The ICC: easing the white man's burden one African leader at a time

The Globe and Mail has been finding plenty of room for articles lauding the International Criminal Court's conviction of Charles Taylor this week.

A few days ago Lorna Dueck portrayed the Court as doing God's work in an item entitled Liberia proves the power of prayer.

Today they've got Erna Paris putting a secular but no less self-congratulatory spin on things in an article called One step closer to a humanitarian vision.

Whereas Paris invokes Immanuel Kant and Dueck the God of Abraham, both writers make one thing perfectly clear; Africa's salvation lies beyond her borders in the hands of the Nations of Virtue, that Western aggregation of capitalist democracies who know what's best for the rest of the planet.

What the Globe and Mail won't find room for are articles critical of the blessings the Nations of Virtue continue to bestow on the Dark Continent.

For example, in a beautiful irony, the ICC shares its home base of The Hague with the world headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell. Volumes have been written about Shell's rape of Nigeria, but don't expect to read about it in the Globe. Shell alone takes more money out of Nigeria than the Nations of Virtue provide in foreign aid for the entire continent.

And don't expect to read about American trainers training the Ugandan Army to train Congolese rebels so that the world's longest-running and deadliest war since WWII can be kept smoldering.

Nor should you expect to see Ugandan President Museveni in the docket at the ICC anytime soon, because while he is no friend of human rights he is very much a friend of the Nations of Virtue.

Unlike the hapless former dictator of Libya, who in the end learned that those friends he had bought in the West, friends like Blair and Sarkozy, were prepared to turn on him the moment a better price could be arranged.

The list of our accomplishments in Africa runs from slavery through colonialism to the neo-colonialism exemplified by the ICC.

It's a shameful history, but don't expect to read about it in the Globe and Mail.