Leaderboard

I was pleased with the shift in US foreign policy delineated in the President's speech of 31 August. I was disappointed, however, to see that we shall be sending humanitarian aid to Afghanistan through the US government. We do not owe them anything collectively in the sense of pertinent causal responsibility. It is not the US war there that caused, in the responsibility-sense, the coming dire straits of that country. Many countries, including Afghanistan, have the potential to produce enough to feed themselves and advance themselves were their country to wake up one morning and find that all the other countries in the world had vanished, leaving only ocean around the globe beyond their own borders. Also, I'd bet that such humanitarian aid that well-off countries give to other countries is very often meted out in such a way as to reinforce power of the particular political regime of the day, not merely to fill needs of all people equally. And of course, because of the coercive way in which governmental charities are funded and because we are not and should not be an empire (such as the old British Empire) and because the proposition that governmental foreign humanitarian aid improves protection against foreign attacks on the US is a falsehood and a lie: governmental humanitarian foreign aid is wrong in complete generality.