Evaluate a Speaker. what is the viewpoint and claim and reasons? 13 POINTS Ben Affleck: In Congo last year, I visited a home for orphaned street kids who were terribly mangled and disfigured by polio
This is the twenty-first century, and Eastern Congo is medically a medieval throwback to a time when the most pernicious diseases ran roughshod over humanity, and most medical institutions, NGOs, and foundations are not breaking down the doors to the Kivus to get in there and make it better.
Who is breaking down the door? Who has been inside doing the hard, unglamorous work in terrible conditions is the International Medical Corps. And I've seen where they are living and I can tell you, they are not doing it for the money.
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You will hear the voices of critics who will tell you, "Americans don't care about Africa. Africans are too different from us to elicit real empathy. It's too far away. We're a self-absorbed country that just wants to eat fast food and watch reality television, and in a down economy, no one's going to give money to those who are suffering because people feel like they have less for themselves than they used to."
Those voices are convincing, but sophistry always is.
At the turn of the last century, King Leopold's murderous colony in Congo was in the process of claiming ten million lives, all under the auspices of a humanitarian mission called the Congo Free
The first man to report these terrible abuses, to make them public was George Washington Williams, a minister, a veteran, a politician, and an American, a man who used the term "crimes against humanity" long before Nuremberg.
Huge numbers of Americans joined groups, sent money, and agitated on behalf of the Congolese. And due to enormous pressure, King Leopold was forced to sell his state and finally end his brutal regime.
This movement was begun by an American and fueled by Americans, who did care about Africa, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was in its ascendancy, when they weren't able to see televised images of suffering, and when real wealth in the United States was far, far below what it is today