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Entries Tagged as 'Foreign Aid'

The Best of Intentions

January 3rd, 2007 · Written by · No Comments

Once in a while a friend or relative will inform me, enthusiastically ecstatic, that they are headed off to some foreign land for missionary work. Unassailable on their moral high ground and armed with benevolent yet insidious weaponry – you know, peachy platitudes like vaccines, schools, modernization – their eyes twinkle with altruistic intentions as they expect me to share in their “doing the right thing” intoxication.

Righteous delusions aside, the reality of the situation is that each of these potential mouthpieces for Judeo-Christian cosmology are complicit in an ongoing catastrophe. […]

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Aid:

What's really plaguing Africa

January 3rd, 2006 · Written by · No Comments

Road to Hell

It wasn’t as if domination was their manifest purpose. They claimed they were there to help. And some of them believed it. The objects of their assistance were underprivileged and backwards, nobly trying to grasp the concepts of a new era but disastrously unable to do so. What they needed was the golden touch – the magnanimous muscle of giants born into privilege.

I speak, of course, of foreign aid. Or maybe old world colonialism. The similarity between the two is a theme woven throughout a groundbreaking narrative by experienced aid worker Michael Maren entitled, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity.

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