One of my courses this semester is Third World Politics. To set the groundwork for the course, during the first two weeks, the professor has given us a brief history of the third world (or global south, as sociologists now call it, as opposed to the global north, a.k.a. first world). From the brief history we’ve been given, I can already tell that this course is going to be depressing.
I’ve known for a long while, somewhere deep in my mind, that not all in the world is as, for lack of a better word, nice as things are for me and many of my online friends. We all live in developed countries, we all have the internet, none of us are starving, we’re attending college or have already graduated. Obviously, not everyone in the world lives in such a setting. In fact, I came to find out that only about 15% of the world lives in such conditions. The rest live in conditions that we in the “first world” would find horrible and unbearable.
I think most of us in the “global north” know that things aren’t so great elsewhere. In fact, most of us know that elsewhere on this little rock of ours, things suck pretty bad for a lot of people. However, the mind has a way of suppressing such overwhelming thoughts. We might acknowledge such problems when we see a starving kid in Africa or Ethiopia on our televisions, but most of the time, you and I are stuck in our own little world, oblivious to the problems and suffering of others.
The first two weeks of my Third World Politics course has been a real eye opener. Having never really paid much attention to the third world or studied its history, I didn’t truly understand why things are the way they are. I knew the nations of the global south were in pretty dire straits, but I didn’t understand how they had reached that point.
These past two weeks have shed some light on that for me, and learning of the causes has made me more than a bit upset. How did many third world nations get into the predicaments that they now find themselves in? We, the first world nations, put them in those positions. We colonized the areas, we stripped them of their natural resources, and, within the past 50-75 years or so, we started letting them loose as they clamored for independence. In other words, they were crippled right out of the gate.
Just as many of these third world nations gained their independence, the Cold War started, which left the third world nations in a bit of a bind: should they side with the United States, which wasn’t overly keen on helping them develop? Or should they side with the Communists, who were willing to help them develop? Doing so, obviously, would put the third world nation on the United States list of “bad”nations.
Clearly, these are generalizations – the stories of third world nations are varied, just as the stories of first world nations are – but their stories are all rather similar. Usually, some first world nation (or a group of them) has played a large role in crippling a third world nation. And now that the third world nations have independence, what do many first world nations say? “Hey, what’s up with the third world nations? Why aren’t they developing?” Huh. I wonder.
I don’t know what the solutions are to all of the problems facing the third world are, but I do know this: if the first world nations don’t decide to truly help, to make ending poverty and disease throughout the third world a top priority, it won’t happen. While a few third world nations are crawling out of the pit we threw them in (South Korea, for example), most of the third world nations don’t have a chance in hell of improving without our help. While I certainly don’t know the solutions, I suppose the first step is for the first world nations to truly see and acknowledge the problems that the third world nations face, and accept that we have a huge role to play in fixing them.
Time to call on a cliché: we’re all in this together. I think it’s time we started acting as such.
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