this is a picture from a recent new york times article on the zoe's ark situation:
The Orphans Who Didn’t Need Saving
these are some of the children (at least this is what the government of chad wants us to believe) who are waiting to be sent back to where they were living, which might not be possible to determine in some cases for many of the *actual* children involved. the times article is pretty informative and very unbiased. my comments won't be quite as neutral...
in the first report i read about this alleged kidnapping, one of the charity workers was quoted as saying that the arrests happened because the officials in chad were asking for a bribe that was too big to pay. but since that first report, none of the subsequent reports have mentioned that. instead, they've focused on whether this was a case of true charity or some greedy scheme to make money by trafficking in young children. honestly, this shouldn't even be a question. there are a lot of easier ways to make money than traveling thousands of miles to a war zone and exposing yourself to countless dangers, including the possibility of being arrested by corrupt officials on whatever charges they can fabricate. the government of chad has had a deep-rooted hatred of europeans, and the french in particular, as this article points out. the volunteers of zoe's ark were the perfect target for a bitter government to seek revenge for all the wrongs the europeans have or haven't committed against them.
here's another thing to consider: wherever these children came from in this war-torn region, isn't it interesting that their “caretakers”, be they family or friends, were willing to let *103* of their children be given over to *complete strangers*??!! i don't care what excuse they claim the volunteers invented, anyone who would subject their children to such unknown circumstances clearly doesn't care much about them to begin with. there are 1.9 million children in chad. of these, *380,000* are not expected to make it to the age of five!! and *720,000* will grow up stunted because of malnutrition!! don't tell me the chadians care much about children. if one out of five won't live to be five years old, and almost half will be severely disabled, and they keep adding more to the population, what does that say about their concern for their own offspring? the situation in chad has been horrible for many years, and the chadians know things won't change soon. but still they continue to bring huge amounts of children into the world, knowing that they're only adding to the numbers of those who will suffer and die. i'm sorry, the chadians don't give a sh*t about what happens to their children. that is, they didn't until now- until this whole thing became a major news story. now i bet every chadian in the country is going to claim that one or more of the children belong to them. people can be such devious f*ckers!!
here's my spin on what happened. the zoe's ark volunteers went to save 103 children from a life of unimaginable danger and suffering. these children were allowed to leave with the complete approval of those who were “caring” for them. when the volunteers sought to leave the country, the chadian officials demanded a king's ransom for allowing them to depart. the volunteers couldn't pay it (which the chadian officials knew already) and so they used that as a pretext to arrest them on charges of kidnapping. the chadians knew they could get plenty of dishonest witnesses to make the charges stick. and so now you have 10 innocent people who are facing the very real possibility of being sentenced to 20 years of *hard labor* for caring about children that the chadians themselves obviously could have cared less about (not)!! i'll tell you, if sarkozy had any b*lls, he'd tell chad to release those people immediately or face immediate military action! but like many frenchmen, he completely lacks spine. i know, he's worried about france's relations with chad as he plans on deploying troops to the east of that country, as related in this article:
Sarkozy intervention results in seven freed
so how about this, chad? you escort the ten french hostages to a comfortable jet with first class tickets bound for france, you apologize to them for what they've gone through and drop all charges against them. *or* instead of landing to the east of you, those french troops will come right into the capital, set up their headquaters there, and then grab the hostages from you! come on, sarkozy, don't be a wimp. in july your ex-wife Cécilia was able to liberate a group of medical workers “detained” in Libya. do you want the world to know that your ex has more backbone than you? and while we're at it, *you* need to apologize to the zoe's ark volunteers for condemning their actions when you have no idea what the f*ck actually happened. you need to declare their innocence and welcome them home as the true heroes that they are!
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one of the sad truths is that as long as chad is ruled by such a corrupt government, most of the charitable efforts they receive will only be offset by the government's ever-increasing greed. however, there is a simple solution to the poverty problem in chad (and in other poor countries) if a somewhat ethical government can be created. may i submit to you, the *childbirth lottery*!!
before you jump to conclusions about my motivations, hear me out. the poverty in chad and many other poor countries is due to a population that is much larger than its resources. often the stress of such overwhelming impoverishment leads to armed conflicts. therefor, if poverty is reduced, war will be reduced or in some cases eliminated altogether. with the right kind of government in power, a childbirth lottery would have a huge impact on poverty. this government would need to be controlled, either by itself or by an outside force, so that its own demands on the country's resources would be limited. once this has been accomplished, the lottery can begin. each year, a certain number of women will be allowed to have children. the rest will be sterilized. “*omg*!! how f*ckin crazy can you get??!!” you think that's crazy, huh? well let's think this through. the chadians in general have little or no self control, common sense, or compassion for the suffering of other human beings. one way to limit population growth would be to establish limits on how many children each family can have. however, this would never work in chad. anyone who would bring a child into the world with a one-in-five chance of dying by the age of four would not observe any kind of government-imposed limits. so the only other way to limit population growth is through random sterilization. i agree that this solution could itself be corrupted too, but it would have one guaranteed effect, no matter what: less children would be born in a country that can't even care for the children it already has. i know this brings up all sorts of issues about individual freedoms, and i'm all for personal liberty, as long as it is accompanied by appropriate responsibility. the reality is that the chadians have displayed little to no responsibility in general. and as a result, their liberty has condemned hundreds of thousands of innocent children to lives of terrible suffering and early death. so really, is random sterilization such a monstrous thing? if the sterilization of one chadian woman results in saving one or more children from suffering and/or death, don't you think it's worth it? don't get me wrong- i'm not talking about genocide. i'm not advocating the elimination of various races through limits on reproduction. think about it: if 380,000 chadians won't live to the age of five, then those poor souls aren't gonna do sh*t to sustain their race. the only purpose these children could serve is to suffer and die at a very young age. how can *anyone* justify this?!
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of course, some people might suggest random abortions as an alternative, but it has never been proven that abortions don't cause suffering for the unborn child, so i can't condone this as a viable solution. when in doubt, err on the side of mercy, i say. and mercy would desire that the birth rate in countries like chad be reduced. just as a loving parent at times will need to intervene in a child's life to force it to behave in productive ways, so chad needs an external “parent” to take control and make it adhere to necessary limits that it doesn't want to abide by. you see, in this increasingly connected world, the state of each country progressively affects the state of all the others. the extreme poverty in chad and countries like it often leads to wars and instability that reverberate throughout the entire planet. as far as i can tell, the greatest contributor to poverty, and the one that is easiest to control if we are willing to commit to it, is unlimited birth rates. but let me add one more stipulation. there may be certain areas that for whatever reason become so incapable of sustaining human life that a level of zero reproduction is indicated. if this is the case, and if the people affected are a considerably unique race (which would be the case most of the time, with few exceptions), and whose numbers are so small that there is a real threat of extinction, then we must do everything we can to preserve that race by relocating them to another area that has better resources, no matter what the cost.
the bottom line is this: chad is having problems that it cannot or will not deal with. as a result, volunteers from various regions are trying to help ease the suffering of innocent children in that country. if the “government” in chad wants to f*ck these compassionate volunteers over for no reason at all besides their overwhelming need to “make an example” of innocent humanitarians like the members of zoe's ark, who, according to chad's president Idriss Deby “might have been involved in a paedophile ring or wanted to sell the children’s organs [???]”, then something must be done to stop mr. deby and his cohorts. if sarkozy won't do anything to halt these lying bastards, then maybe his wife will. but if no help is going to come out of france then *someone* needs to step up to the plate. i will be very disappointed if the whole world stands by, idly twiddling their thumbs (i had another metaphor, but it's not quite sfw) while ten innocent humanitarians are consigned to a fate worse than death by some half-baked (avoiding another nsfw metaphor here) group of thugs who arrogantly think they can defy people who should know right from wrong and who have the power and resources and should be willing to take take action quickly and with as much force as is necessary- i will be extremely disappointed if nobody does anything to save these innocent humble servants from these chadian _____s. (fill in the blank- anything i can think of is too obscene, even with the asterisks.)
that's my rant for this month. please feel free to comment. happy trails, compañeros!
(btw, the picture at the top came from chad and was likely filtered by the chadian government. some or all of those [relatively] well-fed [though not by western standards], clean-looking children may not even be from the group that zoe's ark was trying to help. face it- it's hard to get a good photo op of chadian children in their natural environment- you have to search all over the place to find any likely candidates, and then you have to find bunches of clean looking clothes and sweets to make them smile. it took a lot of work to make this piece of propaganda.)
