Thursday, January 21, 2010

Guardianism Of The Day

Years of neglect or heavy-handed western 'aid' have left Yemen destitute and unstable. We must share the blame.
There's a "head we win, tails you lose" quality to this. Neglect and heavy handedness are almost mutually exclusive so it's difficult to see how we could avoid either .being one or the other but equally difficult to see how we have committed both sins.

I'm pretty sure this is a cookie cutter Guardianism that can be applied to any poor country that is in the news, in fact the article may well have been about Haiti when the writer began it.

3 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Aha! That's why the Graun covered its bases and said "neglect OR heavy-handedness". The cheeky f***ers even put 'aid' in speechmarks, they must know that it's ALL money down the toilet.

Problem is, our money goes down the toilets of The Righteous.

I tell you, Yemen is the next Haiti.

Ross said...

Wasn't Yemen the next Afghanistan/Somalia though even before Haiti's earthquake?

JuliaM said...

Several articles in the Grauniad and Indy have started to criticise the aid effort in Haiti . I knew it wouldn't be long in coming, but I thought at least the aftershocks would have ceased first...

Truly a case of 'damned if they do, damned if they don't.