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American Culture: A Possible Threat
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12923 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
1,165 Words |
| Author
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Thomas Molnar
Thomas Molnar is professor of religion at Yale. He is the
author of The Pagan Temptation; The Decline of the
Intellectual; Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time; and God and
Knowledge of Reality. |
A vast number of books published during the last thirty years about the Third World contain only as much reality as conforms to the author's biases. Many of these books are haphazard compilations of statistical information with hastily drawn conclusions. Alain de Benoist, known in Europe for his nonconformist views, offers an explanation for the weakness of Third World studies, distinguishing three stages of Western interest - or lack of interest - in former colonial territories.
The first phase extended from before World War II to the late fifties, decades in which the colonies and other "exotic" lands were described in terms of metropolitan interest: the raw materials they offered, the merchandise they absorbed, the cost of administering them, and the prestige they represented for a colonial power in a world where square miles and cultural influence counted.
The second phase lasted from roughly 1960 to the late seventies. In this period, enthusiasm for decolonization and for the heroic halo surrounding the newly independent countries reached its peak: Nkrumah, Sukarno, Ben Bella, Nasser, Nehru could do no wrong. Western media took them for models of heroism and statesmanship; the white man became positively ashamed of his color. The Nehru jacket was the rage of cocktail parties, and London admired Nkrumah although he rapidly squandered the billions that had been given to Ghana by the British. The handful of new countries in which government was relatively honest and efficient - first among them the Ivory Coast - and where the white man was neither massacred nor ignored as entrepreneur, teacher, and adviser were dismissed by the enthusiasts as stooges and Uncle Toms.
Inevitably, a third (and current) phase in the relationship to former colonies emerged by the midseventies. Suddenly former enthusiasts, who had supported industrialization of jungle and desert, made an about-face and showed contempt for the natives' inefficiency in running the steel mills, airlines, and factory complexes that Western governments were shipping to Africa and Asia. New regimes were blamed for donors' errors of judgment. The Third World was dismissed to wallow forever in underdevelopment.
Few had the courage, in the course of all three stages, to draw up an honest balance sheet for Western involvement with Third World territories.
Benoist's Thesis
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