What happens when a Western country collapses is: cannibalism. Liberians had rice riots in 1979, and they devolved into 22 years of civil war. What that wreaked was total destruction of the infrastructure and an 80% illiteracy rate today.
It’s in West Africa, and they never did have a great highway system, but most people had a car or a jeep. The roads were mostly macadam and subject to flooding during the rainy seasons, and most country folk had wells and outhouses, like Georgia and Mississippi up into the late 1960s, but there was electricity, and the railroad, like the American South in the 1960s. In fact, one could say that life in Liberia was as good or better for English-speaking blacks than it was in the USA. The standard of living was way higher than it was in our South.
Liberia had a vibrant and Western culture and economy, rivaling South Africa’s, except that their economy was based entirely on US aid instead of natural resources. They had cars and traffic lights and traffic jams and electricity and television and FM and AM radio and supermarkets and everything, but the country depended on the railroads. Their constitution was written at Harvard in 1839-40, and our Bill of Rights was incorporated right into it instead of being tacked on the back. Their government was modeled after the USA’s. It was the biggest CIA station on the continent. But the aid began drying up. Civil war broke out.
During the civil wars, the schools closed. Food became scarce as roving bands roamed the country. The railroads were torn up. The locomotives and boxcars were sold overseas for scrap in order to buy rice and bullets. The rails and bridges were torn up to buy rice and bullets.
Then the abandoned power stations and the transmission lines came down, and the metals sold for scrap, to buy rice and bullets, and the useless telephone and telegraph lines were torn down and sold for scrap to buy rice and bullets.
No farm in the country was safe, the fields were unplanted, and the goats and the cattle were executed by roving militias (there were about 25 of those).
The militia kids were convinced that eating the hearts, livers and limbs of their enemies would make them stronger and smarter and literate. Regional cooperation, such as it was, depended on who had rice and bullets.
Friday 14 October 2011
War, Peace, and Resilient Communities ☀
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