“Helping” Developing Countries – The Mastery of Abuse
Mentatul Monthly Focus
April 2019 Edition
– (War-torn) Developing Countries –
The way superpowers and developed countries have spent money in order to „help” developing countries is often highly questionable. The „help” ranges from plain naive to ruthless neo-colonialism.
What adds insult to injury is that more often than not, the problem was caused by those „helpful” nation-states in the first place. This is a very complex topic that, for now, I will not debate. I’ll just give you the information along with a few short comments.
1. We’re going to start with borders, more specifically what happens when one draws a straight line between communities that share the same religion or put vastly different cultures in the same bucket.
2. Then we’re going to go into neo-colonialism with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
3. A naïve interlude will tell the story of an idealist computer scientist who hoped that giving poor children laptops would improve their chances of success in a world where technology plays an ever-increasing role. We will never know if he was right, because the project failed (not with a bang, but with a whimper).
4. No list of atrocities done to/in developing countries would be complete without a story about weapons trade.
5. The dismal situation in the world’s youngest country.
