We've all been supremely generous over the suffering in southern Asia and the tragedy has moved individual and government alike. So let's all go a little further and be just a little more generous. Let's insist that our governments forgive Third World debt.
Because that's what it comes down to in the end. We can shed a tear for the human pain and we can do our bit while the emotions roll. But if we seriously want to help we should cancel, immediately, the so-called loans we have made to the developing world.
I use the term 'so-called' because these are not in the strictest sense loans at all. Most of Asia and Africa was colonized by the western world, exploited by it, used by it and often abused and even raped by it. We had our way with their natural resources and work forces and, when history dictated an end to empire, we walked away.
Yes we did sometimes do good in these regions. It's sheer modernist nonsense to assume that every European or North American was indifferent to the indigenous populations of other countries. Tell that to a young British doctor who spent twenty years in an Indian hill village caring for the sick and the elderly.
The goodness of human nature shone through what was otherwise an inherently base philosophy. That is, the conquest of parts of the world by states that happened to have made more advanced military and technological progress.
A country like Sri Lanka, for example, was never allowed to construct an economy to cater for its own people because everything it did and made was for British imperial success. Along with India and the rest of southern Asia it was denied democracy and independence and then told, almost overnight, to become liberal and pluralistic. The miracle of the region is how democratic it has been able to become.
When Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and the rest withdrew from direct empire, they began an indirect imperialism through economics and political manipulation. At its best this was a relatively generous but still controlling paternalism.
At its worst it concerned the encouragement of internal wars and tribal differences, followed by the selling of arms to the individual warlords and military leaders. Then a refusal to help because, after all, these people only fight among themselves.
Are many countries in the Third World corrupt? Some are, some aren't. And how dare they be! How dare they learn from people of a different race who ravaged and beat their countries, and how dare they try to find a way, any way, out of their crippling poverty?
One has to wonder how much corruption and how much chaos there would be in Canada if we lived on subsistence farming and if we saw our children die in our arms of diseases that were routinely cured in other parts of the world.
There is more. Europe and North America lent money to military dictatorships over the years with the absolute knowledge that they were corrupt and would spend the money on arms that they had to purchase from western arms dealers, frequently the friends of major bankers and politicians.
We knew that this money would have to be paid back by the people of these countries, long after the dictators who had borrowed the money in the first place were long gone. Our banks and governments frequently forced Third World states to borrow money, as part of an aid package, even when they were reluctant to do so.
Many nations in the developing world, including those devastated by the tsunami, have paid back their debts already but are still struggling with the interest on the original amounts. Because of this they cannot build a modern infrastructure, a modern economy, a modern existence.
The cancellation of the billions of dollars of debt load would make very little difference to the west and would barely be noticed by its people. It would, however, lift a moral cloud that has been lowered upon our house.
They owe us nothing. We owe them so very much. I sometimes wonder why they are not more angry at us. And wonder why we are not more angry at ourselves.
