Kate's "Humanitarianism" Demonstrated Towards Angolans During The Marburg Crisis

In Which Eeyore Answers a Question and Asks a Question
About Catherine McMillen's Proposed Genocide Against Africans

Thanks to Warren Kinsella's comment, this has come to my attention from the website of Catherine "Kate" McMillan regarding the recent outbreak of the deadly Marburg Virus in Angola:

The Most Politically Incorrect Question You'll Read All Day

"Is there a point where we are allowed to stop feeling sympathy for these people, seal off the borders and just let nature take its course?"

(click on screen capture to enlarge)

Eeyore Responds Thusly

The link of "these people" is at:

I'd like to answer Kate's question, but it's really more than one question. There's three parts. One is about being "allowed" to stop feeling sympathy. One is about sealing off "the borders". And One is about just letting "nature take its course."

My answers to this three part question are yes, no and yes, but only if you're a suicidal idiot and also a genocidal villian.

Yes, you can feel or not feel sympathy or any other emotion at your own discretion. After all, who can stop you?

No, you cannot seal off "the borders". Whether you mean Canada's borders, Angola's borders or the "borders" of all of Africa, there is no feasible way to halt the spread of this virus by any of those methods as I shall explain shortly. Relying on partially enforceable quarantines at international borders instead of medical treatments and improvements to sanitation would very likely result in the spread of the Marburg Virus to many other countries including your home town and the death of millions of people including possibly you.

And yes, the human race could just "let nature take its course" and let the Marburg Virus spread. Even with the most strenuous attempts to quarantine a country or a whole continent, this could result in the same sort of consequences, namely a global epidemic and millions of deaths, including possibly you. The briefest examination of the practical difficulties of such a quarantine shows that only an idiot would think it would stop the spread of the Marburg Virus beyond Angola or even stop its entry into North America and other continents.

Furthermore, even if your quarantine suggestion worked exactly as you imagine it would and it could make Angola's thousands of kilometers of borders and coastline magically impermeable so that not even one person could pass through carrying the virus, it would still result in the deaths of thousands, if not millions of people, but your plan's intended result has the dubious "advantage" that all the deaths would be in Angola. Since there are, in fact, over 13 million people living in Angola, your plan's intended result could still result in millions of infected people and millions of deaths. It is hard to see how this result could be desirable.

Someone who hated the whole human race and wanted the virus to prosper and mankind to die would have a reason to advocate this. But clearly Kate does value the lives of some people, hence the value of a quarantine to protect the lives of those whom she would prefer remain alive. Another viewpoint consistent with Kate's proposal is the view that the deaths of some large groups of people are desirable while the deaths of other groups are not. This could be motivated by, for example, racism against Africans or a bizarre hatred of Angolans in particular or any other strange collectivist hatred.

It is essentially a genocidal view to advocate or take actions intended to cause the death large numbers of people who are members of a particular nation or race. I do see that the article Kate linked to referred to attacks against foreign World Health Organization (WHO) personnel by some people in Uige in nothwestern Angola. Perhaps she thinks that those people in Uige are the ones who should suffer, but there is no "border" around them and only them. What she advocates is a genocidal scheme which, if it were possible to implement it, would likely result in suffering and death throughout Angola and not just among those who whose behavior may be objectionable. Notably, those same people Kate seems to have a problem with appear to have attacked WHO personnel because they feared they were infected with the Marburg Virus and were spreading it. The Angolans were enforcing a coercive quarantine of their own somewhat like the one Kate advocates. Ironic, no?

That is my answer to Kate's three-part question. Before I ask Kate a question of my own, let me explain why an attempt to "seal off the borders" would not stop the spread of the Marburg Virus.

The practice of quarantine can be effective, but medical quarantines generally involve separating infected patients from contact with any non-infected people except when careful precautions are taken to prevent spread of the disease. Having hospital rooms or a part of a hospital that is quarantined can be very effective. Having individual infected people, their homes and other buildings quarantined can be useful in stopping the spread of a disease. The word quarantine was invented to describe the practice of having ships arriving from plague-infested ports anchor in the harbor at Venice for forty days until it was clear whether or not the disease was onboard. In more recent times, it has meant the isolation of arriving ships, passengers and cargoes. In the recent SARS epidemic, it involved temporarily quarantining specific individuals known to have SARS and anyone who had recent contact with them. This is what quarantine actually refers to. There have been lots of doomsday scenarios, especially in fiction, where some biological weapon or other dread disease is wiping out the human race and entire countries are quarantined. This has never actually happened.

There is only one example I can find in all of history of an attempt to use troops patrolling an international border to prevent the spread of a plague. This was in 1656 when Rome (then an independent country) attempted to prevent anyone from entering Roman territory from Naples where the plague had recently killed 100,000 people. Note that the Romans did not attempt to surround Naples and prevent anyone from entering or leaving. That would be the sort of thing Kate advocates and it would be much harder to impose such a quarantine on an entire uncooperative foreign country. Instead, the Romans merely attempted to patrol their own border and keep the plague out of their own country. Despite the best efforts of the Roman army, the effort failed. The plague spread to Rome despite the troops at the border and 10,000 Romans died of the plague.

A town of even a few thousand people generally survives economically by means of commerce involving the shipment of goods and the travel of people to other places. This is even more true of a whole country. If trade is halted, people inside and outside of the quarantine will be bankrupted or even face starvation. For this reason alone, there are usually many people who will want to make exceptions to the quarantine or just break it. But an even more powerful reason is that people who are not sick often do not want to remain in close proximity to people who have contracted a deadly contagious disease, particularly one dangerous enough to have prompted a quarantine. Therefore, those who are not sick or who think they are not sick will have a good reason to believe their lives may depend on getting out of the quarantined area. It is very hard to stop large numbers of determined people from moving if they believe their lives depend on it. Even threatening to kill them is not much of a deterrent if they fear the disease will kill them if they stay. If there is any exodus of people out of a quarantined area, it is highly likely that at least one of the people leaving will be infected and the disease will be carried out of the quarantine.

One fundamental principle of human relations that seems to perpetually elude the advocates of coercion is that people respond to threats and violence with violence of their own. Do not imagine a quarantine as a crowd of helpless civilians trying to travel down a road that is blocked by a checkpoint with barbed wire and armed soldiers. No. Imagine the soldiers in the dark on a rainy night trying to patrol thousands of kilometers of wilderness while thousands of armed refugees attempt to sneak out or fight their way out.

Little children sometimes learn about world geography by putting together puzzles where each piece is a country. In this imaginary child's puzzle world, the lines on the puzzle map are not imaginary invisible lines across the landscape of the Earth. They are, instead, the places where discrete entities begin and end. You can pick up a puzzle piece of France and put it next to Spain if you wish or next to Angola and the place where the two touch is the border. The puzzle piece borders are not imaginary lines on the Earth, they are real edges of physical objects. The France puzzle piece is a separate physical object, usually a different color from the others that are supposed to be nearby. In this view, Angola is a thing, an object, a puzzle piece that is a unified whole, an object that is of the same color and consistency throughout and is a completely different object from any other puzzle piece. Real countries and real borders are something else entirely. That's obvious when we think about it, but some people still think of countries like puzzle pieces instead of what they really are.

Somewhere along the dusty roads between the villages with thatched roofs surrounded by thatched barriers to keep wild animals and intruders out, in the bushlands and plains of the Etosha Pan where the lions and hyenas hunt, there is an unmarked spot not noticeably different from any other. If you stood there with a GPS device, the longitude and latitude information from satellites in space would confirm that your location is approximately the same as the invisible border between the part of Ovamboland that is claimed as southern Angola and the much larger part that is part of Namibia. You cannot find any actual precise border because GPS and other navigation systems have a margin of error. There is no fence, no line on the ground, no guards or checkpoints at that spot, nothing like that. And there is certainly no seam there between tectonic plates or puzzle pieces.

In the dry bush country of Ovamboland in southern Africa, the people of the Ovambo tribe have lived there for a long time with their own ways and their own language. They very recently fought a long and gruesome guerrilla war to free themselves from occupation by the white racist soldiers of the South African Defense Force and rule by the government of the Republica of South Africa. Out in Ovamboland, there are small monuments to the "heroes" who fought for independence. Many of the Ovambo men still have AK-47 assault rifles and RPG-7 rocket launchers and have many years of combat experience in how to defeat a high-tech modern army. They are the veterans of SWAPO, the South West African Peoples Organization, which did, in fact defeat the South African Defense Force, a very sophisticated, high-tech, experienced and well trained modern army. One of the main things SWAPO got very good at over the years was smuggling arms, supplies and people from Angola into Namibia.

This is just part of the 5,198 kilometers of Angolan border that Kate proposes to "seal off". Imagine for a moment trying to really do that. The term "seal off" brings to mind sealing a ziploc bag or something. Or an airtight seal like on bulkhead doors between compartments on a seagoing ship. But there are no bulkhead doors between countries and no handy ziploc edges. There is nothing to "seal" between countries. What is really meant by "closing" or "sealing" an international border is to send men with guns to threaten or shoot people who are traveling from one place to another.

Kate neglected to mention the mechanics of her proposal. She didn't mention the men with guns at all, so she handily avoided informing us exactly who they would be. The Angolan army? Do not imagine for a second that they would be willing to even try to assist in Kate's plan to sacrifice their whole country. Even if they were willing, they are incapable of stopping all traffic across their borders. Who, then? The military forces of neighboring nations? They aren't capable of it. Their willingness is also doubtful.

Take Ovamboland for example yet again. Since most of the SWAPO guerrillas who fought for the independence of Namibia and a very large portion of the population of Namibia are members of the Ovambo tribe who live near the Angolan border, it should be no surprise if the majority of the soldiers of Namibia are members of the Ovambo tribe who come from the border region. The Marburg Virus outbreak is actually in the north of Angola, far from Ovamboland. If, somehow, the Namibian government could be convinced, bribed or bullied into ordering its army to patrol the border with Angola, can anyone seriously believe that they would not be willing to make exceptions to the quarantine for members of their own Ovambo tribe who live on the other side of the border and are in many cases their uncles, nieces and cousins? Would they turn them back at gunpoint to face suffering and death even though they almost certainly have not been exposed to the virus yet? Would they shoot their own people to stop them from coming to visit their cousins when the threat is yet distant? Would they shoot their own cousins to prevent them from saving their lives if the situation gets more dire? If you think they would, you don't understand tribalism in Africa.

I predict that if the Namibian government orders the border closed that there will be stretches of border many kilometers long, probably hundreds of kilometers long, with no guards and where there are guards, anyone not showing obvious symptoms will be able to bribe their way through. Relatives of the guards would be allowed through for free, no questions asked.

A similar situation exists with the other three nations that border Angola. So who will be the sealers who will "seal off" the borders of Angola in Kate's fantasy? She's blithely talking about 5,198 kilometers of land borders through some tremendously remote and inhospitable terrain. In addition, Angola has 1,600 kilometers of coastline on the Atlantic Ocean. Kate is apparently from Canada. So who is the "we" who she thinks can "seal off" the Angolan border. Does she mean the Canadian military?

Canada only has 19,300 regular army soldiers. Militia and Canadian Rangers comprise another 17,500 troops. So that's 36,800 soldiers, total. Angola, by the way, has about 100,000 regular army troops plus another 15,000 paramilitary police. So if Canada actually sent every single soldier it has and left none to defend Canada, the Canadians would be outnumbered three to one. As if that's not bad enough, very few of the Canadian troops have any combat experience and they would be operating in a foreign country with supply lines thousands of miles long while the Angolan military consists primarily of men with years of recent combat experience and they would be operating on terrain they know very well.

Does she think the Canadian army is so much better than the Angolans that the war would be short? Don't count on it. The only sort of war the Angolans know how to fight is guerrilla war, the sort that is giving the United States so much trouble in Iraq today. Angola has only had peace for three years out of the past three decades. The other twenty seven years were non-stop war. There are veterans of at least six different guerrilla armies in Angola, the MPLA, the FNLA, UNITA, FLEC, FDC and SWAPO. The Angolan army today is basically the MPLA renamed. They have an arsenal of Soviet made weapons and they have defeated two modern, European style armies, the Portuguese army and the South African army.

How many troops would be needed to even begin to stop people and the Angolan soldiers and guerrillas from crossing the imaginary borderline? And where would you put them? Would the troops be on the Angolan side of the border? That's an invasion, not a quarantine. Deploying foreign troops to Angola against the wishes of the Angolans would mean war with Angola. Deploying foreign troops on the other side of the borders to stop all Angolan travel and trade would still mean war with Angola and probably with some or all of the four neighboring countries as well. The number of troops that would be needed to make a serious attempt to close Angola's borders would be large enough that any of Angola's neighbors which permitted such a deployment would basically be giving up their sovereignty to foreign occupation.

Whether foreign troops were deployed to Angola or its neighbors, the Angolans would be unlikely to cooperate in such a scheme and would be more than a match for Canada. There is really only one country on Earth that has enough military forces to seriously consider such a move, considering the vast distances that separate Angola from most of the world's major armies. That one country is, of course, the United States. The U.S. presently has the largest military and also has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in building up the capability to deploy their military forces anywhere on Earth. That sounds good in theory until one gives the notion the briefest consideration and recalls that the U.S. has over 150,000 troops deployed in Iraq and is considering increasing the size of the U.S. army because there aren't enough soldiers to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and maintain all the other bases and "commitments" the U.S. has already. The U.S. has already decided to withdraw tens of thousands of troops from Korea and Germany and to "reorganize" its forces so it will have more infantry available for occupation duty. They have forbidden thousands of soldiers to leave the military even when their term is up. They have increased re-enlistment bonuses and launched new recruiting drives and STILL they don't have enough troops to even maintain their presence in Iraq without severe strains. The U.S. estimates the guerrilla force in Iraq at 20,000, most of whom had no experience at all in guerrilla warfare until the war broke out. How many troops do you suppose the U.S. can spare right now to fight over 100,000 more experienced guerrillas in Angola? My guess is none, and certainly not enough, even if they wanted to.

How many soldiers, how many ships, how many aircraft would you need to have to try to make sure that not even one infected person left Angola? After all, if even one gets out, you might as well not bother with the quarantine in the first place.

Fishing boats from Angola routinely go out to sea. Near borders, fishing boats from Namibia and the Congo are fishing in the same areas. They could easily transfer cargoes or people in exchange for money. When Namibian and Congolese fishing boats return to their ports, anyone who got onboard from an Angolan fishing boat would have escaped the quarantine. Would you want navy ships to stop all fishing boats from putting to sea in all of Angola? Try to prevent Angolan fishing boats from getting near any other boats? Note please that one of the busiest international shipping routes in the world runs directly along Angola's 1,600 kilometer coast as ships from all over the world go to and from the passage around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. If those ships continue to pass that way, there is the possibility of ships or boats from Angola coming out to meet them, and people from Angola boarding them covertly or for money. Angolans who live abroad outside the proposed quarantine might bring ships to that coast for the express purpose of evacuating their friends and relatives. Would you try to stop all traffic on one of the world's busiest shipping lanes? Delay it while every ship is searched? How well can you search thousands of large ships to be absolutely sure that none of the crew are really Angolans, that nobody is hiding anywhere on the ship, not even in a cargo crate in the hold?

The Canadian Maritime Command (Navy) only has 18 warships, including both submarines. I don't think they are up to the job even if, in a fit of mental incapacity, the Prime Minister of Canada sent them to do what Kate proposes.

There is also 1.2 million square kilometers of land area in Angola where any number of aircraft could take off and land on existing runways, improvised dirt landing strips or even roads. Helicopters can land and take off from any small patch of ground and need no runways at all. Flying at low altitude to avoid radar, aircraft would have their choice of spots to leave Angola anywhere along its 6,798 kilometers of land and sea boundaries. Carrying supplies in for desperate people or smuggling desperate people out would be more profitable the more effectively Angola was "sealed off" from the rest of the world. The Marburg Virus is not transmitted by air, but only by bodily fluids. So long as passengers were transported in a separate compartment from the crew and the passenger area was thoroughly cleaned, there would be no risk that the aircraft crew would catch the disease even if they were carrying passengers they knew were infected.

If you do not have the ability to detect and intercept ALL aircraft entering or leaving Angola, even those that fly below normal radar, at night in bad weather when visual observation is impossible, then the whole quarantine is worse than useless.

Then there is the Cabinda Enclave. This place is considered territory of Angola, but it doesn't border the rest of Angola. It does, however, border two other countries, both named Congo (formerly the French Congo and the Belgian Congo, more recently the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The Cabinda Enclave has its own coastline, significant oil wells and gold mines and not one but two of its own guerilla movements (FLEC and the FDC). With an armed guerrilla organization (FLEC) in control of the gold mines at last report, they are extremely likely to use force to get gold shipments across the border to continue to finance their operations. That risks contamination of other countries, but why should FLEC care about that if they were consigned to death by a quarantine?

Then there are the offshore oil platforms owned by Chevron and ELF. Shut them down? Risk refugees showing up by boat and infecting the oil crew? What about oil platforms that are in the territorial waters of nearby countries? They are close enough to Angola or the Cabinda Enclave that refugees in small boats could reach them, but they aren't even Angolan territory. After the oil company lobbyists finish talking to their governments (such as France and the United States) will you still be able to shut them down?

Where does Kate think the troops, ships and aircraft would come from? Perhaps Kate is counting on a multinational coalition. We can imagine, for the sake of argument, that the leader of one country might be demented enough to share Kate's view and even a whole country blindly following such a leader, but an international coalition of nations all led by genocidal racist idiots is not even credible enough to be worth a hypothetical scenario. It's not going to happen. The nations of the world will send doctors, money and assistance. They're already doing that. They may quarantine travelers arriving in their countries from Angola and wherever else the Marburg Virus strikes, but they aren't going to do what Kate is talking about.

In fact, not even one nation is going to attempt what she is talking about. Kate herself probably wouldn't even be willing to go along for the ride on a mission as long, difficult and dangerous as she advocates for unspecified gigantic armies, navies and air forces to undertake.

Or perhaps it wasn't Angola's borders she wanted to "seal off". Could it be she meant all of Africa? In that case, multiply the size of the problem, the number of troops needed, the number of guerrillas opposing it and the other difficulties by a factor of at least twenty.

Did she, by chance, mean only that Canada should "seal off" its borders and leave the whole rest of the world to be ravaged by the Marburg Virus? I think I made it clear that Canada's 36,800 army troops (including militia and rangers) are not enough to "seal off" the 5,198 kilometers of Angola's land borders. It should be fairly obvious that those same 36,800 soldiers are not capable of "sealing off" Canada's much longer 8,895 kilometers of land borders, either.

Does anyone care to imagine the consequences for Canada if all trade with the United States were cut off abruptly? Not just a steel tariff, not just a softwood lumber tariff, but a complete and total cutoff of all trade. That's what it means to "seal off" a border as Kate recommends (though who's border she wanted sealed is unclear). If you're going to let cargo through, you might as well not have a quarantine. We've all been told for years that you can't catch HIV, the "AIDS virus" from saliva or sweat. Now, we're talking about a different virus. The same doctors who tell us that you can't catch HIV from sweat are saying that one of the main ways that people are catching the Marburg Virus is from touching people who already have it. Just touching someone is enough. It CAN be transmitted by sweat and saliva. Sweat from the arms of the guy who loaded a box onto a truck can infect the guy in Canada who offloads the box. You can't count on stopping the Marburg Virus from crossing Canada's land borders without stopping all commerce across those borders. Of course, if that really happened and people didn't break the law and the quarantine out of sheer economic desperation, then Canada would have an economic catastrophe worse than the great depression. If Kate meant Canada's borders would be sealed, that's what inevitably would follow if Canada were capable of actually doing it.

On the other hand, Kate is one of those strange Canadian conservatives who at times speaks of "we" and somehow means the United States. And of course, if the United States decided to "seal off" its borders... there's only two. The Mexican border and the Canadian border. If the Americans attempted to "seal off" their borders, that would also cut off trade between the U.S. and Canada and result in the economic catastrophe for Canada that I was just talking about. The only difference is that the U.S. has more ability to actually do it.

Now that I have answered all three parts of Kate's ridiculous question and taken a look at why it is ludicrous to consider trying to "seal off" long international borders as a solution to the Marburg Virus outbreak, I will ask her a question of my own.

Kate asked:

Is there a point where we are allowed to stop feeling sympathy for these people, seal off the borders and just let nature take its course?


I could ask who Kate imagines is not allowing her to stop feeling sympathy.

I could ask whether she ever actually felt any sympathy for dying Africans.

I could ask if she has ever even heard of Angola before.

Instead I will ask something more relevant to Canadian politics. This is my two-part question:

Kate, who in the Conservative Party of Canada thinks you are cool and who at the Western Standard wants you to be one of their writers?

Wait, I have been asked by a representative of the Liberal Party of Canada to ask you one more thing: will you please run for parliament as a Conservative?