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06/12/2005:
"Don't take the blue pill"
by Gary Younge...Such selective amnesia is not confined to the south or to segregation. The war on terror is being fought with convenient disregard for the fact that the terrorists the US is fighting today it armed only yesterday, and that among its allies today are vicious dictators that it will undoubtedly attack tomorrow. Nor is it confined to the US. The whole debate around debt relief in the UK takes place as though Britain had no responsibility for the state that Africa is in today. Those who lambast Africa for its rampant corruption and poor governance forget that most of these dictators have been knowingly propped up by the west. They lecture Africa on the need for democracy apparently unaware that the continent only got a shot at democracy once Europeans left.
Those who deride Make Poverty History and other activists for their naivety in trying to challenge inequalities bequeathed from the past are in need of a new slogan for a new wristband: Make History Impoverished. For the trouble is not that this sense of collective historical identity does not exist - Britons and Americans have no trouble saying "We beat the Germans and the Japanese" when referring to the second world war. It's that they apply it only selectively. Nobody says, "We backed death squads", "We lynched children", or "We tortured Kenyans" - even though these happened more recently.
The target here is not individual guilt - there are therapists for that - but a collective reckoning with the past that would help make sense of the present. Like everyone else, African-Americans, Africans and Arabs must naturally take responsibility for their own actions. But to pretend that their choices are not shaped and limited by the past is not just dishonest; it leads ineluctably to the racist conclusion that Arabs can't handle democracy, black Americans are inveterate criminals and Africans just can't cut it in the modern world.
"I am born with a past," writes Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue. "And to try to cut myself off from that past is to deform my present relationships."
guardian.co.uk
This article is better than most, but still the problem is how the rest of the world is subjected to the white world's interminable conversations with itself, these narratives of empire:we will be the ones who will 'make poverty history.' If we think in terms of reparations rather than aid, then it naturally follows that it is for Africa to dictate the terms.
