But the First and Second worlds only accounted for a third of the planet' s people. What of the two-thirds who remained outside the East­ West circles; what of those 2 billion people?

The First World saw them as poor, overly fecund, profligate, and worthless. Images of poverty in the formerly colonized world flooded the magazines and newspapers of the First world-not more so per­haps than in times past, but with a new emphasis. Now, these countries did not have the tutelage of their colonial masters but had to wallow in their inability to handle their resources and disasters. Images of natural calamities, famines, and droughts joined those of hordes of unkempt bodies flooding the First World's living rooms-where pity and revul­sion toward the darker nations festered. Paul Ehrlich's 1968 The Population Bomb received such tremendous acclaim in the First World because its neo-Malthusian ideas had already become commonplace: that the reason for hunger in the world had more to do with overpopulation than with imperialism; that the survivors of colonialism had only themselves to blame for their starvation. The people of the colonies cannot save themselves, so they must be saved. The agencies of the First World could provide them with "family planning" or "birth control" technolo­gies to break the Gordian knot of population growth, and they could offer them charitable aid. When "aid" came from the First World, it would not come without conditions. As the president of the world Bank, Eugene
Black, wrote in 1960, " Economic aid should be the principle means by which the West maintains its political and economic dynamic in the un­derdeveloped world." [...]