September 08, 2003
Nigger Is The Nigger Of The World
We've all heard plenty of references to the global AIDS crisis. We all heard George Bush's specious pledge, in his most recent State Of The Union Address, to earmark bunches of money to combat the crisis.
But rarely (if ever) has it been so staggeringly humanised as in a recent Anderson Valley Advertiser interview with Mendocino-based AIDS activist Kathleen Martin.
After reeling off several heartbreaking and eye-opening anecdotes and statistics, Martin gets to the heart of the matter, relating a conversation she'd had with a South African businessman: "Look at it! You can't worry about any of these AIDS people, because they are less than one-tenth of one percent of the world's gross national product."
Similarly, while Al Gore held AIDS victims hostage to pharmaceuticals' "property rights" in order to bolster his election campagin war-chest, the Bush Administration has recently politicised the cause as well. In addition to taking the "property rights" baton from Al Gore in perfect stride, the Administration late last month cut off funding for an African/Asian AIDS programme, essentially because one of its participants offers abortion counseling and services. It appears that UNICEF will be the next victim of the Administration's Theocratic Hatchet.
In a related matter, Harry Magdoff, in an interview in the current number of Monthly Review, tells of having been asked by the Encyclopædia Britannica to write an article about European expansion:
I made it my business to tell the whole story, identify by names the specific African tribes, coalitions, and kingdoms which fought the intruding powers -- the Ashantis, the Fanti Confederation, the Opobo Kingdom, the Fulani, the Tauregs, the Mandingos, and so on. The Encyclopædia Britannica editors at first didn’t want to publish the names of the resisting peoples. Why? Because nowhere else in the encyclopædia are the names mentioned, so readers would not know what I was talking about.
Minor skirmishes in the "clash of civilisations"? Perhaps so, in the eyes of businessmen, drug manufacturers, and encylopædia publishers. But for the hundreds of millions of victims of the policies championed by these and other "representatives of the civilised world", maybe not.
What You Can Do: Martin's Zebra Foundation is trying to raise funding for a female condom -- prototypes of which, she relates in the interview, have met with immediate and enthusiastic support among African women. Those with a few extra dollars to hand could help make a big difference in heading off the building calamity so terrifyingly described in the interview.
Posted by Eddie Tews at September 8, 2003 02:11 PM
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