My first post, 2 days ago, serves as the introduction to this blog. It was marred by the inclusion of some irrelevant text. I’m just learning how to operate this vehicle. Hopefully, you were able to read it by scrolling down to the post. This post, my second, begins the exposure of the lives and circumstances of the people of the Third World—-Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia—-and how they got that way. In this investigative pursuit, many of the literary heroes who have already written on the subject are cited and quoted, some at length. (They all have given their permission for the use of their excerpts in this project.) I also wanted to mention that I think that if anything should be communally owned it should be knowledge. Therefore, all my writing and subscriptions are free.
To Begin:
From an August 27, 1962 report in Newsweek:
Just a few hours by jet from New York or Chicago live more than 200 million people in the vast reaches of Latin America, and it is doubtful whether one-tenth of them know what it is like to go to bed with a full stomach. The great cities glitter opulently—Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mexico City; but beneath the glitter and in the hinterland are odious and despondent slums where liquid-eyed Indian children scrounge for scraps and handouts while their parents labor for wages of twenty cents a day or less. This is the wasteland of the Western hemisphere, a land of misery whose poverty is as stark as any in the world.
In April, 1968, George W. Ball, U.S. diplomat, banker, and U.S. ambassador to the U.N., wrote:
“At least for the next several decades, the discontent of poorer nations does not threaten world destruction. Shameful as it undoubtedly may be, the world has lived at least two-thirds poor and one-third rich for generations. Unjust as it may be, the power of poor countries is limited.” [With all its arrogance of power, this is about as close to a confession and apology there ever will be for the U.S. and Europe exploiting, impoverishing, and humiliating hundreds of millions of people for generations with the clear implication that this arrangement is the “natural order of things” and is expected to continue indefinitely. And continue it has, though one doesn’t hear much about it. But I’m sure the people all felt much better after hearing Mr. Ball speak.—-My comments.]
THE “GREAT” PYRAMID—-THE VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM
From Inside the Third World, by Paul Harrison, 1984
“I remember the hunger of little boys in Kano, northern Nigeria—-their sad faces covered in the white, flaky skin of kwashiorkor [malnutrition caused by lack of protein in the diet]. They had learned by heart the common West African beggar’s plea, ‘Dash me money.’ I ate some cooked cassava for a snack and accidentally dropped a piece on the ground. Half a dozen of them leapt on it like a pack of wolves and fought each other desperately for it.
“The distribution of the whole world’s income is more unequal than even the most grotesquely unjust of individual national distributions. In 1976, the industrialized countries made up only 24 percent of the world’s population, but raked in 78 percent of the income. The ‘developing’ countries—-76 percent of the people —-got only 22 percent of the income. The average ‘developing’ country remained at around 7 percent of the average income of western countries. Latin America, southern Asia, and Africa represented a smaller percentage of western incomes in 1975 than they did in1950.
“Two thirds seriously poor, two fifths destitute: these are the people who are gaining least, and often actually losing out, as their countries ‘‘develop.’ This immense army, legions of the damned in this life, is the bottom layer in the great international pyramid. They are the very crux of the development issue, for if development is to mean anything, it must mean the eradication of this great mass of suffering. In India, the building sites of Bombay or Calcutta are full of seasonal laborers. They live in ragged tented camps like the hordes of Genghis Khan. The landless laborers of Rajasthan move to Delhi or Ahmadabad for the dry season, when there is no work to be had on the land—-and their women and children go, too.
“The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that in the early 1970s there were 455 million people in the Third World getting less than the minimum intake of food required to keep body and soul together in the long term.
“Private property in land is an extremely dangerous institution for the welfare of the poor. It leads to social polarization, increasing degrees of inequality, and grinding poverty among those without adequate access to land. Almost everywhere in Asia it is the same story of commercial and technical progress, coupled with an increase in landlessness and poverty, and the death of the traditional systems that provided social security for everyone.
“The incidence of illness in the poor countries is on a scale quite unimaginable to the incubated westerner. Threadworms infest one billion people, trachoma and hookworms afflict half a billion each. Infant mortality takes a terrible toll. In the poorest districts a baby may have little better than a sixty-forty chance of survival. Parents have learned to live with infant mortality and accept child illness and death stoically; it is one of the tragedies of their lives. Illness in general can be looked on as a kind of disease that thrives in the environment of poverty and perpetuates it. Simply wearing shoes, for example, would prevent parasites like hookworm from penetrating the feet. People in the Third World do not go barefoot out of ignorance or for cultural reasons. If the poor do not wear shoes, it is for one reason only: they cannot afford them.
(My next post, # 3, will come in the next few days.)