Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
economist.com
economist.com
Looking into this, it's because the UN will only declare a famine if there's no functioning government. If there is one, they have the government declare a famine.
Presumably that's why the UN declared a famine at the refugee camp, not the country or region.
This story from last month discusses this aspect. https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/08/21/g-s1-...
Importantly, he's the shit stain most responsible for the current situation. He was your traditional shitty dictator for a few decades but went further - incited a genocide, created a two power structure system (army and a militia, headed by two men that hate each other) to ensure the army isn't strong enough to overthrow him. Well they both worked together to overthrow him, surrendered him to the ICC, and have been at a civil war with bonus genocide ever since.
Food insecurity experts working on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., an initiative controlled by U.N. bodies and major relief agencies, identify a famine in an area on the basis of three conditions: 1. At least 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food. 2. At least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition. 3. At least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/world/middleeast/what-is-...>
Archive / paywall: <https://archive.is/Hf5f5>
The classification was created in 2004, and has been used to identify two famines: Somalia (2011) and South Sudan (2017).
UN: "I didn't say it. I declared it."
I spent 3 weeks driving my 4x4 through Sudan in early 2019 [1], just a month before they finally got rid of Al-Bashir, and it was incredible.
The people of Sudan were some of the kindest and friendliest I have ever encountered on the planet. When I asked for directions to buy bread and it turned out to be complicated, the following morning locals brought a bag of fresh-baked bread to my campsite and refused to let me pay for it no matter how much I insisted. Their currency was already falling so fast I was getting a better rate for USD cash every day.
Gas at the time was $0.35USD / gallon - though the lineups were days long. The locals never let me wait in line and insisted I skip it every time.
Later in the North I met a very kind man who invited me for delicious coffee every day just to sit and talk. He again refused to let me pay for it and was clearly very proud of his country and people. On the second and third day I brought pastries to share. He said for decades it would have been unthinkable to talk out loud about getting rid of Al-Bashir, but during my visit it was starting to almost be acceptable. He did warn me to keep my voice down and leave my big camera in my 4x4 - people were edgy.
Sudan is on the list of 5 "evil" countries, just because I visited for three weeks I can never again get an ESTA (visa waiver) to enter the USA. It makes crossing the border much harder, especially when I live in Canada (not yet a Canadian citizen).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pqtfwlfDAw
or text if you prefer (hit next article at the bottom of each post) http://theroadchoseme.com/to-khartoum
I’ve driven through 55 countries in the undeveloped and developing world. Many were friendly or kinda neutral. Sudan is a very clear standout.
Sudanese were way more friendly than Australians, Canadians, Brits
Then why the fuck are they killing each other in a bloody civil war?
A foreign intervention isn't necessarily a bad idea but doing it effectively would be far more complex than you imagine.
Amrtya Sen "Nobel" in economics was related to this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I....
Phase II is when debt-burdened countries stop paying their debts, and the creditor sends in their military.
Phase III is when other countries support the debtor, for a variety of reasons, and start a proxy war.
Please don't guess, then? The famine started because of a military intervention gone south. The reality is that the Sudanese are a victim of circumstance. A war between some Arab rulers over who controls the Sudan.
It's interesting where to draw the line though, because it's relevant in the context of violent/-ist content as well - Relevant to the BS going on in the UK atm; we can claim that a "call to violence" is illegal as it well should be, but there is also the personal responsibility of those involved and that is why they're receiving sentences for participating in violent riots.
It doesn't always end well, but are you proposing the solution is to ensure that societies never try?
Can you give me some examples? My own knowledge of history goes like this: proximity (between cultures / ethnicities) = war.
So, as far as I am aware, any nation that is currently at peace can serve as an example.
Maybe it's the other way around: the more any two groups get along, the less we consider them meaningfully distinct.
I have lived in the US and the Netherlands. I can say both have a mix of both cultures and religions without widespread famine and bloody civil wars.
They did not propose to fix it via an army. Instead they said "nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this" That is not a recommendation. Instead it is describing how difficult the problem is to solve.
They then followed it up by saying "but that has its whole slew of unintended side effects". This is significantly hedging the claim, saying that the military could actually make things worse!
Maybe one of the side effects that he is saying could happen is exactly the issue brought up, meaning that the famine would get worse. Therefore bringing this up as a possibility is not a critique, and actually agrees with the original statement.
And they also previously had said "I’ll let people smarter and more powerful than me debate what could/should be done". That statement explicitly saying that they aren't proposing things.
They even finished up the statement by saying "a conversation needs to be had very soon how this should be handled ", which only suggesting that this should be talked about, because he quite clearly thinks that this is a complicated and difficult problem to solve, for which a military intervention could very well not be a good idea!
If you actually read the original statement it is extremely conservative in its statements, and you have to almost intentionally be obtuse to attack such a hedging non recommendation that merely describes how bad and hard it is to solve!
Military interventions most often fail to secure a country than the opposite. Haiti had a long peacekeeping mission from the UN and fell back into anarchy, Sudan has also had a military intervention. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. are other examples of interventions gone south.
Probably one of the few more successful interventions was the Yugoslavian Civil War, nowadays the appetite of the world for NATO bombing a country isn't really there.
No one has figured out how to do nation building from the outside, that often has come from the people in those nations themselves.
There will always be more greed than resources
2. ...but terminology does not at all fail here, there is a separate term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie which describes a breakdown in order and social function.
Notably, anarchists would probably claim that the fact that there's a civil war of various warlord factions and wannabe-states going on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80...
is a good example why anomie and anarchy probably _should_ be distinct concepts, as there's probably plenty of hierarchy, localized state power and centralized decision making going on in Sudan, while e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Lib... appear to have done absolutely fine keeping and improving a social fabric for the last 30 yeras (until recently, gangs arrived and brought the anomie that comes with organized crime).
Again, I don't think it's a winning strategy for political anarchists to try and convince people that "acshually it's anomie, not anarchy", but I think on this page, peoples professed self-identity makes sharing out this separation of concept worth it
At no point, besides the title, does the article make mention of anarchy or chaos. Rather, the article pretty clearly states that the famine is a result of a civil war between the government and a paramilitary group that was previously given weapons by the government.
Liberal politicians (and less commonly journalists) like to latch onto the words anarchy and chaos to fear monger and dramatize, but often the so-called anarchy and chaos they call out is a direct result of their own ruthless attempts to keep order.
For example the American civil war didn't create anarchy, the states continued to function on both sides so there were no mass starvation events.
There is no actual governance of the land, agricultural exploitation or oversight, basic services, or anything else.
Just armed men plundering, which is not any actual government control, hence the anarchy there and all around the country. There is a power structure in some places, but only insofar as military control and plunder; everything else is left to its own devices, hence chaotic anarchy.
Also... You may perceive this as anarchy, but many anarchists perceive most governments as exactly that... Just armed men plundering.
That is one possible consequence of civil war.
I assumed the nuance there would be nitpicked (as the thread proves) which is why I didn’t post this but I’m glad you did.
This famine is the expected result of 20 years of post-colonialist civil war, which the article goes on to explain lightly.
The economist is a capitalist magazine, so they of course are going to choose terms which resonate with capitalists.
The majority in this thread look at this situation as a failure of “valid liberal government” rather than the results of capitalist colonialism, which is what it is.
Colonialist resource extraction by Western powers, exemplified by companies like Chevron, exacerbated ethnic and regional tensions in Sudan and Darfur by prioritizing profits over local communities.
Specifically Chevron's involvement in Sudan's oil industry during the 1970s and 80s led to the displacement of populations and the allocation of resources to specific ethnic groups, heightening grievances and competition over land and wealth.
The infrastructure and political systems left by colonial powers were designed to facilitate such extraction, rather than fostering equitable development, creating a legacy of economic disparity and weak governance. This upended centuries of pastoral farming, and created conditions for this massive civil war, as marginalized groups rebelled against a state that was perceived as both complicit in and shaped by foreign exploitation.
There are other actors playing here: See the Grain from Ukraine program
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_From_Ukraine_program
"The blockade of Ukrainian ports by the Black Sea Fleet in the first weeks of the invasion interrupted grain exports, rapidly increasing global food prices and fueling food crises, greatly increasing the risk of famine in the poorest countries"
"the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme, has estimated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed around 70 million people to the brink of starvation worldwide"
The scope of the program includes Sudan
This might be naive but what's stopping the U.S, Russia, E.U, China or any capable world power from just air dropping tons of food onto Sudans population centers? You can't tell me Sudan's military has the ability to shoot down advanced aircraft. Am I missing something? The country has no government currently so claiming it's a violation of sovereignty would also be questionable imo.
Super inefficient, but makes for great photos. Good piece on NPR US airdrops of food into Gaza here:
"the first thing to understand about airdrops is they are probably the most inefficient possible way to deliver aid. So they're used very, very sparingly and only when there is truly no other way to get aid in.
"...ballpark eight to 10 times as expensive logistically to deliver by air as by overland transport"
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1236019060/gaza-israel-airdro...
Basically because of the logistical nightmare it is to airdrop food, there is no way that you can feed millions in famine with it. You need trucks on the ground bringing in food.
I'm not seriously advocating anything. It's a pretty hard problem to solve. Famine in itself, is not so hard, we can solve that with money -- the civil war thing is difficult though.
Airdropping thousands of tons of food per day, every day, for years on end would temporarily reduce famine. It wouldn't prevent famine (armed groupings who would gain control over of the airdrops wouldn't necessarily share), and would destroy local farming, and would be horrendously expensive but it's possible (see e.g. Berlin airlift) if someone major really wanted to dedicate all their airforce (again, see e.g. Berlin airlift for what it takes) to that.
While the AMC has the capability it isn't unlimited. They are already stretched thin delivering on other taskings, so if they have to pick up a new humanitarian aid mission then other missions will have to be postponed. Perhaps you should ask the Houthis and Iranians to suspend their terrorist activities in the Middle East in order to reduce the current workload.
And this way of distributing food is virtually worthless without corresponding ground operations.
I think this is closer to the Onion story about American mass shootings: people shake their heads with sorrow while asserting nothing can be done.
I speak of the observed responses, not to the actual limits to those willing to champion for a better world.
Only the third time in the last 20 years? I thought we were firmly past this…
Humanity has reduced famine dramatically over the past 100+ years. If Sudan famine ends up having the higher end of the estimate for deaths, it will likely reverse the clear downward trend, which should be alarming.
Or extremists gaining power, it's not that we've improved, it's that people had enough to eat. But it's slowly changed also here, you can be pragmatic or starving, but not both.
But other democracies and governments are not as strong, and of course, in the west we're enjoying some level of stability that also is a result of exploitation of other parts of the world that is then fighting over a limited amount of remaining resources
I think starving people are often very pragmatic? There’s a great deal that makes perfect sense if you’ve got nothing to lose.
Central planning of societies doesn't have a good track record, especially when there are competing external interests. Look at the horrific consequences of the American meddling in geopolitics of the third world over the last 100 years. The CIA and war industry is responsible for the destruction of countless traditional cultures and the lives of hundreds of millions worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_S...
And to be clear I'm not advocating for forcibly imposing our cultural values on those other countries. But let's not have an overly romanticized view of cultural diversity.
(lol, well, we do accept it, as history has shown us time and time again, but we tend to not want to do nothing)
USAID funds USD$50b / year, and the US funds UNICEF to the tune of USD$1.4b / year.
Which, among other things, supports the polio vaccination campaign being rolled out in Gaza, to prevent a public health catastrophe and possible resurgence of polio in the Middle East.
It's easy to say "Let them eat cake" when one is sitting in the palace and opining about CIA boondoggles.
In the real world, that means people are starving and children are crippled.
We can (and should) strive for better than nasty, brutish, and short lives, regardless of a person's nationality.
Seeing as that's who their military reports to.
The US may not be restraining them sufficiently, inasmuch as any country can another, but it's kind of a weird question.
Israeli is more than capable of bombing Gaza into the stone age even absent US military aid.
The broader finger pointing should be that, as always, nobody actually cares about the Palestinians.
The West doesn't care, because Israel. The East doesn't care, because why would they? And the Middle East doesn't care, because as much as they trumpet the Palestinian cause to boost domestic popularity, none of them are actually willing to suffer consequences for the benefit of Palestinians.
Which leaves... the Houthis and Iran, neither of which are very linked to the global economic network at this point, and so have little to lose.
That's not true at all.
Israel's military machine is far more self-sufficient than it was 20+ years ago. But over time, its capabilities would be significantly hobbled without U.S.-supplied parts and munitions. Don't forget those two aircraft carriers parked offshore, either.
Losing access to U.S. military aid, weapons sales, and strategic backing would definitely hurt. Given that it has now chosen to expand the war to 3 fronts, it really doesn't want to put itself in that box.
The greatest loss to Israel if the US were to withdraw aid would be in air defense -- specifically the US leaning on its allies in the region (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt) to quietly use airspace and basing to defend Israel from missile barrages.
At this point, it seems like Netanyahu doesn't much care what happens in the future, as long as his short-term political survival continues.
We'll see if the hostage death protests change anything, since the Israeli public seems like the only entity that can prompt policy change.
Israeli is right behind Australia and Poland in terms of defense expenditures. Wanting for funding, they're not.
Would you care to address my comment, instead of throwing fact darts and seeing what sticks?
Kind of an international effort.
Paying Turkey to hold the Syrian refugees back and housing those that passed through costs Europe tens of billions each year. Engagement would have been hard, but one is left to wonder if we shouldn't try harder for own benefit.
During the Great Leap forward, the central planners demanded the implementation of new Lysenkoist farming practices that were reportedly a great success and on track to deliver a record harvest. The central planners then dispensed generous daily rations from the granaries, so that everyone could eat their fill, causing farmers to spend less effort on the side crops they had been growing in addition to working on the state farms. The central planners decided that they didn't need quite so many agricultural workers, so they redirected the labor surplus to increasing steel production in order to catch up with the British Empire and overtake the United States. And they also increased food exports to other countries.
Then it all came crashing down: the reports of huge productivity increases were made up, the record harvest was a record low, the surplus was a deficit, tens of millions of people starved. (Steel production did not meaningfully increase either.)
You could argue that it was just a very expensive beginner's mistake because they'd only been doing the central planning thing for about a decade at that point, but then after Mao's death less than two decades later, the first big economic reform was the Household Responsibility System where farmers would decide for themselves what to grow, and the state would just buy it from them.
So I think the verdict from the world's greatest experts in agricultural central planning is clear: don't do it.
Every country has some central planning, China doesn't have much more central planning today than your average European country. Or do you believe some CCP central planner decided to put in scantily clad anime girls in games from China?
China today is very capitalist, they lack democracy, not capitalism.
I am pretty sure Chinese citizens are allowed to live where they can afford and they are allowed to go to university if they score well enough on the public tests. Just like in Europe.
If you are talking about the random arrests that happens in China, that is due to the undemocratic authoritarian regime and corruption, not due to central planning.
Edit: Also class based societies are typically not called central planning, it is lack of human rights.
Western nations do similar levels of planning just by deciding how many new houses are allowed to be built, you need a permit for every business to ensure you don't take too much electricity etc, tons of central planning everywhere.
China implements a comprehensive system of geographic affirmative action to prevent universities from being taken over by southerners. A school participating in this system will publish a plan stating how many students it will enroll on a province-by-province basis. (It's also divided by whether the students will major in science or humanities.)
Once the tests are scored, the students in a particular province are assigned in top-down order of score to the school of their choice, as long as that school's quota for accepting students from that province is not yet full. If your school of choice has filled its quota, technically you can have listed a second-choice school, but this is widely viewed as a disaster for the student. You need to get in to your first-choice school, or take a year off and try again next year.
What's happening in admissions cells for other provinces at the school you apply to is not relevant to you. You can outscore 90% of students who get admitted that way and it won't matter.
And this is not an especially unlikely scenario, because Chinese policy is that schools have much larger quotas for local students than otherwise. I think you need to score at about the 1 in 60 level, top 1.66%, to get into a top Shanghai university from Shanghai; you need to do a lot better than that to get in from outside Shanghai.
Sanity checking that, the admission table for Fudan University in 2018 is here: https://ao.fudan.edu.cn/a7/19/c36333a435993/page.htm . This contains some annotations that I don't understand, but let's say you want to be admitted as a math major. The score threshold if you're coming from Shanghai appears to be 586 ("选考科目999"?); 586 on the Shanghai 2017 gaokao is top 1.1%, or in perfect detail the top 473 people out of 43,103 who took the test. ( https://news.koolearn.com/20170623/1127786.html )
The score threshold if you're coming from Fujian appears to be 680 on the science test. A 680 on the 2017 science test in Fujian means you were one of the top 72 scorers out of 86,368 people who took the test, or the top 0.00083%. ( https://max.book118.com/html/2021/0817/8104004033003135.shtm )
That admissions table for Fudan is divided into two categories, 提前批 ("advance admission"?) and 本一批 ("freshman admission"??). I'm not sure what they mean; I used the 本一批 numbers, which are stricter.
Relevant here, I knew someone who attended a high school affiliated with Fudan (a lot of Chinese universities have these), and she informed me that before taking the gaokao, she had an interview with someone at Fudan, and their approval of her meant that she needed a lower score for admission to Fudan than would otherwise have been necessary. I suspect that this may be related to the difference between "advance admission" and "freshman admission".
(There is also affirmative action given for non-geographic reasons. Sometimes they combine in interesting ways. A friend of mine who was admitted to 上海财经大学 benefited from a program for minorities. She was a Mongol, and would have been given a direct bonus to her gaokao score for that reason, but this program additionally involved (1) attending a special high school in Beijing, and (2) counting as a resident of Beijing, and therefore also benefiting from the geographic scheme, for admissions purposes.)
Human rights don't come before people have a certain dignity to live. Trying to preach human rights to a starving population is just .....
Or you could not red herring me and supply a proposed solution that could work instead of painting my opposition to central planning as an opposition to fixing famine in an emotional appeal.
It's got a very terrible track record in China; the government caused tens of millions of its own people to starve to death, and set the economic development back decades. The GDP per capita in Taiwan is more than double that of China currently, but both started at a similar position. If China had had a similar political system to Taiwan, its people's standard of living would be much better.
This is just absurd. Taiwan's entire economy is TSMC + some small things. Copying political systems doesn't get you per capita standard of living.
Yes Mao's China did stupid things but post Mao China has done well economically atleast. They had an enviable job of bringing so many people out of extreme poverty and have done well.
Literally zero work is required for this. You just need to stop keeping people in extreme poverty - and that's it.
You should also compare it to situation where those countries wouldn't be centrally planned. Not so possible without time machine, so let's leave out measuring of efficiency of such systems. Ie when in Eastern Europe communism and central planning failed and fell down overnight, literally all those economies experienced massive boosts. I know I've lived through such transition there, hard to describe with words.
China still has Five Year Plans and some central planning, but Deng Xioping took steps away from it in the 1980s.
There's a mythology the US has no central planning, but it has had a lot of central planning since 1932 and certainly since 1941. Market makers watch for the presidentially nominated Powell to come out and announce the fed funds rate for our fiat currency, and the economy either speeds up or slows down in response. We are typing on a network the government paid BBN and other companies to create, on chips descended from the Fairchild chips that Air Force contracts funded. For various historical reasons, much of the central planning in the US is done via its very well funded military (then well funded military contractors pay think tanks and politicians to go out and say they're not so well funded)
- 8 different currencies across EU member states - 24 languages - 27 sovereign countries with wildly different economic, social, foreign, military … policies - laws and regulations are only slowly harmonised across the board - deep seating historic prejudices (which lead to major wars in the past) - unfriendly and downright hostile neighbours - a smaller amount of natural resources to exploit - etc etc
How many wars were fought on European soil between 1776 and today? I couldn't even begin to answer that.
I am not saying central planning is a cure all. Trying a bad economic system with any kind of planning will fail.
> Maybe but its doesn't work in democracies well.
Correct, in the absence of strong top down rule (whether democracy or not), social changes are just going to be very slow (this doesn't mean strong top down rule will result in good changes, just that otherwise it is slow). The US needed a civil war to abolish slavery and two world wars for many other social changes (similar to most of western Europe).
I am not saying A or B is better. But without central planning the chances of any big cultural changes in Sudan type countries happening in the next 50 or even 100 years is very remote.
So "let the chaos develop on its own" reasons from a situation that simply does not exist.
Let the heroes be local heroes, not just some abstract alien organization that no one has any social connection to.
So I ask again, have these people actually requested your help? How do you know what they actually need? Maybe the best solution is a way to gtfo of Sudan and let it collapse. Maybe they want weapons or chickens. I don’t know!
I don't think it will. There will always be powerful people who want to maintain that power, and wannabe powerful people who want to get that power.
So long as that way of thinking leads to power, there will be people who will follow it.
The problem is not that people are tainted by colonial thinking - its that humans are tainted by ambition.
There's a reason we stopped believing "just let sovereign nations sort themselves out" is the best approach. It's a pretty selfish reason.
But that's my point. "Here's the obligations, sort out how to meet them yourselves" was the old model. It doesn't work out.
And no obligations is impossible in an increasingly interconnected world.
This simply never happens. The developed world is constantly putting its nose into everyone else’s business, and through globalization and industrialization, there’s nothing on this world that the Western economy doesn’t touch.
China did well after their cultural revolution. Took time but the page has been turned on that episode.
Absolutely somebody should have intervened if possible to halt that madness.
Things got so bad that people actually ate human flesh, not because they were starving, but to demonstrate unquestionable loyalty to the party. Students literally ate their teachers.
That being said, my impression is that the people leaning left in politics are strongly against non-interventionism. This means it will become a political issue in the countries that can help (or intervene), especially because most of these countries have a very strong left leaning. Sudan will become ammunition in electoral fights in elections, politics will win and interventions will happen just because of that, not because the interventionists care in any way about people of Sudan, they are just simple pawns on their chess board.
Unless you’re using “the left” to mean “neoliberals”, as seems to be common among the American right, in which case let me refer you to the first paragraph (since the American Democratic Party is by all measures a right wing party).
Only fiscally, if you look at social issues they are very left.
Like colonialism? Can't get much more radical than that, and some implementations actually worked pretty well to build up some countries, to the point where those countries are now major players in the world, like India. In others, it failed, either due to the brutality of the colonists or the pride of the colonized.
Could just leave these people alone though.
Many of these peoples have deeply-embedded cultural traits that prohibit them from establishing the standard of living that many of us take for granted. These debilitating cultural traits are likely a product of the harsh climates these people reside in, but only in part. Much more effective cultural traits could be introduced to and imposed on them (colonialism), and in exchange they'd receive the opportunity to participate in and contribute to the regional and even global economy, as well as benefit from mitigations against things like famine.
But maybe we should just leave them alone. Tikkun olam is noble indeed, but many peoples are just completely unreceptive to it, and many adherents of this ideal have no business worrying about other people's trash when their own backyards are a mess.
So, maybe just leave these people alone.
What are the social, political, cultural and intellectual preconditions of a free society? What ideals and values does the culture need to hold before you can have a stable government that in a general way - values liberty for its citizens?
While I'd love to see many parts of Africa and the mideast embrace the enlightenment values that have created our modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state, etc. I don't think those cultural values are in place. And yes, you can shake a finger at your choice of western country and point out the many ways they fall short of those ideals and you'd be right, but I think you're missing the forest for a diseased tree.
So what to do? Provide free resources until they figure it out? Not sure that's worked out. Ignore them? Lecture them?
How do you change a culture that in some ways doesn't want to change?
> What are the social, political, cultural and intellectual preconditions of a free society?
I think societies don't become free before they get prosperous. Having lived in dirt poor societies and posh societies, individual freedoms culturally seem to have a strong tie to prosperity. When you are so inter dependent for survival on your social network, the concept of freedom or individual dignity seems so distant. When everyone has more than enough resources for their own prosperous survival, the individual freedoms come to the forefront.
Another problem is that countries and societies are almost always resistant to change in absence of a large event. It took WW1 to get women voting rights (and several other social changes) in the west for example.
Sadly there is no magic potion to transform societies in absence of large scale events or them lucking out on a good dictator (LKY, Deng)
> How do you change a culture that in some ways doesn't want to change?
I think across history I find only two ways this happens, either very very slowly, or strongly pushed top down by an authority with the power and willingness to enforce.
The aspects of modern 'free society' evolved from the complex legal environment of rights and privileges in the middle ages.
Put more bluntly: Freedoms don't put food on your table, but killing the bastard next door so you can use his land might. Guess what hungry people will do.
So you are quite right; freedoms only become a concern once the people have most if not all their immediate needs satisfied. People need to enjoy life first before they will start caring about freedoms.
Of course, the vicious cycle is that being poor is expensive. It's not easy to break it and start accumulating societal prosperity.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15gn0lq7p5o (Misogyny to be treated as extremism by UK government)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Act_to_amend_the_Canadian_H...
One can easily find examples in all countries. These countries do not have a free speech right in their Constitutions, for example, and no plans to include it.
There are limits to speech, but that is true in every country, including the USA (if you dont believe me, try yelling "i have a bomb" in an american airport and see what happens next)
This was confirmed by how the Charter did nothing to stop the abuses that Canadians endured from 2020 through 2022.
Or if its all section 1, do you feel that any country at all has freedom of speech? I can't think of any country that doesn't have something equivalent to section 1, even if only implicitly. Different countries draw the line somewhat differently, but there are none that dont have some sort of similar limited limits to freedom of speech.
But Quebec, for example, has repeatedly invoked Section 33 over the years, including for legislation limiting expression in non-French languages, among other matters.
Any country that imposes limits on expression simply doesn't have free expression. That would include Canada and the US, and like you say, probably most every other country.
As a Canadian, I can't honestly claim to have constitutionally-protected free expression when I know I could be prosecuted merely for expressing certain ideas.
In the US at least, I'd say for most of the existence of the web, the prevalent idea was that the best way to counter 'bad' speech was more speech.
The concern over 'misinformation' has resulted in a lot of people, whom previously had advocated for unrestricted speech, calling for regulation or removal of section 230.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/opinion/misinformation-di...
Like many Zeitgeist trends, it is difficult to measure concretely and objectively, especially if it hasn't been tracked in the past. Especially when people's understanding of what constitutes "free" speech shifts over time.
> China, Japan and other successful Asian countries:
Japan was kinda occupied by the Americans post WW2 and had an American dictated constitution, with a very American influenced society and everything.
The Chinese after years of socialism copied western capitalism (and lots of other things) with a very strong government being the only difference. And before that change they too kept having their share of extreme poverty and famines.
> just like Europe did after the Roman Empire collapsed.
Sadly this might mean waiting for a millennia which might have an unacceptable cost.
> We were able to do it on our own and thinking they need us to help them is pretty demeaning IMO.
Yes but in a millennia in which rest of the world made much less industrial progress than happens in less than a century now.
I have no solutions in mind here. Just highlighting some points to think about.
Anyone who knows the history of the past decades and centuries of western interaction with the Middle East and Africa knows what a laugh this is.
The US is currently paying Egypt's current rulers billions a year to prevent and violently crack down on anyone who wants "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state". I watched former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd question whether it was wise for Obama to allow the Arab Spring to push out the violent dictator Mubarak. Speaking of capability for "enlightenment values" - the citizens risk their bodies and lives to go out in the street and fight for free elections and such, while the US arms the dictator fighting against those values.
And what would a free Egypt do? It certainly would not be as cooperative of these people "making aliyah" and then slaughtering Palestinians on Egypt's border in Gaza, that's for sure.
As you mention Africa, I think back to when I watched Reagan cooperating with the apartheid South African government, again fighting against those who wanted "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state, etc."
I could go on and on over the past decades - speaking of rule of law and all of that, I won't even go into what Israel is doing right now - they're showing Israeli soldiers raping Palestinians on Israeli TV now (and on Twitter too, for now at least) - nor will I go.into the US support of all of this.
People can be on your side or not, but at least you are rooted in the real world and actual history.
Better to deal with a secular dictator than an elected religious extremist. Elected Islamists always crap on democracy once they're elected.
The Muslim Brotherhood has no appreciation for multiple political parties in Egypt. Nor do you, as you are openly supportive of a dictatorship.
You and yyyk both support my point - the West does not support for Egypt what the original poster called "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state".
There are Russian/Wagner troops present and most likely a USSOF detachment as well, but the actual enablement, training, and impetus is driven by regional states now.
The era of "superpower" is over, and there are multiple proxy wars now like this (Syrian Civil War, Yemeni Civil War, Ethiopian Civil War, Myanmar Civil War, Libyan Civil War, etc)
"we could not govern ourselves" really belies how young many countries are and the unique challenges they face w.r.t. interference from developed nations. Nation building takes _time_ and I would implore you to think about the historical events that have shaped your nation.
If you've never lived in a poor, corrupt, dysfunctional place, you'll not understand how bad life is that'll make someone wish to be occupied.
The previous colonial/imperial regime of the Mughal Empire was just as much a burden on the population.
The main reason India is able to feed its population today is the green revolution post WW2, especially the work of Dr. Swaminathan in India. Without it I think we would still see massive famines in India.
In short term if you want to stop this particular war make UAE and Egypt hurt as they are funding the groups.
Hard to say if it would have worked, Ian Smiths comments was mostly made after Mugabe took over, so it was never tested if it would work, or if Smith was even sincere in his statements.
South Africa today is simultaneously a troubled place and yet doing well compared to many of its peers. Violent crime is very high, for example, but similar to 19th/early 20th century USA.
For context: We occupied Japan for, what, 12 years? We technically occupied Germany longer, but practically it was about the same (I think - from memory and not researched). In that time, we transformed them from violent, racially superior, conquer-the-world militarists to more-or-less western-values democracies. But we put a lot of people in there, and we controlled every aspect of their society.
Iraq and Afghanistan, we tried to do it with half-measures rather than a complete rebuild. And it failed.
One started because we won a decisive war against the nation, in the other we invaded the country on a flimsy excuse.
We have entirely different cultures, times, mores, media landscapes, and different series of occupations, modern weaponry, 4th generation warefare (post vietnam) tactics, the list goes on.
Why would "oh we didn't waste enough money occupying a country that we gained little from" be the right choice? How do we magically know that?
I think the parent comment has shared their experience which makes them think this idea might be better than status quo in their country.
Come to the west, get trained and return home and build something better. Doctors and engineers driving a cab in New York is so broken.
It's broken, all right, but what's broken is "home", not the west. (All right, the west is broken too, but in this situation the brokenness of the west is not the primary issue.) And they didn't that they could fix "home", so they left, and for the most part they aren't interested in going back and trying to fix it. They probably have a better perception of how hard it would be to fix than we do.
Best to ensure developing nations have their best talent to DEVELOP the nation rather to deprive them of the best people and hinder development and improvement. You take out the best people and what’s left, poverty, corruption and conflict that forces more people to leave and requires more outside aid.
We need to recognize that the people of countries like Sudan are not children who don't know any better, contrary to European leftists' views. They are fully functioning adults who made a series of choices that led to the present situation.
Nitpicking here, but Sudan specifically only passed the median population age of 18 in the 2020s.
Colonial governments like the British often (almost always) left a mess behind them.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sudan+nominal+gdp+per+c... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=india+nominal+gdp+per+c...
The point stands that decolonisation was a mess and the colonisers played a large part in it.
So much senseless violence.
I lived in Nigeria, when they had the Biafra War[0]. That also killed a heck of a lot of folks. The problem, there, was sort of too many rulers.
I don't subscribe to this fixed mindset. I believe all peoples can learn to do well. It's hard, but possible. So the lack of conolialism isn't the answer, but lack of learning.
Wouldn't this way of thinking prevent any improvement at all?
If I must have accomplished something before believing I may be able to accomplish, how am I even going to try?
Colonization is preferable to that. However, because that’s not a palatable form of social order today the next best thing is complete abandonment and true self determination to discover where the borders are and who rules them. This will be bloody, yes, but have an outcome that leads to order if not tampered with. That’s preferable to the last 70 years.
"This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “An intensifying calamity”"
You have to use the 'archive.ph' link in the HN commens to find it.
Functionally, famine is little different to death squads.
Further to this, we have a sanitized term in the modern era for intentionally starving people to death. It's called "economic sanctions" [1].
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-m...
For instance, current major crises are ongoing in (per Wikipedia) the DRC, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Yemen, Sudan (of course), the Sahel, Somalia, Syria, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Haiti, and South Sudan -- but most of those are rarely mentioned in the media.
The Gaza war is of course a major humanitarian crisis, but it's not as important as many of the other things. All of Gaza, for instance, has around 2 million people; the whole of Palestine has a population of under 6 million. Assuming a horrific genocide with a death rate of 100 percent, the number of deaths is still less than the optimistic scenario in Sudan of 6 million excess deaths. I wouldn't be surprised if other regions (the Sahel, Yemen, Nigeria, the DRC and Ethiopia, in rough order of likelihood) also likely have expected number of deaths greater than the population of Palestine; the first two because of major crises, the last three because of crises but also because they have so many people (all over 100 million).
I get why Ukraine gets more attention than Somalia (racism), but why would Gaza get more attention than, say, Yemen, Afghanistan, or Syria? All are somewhat Middle Eastern, after all, so it would be hard for racism to be as much of a factor, if at all.
And turn this around: how much attention is Somalia, or Sudan, getting on the African continent? Do events in either of those two countries make it to national headlines?
But not simply because of that. It gets attention because the nature of the aggression is extremely clear, and highly unusual (in its brazenness and openness); and due to the clear and present threat to the (at least approximately) rule-based world order that human beings have been trying to keep in place since 1945. And it "happened" because the regime currently installed in the aggressor country chose to take the action that it did (and falsely calculated that the invasion would be a brilliant success, and face very little effective resistance).
Not because of anything that went down in the 1990s.
Nothing remotely related to 'racism'.
On the contrary -- this decision was intimately tied to Putin's racist conception of Ukrainians as a people (and his supremacist views of his own people, or what he believes to be "his" people anyway). This is eminently clear from his own statements and numerous other indications.
If you wish to explore this topic further, then I invite you to consider the writings of e.g. Terrell Jermaine Starr:
https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/a40137153/terrell-j...
However you choose to ignore these indications and the openly available history of the region, and build your narratives accordingly -- that's up to you.
As for Gaza, well it's good old fashioned anti semitism. People love to hate the Jews. It's shown in the double standards, e.g. the insane levels to which Israel has gone to reduce collateral damage that no other country has ever tried to do vs an enemy that deliberately seeks to increase collateral damage in both targeting Israeli citizens and using it's own citizens in ways that ensure their deaths.
The Palestinian crisis has always gotten more attention in the US because of Israel's close political relationship with the US and Jews having a strong cultural influence in the US especially since WW2. It's similar to the reason why almost no one in the US knows about the Nazi's oppression and genocide of the Roma.
Also, tragically, the US has never cared about how many people die in Africa. We're so used to hearing about "hundreds of thousands dying of X" in Africa that we're completely desensitized to it, whereas one American hostage dying will be major headlines for weeks.
also a major component in sudan is arab racism against black africans and arab hate for jews. As soon as its muslim on muslim violence its okay.