AIDS in the third world

The AIDS pandemic in the third world isn’t just a medical emergency. It is a cultural emergency as well. Some traditional societies can no longer govern the sexual mores and behaviours of their children as they once did. On the other hand, they do not yet have sufficient marketing and educational infrastructure, life expectancy, childhood survival rates and income to sell and buy safe, equal and small family modern sex.

HIV is an especially devastating curse for detraditionalising societies. However, it is likely nowhere near the same problem in territories governed by Sharya Law, because it just doesn’t tolerate the behaviours that give rise to it. For them, stoning a few miscreants seems a small price to pay for avoiding watching helplessly while a whole generation of grandparents vainly struggles to raise its dead children’s children, who have been born with this appalling disease and are destined to die of it before they grow up.

In a world where a condom can cost a significant percentage of a day’s wages, chastity is the only option and enforcing it uncompromisingly is the only reliable prevention of venereal plague.

It is all very well to talk about human rights, improving the condition of women in traditional society and ‘safe sex’, but if in the transition from traditional to modern you lose much of the generation that will have to make that passage, you risk losing both a viable traditional society and the modern one that one day might have replaced it. What comes out of such a process is an early foretaste and one of the more hideous versions of Post-Modern deconstruction; one especially reserved for those who never really made it into the modern world.