National Observer, Australia, No. 83 (June - August 2010)

 

Anatomy of a swindle:
Live Aid, twenty-five years on

by R. J. Stove

National Observer
Australia's independent current affairs online journal
No. 83 (June - August 2010).

Charles Péguy, one of the most eminent authors whom even early-twentieth-century France produced, wrote with clairvoyant wisdom in a 1905 essay: “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” A few weeks ago, we witnessed the silver jubilee of an event which illustrates, with shaming clarity, the truth of Péguy’s aphorism.

That event was the Live Aid rock concert held on July 13, 1985, at London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium simultaneously. Masterminded by the already obsolete Irish-born pop star Bob Geldof (a visitor to Melbourne during May 2010), Live Aid purported to raise $US283 million for the purpose of stopping famine in Ethiopia, which had been under Marxist barbarians’ rule for the preceding eleven years. The resultant showbiz orgy — adorned by such ethical exemplars as Geldof’s fellow Hibernian one-worlder Bono, the bisexual cocaine-addict David Bowie, the transvestite Boy George and the AIDS-infected homosexual Freddy Mercury — attracted, at a cautious estimate, 380 million viewers.

Live Aid obtained for Geldof an honorary knighthood from the Queen. It also inspired mass media coverage so brainlessly obsequious that Kim Il-sung himself would have felt bound to applaud. No dissenting voices, questioning either the competence or the basic truthfulness of the promoters, were permitted expression in the English-speaking world’s major newspapers. Yet, to anybody with the slightest grasp of what Marxism means, what the Third World mindset means, and how much of a right the average superannuated rocker’s garglings have to serious intellectual consideration, the menace which Live Aid represented — not mere squandermania, not mere misdirected enthusiasm, but outright menace — was entirely patent at the time. It did not need confirming by such post-1985 helps to understanding as the Internet.

To begin with, Geldof’s own credentials as an upholder of anything remotely akin to Western civilisation were, and are, of the flimsiest. Born near Dublin in 1951, and possessing a combination of great cleverness with almost nonexistent erudition, he quickly apprehended the necessity of spitting on his country’s national and religious heritage if he was to acquire the social honour to which he felt himself entitled. Accordingly his memoir, Is That It? (1986), is in its first section a veritable litany of hatred against the Irish priests and brothers who, during his schooldays, treated him with what he believed to be insufficient deference.

At one stage during his eventful adolescence, Geldof imported 100 copies of Mao’s Little Red Book directly from the North Vietnamese régime, and passed many of them around to his classmates. Because the very possession of printed Sino-Communist propaganda violated Irish censorship laws — how blest the nation which concomitantly spared itself both Maoist ravings and the Pill! — Geldof’s act came to the attention of the Irish police force’s Special Branch. Nevertheless Geldof suffered no worse punishment than discharge from his boarding-school.

Far from being grateful for the leniency shown to him, he seems to have been provoked by such leniency into still keener abhorrence of his ancestors’ faith. It is fair to conclude that even in the 1960s he dreamed of the iconic status which would one day be his.

There is not the smallest suggestion that Geldof ever fell out of love with his teenage Maoism. Not once in Is That It? does Geldof feel obliged to utter the faintest reproof of Communism as a system, let alone as the system which exterminated several hundred thousand Ethiopians with the same callous deliberation that Stalin showed in the Holodomor. Geldof does, at one point, allow himself in his recollections a brief and hostile reference to “Stalinist” elements in Britain’s pop music magazines, these elements consisting, it would seem, of those who shared his former schoolteachers’ reluctance to take him at his own exalted valuation. Other than that, his ignorance of modern history is as breathtaking as his arrogance about it. The combination, however lucrative for Geldof’s ego, turned out to be literally lethal for those whom he purported to help.

In 1974 (as Is That It? deliberately refrains from noting) Ethiopia’s octogenarian Emperor Haile Selassie — himself one of modern Africa’s more clownish despots, with his own impressive achievements during 1972-73 in effecting mass starvation, albeit in his case through spectacular ineptitude rather than evil — was overthrown by a Marxist junta known as the Dergue. It soon became obvious that the Dergue’s de facto leader (though not, at first, its de jure one) was Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had benefited from military training in America. Within a year, Haile Selassie had been slain; Mengistu himself always denied smothering the old man with a pillow-case, but his denials possess no evidentiary weight, since Lenin had specifically informed the world that “Telling the truth is a bourgeois prejudice”.

Ultimately, Mengistu’s Dergue rivals were sidelined or worse. Two successive Ethiopian presidents, Mikael Andom and Benti Tafari, fell foul of Mengistu and were summarily executed, Tafari being killed during a particularly fervent conference of the Dergue central committee. With Andom and Tafari dead, Mengistu faced no remaining barriers to supreme power, and declared himself head of state in 1977. He held this post till 1991.

Completely unashamed of running a Soviet client-state, Mengistu happily accepted massive military aid from the USSR, East Germany, Poland and even Cuba. All the better to carry out the pointless mayhem at which Mengistu excelled even by twentieth-century governmental standards. He had a particular taste for gorging himself on the blood of youth.

Harvard University Press’s The Black Book of Communism (1999), originally published in France, reports that as early as May 1977 the Save the Children Fund’s Swedish secretary-general noted: “1,000 children have been killed, and their bodies are left in the streets and are being eaten by wild hyenas.… You can see the heaped-up bodies of murdered children, most of them aged eleven to thirteen, lying in the gutter, as you drive out of Addis Ababa.” Meanwhile, of course, the Western Fourth Estate never for a moment abandoned its hysterical pretence that the greatest outrage ever to afflict the Dark Continent was … South African apartheid.

Geldof’s culpable naivety — to put the most polite interpretation on his behaviour — in supporting Mengistu’s thugs by propping them up with foreign aid has become, if possible, even more obvious in latter years than it was to thinking observers amid Live Aid itself. Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, hardly a right-wing redoubt, aid analyst David Rieff observed back in 2005:

In the same year as Rieff’s article, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly told viewers of how Live Aid money had ended up subsidising Ethiopian troops. This is precisely what sceptics at the time said, in private, would happen. (They could not say it in public, because even if they had been given a forum for querying the divinity of Geldof — which would itself have been unthinkable in practice — the screams of “racism” would have rendered their complaints inaudible.)

Even the left-leaning British Broadcasting Corporation has lately changed its tune. During Live Aid itself, the BBC had been happy to record not just the antics of Live Aid’s bands but the effusions of Geldof’s own foul mouth. (To a TV presenter trying to give viewers the addresses of donation recipients, Geldof screamed: “F**k the address, let’s get the numbers!”.) Now things are very different. The BBC World Service’s own Africa editor, Martin Plaut, admitted in March 2010 that Geldof and his hordes of clueless apologists had been thoroughly swindled:

Quite apart from the specific dangers in supping with the Marxist devil, none of the chicanery involved should have surprised anyone conversant with an earlier musical fiasco: the August 1971 Concert for Bangladesh. (Only five months earlier, Bangladesh had declared its independence from Pakistan. It continued to suffer the after-effects of the November 1970 cyclone that had claimed almost half a million lives.) The proceeds of this occasion, which was captured on a triple-LP boxed set that included performances by various ex-Beatles, were made over to that well-known economic powerhouse, UNICEF. Because nobody in charge of Concert for Bangladesh had sought tax-exempt status for the campaign, America’s Internal Revenue Service filched most of the charity funds.

The pathology involved in Live Aid and Concert for Bangladesh — for it is above all in the field of personal neurosis, rather than in that of political science, where we must seek the explanation for Bangladeshi and Ethiopian relief crusades — was captured with cold brilliance seventy-two years ago, in the prose of Evelyn Waugh. Fresh from marvelling at those ostensibly cerebral buffoons who glided effortlessly from proclaiming Stalin’s Ukrainian humanitarianism to eulogising the wonderful religious freedom permitted by Spanish Reds (one of whom, Prime Minister Largo Caballero, boasted that “I shall be the second Lenin”), Waugh found himself confronted in 1938 with the buffoons’ subsequent gushing over Lazaro Cardenas, the latest pagan mobster to take over Mexico City’s presidential palace. As Waugh remarked:

One may nonetheless suspect that Waugh, for all his genius, could never have imagined a situation so nightmarish that its most fashionable pop-culture illuminati would seek the Promised Land in the Horn of Africa.

Meanwhile we await, with interest rather than any genuine expectation, the pronouncing of seven little words by which Geldof — even at this belated stage in the whole saga — might yet, to a degree, do penance for his global sins. Those seven little words are ones he was required to hear in each Sunday’s liturgy during his childhood: “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

R.J. Stove lives in Melbourne and is a writer and commentator on public affairs. He has had numerous articles published in Quadrant, National Observer and Chronicles. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative.

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National Observer, Australia, No. 83 (June - August 2010)