The Lies They Tell Us: Famine and the 1985 Live Aid Concert

If you were alive in 1985 and paying attention to the main stream media's reporting of the Ethiopian famine, or were subjected to later history lessons of the same, you probably never heard the full backstory of the famine or where the money went afterward. No Pasaran delves into this topic in a piece entitled: "Live Aid 1985: What Nobody Tells You About the African Famine that Led to the Most-Watched Concert in History." 

    Although the immediate cause of the famine was a drought, it should surprise no one that the reason Ethiopia suffered more than its neighbors was because of its government. Specifically, "in September 1974, a Marxist-Leninist military junta called the Derg overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. By 1977, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam had killed his rivals inside the junta and taken sole control." Mariam "built a Soviet-style state. He nationalized all rural land in 1975 and imposed grain quotas that peasants had to deliver to the state at prices below the cost of production." Consequently, when the drought struck, there was no surplus from earlier years, and the people starved. 

 This is the mechanism Stalin had used to engineer famine in Ukraine in 1932. The state destroys the production incentive, then extracts grain by force. When drought arrived in northern Ethiopia in 1983, there was no surplus and no buffer. Forced collectivization had already destroyed the country's food reserves years before the rain stopped.   

In short: "The famine that produced the most-watched concert in history was caused by forced collectivization, forced grain seizures, and a deliberate policy of using hunger as a weapon against civilians. Four decades later, that half of the story still does not appear in most accounts of Live Aid."

    But it gets even worse. The money raised by Live Aid was used to fund Mariam's military and, therefore, financed his killing between 50,000 and 100,000 of the Ethiopian people. 

    Yet another example of liberals being more concerned about their public image than actually helping people.