Once more, the morons of public broadcasting unintentionally proved that everything for which they stand is so much hogwash.  We have written about such slips, before.  Read Two Great Lies and Two Great Truths as one example.  The one to which we will refer in this essay took place on the News Hour on July 10, 2002.  Ray Suarez (photo above at left), the show’s token Hispanic staffer, moderated a discussion about Africa.  The two guests with which he spoke were the black socialist fool, Bill Fletcher, Jr.* (photo at right) of the TransAfrica Forum, and, both last and best, a brilliant man who is new to me.  His name is Dr. George Ayittey (ee-ah-tay), He is not an African-American.  He is an African, from Ghana, who at present is an economist at American University and the president of Free Africa Foundation, a D.C.think tank. (That's him, below)

It was a joy to watch this fellow slamdunk the Hispanic and the African-American in the hoops of truth, logic and reason.  I savored the experience like grain-fed, broiled rare beef. 

The setup piece was a taped segment about the Dark Continent, these days more properly called the Dark Incontinent.  Zimbabwe (formerly known as Rhodesia) was featured.  This nation, the narrator said, was in danger of 
mass starvation.  Factors mentioned were drought (a perennial African problem) and the departure (to Heaven or whiter regions) of the remnants of the evil colonial agricultural community. 

The first destination is the result of a national redistribution of wealth effort by blacks who fought for the military dictator, Robert Mugabe, who now runs the country.  These men roam around raping and butchering white farm families, then occupy the farms.  We predicted this sort of thing years ago, long before the creation of the internet version of Oregon Magazine.  To date, something in the neighborhood of five thousand of these farmers have been killed or chased away. (BBC story about legalized theft of farms.)

The result is exactly what we predicted in the Nineties.  African clowns who plow with sticks, people who are completely ignorant of farming techniques developed after the birth of the prophet Abraham, have stolen and destroyed the food production facilities that once made Zimbabwe a food exporting nation.  They have turned their country into an agricultural wasteland.  Millions will starve.  Tens of thousands will leave for nearby nations where they will fight with residents over rotted scraps of food.  Disease will proliferate.  The raven will become the national bird.

Suarez and Fletcher, of course, believe this is all the fault of the white man's capitalism.  Conservative, white, male Christians are the worst ones. North America is just chock full of idiots like Suarez and Fletcher.  I think it’s our school system that creates them.  Kids are fed a lot of crap about multi-culturalism and the evil ways of white men in our institutions of elementary, middle, high and higher learning, these days. Hollywood feeds these destroyed minds with additional pap and the mainstream media ignores or distorts the truth in everything they present, as well.  We shouldn’t expect anybody on this continent to be able to think rationally after all that.  But, somehow, some manage to do it.

After the intro piece, the discussion began.  Here is what we learned from the moron,  Bill Fletcher, Jr. of the TransAfrica Forum. 

All the problems of Africa are due to the evil white man – particularly conservative, white, male Christians – and the corporations they run, and their lapdog, the evil World Bank.  What needs to be done is to wipe out all debt from former loans to African nations, all of which were CIA bribes to maintain cruel African leaders during the Cold War against the wonderful Soviet Union where all people were equal and very happy and loved Stalin and planting potatoes and singing songs about the socialist revolution.

(Some of the preceeding was merely implied within Mr. Fletcher’s remarks, but it was quite obvious that he had merely forgotten his Mao cap when he left home to come to the program.)

The eager, satisfied face of the token Hispanic, Suarez, began to sag, however, when the real, actual, bona fide African, Mr. Ayittey, began to speak. (Mr. Fletcher’s face turned white with shock as the blood drained from it.) 

You see, Mr.Ayittey said that of Africa’s (I think he said) 56 nations, only 15 were democracies.  Then, he said that Zimbabwe was collapsing because the recent elections there were fraudulent without any help from the CIA, and kept in office a monstrous dictator who supported the rape of the nation’s agricultural community. (Outline map of Africa)

Then he said that the other African nations, all run by black or Semitic (Arab) people, should be ashamed of themselves for keeping silent about it.  Then he said that there is no reason why the West should give money to any African nation which does not have a government that is responsible and respectful to its citizens, open to free trade and financially transparent..  Then he said that free trade existed in Africa before the white man got there, and that what Africans want is a return to that free trade.  (It is, in most regions, the village farmer’s market kind of free trade – a precursor to extra-national trading economies, corporations and so forth.)

Mozart never wrote music so sweet as the words which drifted from the excellent Mr. Ayittey’s lips.  They were as poison to Mr. Fletcher of the socialist, racist TransAfrica Forum.  They shocked and puzzled moderator, Suarez.

You see, the words of Mr Ayittey are true. Truth is death to liberals.  Fletcher and Suarez know that if Mr. Ayittey’s advice is followed, sensible reforms will take place in Africa.  People will have enough to eat, behavior that encourages AIDS will be discouraged, the Christian religion, Africa’s largest, will be allowed to flourish, mass slaughters of whites will cease, children will live in peaceful, prosperous villages and have the opportunity to get an education.  Worst of all, socialism will be gone from the land.

God forbid that a tragedy of those proportions should be allowed.

*Bill Fletcher is an assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. He was formerly the  education director for the AFL-CIO, and led the designing of the Common Sense
 Economics program, an effort to begin teaching workers about how capitalism works as a  system. He comes out of the left, was a principal organizer of the Black Radical Congress,  and is a contributor to Monthly Review and other progressive publications. (OMED: this information comes from a 1991 interview in The Progressive. Fletcher now runs the TransAfrica outfit.)

© 2002 Oregon Magazine  Most of the graphics link to their source.