The AIDS Plague in Africa Jude Wanniski May 18, 2000

To: Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Africa’s AIDS Holocaust

I’ve been meaning to write you these last several weeks since I saw you on tv upon your return from Africa. You have discovered the AIDS holocaust, which has been underway in the Dark Continent for more than 20 years. As I recall, the HIV virus began in Africa and has been its principal export to the rest of the world in the years since. It has been my opinion for the last 15 years that it is Africa’s way of paying us back for our export to them of the economic policies of the International Monetary Fund. It was at least 20 years ago that I began calling the IMF the “Evil Empire,” in that most of the poverty and war in the world followed in its tracks. It is because Africa is at the very bottom of the world socio-political pyramid that it is being crushed in this manner.

When men are unable to care for their families by putting calories on the table, they tend to do ugly things. If there is sufficient economic contraction, men either become criminals or warriors. They will steal from their neighbors or join together in war to kill enough of their neighbors to reach a new caloric equilibrium. When men cannot be men in this civilized fashion, they become animals. This is the net result of the IMF policies throughout the world. In one way or another, by forcing insane economic policies down the throats of the governments of the developing world, they push people into pre-civilized conditions. In Africa, a great number of men prove their manhood now by having sex with as many women as they can in the course of a year. There can be little resistance to this form of sexual exhibitionism, and of course it is the primary source of the HIV virus and AIDS plague. This was explained to me a decade ago by a German doctor, a woman, who lived in Johannesburg in the late 1980s and treated AIDS patients. She finally gave up, realizing there was no end to the plague. She married a Canadian who I happened to know, which is how I got this story. I’ve heard it many times since.

My efforts at making changes in the IMF have been without success, of course. The big banks in New York and London – Citigroup, Goldman, Sachs, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, etc., have vested interests in the international financial institutions. They provide a “safety net” for bad loans, you see, as a form of corporate socialism. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan knows this is what goes on. So do the candidates for high office. But that is the way it is. They do not think they can afford to change the way this dirty business is done. It is far easier for them to say that Africans are that way because they are African, and there is nothing else that can be done. Of course, they are shamefully covering up their fundamental complicity in this ugly game. The Wall Street Journal editorial page once or twice a year grumbles. Once or twice a year Jack Kemp complains. But the big guys are in control of both political parties, so that is that.

I’ve done this with a great many people in your position, offering to explain how to turn this around, so there might be some way of saving Africa before it is a total wasteland. I will even come into NYC and take you to a fancy dinner and pay for the calories. Or if there is a strict rule against UN Ambassadors being taken to dinner, you can take me. After all these years of trying to find a way to stop the IMF holocaust, I will not permit a strict rule to stand in the way of solution.