certain circles in the West (I will not say leftists do not drop in hard right wing agenda) for all what happened and happens in Third world are pointing to the West. But it is wrong. For each country of the third world it is much better to look at their own strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities which has on the road to development than blaming the West for the miserable destiny.
The West may not be responsible for "
all" that is wrong with the Third World but they are for
a lot of it, and in many cases, their significant involvement has done more harm than good.
1.) One of biggest problems is that in places like Africa and Asia (including the Middle East), for centuries or even thousands of years, there had already been intra-continental fighting between national/ethnic/religious groups with longstanding grievances. The West conquered and colonized these places and either took advantage of and exploited the sectarian differences or ignored the differences and treated the conquered peoples as one. Worse, certain groups were favored over others and the allocation of resources were unequally distributed which exacerbated already existing tensions. And then during major political upheavals like WW1, WW2 and decolonization, there were many "arbitrary" borders constructed that didn't take into consideration the prior grievances and disputes amongst the peoples on the land and unsurprisingly, all hell broke loose, eg. Jews/Palestinians, Hausa-Fulani/Igbo, Hutu/Tutsi, Sunni/Shia/Kurds, etc....
2.) Let's remember that while Europe was still ensnared in the Dark Ages, there had been the Mayans, the Kingdom of Pagan, the Ghana Empire, the Incas, the Mali Empire, and don't even get me started on the kingdoms of India and dynasties in China--my point is, for most of the peoples who currently occupy the "Third World" or are considered to be developing nations, they were not culturally and economically impoverished pre-European Colonialism and Imperialism. No, they had long established their own artisans, monuments, currencies, trade routes, etc... and
evidently were not desolate, "lazy," colored people--all propaganda used by Europeans to justify their disenfranchisement by the way. Resource rich Latin America, Africa and Asia have been robbed and plundered for centuries by the West; and the pillaged resources weren't just limited to the likes of sugar, cotton, gold, timber, coal, oil, etc... but also human capital via slave labor. Many peoples were forced into artificial, long lasting, generational poverty because their lands and resources were overexploited and completely depleted to the benefit of the Europeans and not the native peoples. For example, Britain utterly undermined India's economic potential--India went from exporting manufactured goods to providing raw materials to Britain, that for almost a century, amounted to the yearly equivalent of sixty million Indian workers. India didn't become poor on its own. And this trend took place consistently all over the Third World.
3.) And I just want to quickly address the slavs, who seem to be quite conservative, nationalistic and anti-left around here. Even Eastern Europe owes a lot of its current situation to Western European machinations. The very fact that the word slave is derived from slav is painfully telling. Whether from being worked to death in Charlemagne's mines, to being sold to the Muslims by Germany, France and Italy in order to revitalize themselves after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, to being specifically targeted for extermination by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, slavs have had a hard time. And if that hadn't been bad enough, slavs then became the victims of Soviet expansion (colonialism and imperialism by another name). So, because Eastern European slavs have fared pretty badly over the past millennium or so, does that mean that they are inferior peoples meant only for servitude? Or that they were victimized continuously by various oppressive elements to the point where they were stagnated as a people? Philosopher Friedrich Engels once wrote concerning Irish treatment at the hands of the English: "How often have the Irish started out to achieve something, and every time they have been crushed politically and industrially. By consistent oppression they have been artificially converted into an utterly impoverished nation." Something to think about.
Far East countries through appropriate strategies and hard work managed to escape initially unfavorable conditions (without thinking that blame West) and they show that path is possible.
1.) Far East Asians are hard working and everyone else in the Third Word is simply lazy? Thanks for signaling the oldest and most unsubstantiated claim by Western Imperialists to date. Again, pre-European Colonialism and Imperialism, the "Third World," much of which is located in warm climates and inhabited by brown people, had flourishing kingdoms and civilizations. So, out of nowhere, and of their own volition, they somehow became slothful and lazy? Mind you, these are the same people who, today, often work excruciatingly long hours in
warm, tropical climates, for meager earnings. Laziness isn't the problem.
2.) The Far East has plenty to "blame the West" for and they have and they will get even, eventually. Japan and China are well versed in playing the long game. They know how to bide their time and strengthen themselves before they get revenge. When the US under Commodore Matthew Perry humiliated Japan (then run by a Warrior society) by forcing them to open up their borders for trade, they copied and duplicated Western societal models and became an Imperial power themselves. And then eventually, Pearl Harbor happened. They had been embarassed less than a century prior to that--which was a defining cultural memory for a very prideful, honor based people. And then Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened which upped the ante--they have neither forgiven nor forgotten. And China deserves to be even angrier. They too had been forced by the West into unfair trading treaties and when they revolted, they were put down brutally (which the Japanese jumpstarts aided in). One of the reasons why the Chinese embraced Marxism was because they saw it as anti-Western, which had been personified in their eyes through imperialist capitalism. And of course, communism led them down a dark, isolated, regressive, restrictive path but they are recovering, and
fast. One day soon, they will be powerful enough to seek revenge on all of those who have wronged them, chief on the list being the West and Japan (who is allied with the West).
Bicicleur noticed extraordinary:
This is great truth, no matter how many tried to present it is no so.
I don't think that was some extraordinary, unknown observation. Muslims have had an uneasy time reconciling their traditional, conservative beliefs with secular modernity; that tension stagnates them. They want to be modern, and there are many things they like about the Western world, but at the same time, they don't want to violate a belief system that is attached to their identity (even more strongly than their ethnicity--people in the West can't understand this). They would not be the first people, who faced with two difficult, complicated, polarizing choices, choose to "do nothing."
