Live Aid: The Terrible Truth

[PeteS in CA]

Live Aid: The Terrible Truth

One night at dinner in late 1985, a friend talked about Ethiopia being in a civil war. Neither I nor anyone else at the table had heard that. It hadn’t been covered in the American press. This was just six months after the Live Aid concerts in Philadelphia and London had directly and indirectly raised over $100 million dollars for famine relief in the African nation. ...

... research was done by going to the library and trawling through endless spools of microfiche — film of newspaper pages from around the world. That evening she came into my office ashen faced — she had discovered it was clear, and very well evidenced, that this famine, the awful depictions of which had pulled on the world’s heartstrings, was man made, by government planes deliberately napalming rebel farms.

Every year Ethiopia experiences some degree of drought, the worst ones bringing famine. But the country historically dealt with this. Some years were worse than others. In 1984 the famine that inspired first Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and then Live Aid, was very bad and people were dying of starvation. But the cause was less nature than cynical genocide. ...
...
Most damningly, Keating reported that Geldof was warned, repeatedly, from the outset by several relief agencies in the field about Mengistu, who was dismantling tribes, mercilessly conducting resettlement marches on which 100,000 people died, and butchering helpless people. According to Medicins Sans Frontiers, who begged Geldof to not release the money until there was a reliable infrastructure to get it to victims, he simply ignored them, instead famously saying: “I’ll shake hands with the Devil on my left and on my right to get to the people we are meant to help.”
...
... our report, in July 1986, shocked the world. That is not an overstatement. It comprehensively exposed the fraudulent use of the charitable money by unmistakably the world’s most brutal dictator, and the naive, hubris-drenched, unwitting complicity of Live Aid and Geldof.

"We are the DUPES! ..." I'm struggling for words for Geldof's willful blindness. Maybe Messianic Complex Hubris - Geldof was so convinced he was saving starving Ethiopians that his pride blinded him to the warnings of people who knew the situation.

[dfwgator]

They would have been better off heeding Sam Kinison's advice..."Move to where the food is!  You live in a bleeping desert!"

[Sanguine]

I remember this very well.  It was very hard to understand.  There were a few random comments about "political famine", but the news never expanded on that and there was never any good explanation of what was really happening.  I guess it's finally come out.

[PeteS in CA]

I remember this very well.  It was very hard to understand.  There were a few random comments about "political famine", but the news never expanded on that and there was never any good explanation of what was really happening.  I guess it's finally come out.

Mengistu's government was trying to impose their version of socialism. The MSM covered up Stalin's 1930s terror-famine. The MSM covered up Mao's late 50s-early 60s Great Leap Forward famine. The MSM covered up Mengistu's government being the cause of Ethiopia's famine. The MSM have been trying to minimize coverage of Chavez & Maduro's starvation in Venezuela. Socialism kills. The Mainstream Media conceal.