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The Decline of America: PART (II): PRIORITIES: Bombs, not Food for 3rd World

    "Three million die each year from infectious diseases that could be
    overcome by vaccination, at a cost of about $10 a head."

Chomsky writes in _The Victors_, part 2 (See bottom):

   There was a plea to the industrial powers to more than double
   their aid to a munificent 2/10 of 1 percent of their GNP, but no
   agreement was reached, the New York Times reports "principally
   because of opposition from the United States."

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[...]

===========================
The "Unrelenting Nightmare"
===========================

THE WORLD HEALTH Organization estimates that 11 million children die
every year in the world of the Cold War victors ("the developing
world") because of the unwillingness of the rich to help them. The
catastrophe could be brought to a quick end, the WHO study concludes,
because the diseases from which the children suffer and die are easily
treated. Four million die from diarrhea; about two-thirds of them
could be saved from the lethal dehydration it causes by sugar and salt
tablets that cost a few pennies. Three million die each year from
infectious diseases that could be overcome by vaccination, at a cost
of about $10 a head. Reporting in the London Observer on this
"virtually unnoticed" study, Annabel Ferriman quotes WHO
director-general Hiroshi Nakajima, who observes that this "silent
genocide" is "a preventable tragedy because the developed world has
the resources and technology to end common diseases worldwide," but
lacks "the will to help the developing countries."

The basic story was summarized succinctly by President Yoweri Museveni
of Uganda, chairman of the Organization of African Unity. Speaking at
the UN conference of the world's 41 least-developed countries, he
called the 1980s "an unrelenting nightmare" for the poorest countries.
There was a plea to the industrial powers to more than double their
aid to a munificent 2/10 of 1 percent of their GNP, but no agreement
was reached, the New York Times reports "principally because of
opposition from the United States."

   -------------------------------------------------------------------
  | The fashion at home, as noted, is to attribute the problems of    |
  | Eastern Europe to the "sick system" (quite accurately), while     |
  | ignoring the catastrophes of capitalism or, on the rare occasions |
  | when some problem is noticed, attributing it to any cause other   |
  | than the system that consistently brings it about. Latin American |
  | economists who have attributed the problems of the region to the  |
  | "development model" are generally ignored.. -Chomsky,_Victors II_ |
   ___________________________________________________________________|

As capitalism and freedom won their Grand Victory, the World Bank
reported that the share of the world's wealth controlled by poor and
medium-income countries declined from 23 percent to 18 percent (1980
to 1988). The Bank's 1990 report adds that in 1989, resources
transferred from the "developing countries" to the industrialized
world reached a new record. Debt service payments are estimated to
have exceeded new flows of funds by $42.9 billion, an increase of $5
billion from 1988, and new funds from the wealthy fell to the lowest
level in the decade.

These are some of the joys of capitalism that are somehow missing in
the flood of self-praise and the encomia to the wonders of our system
-- of which all of this is a noteworthy component -- as we celebrate
its triumph.  The media and journals are inundated with laments (with
an admixture of barely concealed glee) over the sad state of the
Soviet Union and its domains, where even a salary of $100 a month
enjoyed by the luckier workers is "scandalously high by the niggardly
standards of Communism." One will have to search far, however, for a
look at the scene nearer to home, or for derisive commentary on "the
niggardly standards of capitalism" and the suffering endured by the
huge mass of humanity who have been cast aside by the dominant powers,
long the richest and most favored societies of the world, and not
without a share of responsibility for the circumstances of most of the
others, all too easy to ignore.

The missing view also unveils a possible future that may await much of
Eastern Europe, which has endured many horrors, but is still regarded
with envy in large parts of the Third World domains of the West that
had comparable levels of development in the past, and are no less well
endowed with resources and the material conditions for satisfying
human needs. "Why have the leaders, the media, the citizens of the
Great Western Democracies cared long and ardently for the people of
Central Europe, but cared nothing for the people of Central America?"
the experienced correspondent Martha Gellhorn asks: "Most of them are
bone poor, and most of them do not have white skin. Their lives and
their deaths have not touched the conscience of the world. I can
testify that it was far better and safer to be a peasant in communist
Poland than it is to be a peasant in capitalist El Salvador."

        [Again, for an essay by Guatemalan journalist Julio Godoy,   ]
        [former Nieman fellow at Harvard, "Return to Guatemala:Unlike]
        [East Europe, Fear Without Hope," send the 1-line message    ]
        [GET E-EUROPE C-AMERIC ACTIV-L  to: LISTSERV@UMCVMB.BITNET   ]

Her question is, unfortunately, all too easy to answer. It has been
demonstrated beyond any lingering doubt that what sears the sensitive
soul is the crimes of the enemy, not our own, for reasons that are all
too obvious and much too uncomfortable to face. The comparison that
Gellhorn draws is scarcely to be found in Western commentary, let
alone the reasons for it.

As in Latin America, some sectors of Eastern European society should
come to share the economic and cultural standards of privileged
classes in the rich industrial world that they see across their
borders, much of the former Communist Party bureaucracy probably among
them. Many others might look to the second Brazil, and its
counterparts elsewhere, for a glimpse of a different future, which may
come to pass if matters proceed on their present course.

       __________________________________________________
      | Footnotes to this article are available from    |
      | Noam Chomsky, MIT Linguistics Dept.,            |
      | Cambridge, MA 02139. Please include $2 to       |
      | cover reproduction and postal costs.            |
       --------------------------------------------------

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