Third World Quotes
Even a cursory reading of the Koran and early Muslim history would show that there were vast inequalities in the economic order long before the ‘imperialists’ were involved in the Middle East. Throughout the Islamic world there has always been the oppressors and the oppressed and inequality has usually been much worse than in the ‘imperialist’ countries.
The title of this controversial poem became a rallying cry for imperialists and anti-imperialists both. The imperialists saw it as a justification for expansionism and colonialism—that the white had a moral responsibility to bring civilization to the other races. To the anti-imperialists it was a racist justification for imposing Christian values on the rest of the world which didn’t want them. In the quotation example here, the poem was used to state a dilemma of foreign aid and trying to bring democracy and freedom to the world.
At the time “race” was used in its modern meaning and to denote nationality or even ethnicity.
It would take almost a thousand years for the relationship between women’s role in society, standard of living, poverty and development would be recognized by all but the most fundamentalist religious orders. Yet, at the flowering of Islamic intellectualism, the idea was discussed.
Despite this economic reality, many underdeveloped nations sell their raw materials because it is easier than the alternative which takes capital investment in processing plants and equipment, training of workers, and establishing a marketing mechanism. Most third world nations are limited in their capacity to do this but they have abundant natural resources.
This quotation got him fired by the very conservative Washington Times.
