There is actual content to the argument (the injuries to the global South inflicted by the North) which deserves the respect of disagreement or refutation. You do not intend it at all (in my judgement), but other forms of response are no different than the old hand-waving about hysteria, etc.
[WS:] Actually, it is my intent to refute this claim, but since it is an article of faith - it is very difficult to do it in a rational, matter of fact way. The only way to argue with any religion or ideology is to ridicule it in one way or another.
It is an article of faith that all evil that exists in the world is attributable to a particular form of government - the US "capitalism," Northern "imperialism" or Soviet "communism" and it thrives on an illusion that is particularly resistant to rational argument. That illusion has been identified by Roland Barthes as mythology - or the form of thinking in which an empirical observation becomes a signifier of an abstract idea (e.g. evil) in a bait-and-switch way i.e. each time the idea is being questioned the empirical signifier is being used as a "proof" that the idea is a "fact."
The rational way of proving or disproving the claimed connection between the pet form of government and the idea (evil or good) is to look into the cases in which, ceteris paribus, the form of government in question is either present or absent. Comparing these cases would then allow assessing what difference that presence or absence makes.
In this particular case, it is quite obvious to me that even in the absence of the US influence, or for that matter Soviet influence there would still be wars, conflicts, dictatorships, repression and kindred nasty stuff in the world - except that they would most likely take different forms - very likely much nastier than those sponsored by the USG (or x-USSR), judging from conflicts in Rwanda, Liberia or Darfur in which the involvement of the aforementioned governments is minimal. That leads me to the conclusion that the claim of injuries inflicted on South by North is basically without much substance - in the absence of the Northern influence the injuries would still be there, albeit in a different form.
One can also argue that the North could do more to prevent these injuries from happening, but it chooses not to. Therefore by not doing what is in its capacity to prevent the injuries, the North is guilty of sin of omission. This, however, is a very different argument from the claim of North inflicting injuries on the South. Needless to add that this argument hinges on the claimed capacity of the North to stop the injury, which itself is anything but proven and requires empirical verification. Not to mention that it smacks of certain paternalism.
Needless to say that such reasoning aiming to verify the claim of purported injuries is a rather formidable intellectual task that requires questioning and critical examination of many common beliefs and perceptions. That makes it virtually an impossible task, because those who have vested ideological interests in the claims being scrutinized to derail the scrutiny by appeals to common sense and common values and morals (e.g. by calling the investigator a "denier" of one sort or another.)
In that light, the only effective way of arguing with such claims is to question the credibility of those who make them. This is precisely what I did by claiming that the detractors of the "global North" miss the obvious positive sides of it, and thus throw the baby with the bath water in their zeal to prostrate themselves before the "global South." You are of course free to interpret it as right wing hysteria or "Northern jingoism" in order to dismiss it, but take my word that self-congratulatory jingoism is definitely not my cup of tea.
Wojtek