Blood Diamonds

It may be beating a dead horse to talk about blood diamonds except people are still buying them, the artifical custom of the diamond engagement ring persists, and the average person does not feel blinded by rage when they see a commercial for diamonds. Also, you may be wondering what sparked this posting. I didn't just see the movie Blood Diamond and have my eyes opened to this tragedy and rush out to tell the ten people who accidentally come to this blog every day. I have been pissed about this injustice since I was a little high school hoodlum but I recently stumbled on my notes from last summer regarding this topic and I stumbled on this article on Fark.

That article recounts an older story regarding how the value of diamonds was artificially inflated and bullshit symbolism was imbued into the diamond. It recounts how a common stone with little intrinsic value was kept from the market in order to artificially create a low supply while some clever advertisers associated the diamond with eternity and love and forced every man in western society from then on to spend two months salary on a worthless crystal of carbon for fear of sending the wrong message to the woman he loves. Fortunately, for their trouble, those advertisers will have to crouch in the desert of sodomites for all eternity. Unfortunately love isn't enough to overcome the demands of consumerism in our culture, or informed women who truly loved their future husbands would insist on not wearing murder on their hands. They would not be able to look at their enggement ring and see the love of their husband but would instead witness blood flowing from the stone on their ring, the blood of the children who died in the mines and the men and women who were murdered when a new militia came and took over the mine.

Remember those anti-drug adds just after 9-11 where the Bush administration and John Ashcroft were trying to capitalize on nationalism in the war on drugs? They implied a connection within the drugs trade wherein money American teenagers spent on pot went into the coffers of the terrorists who had attacked us. The same is true of the diamond trade. If you buy diamonds, you are putting money into Osama Bin Laden's pockets.

What about the Kimberly process you ask? What are you some lobbyist for the diamond industry? For the rest of you, the Kimberly process is the method the diamond industry created to pretend they were doing something about blood diamonds as a public relations scheme. The process is entirely voluntary, completely self-administered with no accountability, and there are large financial disincentives to poor african countries to conform rigorously to the process's own loose guidelines. Given the fact that emeralds and rubies come from conflict ridden regions in Colombia and Burma respectively, and the gem industry turns a blind eye to the suffering inflicted on people in those areas, it is unsuprising that their own method of self monitoring the origins of diamonds is far from robust. This is what it looks like when evil people try to do good but can't stop thinking of their own greed.