This article was in The Daily Times, it is very interesting it gives you (if you will excuse the pun) food for thought! Do our leaders think about these things when they are lining their pockets while people starve?

The Daily Times, Wednesday, September 1, 2004
> Jika Nkolokosa
>
> THE Bard of Avon once said " the evil that men do lives after
> them, the good is oft interred with their bones." Those  were
> powerful and prophetic words of Mark Anthony during his
> funeral oration for Julius Caesar. Few men live have taken
> heed of those words and most like to believe that somehow
> those words cannot turn out true for them. So they carry on
> with their evil and damn the consequences.
> What evil do men do? In the case of the Roman conspirators,
> it was the cold-blooded murder of Caesar, whose only wrong
> was to be deemed ambitious by some of his countrymen,
> although this same Caesar thrice rejected the kingly crown.
>
> In the case of other men, Adolf Hitler of the Third Reich, it
> was the desire to dominate other people in the name of
> fighting wrongs of the past, it was genocide as a solution to
> perceived wrongs dome to his people; it was eugenics gone
> completely wild. It was, in short, a host of evils, which his
> most fanatical followers took for gospel truth. In the case
> of Pol Pot, the murders  extradinaire of Cambodia it was a
> mania that defies description, but one which causes untold
> suffering. Even people who seemed like benevolent dictators
> like the emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia had their mad
> streak. The Emperor who famously addressed people with the
> royal " we " in the company of his pet dog, was known to keep
> and feed hundreds of lions at his palace while some of his
> subjects were starving.
>
> Talk about leaders who completely tune off when their
> subjects are starving and there are many cruel anecdotes,
> which have been told around the world. Remember the French
> Queen Marie Antoinette who blithely told her courtiers to
> tell the peasants to eat cake when she was told the people
> had no bread to eat. They did not eat cake, for there was
> none. Instead they chopped off her royal head. Strange
> things happen around the touchy subject of food, especially
> where leaders create artificial food shortages to force
> people down their knees, so they can do the leader's bidding.
> This is nothing new in Africa. Zimbabwe was rife with stories
> of people being deliberately starved in Matebeleland to force
> them to toe the ruling Zanu -PF line.
>
> In Liberia and Sierra Leone, food was regularly used as a
> weapon on helpless people. There are many people who cannot
> resist the temptation to use food as a weapon to cow their
> real adversaries or perceived enemies. If Mark Anthony were
> to deliver his funeral oration today, he would no doubt
> maintain that it is evil to use food to force anyone on their
> knees and it is an evil that would live well after them. It
> is uncommon to hear parents threaten their wayward children
> that they would go without food if they did some mischief.
> Perhaps that is forgivable when it seems to serve a purpose,
> but it is not when a whole nation is made to starve for no
> discernible reason. Take it or leave it, starving anyone is
> an intolerable ill and no one should be allowed to commit
> such an ill, at least not with impunity.