Sir, – It is curious how people can come to the same conclusions through widely divergent experiences and thought processes. Leibniz and Newton developing the logic of calculus, or Wallace and Darwin envisioning evolution by natural selection are among the more celebrated examples. Such confluence of thought is even more striking when the conclusions reached are dangerously wrong.
Supporting Ed Sheeran’s opposition to the latest Band Aid initiative, Ed Power argues that the charity has “contributed to stereotyping people across . . . Africa as lacking agency” and as requiring western pop stars to save them, reinforcing a “white-saviour complex” (“Ed Sheeran and Mary Robinson are right. It’s time to bin Band Aid”, Opinion, November 30th). Such an attitude to a situation where tens of millions in Sudan are facing starvation, displacement and war seems an astonishing failure to see what is obvious. That the relevant people lack any control over their lives is surely clear, and if the word “agency” is to have any meaning for them it will be to refer to the relief organisations that might appear and prevent their deaths.
It seems chilling how these views reconcile with historical rationalisations of inactivity when starvation has threatened. They evoke those of Viceroy Linlithgow as famine hit Bengal in the 1940s. His reluctance to “infringe provincial autonomy” was apparently among many factors leading to millions of deaths. Or, similarly, the cultural memory of Trevelyan seeing famine in Ireland, but holding the logic of laissez-faire economics to be morally right, and a sound basis not to intervene in markets which might eventually stabilise.
It is jarring that modern progressives have become so concerned to protect the agency of people who clearly have none that they will defend it with those unfortunate people’s lives.
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Their attitude to the imminent deaths of so many faced with starvation appears to be “Let them eat woke”. – Yours etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.