Mapping populations: The United Nations, globalization, and engendered spaces, 1948-1960

Over the last hundred years, we in the more favored parts of the world have been doing all that we could to displace [the] attitude of resignation and feeling of inability to do anything about such circumstances ["poverty and disease and ignorance"]. We sent missionaries throughout the world preachi ng the gospel of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and conve rting a lot of people in the underdeveloped areas of the world to a convict ion that they can in fact work out an improvement of their own lives. In ad dition to these religious missionaries we sent out trade missionaries, comm ercial agents, who aroused desires on the part of the people of the underde veloped areas for conditions of life and physical comforts that are commonp lace in the advanced countries of the West. Moreover, during both World War s, but particularly during the second, we sent our military forces into pra ctically every corner of the world so that at the present time there is no place anywhere on the globe in which any considerable number of peoples liv e who do not know that it is possible for a human being to live a far bette r life than is customary for three quarters of the human race.(1)