This week the British Broadcasting Corporation flew halfway around the world to find a sad story that it could blame on (1) America and (2) climate change.
Their drama opens in Afghanistan’s Ghor province, where fathers line up before dawn at a dusty square hoping to find a day’s work. One man weeps that he is preparing to sell his seven-year-old daughter to feed the rest of his children.
The reporter then explains how nearly five million Afghans are food deprived; she goes on to describe graveyards of dead infants, and then tells the story of another man who already sold his five-year-old daughter for about $3,200.
It is all genuinely terrible. But when the BBC starts explaining WHY any of this is happening— is where the journalism ends and the propaganda begins.
Famine, in almost every modern case, is not a weather event. It is a political outcome.
Afghanistan has fertile river valleys and enough arable land to feed several times its current population. Whenever a country is starving, it is due to bad policy— not bad soil.
It was the same issue when Venezuela ran out of food a few years ago. People were starving. Supermarkets were stripped bare. Zoo animals turned up on dinner plates.
Yet Venezuela has a tropical climate, a year-round growing season, abundant water, and some of the most productive farmland on the planet.
It really takes a special kind of incompetence to starve citizens in a place like that. And the same kind of incompetence is at work in Kabul at the hands of the Taliban overlords.
The BBC mentions none of this. Instead it points the finger at the legacy media’s two favorite villains: Donald Trump and climate change.
To make the case, the reporter sits down with a senior Taliban official, who insists that their regime “inherited poverty, hardship, unemployment and other problems”.
These “problems” were entirely due to the US presence, he explains, which had built “an artificial economy due to the influx of US dollars.”
In other words, the men who reconquered the country, kicked girls out of school, and locked half the workforce in their homes, are blaming their economic problems on the US investing too much money in Afghanistan.
Yet the BBC nods along enthusiastically.
Ironically, despite blaming America’s substantial investments in Afghanistan for the country’s problems, the Taliban’s solution is for America to give them more money.
“Humanitarian assistance should not be politicized,” said the Taliban spokesman, parroting the exact talking that point Western NGOs use to demand more no-strings cash for regimes that whip women in public.
The BBC nods along enthusiastically again.
Hellbound and Down 