Bob Geldof and his charity have been doing a great job all these years in helping the poor in Africa. Not quite. They’ve both been doing an even better job in being a cover up for who were really responsible for the Ethiopian famine.
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Bob Geldof and his charity have been doing a great job all these years in helping the poor in Africa. Not quite. They’ve both been doing an even better job in being a cover up for who were really responsible in the first place for the Ethiopian famine.
Band Aid 40 was an anniversary which came and went, with few even noticing it. The original ‘Live Aid’ event in the summer of 1985, created by Bog Geldof and Midge Ure, on the other hand, was unforgettable by the 50 plus generation as there was nothing like it and many felt good about being part of a pop concert which raised money for starving Ethiopians.
Yet the truth about both Live Aid and the subsequent concerts held each decade and the charity work it does are at best dubious and at worse a repulsive example of western decadence in its ugliest form. The number of things wrong with the whole event and its spin-offs are starting to outweigh its positive points – even those made in good will.
In 1985, the star-studded line up took to the stage and won our hearts. Geldof’s charity took the money raised from the single ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ (around 24m USD) to Ethiopia to where starving refugees in the south needed food, blankets and medicine. The scandal however, was not that the Thatcher government of the say wanted to charge VAT on the record sales, but something much more sinister.
Live Aid didn’t really work. At least not the operation in Ethiopia. In a mad frenzy of wokeness on a differently level there was no initiative from Geldof’s charity to do a little research and work out who were the good guys there and who were the baddies. The result was a catastrophe. Most of the trucks that Geldof bought in Ethiopia were junk, given a lick of paint to be sold to naïve westerners with too much cash to burn and so most didn’t even make the long journey south to where the refugees were. A lot of the money was also soaked up by corrupt officials who saw the obvious advantageous point as various permits were needed and of course the convoy had to deal with military roadblocks whose senior officers had been warned in advance. The whole thing was a shambles from the off due largely to the politically correct buffoons Geldof employed who really understood nothing about the country, the continent or simply how things work in poor countries. People have to be bribed even for food to get through to the starving. And sometimes quite generously.
Recently, a British broadsheet did a hit job on it, leading the reader to wonder if the vitriol and hatred is more about Geldof himself, who has made more than a few enemies in his time.
“Yet the criticism of Do They Know It’s Christmas? is not confined to modern-day “woke do-gooders” (the words of promoter Harvey Goldsmith on Monday), but has been almost as constant as Phil Collins’s drumbeat on the original song” it reads. “Among the objections are that the lyrics are patronising, it is shoddy musically and, most troublingly, that some of the money raised was misused and did not help its intended recipients”.
The number of musical artists who refuse to work on the more recent versions of Band Aid include Morrissey, Adele and Ed Sheeran. For them it’s the fingers-down-the-throat woke do-goodery which translates in today’s terms as paternalist gobshite which dehumanises Africans, justifying an extended outdated colonial mindset.
The world changed since 1985. People became woke, but also, strangely also cynical. These days a growing number of artists won’t do free concerts with pictures of starving children because the naivety from the masses of the mid-eighties is no longer prevalent and it backfires. Bad business.
But amongst the scramble of hypocrites and opportunists, the real story of Live Aid in 1985 and even today is darker and more shameful.
The truth is that the very famine itself which Live Aid and Band Aid apparently rescued from being a fatal famine, was entirely created by western elitist buffoonery. The UN, an organisation largely serves the hegemonic endeavours of the West messed up on a grand scale. Their refusal to engage local experts in preference for overpaid westerners, very well detailed in Graham Hancock’s exposes of UN graft in Lords of Poverty, largely created a singular zone for most of the refuges in the entire region, accessible by only one major road from the capitol. This stupendous blunder gave the regime at that time the opportunity to use hunger as a tool of war. Which they did on a “biblical” scale causing the famine. Worse though was the denial from Western governments.
The most extraordinary thing about Live Aid and the Band Aid singles is that they largely appeal to poor people in UK and U.S. to hand over their last few coins of their benefit money or minimum wage. While Geldof hits back at the critics with his claims that he has given the famine project in Ethiopia over 140m GBP pounds since 1985 (pennies in term of what the UNDP gives as food aid), some of us might be wondering if half of that goes on inept white aid workers from Ireland and corrupt officials. But Band Aid seemed to have a political agenda as well. With the media spotlight on them, they could have made some pretty scandalous accusations – charges that might steal the thunder of a group of pop idols and their most “self-righteous platform in the history of modern music”.
“The whole implication was to save these people in Ethiopia, but who were they asking to save them? Some 13-year-old girl in Wigan! People like [Margaret] Thatcher and the royals could solve the Ethiopian problem within 10 seconds” argues Morrissey. “But Band Aid shied away from saying that — for heaven’s sake, it was almost directly aimed at unemployed people.”
