It’s Our Fault. It’s Always Our Fault.
By jimrob | June 12, 2008
I was watching Current TV the other day. It’s that Al Gore / Google “news” network, which makes CNN look like Fox News if it were ran by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ronald Regan if he weren’t a liberal.
There was a news story airing on the troubles the U.S. is causing Afghani poppy farmers. You know, those poor simple folk who only seek to make a living by growing flowers used to make opium and heroine. Yeah - those poor Afghani poppy farmers.
One of these men has lost his daughter, thanks to the U.S. destroying his poppy fields. Did we spray the field with pesticides and inadvertently spray his daughter with pesticide? Nope. Did we firebomb it and accidentally torch his child like a pig at a Luau? Nope. We caused his daughter to be married off to drug dealers because his lack of a harvest caused him to reneg on a loan.
Local farmers say a man can get killed for failing to repay a loan. No one knows how many debt weddings take place in Afghanistan, where 93 percent of the world’s heroin and other opiates originate. But Afghans say the number of loan brides keeps rising as poppy-eradication efforts push more farmers into default. “This will be our darkest year since 2000,” says Baz Mohammad, 65, a white-bearded former opium farmer in Nangarhar. “Even more daughters will be sold this year.” The old man lives with the anguish of selling his own 13-year-old daughter in 2000, after Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar banned poppy growing. “Lenders never show any mercy,” the old man says. Local farmers say more than one debtor has been bound hand and foot, then locked into a small windowless room with a smoldering fire, slowly choking to death.
Yep. Don’t criticize the man who is growing a crop used to make highly addictive and destructive narcotic substances. Don’t blame the drug dealers who are forcing adolescent girls into unwanted marriages. Don’t blame the Islamic religious beliefs which condone these activities.
Blame the United States for causing the man’s crop to fail, resulting in him not being able to pay off a loan (one which makes the activities at the local Check ‘n’ Go pale in comparison) to a drug dealer, causing him to marry off his thirteen year-old daughter to satisfy the conditions of a loan he agreed to.
Of course, if the United States weren’t meddling in world affairs this never would have happened. The farmer would have successfully harvested his poppies, the drug dealers would have their opium and heroin to peddle to the world, and little Rebeca-Ann Hussein Bin Laden would be happily eating goat with her dad the rest of her life (until she was stoned to death for dishonoring her family by allowing herself to be raped or for wearing blue jeans.)
“Oh you just don’t understand,” the intellectually advanced liberal reader of my blog (there’s at least one) says. “They have to do this to survive, thanks to the global capitalist machine ran by the Imperial States of America.”
I call, most emphatically, bullshit. They’re farmers. They can grow anything native to that area. You’re telling me the only way they can make a buck is to involve themselves with the drug trade?
They could grow food. They could raise livestock. They could do something. Don’t give me this bullshit about how, thanks to the evil actions of ConHugeCo, Inc., headquartered in the good ol’ U-S-of-A, all they can do is raise drugs.
They can choose not to compete in the global market. They can build their own local economy, buying and trading local goods and services to one another. They don’t have to survive based upon drugs.
Topics: Praise Allah, Kill Someone! |
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