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The Story About Live Aid and the Music Community's Hope to Stop starvation in Ethiopia

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posted on Sep, 3 2014 @ 01:48 AM
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a reply to: xuenchen

Geesh...really


You had to go there huh?



posted on Sep, 3 2014 @ 01:51 AM
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a reply to: thesaneone

Huh? Where did you grab that from?



posted on Sep, 3 2014 @ 01:52 AM
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a reply to: GrantedBail

It made me sick too GB. The info is out there. I remember watching Live Aid with my friends when i was just a nipper. There was a real sense of getting something done for these poor people but it was just another scam. Somehow the World looks different after you find out these thing's.



posted on Sep, 3 2014 @ 01:54 AM
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a reply to: GrantedBail

I forgot to tell you, thank you for bringing/keeping the awareness. Your heart is in the right place.




posted on Sep, 3 2014 @ 04:29 AM
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I remember Bob Geldof's famous "give us your f***ing money" line, in his thick Dublin accent. Brilliant.



posted on Sep, 3 2014 @ 01:21 PM
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a reply to: DrunkYogi
But Live Aid wasn't a scam. Saying that is just so completely wrong. Everything about it was genuine and stands as a shining beacon of the goodness that humanity is capable of.

If some of the money was obtained by others using deception later on, while it shows us the other side of humanity, it does not detract from the event itself or the motives that drove it, or the good things that were achieved. Same goes for Band Aid and it's US follow up, USA for Africa, that paved the way between them for the transatlantic main event.

I remember the whole thing, it was magnificent. As for the video being 90 minutes long, Live Aid began at 12:00 noon in the UK and finished at 1:00 am with the US acts continuing until about the same time in Philadelphia, or 5-6:00 am UK time.

We had stamina in my day


edit on 3-9-2014 by waynos because: (no reason given)



posted on Sep, 3 2014 @ 03:22 PM
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I'm really torn. I didn't know anything about Live Aid, and didn't see or hear any of it. I'm perfectly willing to believe that all of the people buying tickets felt united in a great feeling of togetherness and the belief that they were helping. In a very loose sense, Live Aid sounds like an emotional religious experience.

But back to Wiki:


Although a professed admirer of Geldof's generosity and concern, Fox News Channel television host Bill O'Reilly has been critical of the Live Aid producer's oversight of the money raised for starving Ethiopian people, claiming (in June 2005) that much of the funds were siphoned off by Mengistu Haile Mariam and his army (which included the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front). This coalition battled, at the time against Derg. O'Reilly believes that charity organizations, operating in aid-receiving countries, should control donations, rather than possibly corrupt governments.

Arguing that Live Aid accomplished good ends while inadvertently causing harm at the same time, David Rieff gave a presentation of similar concerns in The Guardian at the time of Live 8. Tim Russert, in an interview on Meet the Press shortly after O'Reilly's comments, addressed these concerns to Bono. Bono responded that corruption, not disease or famine, was the greatest threat to Africa, agreeing with the belief that foreign relief organizations should decide how the money is spent. On the other hand, Bono said that it was better to spill some funds into nefarious quarters for the sake of those who needed it, than to stifle aid because of possible theft.


Yes, Live Aid did some good things, but there is a fair amount of evidence in David Rieff's mind that harm was done as well. A little quick background. Ethiopia was taken over by Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1974, and officially became Communist in 1984. The ruling body was called the Dergue (Committee). MSF is the acronym, in French, for Doctors Without Borders.


Of all the NGOs, only the founding (French) section of MSF refused to go along with the pro-Dergue consensus. Once expelled from Ethiopia, however, MSF France was free to talk about what it knew of forced deportations. "We are witnessing the biggest deportation since the Khmer Rouge genocide," said MSF's president, Claude Malhuret, in late 1985.

For MSF, the decision of aid agencies, UN institutions and donor governments to help a totalitarian project like the Ethiopian resettlement programme was an exercise in deadly compassion. As Claude Malhuret put it, Ethiopia demonstrated that it had become imperative to "clarify the complex relations that humanitarian action forms with a totalitarian regime; to mark out the indistinct but very real limit beyond which aid to victims was unwittingly transformed into support to their executioners."


www.theguardian.com...

I applaud the enthusiasm and the good feeling, but it has to be coupled with practical policies and planning to achieve it's best effect.



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