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From: gjk@talcott.UUCP (Greg Kuperberg)
Newsgroups: net.flame,net.politics
Subject: Re: Re: White greed (about foreign policy)
Message-ID: <320@talcott.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-Mar-85 09:45:52 EST
Article-I.D.: talcott.320
Posted: Mon Mar  4 09:45:52 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 7-Mar-85 05:28:43 EST
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> >Of course, one shouldn't forget the military dictatorships being
> >supported by "Capitalist" countries too: Pakistan, countries in
> >Latin America, etc.  One of the major "underdeveloped" countries
> >happens to be a democracy: India (in fact, the largest democracy in
> >the world) 
> 
> I haven't forgotten.  Support of dictatorships is not a function
> of economic systems, but of great powers politics.  I don't
> support any of it.  Reagan is as bad as the Russians in this regard.
> At least the dictators the US supports are honest about self
> interest and don't hide behind some phoney theory of 
> dictatorship of the proletariat.  They also seem to be a 
> hell of a lot easier to overthrow.

Reagan is *not* as bad as the Russians.  El Salvador, Grenada, and all the
rest are utterly incomparable to Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Vietnam
(remember Vietnam?  The one with the boat people?  I know you don't hear
about it in the news anymore, but it's still there...)

> >Development is a self-supporting process.  The developed
> >countries that have gained mileage have done it at the initial expense
> >of those less developed ones.  "Culture" and "technology" exist
> >in those countries too, but they simply can't penetrate into the 
> >competitive economies of developed countries and their cartels.
>
> Certainly they have gained mileage, but if all the underdeveloped
> countries were on another planet, I don't think it would make
> all that much difference to the developed ones.  They would have
> to scale down some, but they have alternative means of manufacturing
> almost everything through technology.

I agree entirely.  The leading developed countries are the U.S., Japan,
the USSR, and West Germany.  The USSR is a somewhat different story, but
the prosperity of Japan and West Germany has little to do with "exploiting"
the less-developed countries.  And in the U.S., the same is true of the
some of the wealthiest parts of the nation:  Alaska, Northern California,
and Texas.  In fact, the U.S.'s imports are pretty small compared to its
domestic economy;  it would be hard to show that the imports are the
driving force of the economy.

> Sure there have been injustices, and they will continue.  I hope
> the third world countries will soon realize the utter futility
> of crying about "moral responsibility" and how the developed
> countries should give them a lot of aid.  Charity has never in
> been very popular in the "community" (jungle) of nations, and things aren't
> about to change now.  Such anomalies as the Marshall Plan are quite 
> unlikely to recur in our lifetime.  The best policy for the third
> world is to distance themselves from the great powers..."when
> elephants fight, the grass gets trampled."  Cozying up to the
> U.S. or USSR will only give them a bloody nose in the end, or worse.

I disagree.  Almost by definition, the Third World countries are poor.
This is usually due to crummy internal economic policies, which gave the
economies of these countries a slow exponential growth, as opposed to the
West, whose economies have risen like a bat out of hell, up until the last
few decades.  These countries, now much poorer than the Western countries,
would very much like to have some of the wealth/happiness/power of the
West, so they beg us for loans, charity, etc.  Sometimes they are most
interested in power, in which case they beg for weapons instead, or they
might go to the Eastern bloc, which, although is not known for causing
the sort of prosperity that the West is, does have a comparable amount
of weapons.  Some Third World countries, like Libya, are stupid enough
to sever their ties with the West; that is, they want independence so much
that they cut off their umbilical cord.  Libya, which as a result of this
had a ruined economy, subsequently joined OPEC so they could screw us
in the ass and get rich that way.

This is not to say that the superpowers always give the trade/capital/charity
that they were asked for.  Of course, they have their own power struggles and
economic worries.  Nevertheless, not to cozy up to the West is to be an
economic island (except for members of a certain cartel), and not to cozy
up to either the East or the West puts one at a great military
disadvantage.
---
			Greg Kuperberg
		     harvard!talcott!gjk

"2*x^5-10*x+5=0 is not solvable by radicals." -Evariste Galois.