LONDON – A reader of a column of mine on the social consequences of abandoned street children wrote to point out that my prognosis that these little Lords of the Flies would grow up as the new bin Ladens, primed to wreck vengeance on established societies, was mistaken. “Osama bin Laden’s anger did not develop out of poverty,” she argued, “but out of a middle class malaise”. Of course. And so did Che Guevara’s and Stokely Carmichael’s and that of Marx and Lenin. But this does not exclude the undisputable, well-researched, fact that poverty, particularly when it exists in a society of gross inequalities, breeds violence, crime and the urge to deal out deadly punishment on conventional society. The leaders may be educated; the shock troops often come from the underclass. Besides, humanity has never confronted before 100 million youngsters growing up on the street, without parents. Their anger, one...
