|
To:
letters@guardian.co.uk Date: Wednesday 23 February 05 |
||
|
||
|
Dear Jonathan (Mr Freedland), I was stuck by your choice of words in what you wrote about South Africa for today's Guardian: ". . . a Black Economic Empowerment programme [is] designed to spread the spoils more fairly", the italics, of course, being mine ("The elusive rainbow"). Without realising it, you have used a very appropriate word for describing the huge amount of material wealth in which we are awash, but which, as you lament, is so unequally distributed among human kind. They are in fact - quite literally - the spoils of our plundered planet. The trouble with so many well-meaning, leftwing intellectuals, like yourself, is that you are so preoccupied with attacking the injustice of how unequally wealth is distributed that you fail to notice exactly where it comes from. We are like bandits squabbling over the booty we are robbing - in our case, from our OWN children and descendants. And we are not just robbing them of things they will be able to replace (although that would be immoral enough), we are behaving like Vandals, at the same time destroying (or at least, severely impairing) their ability to recover from our rapaciousness. How can we behave so barbarically (not just towards other races, but towards our own children)? The simple answer is that we do not realise what we are doing. No one (not even a nasty Conservative) would deliberately harm - and evoke the curses of - his own children and descendants. You came of age in the 1980's, you write. For me it was the 1970's, at about the time when “The Limits of Growth” was published by the Club of Rome. Tragically, instead of facing up to the difficult truths it contained, and under massive pressure from financial and economic interests (right across the social spectrum), we went into collective denial. We are still there. And time is rapidly running out. Roger Hicks |
||
|
|
