Margaret Thatcher Quotes

The industrialized world was dominating the processes of change in the Third World, in particular in the Islamic world. And, that domination resulted in educational processes that were shaped by the First World.

After WWII .... the West exchanged the old racist coinage for new currency. "Uncivilized" became "underdeveloped". "Savage people" became the "third world". There was a genuine change of heart away from racism and toward respect for equality, but a paternalistic and coercive strain survived.

As long as imperialism exists it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries. Today that domination is called neocolonialism.

The culture of death is imposed by economic and political interests, the arrogance of power, corruption. I blame the first world for having taken our riches for so many years. I am speaking of the superpowers that dominate the life of the world. More concretely, the World Bank, the IMF. Those that have caused and tolerated the death of our people, those responsible for the plundering of the third world. Silence is also part of repression.

As someone from a developing country, I have a problem with rich countries thinking they can tell us anything, simply because they are giving money.

Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries' failure to advance.

The natural consequence of our submission, even in part, to the system that looks to compelling the export of raw products, the exhaustion of the land, the cheapening of labour, and the export of the labourer.

Often Hollywood crews go into third world countries and I don't believe they behave well.

Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.

The Portuguese, Dutch and English have been for a long time year after year, shipping home the treasures of India in their big vessels. We Germans have been all along been left to watch it. Germany would do likewise, but hers would be treasures of spiritual knowledge.

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.

Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.

Those strutting, heroic figures who destroyed Spanish rule were, it seemed, unable themselves to rule for any significant period of time, or to build lasting institutions. Worse, the cult of personality that grew up around them served as a precedent for the two most serious evils that were to afflict Latin America until well into the late twentieth century – popular dictatorship and caudillismo, military rule – which alternated in many countries, and even sometimes merged, with doubly tragic results. Latin America’s underdevelopment since independence, particularly as compared with the United States, has been largely ascribed to such misgovernment.

Part of the process of colonization (cultural conquest and domination) is the replacement of the celebrated drugs of the colonized with the celebrated drugs of the colonizer.

The World Trade Organization is a fearful instrument of re-colonialization and exploitation

The lack of equity and of a sense of solidarity in international transactions works to the advantage of the industrialized nations so that the gulf between the rich and the poor is ever widening. Hence derives the feeling of frustration among third world countries, and the accusations of exploitation and economic colonialism brought against the industrialized nations.

The main reason western culture has been dominant is because Europeans have controlled political, economic and social power including educational policy for the last several centuries.

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

We cannot sit in the West and prescribe for peoples in the East, whose societies and ways of life are being destabilized by Western and imperialistic religious, economic and technological initiatives -- without having walked in their shoes

It was enough to be familiar with European culture - enough just to be a European, born or naturalized - to feel oneself the master, lord of the house, the world's custodian. For this European needed no qualifications, no additional knowledge, no particular qualities of mind or character. I observed this still in the 1950s and 1960s in Africa and Asia. Some European, in his own country very average, even incompetent, and held in law regard, right away became a high commissioner, the chairman of a great concern, director of a hospital or school when he arrived in Malaysia or Malawi.

Development was--and continues to be for the most part--a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach that treats people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of 'progress.' ... It comes as no surprise that development became a force so destructive to third world cultures, ironically in the name of people's interests

Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies

There is a dismal record of failure in Africa on the part of the developed world that shocks and shames our civilization.

Quite a few people who are in the media and in control of the big money seem to want to see these Southeast Asian countries - and, in particular, Malaysia - stop trying to catch up with their superiors and to know their place.

I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits and, at the same time, exaggerating my own merits.