It’s meaningless. ‘Development’ is just a map of theft, and you dumbasses can’t even fight a cold

The developed world is just a map of colonialism and theft. Look at the one blue dot in South America. That’s French Guiana, a literal colony. The only exceptions are South Korea and Taiwan, you’re cool*. Everyone else is a bunch of criminals, genociders, and filthy polluters laundering their loot as ‘development’. Y’all can go to hell with your ‘development’ talk. It’s like the mafia telling us about waste management.

Western ‘experts’ love coming here and talking about development models, but what is that exactly? Should we invade random countries, enslave people and take all their shit? Should we go to another continent, genocide everyone, and then militarize the borders? After exploiting people, should we pollute so heavily that we colonize the skies? This is the literal western development model. Should we really follow you?

For me the most striking example is the British Opium Wars. This is the true western development model. In this the British grew drugs in occupied Bengal, pushed it on China and — when China resisted — deployed their Navy to bomb and bayonet the drugs down their throats. Queen Victoria literally stole a dog from Shanghai which she named Looty.

Is that what we should do to be developed? Should Sri Lanka invade India, make crystal meth there and stab Vietnamese people to death until they take it?

And of course this ‘development’ model hasn’t stopped. Western nations today still besiege countries they don’t like for generations, starving and depriving Iranian, Cuban, and Venezuelan people for no fault of their own, while dictatorships like Saudi Arabia get tear gas and training to use against their own people and neighbors. America claims to be free of colonialism but A) has colonies like Puerto Rico and Guam and B) maintains troops over 85% of the world. Is that what we should do, to be developed? Practice endless war, killing and torturing people all over the world?

But no, that’s not what they peddle. It’s develop as we say, not as we did. And develop our way, to keep giving us cheap shit and preserving our interests (and paying interest for the privilege).

Instead they tell us to have governments that they like (or they’ll overthrow them and sanction our grandchildren), stay within the borders of passport feudalism (or they’ll put us in concentration camps), and pay them interest for money that their Central Banks are just printing. Western development is just using us as a distant colony with even less responsibility — a place where we’re trapped to sew white people’s underwear and rub their feet on vacation.

And it’s not just the accumulated sins of the past, you smug, preachy bastards are still colonizing the very air right now. All of your vaunted development is a massive theft from all future human beings on Earth.

The most annoying thing of all is that — when we somehow manage to build functional societies — they completely ignore us. We do not even exist in the world. Instead they go on TV and talk about the ‘developed’ world like this means something. Like development isn’t just a crime scene. Like it doesn’t just mean white people (plus a bit of East Asia).

People will say “America has the worst pandemic response in the developed world” and stop the conversation — and their understanding — there. No, you dumbasses, America has the worst response in the world. The ‘developed world’ — excluding the cool places — has the worst pandemic response in the world.

The term is not a useful measure of anything except your racism. It’s like if we talked about the Olympic results, but only for white people. The Summer Olympics.

This makes you question what developed even means. How developed are you if you can’t even put on a fucking mask? How industrialized are you when your doctors are wearing trash bags? How advanced are you when you’re getting clobbered by a virus that Mongolia and Senegal and Sri Lanka (knock on all the wood, third wave) are somehow figuring out?

Just stop saying it. Save development for puberty. Just say world. Literally the only places that developed without fucking over masses of people over were Korea and Taiwan. I’m fine with them being called developed, they never robbed me. But the UK? The US? Belgium? The UK looted the globe and remains the money laundering center of the world. The US is a rapidly imploding shithole. Belgium carries the weight of so much atrocity that the entire country should be given to the Congos as reparations.

More to the point, these countries have not even been able to develop themselves. They just have money, which they have been too stupid to deploy to any effect beyond persecuting Muslims and destroying the planet. Europe and America have worse public health systems than sub-Saharan Africa. STFU about Germany, they have the same sized outbreak as Pakistan. These nations spend billions on contact tracing apps while brown people with clipboards run circles around them. These are not developed countries. These are colonial thieves in terminal decline.

So please spare me. We are the world. The Dirty South. We also live in the world. The world is ours, and our children have as much right to free movement as yours. You have no right to ask us for a visa or a work permit, you who tromped onto whatever shores you pleased. The world is ours.

We deserve to be included in your media coverage not as a favor to us, but to you. We obviously know how to fight a pandemic without spending billions of dollars or descending into chaos, so maybe learn something. We have many other talents as well, which you might learn if you A) opened a map and B) stopped talking to white people who visited us a few times as ‘experts’.

I’ll call it now. The developed world is dead. Long live the world, the one with all of us in it.

*note that I’m not including Japan as cool because they were some brutal-ass colonizers themselves. And Hong Kong and Macau shape, but I can’t fit everything in there.