ARMS AND HUNGER
Willy Brandt
New York: Pantheon Books 1986,
$15.95
THIRD WORLD IDEOLOGY AND WESTERN REALITY
Carlos Rangel
New York: Transaction Books 1986
Since leaving office, Willy Brandt, ex-chancellor of the German Federal Republic, has returned to prominence as a spokesman in the West for certain fashionable ideas often described as North-South issues--about the "Third World" and the West's relations with it. As chairman of the North-South Commission, better known as the Brandt Commission, he generated considerable support for these ideas. Half a decade after the commission published its report; Brandt has produced a book expressing his personal views. For a man who was once a practical and successful politician, and a political leader who held coldly realistic views of the Soviet Union, this is an astonishingly vaporous work. Arms and Hunger, in fact, is in spots often strongly reminiscent of Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth, although not quite as bad. Brandt shares Schell's ability to combine the recognition and dull repetition of well-known ugly facts with politically fashionable clichés that have little to do with any realistic analysis of or solution to the problem being examined. The truths about poverty, hunger, and turmoil in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, like those about nuclear war, bear repetition--even Brandt's muddled and pompous moralizing could be borne--if only he would contribute a single original thought that would aid the people he seeks to help. Unfortunately, there is practically nothing new in this book, and although it is just over 200 pages long, it gives the impression of being inflated.
Ideology
Brandt's book is a statement, moderate in tone, yet basically rigid, about "Third World" ideology. The backward countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Brandt's favorite euphemism is "developing countries," although by his own evidence there is precious little development taking place in some of them) are seen as an essentially homogenous bloc of poor and oppressed states with a deep moral claim on the advanced countries of the West. Their poverty is not merely something deplorable that ought to be remedied in the name of common humanity but the ultimate result of Western oppression and international injustice. "Hundreds of millions of people are suffering and dying because our global economy is not as just as it could be." The countries of the "Third World" are, or anyhow ought to be, detached from the Cold War struggle between the Soviet bloc and the West. The Cold War, in any case, is basically unimportant, or anyhow it ought to be, and it is wicked to spend on it. The best way of helping the "Third World" is to channel the maximum amount of aid to its governments, preferably through multilateral channels, and without any strings attached, and to refrain from political interference there. The terms of trade between the West and the underdeveloped countries ought to be altered in favor of the latter, whose products, largely raw materials, have historically been undervalued. If not closed, the gap between "two worlds" of rich and poor will ultimately destroy us all. Given the past guilt of the West and the state of things in the "Third World," we Westerners should not be too critical of what goes on
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