'Economist General's Warning: Diamond Purchases Contribute To Massive Human Suffering.'

Recently my partner and I watched the summer's Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster, Blood Diamond, which was available On Demand one sickly, rainy evening. It's a pretty entertaining flick, with the added bonus of leaving its audience with a strong reaction to its realistic portrayals of the diamond industry and the child soldiers whose lives are defined by tragedy ultimately rooted in Western malfeasance. Normally, the line between social commentary and gratuitous exploration of explosions and gunfights is a hard one, but this movie does a decent job of maintaining its compass and sticking to the realistically-horrific facts of the situation in Sierra Leone, as far as I can tell.

One of the most striking aspects of the film was the difference in the way the good guys -- the non-murderous natives -- and the bad guys -- the smugglers, politicians, and mercenaries -- looked at the diamonds. The fact is, beauty isn't that hard to find in this world. Diamonds are pretty but so is the sunset, and that happens every day. So every time the profit-minded characters gazed deeply and fondly at these chunks of shiny rock, expressions of awe pouring from their sneering faces, I inched closer to realizing something, which finally dawned at the end: there's absolutely no effing reason to buy a diamond, ever. Not just for me, but... anyone. Any perceived sense of beauty is about their monetary value. The aspects of the stones that make them worth fawning over or not are about socially constructed notions of wealth and class, not about any actual, genuine measure of beauty.

So, not to be overly harsh, but here's how I see the lie: If you value diamonds, you're a chump being socially controlled. And if you buy them, you're a chump who is paying people to enslave children, murder people en masse, and generally just hurt themselves and everyone around them in the grand tradition of internalized racist Western hegemony, so that you can have your shiny piece of Africa.

Because the fact is, there's no way to tell if a diamond came from a conflict zone. Which means that everyone who buys a diamond is playing the lottery with their souls, and the best part is that you can never know whether or not the person who mined your lump of white death was killed by the very person who kidnapped them from their village and and/or murdered their family.

Cigarette companies are forced by law to warn their customers that they are playing Russian roulette with their health, so why not put other externalities in places where susceptible consumers will see them? How about a sign in any jewelry stores carrying diamonds saying: "Economic General's Warning: Any Diamond Purchased May Have Been Mined By Now-Severed Hands." Or something like that. Granted, we'd have to create the cabinet position of Economist General, but does the idea of the government helping people keep track of industry's external and delayed costs seem so far-fetched? There's quite a precedent for such a thing between the FDA's food labeling and, as I mentioned before, cigarettes.

Jewelers should know that it's bad business to sell products that virtually drip blood, and the diamond industry should be denied the right to present their products as clean until the relevant NGOs agree that the market is free of blood diamonds. And last but not least, consumers should know the facts before we as a society let them decide to purchase diamonds, so that when they go ahead and do it anyway, we know they are terrible people, and rather than showering them with shallow, easy praise, we can shun them and not invite them to cocktail parties.