Interesting book about Whites and their inability to find a means of effectively helping the Third World; resulting from the White inability to see beyond the profound institutional limitations of both Foreign Aid or Military Intervention - and, indeed, their own limited culture.
Because it is written by a White, he is unable to be honest about the endemic malice and condescension of Whites toward non-Whites. Generalized vindictiveness that causes them to create poverty-reduction plans Whites know are not going to work: Plans designed to disincentivize large-scale migration of Third World poor and to prevent non-Whites from becoming economic competitors in global Capitalism. The War on Terror makes things worse because Whites imagine (as they do regarding their own countries’ crime rates) that terrorism is caused by poverty. That the causes of terrorism are actually the self-same foreign intervention (supposedly designed to alleviate poverty) is conveniently and deliberately elided.
The book also fails to compare - in depth - Foreign Aid with Domestic Welfare such that the similar reasons for the failure of both remain unilluminated. Moreover, White guilt and White narcissism are not assigned their due place in explaining why Whites want to save the world, but have no plan for saving the world from Whites. Whites wish to recreate the world in their own image and so fantasize about being Aryan supermen: The only kind of people Whites imagine can achieve such goals. Utopian for Whites; Dystopian for everyone else. Rather than look at the actual problems of others, Whites choose to see others only in comparison to themselves; presenting a distorted view of objective reality.
The author’s political naivety stems from a belief in the essential goodness of Whites, a belief that only Whites, themselves, possess. As well as their neurotic inability to divorce Intentions from Acts such that preaching what to do becomes a greater goal than actually doing anything. Whites seek a mirror in which to permanently admire themselves; ignoring the suffering they claim to be alleviating as the only means of evading their own inner emptiness. This is why Whites rarely focus on outcomes but on intentions, since positive outcomes are harder to find.
The author’s realization that self-directed and organic development is the only way forward for the world’s poor (as practiced in the First World) is likely to go unheeded. Detested Whites (like Bob Geldof & Bono) are far too keen to publicly remain at the center of their own vain pipe-dreams of sainthood than they are to actually listen to the poor. Helping the world’s poor by funding the poor’s own ideas for development - since the poor are the only people who understand the situation on the ground because of their daily experience of it - keeps Whites from hogging the limelight and, hence, is not favored by them.
