Check out this bit of propaganda from 1947, showing the all-knowing First Worlders bringing the benefits of Science to what I’m sure they considered the backwater rubes of the Third World. Unbelievably, the man of Science sprays a bowl of food with DDT, and then eats it, in an attempt to convince the people I’m sure he considers “savages” of its safety. From the looks on their faces, it doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect, as the Africans begin looking at him with the expression that suggests that they now believe him to be a first-rate dumb-ass:
The Africans that were forced to sit and listen to these idiots had it right, their initial gut reaction was that the suspicious clear chemical would poison them. What I find amazing is the attitude of condescending certainty that the man has while eating DDT. He is absolutely convinced that he is right. And the Africans sitting there, exasperated, rolling their eyes at these nutjobs who seem to feel an overriding need to convince them of the miracle of the chemical they are ingesting. You couldn’t dream up a better metaphor for the entire history of U.S. intervention in the Third World.
It is amazing how often governments and humanitarian organizations from the First World take their new inventions and attempt to foist them on the populations of the Third World. I’m sure these people have had quite enough of being fed, liberated, and generally talked down to by the arrogant, ignorant rich of the West. Our interventions do nothing but leave their nations in shambles, ruining their economies and replacing their governments with malleable Western puppets.
