Wednesday 11 August 2010

Buying Blood Diamonds Isn’t As Bad As…

…drawing attention to someone buying blood diamonds. Apparently.

According to dear, dear Yasmin, anyway:
Granted, Naomi Campbell is not very nice or clever. But I really don't see why the beautiful, sullen, 'dotish' airhead becomes the empty vessel into which the world tosses its scorn.
Because she’s the one who first received the loot, perhaps, Yaz? Though as David Duff points out, it was with no obvious intentions of keeping it for herself...
It has nothing to do with her race – Campbell will always be the dahling of fashionistas to whom her colour has never mattered.
Because only fashionistas are so sophisticated that race is irrelevant, I guess?
OK, so she wasn't the cool, stylish dame last week that she usually is.
I have to say, of all the available adjectives, ‘cool’ isn’t one I’d ever ascribe to the notoriously fly-off-the-handle-at every-opportunity clotheshorse…
Of course, it is an inconvenience for one to whom the meaning of life is make-up, frocks, jewels, cameras, Mammon, smitten men and fawning fans.
Well, of course
I am not being facetious. She had to be ordered to The Hague to give evidence at the war crimes trial of Liberia's toppled leader Charles Taylor, who stands accused of sponsoring savage rebellions in the region. So, she doesn't know where Liberia is and couldn't care less about his misdemeanours and all that boring stuff. What do you expect? She is who she is – a supermodel, as it says on the tin.
‘We’ don’t expect much else, Yaz, to be truthful…
It is not Campbell that is truly appalling, but the chorus of disapproval we have heard this week from people who showed no interest in the trial until a dumb beauty turned up to entertain them.
Ahhhh, right. It’s not the fact that an airhead has been shown to be an airhead that upsets Yaz; it’s that we’ve paid attention to it.

Huh? Even for Yaz, this is surprising. Surely she can find some way in which the West is to blame for…

Ah:
That is racism – treating massacres in Africa as "natural" or inevitable.
/facepalm

They aren’t exactly unknown, though, are they? Should we ignore the evidence of our own eyes, then? Surely, more publicity for the concept of ‘blood diamonds’ is a good one, no?
The media got excited and took their cameras to the courtroom. At least millions now will have heard of The Hague, learnt a few facts about a Liberian warlord, an African-American, like most of the elite in that West African country, created through colonising land on behalf of freed slaves.
Yes, because native-born Africans can’t organise their own massacres, eh, Yaz?
When he was elected to run Liberia in 1997, the warlord Taylor was bathed in so much blood, few could believe his victory or bear to accept him as a leader.
Yet there he was, that same year with a whole bunch of the rich and powerful invited by Nelson Mandela to tour on a five-star train in South Africa and then on to his presidential residence.
And what are we to make of that, according to Yaz?
State villainy carries on in the world because high-minded leaders can let go of moral principles when the time, cause or price is right.
Even African ones, it seems...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poor old Yaz, she just doesn't get it does she. Has she never heard of Somalia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Congo, Zaire, Zimbabwe, Biafra, Central African Republic or perhaps she is having a bout of amnesia. After all it was an African leader who ejected the Asians from Uganda. All those nasty white people must have been hiding behind the curtains telling Idi what to do.

And shock horror, Saint Nelson of Robben Island invited Charles Taylor to tour South Africa on the Blue Train. Hardly surprising when Nelson's first state visit was to his old mucker and financier, Muammar Ghadaffi, and then on to Cuba to visit Fidel & Raul.

I once pointed this out to internet loon Councillor Terry Kelly....oh the abuse!!

Furor Teutonicus said...

She hgot a few glass baubles. So WHAT?

If they do not like working down the diamond mines, they can get a job imn Mc dog burgers, or something.

Clarissa said...

And in Yaz's next column - and without a hint of irony - she'll be criticising all those who have been calling Campbell 'dumb'.

Anonymous said...

I think criticism of Campbell is quite appropriate, in this sense:

It doesn't matter that she was too ignorant to understand the implications of blood diamonds at the time. There's no law against being an airhead.
But having been sent for by the International Court, to testify in a war-crime case, she tried to wriggle out of it. Too busy with her own charmed life to care about justice for those slain in Liberia.
How arrogant. How selfish.

Monty

Anonymous said...

Yup, a moral wuckfit to rival my old Aunt Dorothy who thought black people shouldn't be allowed to compete in sport because they had longer legs.

JuliaM said...

"After all it was an African leader who ejected the Asians from Uganda."

Indeed. You'd think she'd remember that one...

"I once pointed this out to internet loon Councillor Terry Kelly..."

Heh! He's on Twitter, it seems. Though never Tweets.

"And in Yaz's next column - and without a hint of irony - she'll be criticising all those who have been calling Campbell 'dumb'."

Whatever pays the bills, is - I suspect - Yaz's byword.