Friggin rebels

Sierra Leone and machetes, together in my mind.

Nods re nimh.

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gustavratzenhofer wrote:

I guess I thought you were drunk, hostile, and confrontational. I was scared for a moment.

So ya damn well should be, and you should be greatfull that this friggin site wouldnt let me back on to give ya the virtual beating ya deserve. I had ta smack the missus instead.

Now I'm gonna go back and actually read what you wrote.

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I admit I didn't read the article, I already know too much about bush meat and slaughter. Most Congo village markets will be happy to sell you such meat, even when other food is available.

Do you know our love of cell phones is also wiping out the gorilla. You don't need to be a brainless rebel to kill nowadays. The mining of coltan is destroying gorilla habitat at an alarming rate. Coltan is a necessary part of everyones cell phone. There's a dinky movement trying to recycle cell phones, but it's the proverbial drop in the bucket:
Gorillas & cell phones

I always wondered what the person who ate the last Dodo thought, or if the guy who thought shooting the last wild passenger pigeon was fun. I can't relate to this mentality. Anyone read Jared Diamond's book about the collapse of civilizations? If I get a chance I'll start a thread on it. He claims it's human conservatism that drives our arrogance which results in the collapse of societies. He examines past civilizations that disappeared when people were unwilling to change and adapt in a sustainable way. It's a lesson for our times.

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Thanks for that, Green Witch.

You know what seems incomprehensible to me? The fact that these people are killing and eating something that bears such a strong resemblance to them. I might have an easier time understanding this if they were killing an antelope or something that more closely resembled a food source, but the killing and eating of a fellow primate is just, well.... creepy.

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Canabalism is not unknown in that part of the world. Ritual canabalism has been linked to the spread of a few diseases. People that can slaughter their fellow man with such ease think nothing of consuming a evolutionary brother.

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I suppose.

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Well, see, here's the thing... The Congo has been a tortured and turmoil ridden land at least since that Belgian a-hole Leopold got his grasping hands on the place. The ravages and sheer horror of mere day to day existence are unimaginable to most of us (for which we should all thank God). I'm not saying that this makes it right, but it at least may explain the behavior.

As dadpad points out in a somewhat more vitriolic manner, most of us have never had to go to bed hungry; or live in imminent fear that the latest insane dictator du jour will send someone to kill our families in the night; or figure out how to eke out a living in the midst of eternal conflict and civil war. Were the shoe on the other foot, we might find ourselves behaving in just such a fashion-- a manner that we, in our comfortable air-conditioned living rooms far away from strife today consider barbaric and beyond the pale.

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blacksmithn wrote:

As dadpad points out in a somewhat more vitriolic manner, most of us have never had to go to bed hungry; or live in imminent fear that the latest insane dictator du jour will send someone to kill our families in the night; or figure out how to eke out a living in the midst of eternal conflict and civil war. Were the shoe on the other foot, we might find ourselves behaving in just such a fashion

However, there are also Congolese who, in the same circumstances, do not slaughter hippos en masse and for no reasonable food purpose; who even try to stop the men with machine guns from doing so. Those brave park rangers, for example, who are described in the article on my hippos thread.

I agree that it is impossible for us to fathom what people there have to cope with, and that it's deceptively easy to pass judgement from afar. Also that the men with machineguns, the rebels, themselves surely have been victimised and traumatised as well. The line between good guys and bad guys is not simple.

But the alternative trap is to fall in a kind of moral relativism that ends up hurting the people who do try to do good there, or even just to survive, by excusing the worst of actions, like those of the rebels, as only natural given the circumstances.

Those Congolese who are neither government troops nor armed rebels, the ones without machineguns - those are the ones who are actually most likely to go hungry. And they do not benefit from us, sitting in those same comfortable air-conditioned living rooms, relativating the horrors that the rebels, just like the government troops, inflict on them day-to-day, either. They dont benefit from us saying, "well who are we to condemn what the rebels are doing, we cant know how it is".

Seems to me like Dadpad and you are falling in that second trap, even as you boisterously warn the other posters against the first one.

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Boisterously? I agree, it IS deceptively easy to pass judgement from afar...

That being said, nothing I've written obviates that yes, there are people in the Congo who don't kill gorillas or hippos or ostriches or piranhas or Tasmanian devils or whatever the hell else passes for wildlife, who even try to stop such occurences from happening. So what?

My point is that it is deceptively easy to sit off in the distance, quite unaffected by whatever is actually happening in situ and tut-tut about what's right and what's wrong. It does become a tad bit galling however when the judgemental clucking is coming from people whose governments and civilizations directly contributed-- and indeed, in many cases, continue to actively contribute-- to the chaos of that benighted country.

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Its no less easy to sit off in the distance, quite unaffected by whatever is actually happening in situ, and tut-tut away concerns about the slaughter of endangered animals, not to mention humans, because hey - who are we to judge, how can we really say anything, what do we really know about what its really like? Like that kind of attitude will help anyone there.

You and Dadpad appear to be lecturing others about all-too comfortable judgements from far away while seemingly blind to how you're doing the exact same thing. The kind of relativation of the crimes of rebels and militias as, you know, the kind of thing thats bound to happen in a country hungry, exploited and ravaged like that, is also all too easy when you're safely far away from them.

blacksmithn wrote:

Boisterously? I agree, it IS deceptively easy to pass judgement from afar...

I was referring to the folksy, lemme explain all you folks how things really go down-style of "Well, see, here's the thing..." Seemed to go right along with Dadpad's.

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blacksmithn wrote:

kill gorillas or hippos or ostriches or piranhas or Tasmanian devils or whatever the hell else passes for wildlife

This laconic dismissal of the concern about endangered species is also misguided. The point is not just that you know, they'e such pretty or interesting animals, and it would be such a pity if we wouldnt have them anymore. The point is at least as much that their extinction will affect the lives of the very people you are talking about. The degradation of the ecosystem results swiftly enough in more, all too real, human suffering.

Consider this from the hippos article:

Quote:

The rangers also caught several men who were fishing illegally at a spawning site, a desperate tactic that indicates how much damage the declining hippo population has already caused to the lake's ecosystem.

Hippo dung helps to sustain the lake's fish and, in recent years, as the hippo numbers have declined, so the tilapia catches have plummeted in size and number, causing fishermen to target previously protected areas.

"This is not just about the hippos," said Mr Muir [..]. "It's the local people who are really going to suffer if they disappear."

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nimh wrote:

I read a lengthy article about Lagos in The New Yorker coupla months ago, and was floored. By the sheer brutality of size and scope of problems - and the degree to which it appears to be a 'model' of future development that we'll see a hell of a lot more of.

On which count (sorry to the others for the digression), a related recent OneWorld article: Slum Hordes? World at Urban Crossroads, Warns Report ("Over half the 1.1 billion people projected to join the world's population over the next quarter century could live in under-served urban slums, warns a report released today by an environmental and social policy think tank.")

This is off-topic re the subject of the thread, but to follow up on the post above:

Quote:

Germany's intelligence service worried about megacities

1 November 2007
Expatica

Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) views with alarm developments in some of the world's huge cities, where national police forces are on the retreat, BND President Ernst Uhrlau said in Berlin Thursday.

Uhrlau, who does not reveal his thoughts in public often, named Mumbai, Mexico City and Jakarta, saying they had become partially ungovernable.

He noted the rise of private security firms to protect wealthier residents in sealed communities or to support the army, as in Iraq.

"The increasing privatisation of core state responsibilities in the military and security areas carries with it the danger - even in Western states - of the erosion of the state's monopoly on the use of force," Uhrlau said.

He was addressing a conference in Berlin on the theme "Collapse of Order," attended by politicians, diplomats and intelligence service personnel from a number of countries.

International security was being compromised by the retreat of police and military in the face of terrorists, militias and drug dealers in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, he said. [..]

This could lead to the destabilisation of entire regions and promote international terrorism, he warned. [..]

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Friggin rebels

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