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September 5, 2007
Do-Gooder Moonbats Poison Bangladesh
Socializing medicine is only the beginning. Moonbats aspire to a higher objective: one-world government. The UN is laying the groundwork. Its countless agencies give us a taste of what life will be like under the thumb of benevolent bureauweenies in progressive utopia. UNICEF, for example, has poisoned the water supply in Bangladesh:
The story beggars belief. In the 1970s, international agencies headed by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) began pumping millions of dollars of aid money into Bangladesh for tubewells to provide "clean" drinking water. According to the World Health Organization, the direct result has been the biggest outbreak of mass poisoning in history. Up to half the country's tubewells, now estimated to number 10 million, are poisoned. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands will die.
Why? Because nobody tested for the natural poison, arsenic, widely found in underground water. And when a doctor did find traces of the metal, and when Bangladeshi villagers did start turning up at doctors' surgeries with the tumours and telltale signs of arsenic poisoning, the results were swiftly buried so that nobody made the connection.
Even now as the scale of the calamity emerges, nobody is admitting culpability. Not UNICEF, which initiated the tubewells programme and paid for the first 900,000 wells, nor the World Bank, a fellow sponsor.
The bureaucrats had made up their mind that Bangladeshis should shun surface water, and instead pump up what the locals call the "devil's water." Now they say it will take 30 years to find all the poisoned wells — longer than it took to drill them. Belated attempts by the international bureaucracy to address the disaster it created remain mired in — what else? — bureaucracy.
Theodore Dalrymple takes this opportunity to help explain why private industry doesn't stand a chance against transnational do-gooders and their embryonic world government:
Let us perform a small thought experiment. Let us suppose that a commercial mining company had, in the course of its operations, poisoned the water supply of 70,000,000 people in this quite specific way. Would that have been regarded as "a sad irony", an unintended consequence of its search for profit, or perhaps as something rather more sinister and indeed typical of the way such companies operate? Would there not have been large demonstrations, probably turning soon to violence, against that company by those in the developed world who habitually express their solidarity with the impoverished victims of exploitation by their own nations' multinationals? It is unlikely that we would ever hear the end of the matter — in such a case, quite rightly.
However, since the main culprit is an agency of their beloved UN, the moonbats running the media haven't been able to work up much outrage over this story — if they've even acknowledged it.
Hat tip: American Thinker, on a tip from Byron.
Posted by Van Helsing at September 5, 2007 1:11 PM
Comments
"Trick or treat for UNICEF", 1967.
If I were a self-loathing Liberal, I would slash my wrists.
Posted by: KHarn at September 5, 2007 2:27 PM
UNICEF is very popular with the society crowd here in Houston.
Posted by: Texan at September 5, 2007 4:06 PM
Just like a bunch of leftards to dig someone's grave, brag about this "great gift" to humanity, then feign ignorance when it's time to pay up.
ANYONE who digs for water knows to test it. There are techniques in use to clean up arsenic-infested waters. Did that not occur to these geniuses? Why is this story not getting splashed across papers and tv? They ought to be slashing their wrists KHarn.
Posted by: fellowes at September 5, 2007 10:06 PM
