Many in the West find it convenient to see their problems as the result of "contamination" by the Third World. Such commentaries sound patronising, even racist.
NEARLY HALF a century after decolonisation, there is still a tendency in the West to see the Third World as a bit of a white man's burden, though, mercifully, not in the way that once prompted the dispatch of "civilising" missions across the length and breadth of the Asian and African continents. Rather, the Third World is now seen to have mutated, as it were, into a "virus" that is threatening to "contaminate" the Western values of tolerance, good governance, and probity in public life. They call it the Third World "syndrome."
Last week, Mathew Parris, one of Britain's more sober commentators, accused Prime Minister Tony Blair of bringing a "Third World flavour" to British politics. His criticism came amid a gathering political storm over the cash-for-peerages scandal, which is fast heading towards No 10 Downing Street with Mr. Blair set to achieve the dubious distinction of becoming the first-ever serving Labour Prime Minister to be questioned by the police in a criminal case.
But that was not the point of his attack. What Mr. Parris was moaning about was what he saw as a precipitous fall in the standards of Britain's political life because of which, he argued, a "chasm" had opened up between the wider public and those it had elected to govern the country. In this respect, Britain was beginning to seem like a Third World country where, he noted, nobody believed "a word that leaders say about what they will do or what will happen."
"I am used to this chasm because I was born and raised in Africa and have lived too in the West Indies. ... It has been Mr. Blair's special genius to bring something of that flavour to our politics," he wrote in The Times. Mr. Parris went on to suggest that — rather than Iraq or any of the other failings of his government — the "real legacy" of Mr. Blair could turn out to be the way he had managed to infect the pristine British Isles with Third World-ism by creating a gulf between the people and the government. "A strange and growing psychological chasm between two worlds: the Britain that people live in, and the schemes, projects and plans of the British Government."
In the Third World, nobody expected political leaders to translate their promises into reality. People would "smile" and say: "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." And Mr. Blair had brought this "syndrome" to Britain and this, in turn, had "contaminated the public's view of democratic politics," Mr. Parris wrote...
It is noteworthy how the term Third World has been reduced by Western opinion-makers to represent the lowest common denominator against which to judge the standards in the First World. Any sign of a decline in the West's alleged "gold" standards is promptly labelled a Third World phenomenon. Indeed, anything — from political sleaze to creaking public services and law and order — that the Western media and the chattering class find embarrassing is portrayed as having a Third World "flavour." ...But when such comments about the Third World are elevated to the level of serious commentaries and dressed up as an insight they cease to be funny. Indeed, they sound patronising, even racist.
No doubt, the Third World is heaving with problems because of bad governance and corruption. But what is often glossed over is that not only are many of these problems a legacy of Western, including British, colonial rule but that such tendencies are covertly encouraged by First World leaders when these suit their own national interests. Take human rights. For all the Western angst over the state of civil liberties in the Third World, the truth is that the West needs brutal regimes and their torture chambers to do its dirty work.
No comments:
Post a Comment