Science, Society, Sociology.

I originally wrote this for a one page take-home final for sophomore English class. The unit was Things Fall Apart. This essay is obviously pretty leftist and it’s meant to be – my teacher was a diehard liberal. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in this essay, I do think that the concept is interesting and writing nice enough to include on this blog.

Although the days of straightforward gunboat diplomacy and forcible colonization through military might have gone, this overt method of subjugating less developed countries for the benefit of the center has given away to one that is much more covert, and through its deceptiveness, much more effective. Thus, the unfortunate populaces of the periphery are ensnared and put even more so under the control of the powerful as the symbol of power changes from the sword to the dollar sign under the direction of 21^st Century Colonialism and as the worldwide hegemony flourishes.

The story of entrapment usually starts with a salesman, albeit not one in the individual sense. Instead, this salesman is usually a company, group of corporations, or in some cases, the international media. These scouts of the center usually enter the periphery selling one particular idea: that the developed world is marvelous and magnificent and that the periphery must try to become just like it in order to prosper in today’s international society. Although this idea does contain some truth, the aim of these expert trappers is not to be magnanimous, but instead to convince impoverished third world nations to take out loans from first world nations and then spend the money on large projects such as mines or dams that are theoretically smart investments which supposedly will later benefit the nation’s economy.

At the surface, it seems like a wonderful plan, one that can truly ignite a financial growth spurt in nascent nations. However, once the unwary commit to it there are a few problems. First, the peripheral nations usually are not technologically advanced enough to design the complex projects that they want to implement, so they have to contract foreign, first-world companies to help. Of course, these contractors cost money, a cost that is defrayed by the loans that were taken out to budget such projects in the first place- loans that were taken from developed nations. This means that not only is the center benefiting from the usury that accompanies such loans, but also that the money from said loans goes directly back to the center through the contracted, first-world corporations. The final hitch is that once the initial projects are completed, the periphery is already in so much debt that it must take out even more loans, or instead pay off its dues to foreign investors through land, mining, logging, and other methods, thus devastating the country by shipping its resources and money directly to other nations instead of distributing them within its own population.

The brilliance of this entire system and the fact that defines it as a hegemony is the willing subjugation by the oppressed as they strive to become “better”, as opposed to suppression by force. Thus, even though colonialism in the traditional sense is widely considered to be dead, its spectre still lives on in a form that is much better disguised and much more enticing than it was before.