

Nonetheless, she quickly grew to love the simple rhythm of life with the tribe. 'A typical day starts at 4am and ends at 6pm, when everyone sits around the campfire, and cooks and talks. You go to sleep at seven. In the morning, the men go out hunting and the women look after the children and work in the fields. The beauty of sitting under a vast African moon by the campfire, or watching the sun rise over the plain, is hard to describe.'

The tribe quickly took her to their heart, and after two weeks Colette was told the community had decided to sacrifice a goat as a welcoming gift  -  a huge honour.

'They slaughtered it in front of me, which was horrible, then put its warm blood in a cup for me to drink. It tasted disgusting, but I had to do it as I would have hugely offended them otherwise. I just closed my eyes and tried not to be sick.'

On other occasions, it was animal life of a different kind that was hard to stomach. 'One night I left the hut in the small hours to answer the call of nature, only to see a black mamba snake rearing its head just a few feet away. They are deadly, and I was terrified. My screams woke the whole camp, and men came running with sticks and managed to carry it away. I was still very shaken.'

But for all these privations, Colette soon realised she had no desire to leave  -  a feeling enhanced when, a few days later, she first saw her future husband while she was picking coffee beans in the fields. 'Meitkini was the chief's brother, but I hadn't seen him before as he'd been away hunting for several weeks. When I first saw him he was striding towards me carrying a lion he had helped kill, and he looked like this incredibly masculine force. I was smitten.

Later, when I was introduced to him by the chief and we started talking, it was like speaking to my double. He was clever and articulate, and there was an immediate connection. From then on I was in love.'

Meitkini, she says, felt the same way, but Masai relationships do not adhere to the same conventions as they do in the West. 'The Masai don't marry for love but for power and social position, so it is a slightly alien concept. It was a long time before we were able to acknowledge our feelings for each other, and we couldn't express them physically, as Masai rules forbid physical contact between unmarried men and women. It was frustrating, but I had to respect their culture. I was a visitor and it would have been a gross insult to behave any other way.'

Instead, Colette waited, hoping the tribe would grow to trust her. 'Five months later, Kehmini told me the community had accepted me and would be happy for me to live there permanently. It was a huge honour.'

Yet there was one final hurdle to overcome  -  Colette felt an overwhelming urge to finish her studies back home before she could commit to her new life in Kenya. 'It was tough because I loved him, but the intellectual side of me wanted fulfilment too.' Colette recalls.

'I talked to Meitkini about it and he told me he would wait for me.' Matters came to a head when, in October 2008, with civil unrest sweeping the country, a passing UNESCO charity worker told her that, as a white woman, she was in huge danger and urged her to leave Kenya for a while. 'I was scared but also upset  -  I didn't want to leave Meitkini, but he said I should take the chance to return to England and study for a while. There were a lot of tears.'

But there were happier tidings too: before she left, the tribe's chief gave Colette and Meitkini his blessing to marry. 'He said the whole tribe felt something special had happened between us and that we were destined to be together.'

Colette returned to England, moving in with friends into a small flat in south-east London, and quickly being accepted onto her PhD course. But life in the West no longer felt familiar.

'For three weeks, I barely left my room. I felt like a stranger in my own culture  -  the sheer noise of city life gave me a splitting headache. I realised I now thought of Africa as my home, and I was determined to go back.'

Unsurprisingly, her conviction has proved incomprehensible to many of her friends, who cannot grasp why Colette wants to turn her back on the luxuries of western life. 'Obviously, some of them have found it hard to understand  -  they just cannot conceive of what my life is like there. At the same time they can clearly see how happy I am, and none of them have tried to talk me out of it,' she says.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of her mother, who is still unable to accept Colette's decision and remains estranged from her daughter. (Her father's opinion isn't known, as he walked out on her mother when Colette was 12, and hasn't seen his daughter since.) 'The fact that I'm going to marry a Masai is a scandal in the family and, as a result, she and I don't speak. It's sad, but we're very different people,' she says.

And so Colette is making the final plans for her wedding. It will be a two-day affair, with Masai travelling from miles around to celebrate their union, and an ox slaughtered in honour of the happy couple. That, however, is where the festivities will end, and afterwards Colette will be back in the fields at dawn, planting grain or harvesting coffee beans.

'It's a simple life, and one that would be anathema to most people in the West, but it makes me happy,' she says. 'I have no problem with giving up my western ways. When I'm there I feel so alive and free. Living with the tribe has taught me to live in the present. It taught me what matters.'

I wonder how she is doing now . . .

On 13 December 2010 the BBC News online magazine ran a feature about Toby Ord, the 31-year-old man who has pledged to give away £1,000,000 to fight against global poverty over his lifetime. What distinguishes Ord from the likes of Bill Gates and fellow billionaires is that the former exists on an annual income of £25,000 ($40,000), which means that he gives away to charity everything he earns over £18,000, or £833 a month out of an income of £1,583 after tax. This is on top of his entire savings of £15,000, which he has already given away.

In order to achieve this, he lives in a sparse one-bedroom flat, which he rents from his employer; eats out only once a fortnight; and has a cup of coffee only once a week. He also has no children, which enables his wife, a medical doctor, to give away part of her income as well.

What motivated this man to make such an unusual commitment?

Ord tells us that as a university student he was idealistic, and that he would be rebuffed by his fellow students, eager to shut him up, for what appears to have been his incessant pontificating about poverty in Africa. While doing a Master’s degree, in which he studied ethics and philosophy, Ord decided to give away most of his money to help save lives abroad.

I read with interest Denis Mangan's recent article, calling for an end to Western foreign aid to Africa.

I deployed the same arguments, and many more, in the Anti-Geldof Compilation CD I organised five years ago (and which comes with a 28-page booklet, containing a 7,000-word refutation of the Live8 / anti-poverty campaign).

But in 2010 my position is even more radical, in that I reject not just aid, but the idea of 'development' altogether.

Development is a byproduct of the Western liberal ideology, which is founded on doctrines of equality and progress, the former of which implies a totalitarian mindset while the latter implies a linear conception of history. I ask, why do sub-Saharan Africans need to be 'developed'? The egalitarian view is that given equal opportunities, even the Kalahari bushmen will eventually 'develop' themselves into a European-style, techno-industrial civilisation, with only minor anatomical differences. My view and that of others (see Guillaume Faye) is that it is absurd to think that all the peoples of the Earth can and need to be developed. Firstly, our type of civilisation presupposes certain inborn capabilities, temperament, and proclivities that are not present in all humans and cannot be implanted through education. Secondly, and as Faye points out, were the whole Earth to be developed into a global European- or American-style techno-industrial civilisation, the planet would likely not be able to withstand it: the demands on the environment would be too great and have catastrophic results.

If the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa never developed techno-industrial civilisations, it is because they never had any need for it. What is more, even some of the fundamental features of civilisation are baffling to the peoples of Africa even today, such as what they see as an obsession for counting and measuring everything: hence why so many Africans have no idea of how old they are and why a traveller will find many parts without street names of numbered houses (natives use landmarks to find their way around).

For these and other reasons, some of which you can find in the researches of Profs. Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton, and others that you can find in Lothrop Stoddard's Revolt Against Civilization (1922) and Hesketh Prichard's Where Black Rules White (1900), Africa needs to be allowed to deindustrialise and to regress to pre-colonnial conditions. The nation states created there by the European powers must be allowed to disintegrate, and Africa as a whole must be allowed to re-organise along traditional, tribal lines. While North Africa will certainly remain more advanced, sub-Saharan Africa needs to be declared a natural and anthropological reserve.

Most importantly, the West must reconcile itself to the idea of a multi-tiered world, with parts of it organised along traditional or neo-Mediaeval lines, reflecting the capabilities, the temperament, and the proclivities of the peoples who inhabit those regions. This would have the further advantage of being more sustainable environmentally, as traditional and neo-Mediaeval societies do not place so many demands on the Earth.

Of course, this is a long way from happening yet. And if it happens, it will not happen because our political leadership finally reflected on their follies and decided to stop being so foolish, so selfish, and so delusional. If it happens, it will be the consequence of a systemic collapse and a fundamental realignment of values in the West.  

Raise your hand if know what PEPFAR stands for. Raise both hands if you now how much it costs. Launched in 2003 by George W. Bush, PEPFAR stands for President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and it has now grown to the point where it is virtually a promise to help pay for AIDS treatment for every infected poor person in the world. During its first five years, from 2003 to 2008, PEPFAR cost American taxpayers $25 billion. Almost all of that went to Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2009 worldwide, there were an estimated 35 percent more new HIV infections than AIDS-related deaths, so there is no end in sight for the president’s “emergency” program.

You can be infected with HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, without actually being sick. HIV steadily attacks the body’s immune system, however, and most HIV-positive people eventually get AIDS, and without treatment they die. Antiretroviral treatment (ART) does not kill HIV, but it interferes with its ability to replicate, thus reducing “viral load” on the body. People with AIDS have to keep taking the drugs their entire lives to keep the disease under control.

So, just what did George W. Bush get us into? The World Health Organization estimates that in 2008 there were 33.4 million HIV-infected people in the world, with another 2.7 million or so new infections every year. Sub-Saharan Africa has 12.5 percent of the world’s population but an estimated 67 percent of the world’s HIV carriers, which means black Africans are about 15 times more likely than other people to get the disease. (In the United States, black men are six times more likely than white men to carry the virus, and black women are 18 times more likely than white women.)

Antiretroviral treatment is expensive but the big drug companies that invent the drugs are subject to “compulsory licenses,” which means generics go on the market long before drug patents expire. This has brought the annual cost  for treating one person in black Africa down as little as $200 or $300 for the “first-line” drugs that people start with. This is still a huge sum in the poorer countries, which have an annual per capita GDP of under $1,000, and annual per capita public health spending of less than $10. A year’s worth of “second-line” drugs, necessary when the virus develops immunity to the cheaper drugs, costs anywhere from $600 to $1,500. Treatment at these prices is beyond the reach of any but a tiny elite of black Africans, so the continent expects us to pick up the tab. With proper treatment, a patient can expect to live 30 or 40 years, so a commitment to treat every HIV-infected African for the rest of his life is a very long, very expensive, very crazy undertaking.

Despite the billions we are spending, not all the black Africans who are thought to need ART are getting it, so the United States and other rich countries that pay for drugs are routinely accused of murder by neglect. The Obama administration has promised to boost the number of doses, but the budget squeeze means there has been virtually no increase planned for the next fiscal year. HIV-infected foreigners will have to make do with just under $7 billion in 2011.

Curiously, keeping millions of Africans alive does not give the U.S. government any leverage over their governments. As Princeton Lyman and Stephen Wittels explained in the July/August 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, the U.S. government does not dare cut AIDS funding no matter how nastily dictators behave. The half-billion a year we give to the thug government in Zimbabwe, for example, buys us no influence because Robert Mugabe knows we will not turn off the tap and open ourselves to charges that we are killing off black people. The psychopaths who run Uganda, Ethiopia, and most of the rest of the continent thumb their noses at us for the same reason.

Aside from whatever influence we thought we were buying in Africa -- and who cares about influence in Africa, anyway? -- why are we on the hook for decades of handouts? Why are our children on the hook? Except for the small number of people who got AIDS from infected blood transfusions or for babies who got it directly from their mothers (newborns catch it from infected mothers about 25 percent of the time), AIDS is a disease you can avoid with almost 100 percent certainty. Virtually everyone with AIDS got it because of deliberate, reckless promiscuity.

Come to think of it, why are we on the hook to treat all HIV-infected Americans for free? You knew we do that, didn’t you? Fewer than 20 percent of people with HIV have private insurance -- the kind of people who get the disease are not the sort that get insurance -- so you and I pay to treat the rest. The fiscal 2010 federal AIDS budget was $19.4 billion and the request for 2011 is $20.5 billion. That makes a total of nearly $30 billion a year we spend on AIDS drugs for Americans and foreigners.

The British philosopher Herbert Spencer once pointed out that “the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.” He could have been describing antiretroviral treatment. Before the first AIDS drug, AZT, was introduced in 1987, AIDS was a death sentence. Even the most promiscuous homosexuals curbed their lust, and the gay bathhouses in San Francisco became ghost towns. AZT had awful side effects and was not very effective, but it was a start. After protease inhibitors were introduced in 1996, it became possible to lead a more or less normal life despite AIDS.

As Spencer would have predicted, the gay clubs filled up again, and homosexuals are back to the most dangerous, AIDS-inducing kind of sex: unprotected anal intercourse. And why not? Taxpayers will ladle out billions to keep them alive.

Americans are generous. They rush to help victims of misfortune. But how many taxpayers would reach into their pockets to pay for a disease that most people get through deliberate self-indulgence of a kind many Americans find repellent? How many would do so, knowing that treatment encourages yet more self-indulgence, in a vicious cycle that could keep their grandchildren on the hook?

If Americans don’t like the idea of paying for a lifetime of treatment for fellow citizens, what would they think if they knew we are supposed to be paying for endless millions of promiscuous foreigners? They would be hopping mad, especially if they knew most of the money was being swallowed up by Africans who can’t control their sex lives. They might not admit it in public, but if they had the chance in the privacy of the voting booth, Americans would cut PEPFAR off without a dime.

Of course, if you quote Herbert Spencer to explain why the gay clubs are full again, you’re a “homophobe.” If you don’t want to fill Africa with fools either, you’re a “racist.” It looks as though American and European taxpayers will go on paying for their  leaders’ foolish altruism.

...the Religious Right is leftism with God.

Feds Spent $800,000 of Economic Stimulus on African Genital-Washing Program

September 13, 2010

CNS News.

By Matt Cover

(CNSNews.com) – The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex.

The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling – however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011.

“NIH Announces the Availability of Recovery Act Funds for Competitive Revision Applications,” the grant abstract states. “We propose to evaluate the feasibility of a post-coital genital hygiene study among men unwilling to be circumcised in Orange Farm, South Africa.”

Because AIDS researchers have been unsuccessful in convincing most adult African men to undergo circumcision, the UCLA study proposes to determine whether researchers can develop an after-sex genitalia-washing regimen that they can then convince uncircumcised African men to follow.