Die, John Campbell, DIE!

John Campbell is a pinko commie bastard. That on its own is normally more than sufficient for me to curse their existence and pray that God will send down His mighty finger and fry them down to Hell.

But I actually like John Campbell most of the time. Well, some of the time.
But not at the moment.

Campbell's performance last night, jumping on the PC-bullshit "Let's Save Africa" bandwagon is the last straw. Never again, John, will you be invited to dinner. Unless the dogs are particularly hungry.

Campbell's theme, in case you didn't witness it, dear reader, was to fall in for Bob Geldof's limp-wristed propaganda that the West is responsible for all Africa's ills. Starvation, AIDS, and war in Africa is due wholly to America's apathy, Japan's economic success, and Europe's materialism. That patronising speciousness has more to do with Africa's place in the world today: that the West has gained at the expense of Africa is bad economics and bad social analysis. Africa will not improve its standing in the world while it refuses to take responsibility for its own destiny.

The reality is that continental Africa is no worse off in the twenty-first century than it has been throughout history. It remains a primitive, brutal place, many parts of which are locked in the stone age. Urban sub-Saharan Africa is particularly miserable, by world standards. But that is only because world standards have advanced, in medicine, economics, and human rights, whereas Africa has steadfastly stuck to primitivity.

Campbell takes the easy line on Africa: that the world stood by while Rwanda tore itself apart; that it is ignoring the plight of Zimbabweans under Mugabe rule; that we stood by while Ethiopia starved; that we're even willing Darfour to create more human catastrophe. Oh, and that somehow it's rich people to blame for Africans spreading AIDS among themselves.

No, Mr Campbell. No, no, and NO again. I am not personally to blame for the fact that throughout the last sixty years of decolonised rule, Africans have engaged in the worst possible atrocities against each other, have mortgaged their economies to buy guns instead of rice, and have supported dictators and despots of the worst kind and claimed that it is their right to rule themselves the African Way.

The African Way has resulted in Jean-Bedel Bokassa, one of the most horrific characters in human history. For fourteen years in the mid-late twentieth century, he terrorised a continent as Emperor of the Central African Republic. Feeding children to alligators in his private swimming pool for entertainment, he took pride in his seventeen wives, and sixty children. He died of old age, after spending just four years in prison for crimes that made Mugabe look positively gentlemanly.

Idi Amin of Uganda massacred 400,000 people. He too fathered over forty children. Eight years as self-appointed dictator, he died of old age after being granted asylum for twenty-five years in Saudi Arabia.

Likewise, Angola, the Congo, the Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, Nigeria and the Sierra Leone remain in states of constant civil war. Diamonds are only part of the motive: competition for pasture lands, and basic tribalism are at the heart of ethnic and political conflict in the region. Hard to point the finger at the United States over that.

And then there's AIDS. Old gags aside about it reaching the US by coming up the Hudson, it is predominantly an African epidemic. And it will remain so as long as African men consider it their male duty to procreate with seven hundred women, and as long as they believe that the cure for the disease is to rape a baby. And, of course, as long as supposedly "advanced" leaders such as South Africa's Thabo Mbeki refuse to acknowledge it as anything other than a homosexual problem.

AIDS started in Africa. It spread through Africa because of primitive sexual practises. It rages throughout the continent because African societies are ignorant of basic tenets of modern medicine. Even moves, by the West, in relatively safe parts of Africa to distribute AIDS drugs have not worked, because African societies have not been able to cope with the strict disciplinary regimes of following multiple drug programmes.

But back to the blame issue, because John Campbell needs somebody white to harangue for Africa's ills. Supposedly the West are standing back from bringing Mugabe to his knees. Yet that is factually incorrect: it is African power-states such as South Africa and Nigeria that have endorsed Mugabe's rule. Hard for the West to take responsibility for an African regional problem while Africa itself legitimises that problem.

Yes, Mugabe's a detestable creature, and should be lined up and shot. It says a lot about the leftist tendency of the world media that Zimbabwe is attracting so much public attention, as if Mugabe's fate is in the hands of the West. Zimbabwe of 2005 is a hell-hole. Yet is is relatively peaceful, in African terms. And there is no desire whatsoever by either the South African or Nigerian governments--the most stable and powerful--to get rid of Mugabe.

And the solution? Well, reality is, there isn't one. No point in sending more food into war-torn regions if militants are going to hold it hostage to their own legitimacy. So therein lies the issue. Pinko liberals can jump up and down all they like about how the West does nothing to intervene--curiously, as they oppose intervention in Iraq, they advocate moves into regional African affairs that are not even supported by supposedly democratic and legitimate African leaders.

Give yourself an uppercut, John Campbell. As long as tribal African rulers legitimise each other's despotic tactics and engage in counter-war after counter-war and hold their own peoples to the fires of Hell, there is nothing the West, let alone a bunch of hand-wringing self-appointed "intellectuals" from the music industry, can do.