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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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Friday, September 8th, 2006 12:18 pm (UTC)
Yes, sometimes I think of the WHO and other instances of Western good intentions, and I find myself thinking of Daniel Webster's comment that "It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." Much of the history of the interaction between European-based cultures and those of the third world has been a history of Westerners thoughtlessly trying to impose parts of Western culture upon third-world cultures, with the best of intentions but with little to no actual thought or understanding of the interrelation between different parts of a culture, nor of the impact of dropping one single Westernism into a tribal culture without paying any attention to what it interacts with.

Between that and corporate/national greed, I think it's not unfair to say that the West has created a large part of the present misery in, among other places, equatorial and sub-Saharan Africa.

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