In the Heart Of Darkness

A good friend said the other day he does not like the saying "one gets what one deserves", especially when brutal, unfair violence is sort of accepted with this saying: A husband killing his wife becauce "the bitch deserved it", or others saying "she deserved it because she did not leave him". A kid being tortured because she deserved it - she must pay for the sins of earlier generations, or maybe she was born in the wrong culture, and so on.

So many people get totally what they do not deserve: they are suffering from violence, torture, just anything a human being can imagine and even worse.



And we, in the rich Europe, get a lot of what we certainly are not worth of. "Goods", as they are called, even when they do good for no-one, or "products". Whatever you call the well-designed jars and boxes, filled with something that will soon be crap anyway.

These gloomy thoughts took over my mind as I am now under this weekend working at the stupidest fair I have ever been in. Anyone with a bit of sanity would become crazy here. This is all about women's "products for good life".

Cheating and crap, I say. Like over-priced cosmetics; "natural vitamins" (but get them from food and all of them are "natural"), "energy" or "balanced" treatments that promise much but most likely do not deliver (except money for the salesmen); memberships for gyms, the shortest term to get committed to being a year (now that is a clever business con. They sell memberships for lazy but hopeful and easily agitated people, and they can sell much more than actually would ever fit into their fitness dumps). And so on. Get the ugly picture.

I am here with The Books, of course. And I wish I was at home, playing with Funnybunny (who is briefly visiting her grandparents, and that's a really good thing, anyway).

* * * * *

A couple of days before I came across this mind-blowing piece in the Independent:

The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a "tribal conflict" in "the Heart of Darkness". It isn't. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by "armies of business" to seize the metals that make our 21st-century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.

So, is it because You are worth it? Read Johann Hari's article How We Fuel Africa's Bloodiest War and make up your mind.¨


The Congo River, the flow of which is the biggest after Amazon.


Please find more about the exciting rainforests and peoples - like Pygmies - of Congo here.