Michael H. Cognato asks a hard question to the “citizens of the world” out there who want humanitarian aid workers to remain neutral and unbiased. As Cognato points out in his piece ”Must Aid Flow from the Barrel of a Gun?”; combatants in our planet’s worst ongoing civil wars have made the flow of humanitarian aid to these places impossible, without a heavy investment in military hardware to protect the aid workers.
Cognato gives the recent examples of Muslim religious extremists killing aid workers in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. The evil and nefarious nature of Al Qaida deserves condemnation and their activities certainly intensify the risk and difficulty involved in distributing aid to the starving. However, before Bin Ladin formed Al Qaeda, delivering foreign aid without a heavily armed convoy, could prove a suicidal fool’s errand.
The opening scene of the movie “Blackhawk Down” offers an example of what happens when the idealistic good intentions of aid workers meet the bloodthirsty and calculating realism of the barbarians. The movie starts out with a scene reminiscent of Lord Humungus besieging an oil refinery in “Mad Max: The Road Warrior.” A megaphone booms out the commands to a starving mob of Somalis.
[spoken in Somali over a megaphone]
Yousuf Dahir Mo'alim: This food is the property of Mohammad Farid Aidid, go back to your homes!
Movies are movies and reality normally tends to diverge from Hollywood. However, both of these films got one thing truly correct. They nailed the barbaric mind set that is necessary to survive in places like Somalia; which are about as close as our current state of affairs gets to the wasted dystopia that the survivors would endure in the aftermath of a significant nuclear exchange. Hillaire Belloc’s well-mined quote describes the nature of these scavenging, starving people who live beyond the Pale and barely on the edge.
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers ....
So based on the nature of what aid workers will have to deal with when they step outside what Thomas P.M. Barnett describes as The Functioning Core and out into The Non-Integrating Gap, my answer to Cognato’s angst-loaded inquiry would be quite simply “Yes”. Doctors Without Borders and the rest of the noble, and genuinely decent people who willingly risk their lives to combat malaria in The Congo, had better start packing Desert Eagles in their medical bags. They may want to start driving to their patients in MRAP vehicles.
This level of defeatist pessimism is bad even for me. I admit this won’t liven up anyone’s cocktail party. I guess I call ‘em as I seen ‘em and to me; this baby looks ugly. The next logical question becomes why. Even a mordant pessimist should have to justify his belief in the worst about human nature. This can be done by contrasting the evil men do with that which is noble.
Ayn Rand character Francisco D’ Anconia does this beautifully, when he delivers his monologue on the value of a dollar.
To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
This involves more, of course, that merely the presence of a currency. Part of what goes into the value of a currency is an informed estimate of how well a country adheres to some orderly rule of law. Zimbabwe has a currency. Burning those notes to stay warm is cheaper than the firewood they you could purchase with them.
Where humanitarian aid is needed, there is generally very little civilized structure to enforce a rule of law. Armed force is the only medium by which goods and services can be effectively distributed, and any investment in productive industry or agriculture has to be protected by a well-armed militia with the cutthroat instinct to willingly throw down.
As Rand has D’ Anconia starkly point out…
When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other.
Where the rule of law has not been chosen, slavery, violence and rape ARE the primary modes of exchange. If you step into that gladiator pit, you had better step in armed and had better be in a frame of mind that allows you to exert violent dominance without feeling too much regret the next morning. When you deliver humanitarian aid in Somalia; you had better be prepared to play by Somalia’s rules.
What a great piece of writing. It was like reading poetry well done.
And directly on point.