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Do They Know It's Christmas Yet?: They took a trip back to 1984 and broke it.

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As most readers already know, the song had nothing to do with AIDS, but with a famine in Ethiopia. Fewer, however, know that the famine was man-made. It turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance was the easy part. Administering aid effectively was far more difficult. Indeed, evidence suggests that tens of millions of dollars of international aid— not from Band Aid, but from other relief initiatives—were siphoned off to fund a paramilitary group of communist rebels. On a chilly October night in England in 1984, Bob Geldof was alone watching TV. As the frontman of the Boomtown Rats, Geldof had tasted fame and success, but his music career was now at a crossroads. The band was in shambles, and Geldof was trying to “manage the decline” as he considered his next step. The “darker political purpose” Gill alludes to is that resettlement allowed Col. Mengistu to more effectively deal with the alliance of rebel groups, including the Eritrean liberation movement and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, who opposed the communist military regime. There was a charming naivete about this song,” Sting said years later, while speaking to Ure. “I think a more sophisticated song wouldn’t have worked. It had to be a kind of Christmas carol, nursery rhyme, simple, idealistic vision. And that’s exactly what it was.”

Such perceptions should not exactly surprise us. Ethiopia’s famine claimed as many as a million lives, according to official estimates (the actual total is likely closer to 400,000); so it’s not unusual that many would associate the land with starvation. At some point, however, I began to love “Do They Know It’s Christmas”—I still get chills every time Bono hits “well tonight thank god it's them instead of you.”Mengistu’s plan might have been effective as a military strategy, but it ravaged the Ethiopian economy. Among the many problems it produced was that it created a surplus of labor in some places and a dearth in others.

Aid is just a stopgap,” Bono pointed out not long after Gill’s book was published. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.” The] biggest toll of the famine was psychological,” Dawit wrote. “None of the survivors would ever be the same. The famine left behind a population terrorized by the uncertainties of nature and the ruthlessness of their government.” Geldof and Ure had created a charity superband called Band Aid (get it?), and they had invited a host of popular British and Irish recording artists to perform the new song, which was written for a specific purpose: to raise money for Ethiopians suffering one of the worst famines in modern history. This formula—peace and expanding economic freedom—has the power to transform Ethiopia like no amount of humanitarian aid can. The song implores us, “Feed the world.” This is precisely what economic freedom has done, sparking the biggest drop in extreme poverty in history.For this reason, Ethiopia “has insisted on charting its own development course.” They expelled the communist regime in 1991. They’ve steadily expanded economic freedom (though the country still has a long way to go), and prosperity has surged as a result. In 2018, Abiy Ahmed ended the country’s 20-year war with Eritrea, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Dawit Wolde-Giorgis, the relief commissioner and the author of Red Tears: Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia, recalled Mengistu describing his strategy with a Maoist parable of draining the sea to capture fish.

World poverty is a burden to be shared, but there is another principle now widely recognized,” Gill writes. “Poor countries will emerge from poverty only when they take full charge of their own destiny.” Do They Know It's Christmas" remains a holiday favorite. But it turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance in Africa was the easy part. What few realize is that the famine was not an accident. Though drought played a role, many have overlooked that the Ethiopian government's military policies were the primary catalyst.Once [Bob] had Midge on board, all Bob’s friends who know his musical limitations would think ‘we know the record will get made now, so it’s not going to embarrass us,” one person familiar with the project observed. A motley crew of the most popular UK performers in the world gathered, including Phil Collins, who arrived with his entire drum set, as well as Sting, George Michael, and others. The entire process of writing, recording, producing, and releasing “Do They Know It's Christmas” was remarkably fast—less than six weeks. This is not to diminish the work of Band Aid. If you visit Korem today, you can still see evidence of its works, including a hospital completed on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famine with proceeds from Geldof and co. The song was recorded in a matter of hours, and Ure spent the next several days producing and editing in his home studio with engineer Rik Walton.

Gill said perhaps the most obvious consequence of the Band Aid campaign was that Ethiopia became a sort of caricature of poverty and starvation in the minds of westerners.The song’s cultural impact—both good and bad—is also hard to overstate, though many smile at the line “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?”

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