Speaking the Unspeakable.

John Derbyshire questions the morality of governmental aid to Africa for AIDS relief.

Derbyshire raises the uncomfortable idea that we ought to occasionally check back on our charity recipients to determine what good we have wrought, such as in Ethiopia, which, according to Guardian columnist Kevin Myers, is not much, except to subsidize the creation of priapic, kalashnikov-weilding fornicators:

No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again.


It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count.

One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . .

Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

What Africa needs is a conversion to a particularly severe form of Puritanism.