© Chris Port, 2011
Fortunately, you don't know this child personally...
World peace has never been achieved. Nor is it likely to be. This is not because there is anything inherently wrong with the idea. It is simply because there is something inherently wrong with people.
As a friend of mine once observed: “Unfortunately, some people are just dickheads”.
The ‘dickhead’ theory (while lacking intellectual rigour) does have vast explanatory power. In terms of designing a socio-economic system around it, global capitalism seems far more ‘fit for purpose’ than global communism does (if that purpose is to kill more people in a few months than Auschwitz did in 5 years, based indiscriminately on birthplace).
Approximately 18 million people are killed each year by poverty. Today, 22,000 children will die from it around the world. That’s one child every 4 seconds. Fortunately, we don’t know any of them personally. These statistics are therefore as untroubling to us as the paperwork of ‘processing units’ was to the business-like SS.
Xenocide is (mildly regrettably) necessary so that Westerners can stuff their faces, guff about diets, and puff at reality (TV).
The richest 1% of the world’s population own 40% of the world’s wealth. The richest 10% own 85%. The bottom 50% own barely 1%. By ‘own’ we mean a legal system owned by dickheads who assert that the minority’s right to a flash car takes precedence over the majority’s right to life.
The main advantage to such a system is that a tiny minority of dickheads are incentivized to accumulate more wealth than they can spend. Lazy so-called ‘disadvantaged’ destitutes (such as Third World infants) balance the economic books by starving to death. This is seen as ‘fair’ because life is ‘unfair’.
The idea that the overwhelming majority should simply kill these dickheads, and reorganize the world on more rational lines, is regarded as ‘unrealistic’ (by dickheads). Apparently, it won’t work. It ‘goes against human nature’.
“Unfortunately, some people are just dickheads” they claim. Quod erat demonstrandum…
Mitchell and Webb in "Big Talk". "Sorting Out The Third World's Problems"
'Annual income of richest 100 people enough to end global poverty four times over'
ReplyDeleteOxfam International, 19 January 2013
http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressrelease/2013-01-19/annual-income-richest-100-people-enough-end-global-poverty-four-times
The cost of inequality: how wealth and income
extremes hurt us all
http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/cost-of-inequality-oxfam-mb180113.pdf