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May 2, 2006
Who Are The Mortacracies? Part II
RETRACTION: In case you read it in yesterday's Part I, before I edited it out: I lost my cool at the end of the blog and called for the democracies to make war on these bloody mortacracies (a thanks to Walter W. Cox for questioning it). I retract that as an irrational and dangerous thrashing about. I had just seen the previous night the A&E "Flight 93" and 9/11 recap, and then stupidly wrote my Part I about the bloody mortacracies. But the question as to what to do about these mortacracies has to be answered sensibly, and as a last part in this series, I will try to write a more nuanced, practical, and rational blog on what the democracies can do about these mortacracies.
Now, in Part I, I defined the gang of democide committing mortacracies. But what about those regimes whose actions create such life threatening conditions as to unintentionally cause the mass death of its people?
Consider Zimbabwe, for example. Because of the Marxist policies of the Robert Mugabe gang that rules the country by force (the country is rated not free by Freedom House), it has caused the country that had relatively high standard of living for Africa before Mugabe's rule to deteriorate into being among its poorest. It has an unemployment rate of over 70 percent, and among the world's the highest inflation rate at (a roll of toilet paper now costs $145,750 Zimbabwean dollars). There is a crisis food shortage that without outside aid will turn into a famine, and fuel is hard to get. Its economy has collapsed by about 40 percent, dragging down the country's standard of living such that the people now have among the shortest lives in Africa. Their life expectancy (LE) at birth is 36.7 years, and continues to fall. Compare this to 82 years for Japan, the highest among sovereign countries, and 77.1 years for the United States. The chart below shows the six-year movement in Zimbabwe's LE (If the chart does not show, click here)
(continued here)
Posted by Rudy at May 2, 2006 10:23 PM
