| 18 | Christian Contradictions and The World Revolution |
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You are driving your scalpel already in the direction of the bone with your draft Chapter II, which I have been scribbling on since I received it. One of the points that emerges from your analysis is the widening gap between political promise and performance which we have allowed to develop. It is indeed clear that if the freedom, justice and essentials of life, long sought by the oppressed and the deprived, could be provided by declaration, the world would already have become a Garden of Eden. The Declaration of Philadelphia in 1776, proclaiming the principles of independence, recognised the right of every people to insurrection in the pursuit of its ideal. Seven years later, the French Constitution went so far as to designate insurrection not merely as a right but as the most sacred of duties. In our own time, the nations of the earth, gathered in solemn assembly in New York issued the Declaration on the Rights of Man in 1948 and another in 1959 on the rights of the child. A subsequent declaration regarding the world’s starving children represented ‘a commitment at the highest level to build a world that will guard the most precious resource of the human race. Another included a clause giving every people the right to determine their political regime, to ensure their economic, social and cultural independence and to protect the sovereign use of their natural resources and wealth. Not to be outdone, the European governments produced their own declaration on human rights in 1950. The ‘First Development Decade’ in the 60s and then the Second in the 70s were triumphantly predicted to lead the Third World marching behind the
West’s banner into an era of abundance for everybody. The Green Revolution was proclaimed to be the Final Solution to the problem of world hunger, which was about to be banished from the face of the earth and the man who
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launched it duly received his Nobel Prize. Mr Louis Lundborg, President of the Bank of America, declared in 1967 that profit constituted the motive force capable of solving the problem of hunger ‘as rapidly as possible’ (whatever that syntax may mean). Every year on the occasion of FAO’s birthday celebrations, the anniversary of its founding, there used to be innumerable declarations by heads of government and other important dignitaries deciding to solve the problem of Third World hunger. And every time there is a celebration of a previous declaration, as in 1988 for the 40th anniversary of Human Rights, a new round of declarations is spawned from the old. In 1974 there was the Declaration on the Establishment of a New World Economic Order, designed to produce a more equitable system between the rich North and the exploited South. In the same year, the World Food Conference was launched in Rome, where Dr Henry Kissinger, American secretary of state, made a new declaration stating that
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'today we must proclaim a bold objective - that within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, that no family will fear for its next day’s bread, that no human being’s future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition'
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The decade is long passed.
UN statistics show that over 700 million people go to bed hungry every night, that a much larger number fear for their next day’s bread, that over a billion people have no roof over their heads worthy of the name, that more than 20 million homeless children sleep in the streets of Latin America, that 2 billion people suffer from malnutrition, and that 40,000 children die from this malnutrition and its attendant diseases every 24 hours, the time it takes for Western governments alone to spend 1˝ billion dollars (constant 1985 dollars) on arms and armies.
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