Office of the Independent Blogger

There is a genocide going on in Sudan, along with a famine caused by that genocide. The people of the Sudan are being slaughtered, and the survivors are being starved. The rest of the world refuses to take action for a variety of reasons, each of them disheartening and all of them shameful.

The Bush White House won’t take any action over petty differences with the rest of the world over whether or not the Sudanese war criminals should be charged by the International Criminal Court. The United Nations won’t do anything because they don’t have the ability or the nerve. Europe, a continent that might as well be incontinent for all the testicular fortitude it displays to the rest of the world, simply lacks the nerve. Were this not a real tragedy, this type of farce could be a Shakespearean tragedy. Since it isn’t, it’s a peace keeper’s worst nightmare and a child’s haunting ghost.

Today, the storyline became twisted to a point that ties the mind and tortures the conscience. The United Nations had to cut food aid to the Sudan because the rest of the world is stingy. Yes, the United Nations stopped giving food to the Sudan because the rest of the world wasn’t paying its fair share into the fund set up for that purpose. The United States had, as if in an attempt to make some form of apology for its pathetic, petty response to the crisis, giving 188 million dollars to the goal of keeping human beings from starving to death after being savaged to death. In Europe, the only major country to make a contribution was Italy, giving up over a million dollars. France and Britain, the Germans? Silent. Silence is a business that the world is making a killing on.

The lingering silence in Europe, the refusal of the Bush Administration to intervene — these are sounds that combine to make a sad, sorry symphony worthy of Rwanda, of the Holocaust, of every sick nightmare you could ever wish to have never existed, and in whose victims names’ you’d swear that you’d never allow it again. The German mantra in the era after the Holocause being “Never Again,” the American President’s promise being “Not On My Watch,” the Reality of the Situation being the antithesis of their word and of everything good and moral.

To break the silence, five Congressman staged a protest today and found themselves in handcuffs as a result. The worst thing, however, might just be that there are no handcuffs for those whose faith in God is so skewed as to allow hell to burn without giving those innocents caught in its fire so much as a prayer.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Outside Retort (Current Affairs).