Live Aid 1985: What Nobody Tells You About the African Famine that Led to the Most-Watched Concert in History

Over on an X Twitter thread, Students For Liberty take us back to the mid-1980s and reminds us of what our young ones no longer learn in schools and universities:

In July 1985, over a billion people watched Live Aid. Months earlier, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie had written "We Are the World." All of it was a response to a famine in Ethiopia. Almost nobody remembers who actually caused the famine 

 

 … The crisis was framed almost entirely as a natural disaster, the work of a catastrophic drought striking a poor country. Television footage showed cracked earth, dying livestock, and skeletal children. The government in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, was barely named in Western coverage. Its policies were not named at all. 

… What was actually happening: in September 1974, a Marxist-Leninist military junta called the Derg overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. By 1977, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam had killed his rivals inside the junta and taken sole control. He built a Soviet-style state. He nationalized all rural land in 1975 and imposed grain quotas that peasants had to deliver to the state at prices below the cost of production.

 

This is the mechanism Stalin had used to engineer famine in Ukraine in 1932. The state destroys the production incentive, then extracts grain by force. When drought arrived in northern Ethiopia in 1983, there was no surplus and no buffer. Forced collectivization had already destroyed the country's food reserves years before the rain stopped.

… [Médecins Sans Frontières] denounced the program publicly in October 1985. The Ethiopian government expelled them in December. Investigators later established that a large share of the international aid raised in the West was diverted into the resettlement program itself. The same money raised to save Ethiopians from starvation paid, in part, for the operation that killed between 50,000 and 100,000 of them.

 … If the cause of the Ethiopian famine had been a right-wing regime, it would probably be in every school curriculum alongside Live Aid. The famine that produced the most-watched concert in history was caused by forced collectivization, forced grain seizures, and a deliberate policy of using hunger as a weapon against civilians. Four decades later, that half of the story still does not appear in most accounts of Live Aid.

Read the whole thing…

No wonder that there are voices trying to fight back, such as those on the blogosphere of Students For Liberty and Sarah Hoyt, who fires the following shot across the bow: what with "the passing fancy of college professors drunk on socialism", Western society's massive problem

requires a willingness which I know doesn’t exist, to turn off the money spigot corrupting people here and abroad. And it might not exist but it NEEDS to. So if all you do is convince others that this stupidity needs to stop you won’t have lived in vain.

Socialism kills, fast or slow. But on the way there, it makes people into dumb animals posturing and killing for no good reason.

The enemy is collectivism. The enemy is welfare. The enemy is turning humans into dependent zoo animals.

Indeed, the dream of the world's leftists and its drama queens, as I have written before, is to make a world where all citizens are de facto welfare recipients (an update from the serfs and the peasants that they used to be during feudalism and in prior eras). And when and if any of said citizens disagree, the latter need to be gagged and gotten rid of — as we have seen in Ehtiopia (plus the USSR, China, Cambodia, etc, etc, etc) — by any means possible…