Exploiters and oppressors first deprive the exploited and oppressed of resources (relative social and political stability and clean water, electricity, food, etc.) to live "the good life" and then condemn (and teach their hangers-on -- or would-be hangers-on -- to condemn) the exploited and oppressed for not living (or not allowing their children to live) "the good life."
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I think it was the mid-twentieth century French philosopher/activist Simone Weil who once remarked that the Roman Empire was a sort of plague that befell ancient Europe.
Despite acqueducts, roads and all the other things people continue to admire the Romans for, they also brought the insistence that all of the cultures under their thumb must be Latinized.
'We have no idea,' she said (paraphrasing from memory now), 'how various peoples would have developed if left to their own devices because Roman intervention brought self-development to a halt.'
Even in the post-imperial era, the wreckage of the empire created various social burdens that took centuries to remove.
Now I'm not one of those who unthinkingly blames the West in general and the U.S. specifically for all the world's problems.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that many of the world's poorest and most chaotic places are still reeling from the consequences of the imperial interventions of the past. Or, to put it another way, we are, in many cases, not looking at the fruits of cultures as they have developed on their own, but at how they developed (and were, perhaps, warped) in the face of relentless interference and exploitation.
This is not to excuse local political and business criminals for strangling their own people but they are simply the most ruthless domestic parts of a foreign imposed system.
But most of us don't see the whole mechanism and, in our ahistorical critique of poor nations, decry their 'backwardness' and poverty as symptoms of a cultural failing.
DRM
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