Many years ago, when I attended grade school in New York City, my teacher explained to us why people in far-off places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America (what soon became known as the Third World) lived in extreme poverty. They were poor, she said, because there was something wrong with them and their situations. They resided in hot climates that made it difficult to work industriously and caused them to be slow and lazy. Furthermore, they were in the habit of having too many children. To make matters worse, they were not very adept; they were culturally backward. Finally, she pointed out that their lands were poor, lacking in natural resources. Given all this, there was not much hope for them unless America came along and introduced them to more uplifting ways.
This view was not my grade-school teacher’s personal creation. She was enunciating what was the conventional wisdom of that day. Being but a youngster, I never thought to draw a parallel between what was said about the presumed deficiencies of Third World peoples and what was said about impoverished people in America itself, including my own family. We working poor were—and still are—seen as the authors of our own plight, “culturally backward,” “lazy,” “having too many children,” and just not at the top of our game. Same old story.
This too is the opinion about the poor held by many affluent people throughout the Third World itself—if not throughout the entire world. I once saw a documentary in which a group of prosperous, well-dressed, well-fed Paraguayans were lounging on a luxurious veranda, denouncing the deficiencies of Paraguay’s indigent. One of them finally said, quite emphatically, “The poor need education.” I immediately took heart at this comment. Here at last, someone was showing some understanding of what the penniless faced in a country where education was usually out of their reach. But I completely misread the sentiment. The man continued in a most emphatic key: “They need education in how to be human beings! They are animals who don’t know how to live like human beings!” The others in the group readily concurred.
Only years later through my own independent study did I discover that every one of the explanations given about world poverty was false. True, the climate and topography of some parts of the Third World could be forbidding. But even in very dense jungles and frozen arctic regions, people applied themselves resourcefully in order to survive. In any case, they certainly were not lazy; they often worked just as hard or harder than people in more temperate climes.
Nor did they have so many more children than the rest of us. The population density of much of the Third World, especially in those days, was less than in places like the Netherlands, Japan, or England or even parts of the northeast United States. Nor were the denizens of Africa, Asia, and Latin America “culturally backward” (whatever that might mean). From ancient eras to more recent centuries, they had produced magnificent civilizations capable of impressive feats in architecture, horticulture, irrigation, arts, crafts, medicines, public hygiene, and the like, superior in many respects to what was found among the ill-washed, priest-ridden, diseased populations of European Christendom.
Quite frequently it was contact with the western colonizers that brought poverty and disaster to the indigenous populations of Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Once their farmlands and crops were stolen, their resources plundered, their herds slaughtered, their townships destroyed, and their peoples enslaved, deep poverty was the inescapable outcome, leaving them to be denounced as lazy, backward, and stupid. In fact, they were not underdeveloped but overexploited. Their development was never allowed to proceed in peace and self-direction.1
For all its own maldevelopment, illiteracy, class oppression, and violence, Europe did enjoy one telling advantage in the world, in the realm of weaponry. As I pointed out in an earlier work, “Muskets and cannons, Gatling guns and gunboats, and today missiles, helicopter gunships, and fighter bombers have been the deciding factors when West meets East and North meets South. Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro–North Americans to positions of supremacy that today are still maintained by force, though not by force alone.”2