They Don't Get It

4500 protesters have descended on the French town of Annemasse to protest the G8 meeting in Evian. The protesters are so united in their hatred of all things organized that they even attacked a meeting of the French Socialist Party.

The article talks about the protesters attacking stores and pasting signs over gas pumps at closed gas stations.

It never occurs to them that the fact that many commercial establishments in town are closed in spite of a potential bonanza. 4500 normal people stopping in town for a couple of days should be a great deal for business. But these are not normal people.

Even one of their leaders has admitted that there is a small contingent among them "who want to break things just for the sake of breaking things."

So if we look at the protesters agenda, what are they really looking to accomplish? They want to end the move towards globalization. They want to highlight the woes of refugees in Europe. They want to talk about African development and debt relief.

So what about the African agenda? Is debt relief really going to help them? Will forgiving their debt really help them to learn the concept of financial responsibility? I don't think so. It will only make the problem worse. And what about development on the African continent? We have sent billions upon billions of foreign aid, food aid and all kinds of other aid. Yet nothing changes. Corruption still reigns across much of the continent. Until there is a fundamental move among the Africans themselves to stop corruption, no amount of aid will help. For proof we need to look no further than when many of these nations got their independence back in the 1960s, many of them regressed. They were drawn back by the lethal combination of corruption and tribal rivalries. Read the section on Africa in Conquest & Cultures by Thomas Sowell (Buy your copy from Amazon.com!) to get a better feel for what happened post-independence and why it did.

And why are refugees in the situation that they're in? Is it because they were fleeing to Europe to fight the evil forces of globalization? Or would it be because they want to take advantage of the possibilities offered by globalization and the evil corporate machine? If they want to improve the plight of refugees, they need to stop the spread of the cult of victimization in the refugees homelands. Don't tell the Palestinians that they are victims of the evil Zionist Jews. Teach them how to pick themselves up. The protesters always scream about "root causes," but they promptly turn around and misidentify the real root. The cult of the victim, not complex, evil, Zionist capitalist plot are the real root.

And I don't have the patience to go into the folly of trying to stop the globalization freight train by sitting in front of it.

I have yet to hear any of the protesters come up with a viable alternative to the policies that their protesting. Their normal rant is along the lines of "We don't like this so it should stop."

If they want to make a difference, they should become debaters, not protesters. In a debate, they would offer alternatives and would discuss the issues. As protesters, they throw temper tantrums and destroy stuff, but they never offer any ways of improving what their protesting.

But of course, debate requires a certain level of understanding. And the fact that they haven't learned that shopkeepers closing shop when they come to town isn't a good thing tells me they have a ways to go before gaining the understanding needed to engage in real debate.