The NGO Menace

A Trabi.

The NGO menace has become a tired theme, but I don’t care. I am going to write about the NGO menace anyway. I am going to write a whole post about it, and it is going to be a long post. And I am going to do this mainly because I have been reading Björn Harms’s new book on The NGO Complex, and his book has filled my head with thoughts.

My original plan was to review The NGO Complex as part of my general campaign to bring book reviews back to the plague chronicle, but I realise now that a review is the wrong format for what I have to say. I don’t want to discuss, as Harms does, the minutiae of NGO funding, the specifics of their activism and their manifold individual absurdities. Instead, I want to outline my own broad theory of the NGO phenomenon. I want to explain what NGOs are, what they are for, what they get up to, why they are bad and finally also why they are so profoundly dumb. What follows will be unburdened by citations and overmany specifics, although it is inspired in loose ways by Harms’s observations and also by a great many other things I have been reading these past few weeks.