Business is business, and the No. 1 business of the first world is the manufacture and sale of weapons.

So if you are living in the third world and we either kill you directly or your village happens to be wiped out by our weapons which we supplied to the dictatorship that rules your nation, do not make the mistake of becoming troublemakers by adopting radical ideologies, it is just bad for business.

You see, we do not care who kills or rapes or tortures whom. We never have, we never will. It is irrelevant to us because we usually manage to profit politically and economically from all sides, never neglecting any opportunity to do so. Our only concern is about people or organizations who actually threaten our profits, our control and influence, and our cheap and easy access to your resources.

So do not take it personally when your son or your wife are tortured and killed in front of you by paramilitary forces that have been trained, armed and financed by us, as happened in Guatemala for example. It is just business, understand? We hope you do, and God bless.

What is it, you are still whining about injustice, about genocide?

Look here, someone has to bleed for our economies to soar and for our first world dominant positions to be maintained. And we have a privileged class to protect. You are not called the Third World for nothing, because in terms of survival, human rights or anything else you come last. So if our weapons are to be used on anyone, they might as well be used on you, since you have demonstrated, ever since we invaded your nations in our glorious colonial days, a great aptitude for dying.

While you get agitated because living under abject poverty, inequity and injustice, tyrants rise to the occasion to keep you in line through terror and to do business with us, and these tyrants are almost always gold mines for us.

Why you ask? Listen, don’t push it, we are loosing our patience with all your questions.

Tyrants are gold mines because they keep the world out of balance and in a state of war or heavily armed peace, and obviously legitimize our almighty power and our research and development programs for the deployment of ever more lethal weapon systems, such as the space weapons program which is meant to control you, the restless starving Third World masses, and which was another great idea from Nazi Germany by the way, to whom we owe so very much.

Furthermore, tyrants are usually on our side because fighting like us against democracy or people power, to facilitate the rape of the world resources by our powerful and unstoppable corporations, that are themselves financed by the powerful finance capitalists known as banking interests, which are indistinguishable from what we call our national interests.

However your dictators, most of whom are puppets propped up, armed, controlled and financed by our governments, can on occasion become our enemies, like Saddam Hussein or Manual Noriega, when they disobey us and start tyrannizing on their own, which not only is against all the rules but shows blatant ingratitude.

So you see we cannot loose, stealing your natural resources by causing you to go deep into debt and become dependent upon us, a technique we are also using on our own hapless people to keep them in voluntary slavery, in the lines of endless production and consumption through the creation of artificial needs, and by manufacturing and selling the weapons that oppress your people and destroy your nations.

Now, at long last, do you see the straight line to the bank? Yes? So quit questioning our cultural superiority, and be good and keep your families in the line of fire, so that we may test our new war games and sustain our high standards of living.

Have a nice day.

Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport, Calif.