by Brett Stevens on October 20, 2014

Dear third world,

It’s time for us to revise our relationship. Much as we treat our own poor like perpetual gelded children, we have been treating you as the same. That not only keeps us both in a bad relationship from which we do not progress, but also holds you up by keeping you dependent on us when you should be launching into the world on your own.

Our well-intentioned aid, designed to make up for years of abusive colonialism, turns out to have retarded development of the third world across the globe. Not only that, it was given mistakenly. We see now how the technology, learning and structure given to your societies by Western occupation has enabled you to even participate in a globalist system. The net benefit was yours, even if a few million were enslaved. The smallpox epidemic we feel bad about, but it was not intentional. We can see how it is time to stop the myths of our perpetual guilt and your perpetual dependency simultaneously, because they are the same myth. The image of a cruel parent and sobbing child comes to mind and, like that relationship, implies a future of each party hurting the other.

Bad parent relationships involve a parent being both in control and guilty of excessive control, and a child being both dependent and wanting to set themselves free. Our liberals act like children who are rebelling against their parents. This means they both push back against, and yet depend upon the parent figure, which makes them perfect candidates to support large totalitarian governments. This is why tyrannies tend to follow democracies: democracies make people into self-centered perpetual children who want more benefits and guidance from government, which creates an electorate of useless people who must then receive total guidance via complete control. In the same way, you gladly accept our aid and ask more from it, but also want us to accept you as our own:

Ebola now functions in popular discourse as a not-so-subtle, almost completely rhetorical stand-in for any combination of â€œAfrican-nessâ€, â€œblacknessâ€, â€œforeign-nessâ€ and â€œinfestationâ€ â€“ a nebulous but powerful threat, poised to ruin the perceived purity of western borders and bodies. Dead African bodies are the nameless placeholders for (unwarranted, racist) â€œpanicâ€, a conversation topic too heavy for the dinner table yet light enough for supermarket aisles. …To be black â€“ African or otherwise â€“ is to be born into a world that anticipates your death with bated breath (or botched execution cocktail, or vigilante bullet, or syphilis needle). It is to occupy a position of social death, to exist in a liminal space that guarantees neither rights nor recognition under the law. It is to be a perpetual contaminant in the body of the western world.

Although our conservatives will dismiss this for its ingratitude and liberals will agree but note its lack of friendliness to trendy Western issues like gay marriage and transsexual equality, what is being said is essentially true: you will never be us. We have our own path, and it is different from yours. However, my solution is different than that of the writer. She wants more aid to the third world; I suggest total separation. We will go our path and like every other group in the world, be selfish and see only our own interests; Africa will see only its own. Then no one depends on anyone else and we can stop this neurotic, sado-masochistic, broken home of a relationship between the third world and the first.

Tags: ethnic self-determination, Ethno Nationalism, first world, third-world

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