The Holy Radiance of Inability

Introducing Tanzania

Tanzania is a moderately sized nation on the east coast of Africa. It lies south of Kenya, north of Mozambique. A postcard of the country would no doubt display a glossy photograph that embodied every picturesque impression an American might have of East Africa: vast, tropical savannas populated by zebras and giraffes, Mt. Kilimanjaro standing in bluish-relief, a ring of ice around its peak. As far as geographical beauty is concerned, the nation is pure Africana.

The problem is that many other stereotypes about Africa apply to Tanzania, too. Most Westerners have seen images of little black babies starving on television; squalid shacks, corrupt bureaucrats, crumbling roads – Tanzania is no different in this respect. About one in three Tanzanians is malnourished. Roughly half the country lives under two US dollars per day.

The situation would be considerably worse if it were not for the foreigners who keep the nation propped up with charity. According to Wikipedia, outside donors provide 88% of the funding for Tanzanian water sanitization which is still among the worst water services in the world. The UN’s World Food Programme, the USA’s Feed the Future programs, and UNICEF are all involved in sending generous packages of food to the nation: empty carbohydrates, canned soups, and artery clogging vegetable oils that keep Americans so grumpy and blubbery. The key to making the nation better, the experts say, is to get the Tanzanian calorie count up to snuff.

Charity

It is the same conundrum that haunts every nation south of the Sahara: Africa needs aid more than any other region on earth, and yet, no matter how much charity is doled out, no matter how much material tonnage is distributed, Africa’s condition never improves in proportion to the aid given. By any metric, giving things to Africa is a bum deal.

This notion might seem odd to those raised in the West’s progressive-liberal zeitgeist. One can hear the Starbucks crowd ask in their snarky, nasally voices, “How can you expect a return on investment with charity?”

I would argue that a man should make sterner demands of his charity than his other investments. If charity is to be effective, if it is to make a lasting impact, it has to be as sharp as a Wall Street suit. If the charity isn’t effective, then a man might as well take that sum of money in coins and chuck it all into a fountain for good luck. Other investments might pay off in roundabout ways. Charity, without a little common sense to support it, is just an extravagant waste.

With this in mind, the rest of humanity needs to place Africa under a very strong convex lens. For years, we have given food to Africa, yet Africa starves; we have built the Africans electrical power generators, yet they can’t keep the bulbs burning; we send them condoms to stunt the spread of AIDS, and they might as well be blowing balloons with them; we send them doctors and they stone them. Ultimately, one must ask whether the results of a charitable act fall in line with one’s intentions. In fact, it seems that some intellectuals are already asking themselves this question and starting to have doubts about Africa – but more on that later.

Enter the Father

Tanzanians call a man named Julius Nyerere the “father of the nation” with no sense of irony whatsoever. In order to have a nation, I would argue that one must have more than a flag and an anthem – high schools have these things – one must also have a functioning government that is capable of doing more than begging outside nations for aid. Nevertheless, I’ll set aside these qualms I have about Tanzania’s competence and acknowledge that the people who live there consider Nyerere to be a foundational figure.

Nyerere was a short, boney man, with a bookish face and a mustache that went out of style in Europe after 1945 due to its strong association with Hitler. He preferred a plain suit without a collar. It was often of a single color and buttoned down the center with one broad pocket positioned on the left breast. Some observers have compared it to the kind of suits that Mao Zedong liked to wear. Although Nyerere loathed the comparison, his clothes do look curiously like Mao’s, and the comparison is apt for another reason. Nyerere, like Mao, considered himself to be a “scientific socialist.”

Like most socialists who consider their opinions to be synonymous with truth, Nyerere enacted policies, all ambitious and well-intentioned, that amounted to nothing. He tried to achieve self-sufficiency in Tanzanian agriculture by creating ujamaa, collectivized farming villages named after his socialist philosophy, and like farming collectives all over the world, the peasants had to be forced into them at gunpoint, and then agricultural production only decreased. One might reasonably ask how a nation that already had such paltry agricultural output could produce even less. But through socialism, a way was found. By 1979, these ujamaa contained ninety percent of the rural population and yet produced a measly five percent of the nation’s agriculture.[1]

Nyerere nationalized Tanzania’s banks, insurance companies, import and export agencies, and the government became the majority shareholder in many of the nation’s most essential corporations. Religious schools, mostly Catholic, were seized and made non-denominational despite Nyerere having been baptized a Catholic in his youth. The much maligned British, derided as wicked imperialists by black separatists, had not been as oppressive as Nyerere and his cadre of meddlesome social scientists.

To his credit, unlike other socialist dictators, Nyerere did not often murder his political opponents – he preferred to imprison them without a trial.[2] I write this, of course, with some degree of tongue-in-cheek sarcasm but it is a modest achievement on Nyerere’s part. It must have been tempting to execute his most stubborn opponents when he had the power to do so. Very few men with that kind of power are able to resist the temptation; perhaps he was at heart still a Catholic; perhaps he was just naturally timid. He encouraged democracy, but of course, it could only be achieved through his single-party state. He supported freedom of speech when he was on the soapbox, but of course, the most outspoken dissenters found themselves knocked off their own soapboxes and shoved into prison cells for being a “threat to national security.”

Nyerere is everything one might expect of a Serengeti statesman: a self-effacing fop who loved to show off his unadorned suit; an African autocrat who praised freedom as he crushed critics under his knuckles; a promoter of self-sufficiency who left his nation in a state of abject dependence on foreign cash. He was a man of great flaws and contradictions, of strange loves and petty squabbles. He was, in short, a man like any other. Nyerere’s failures resemble what I expect would be the same failures of an everyday American or Englishman if he were given dictatorial powers; it is the failure of lofty intentions meeting violently with incompetence.

Like other African strongmen, Nyerere seemed poised for a well-deserved place in the dusty books of obscure and uninteresting history; another disappointing tyrant from a disappointing continent. That is, if the absurdity of modern politics had not intervened.

Divine Intervention

In May 2005, Pope Benedict XVI parted his white-gloved hands, cleared his hoarse but exalted throat, and with the wisdom of nineteen-hundred years of tradition, proclaimed Nyerere to be a “Servant of God.”

This unassuming title carries with it more significance in the Catholic tradition than one might expect. It signifies that the Catholic in question is being considered for recognition as a saint. It is the first step in a four-part process that leads to canonization. It signifies that Nyerere lived according to Christian virtues like faith, hope, and charity. Although being a “Servant of God” does not yet mean that Nyerere’s spectral presence should be accompanied by the sound of harps or that an angelic radiance emanates from around his bulbous black head, it is nonetheless more than Nyerere deserves. Any holy title seems too much for a man who has accomplished so little. Does charity in the Catholic Church now include receiving charity as much as giving it? Is it a miracle to make millions of Tanzanian tax dollars vanish? And what about all those Catholic schools that Nyerere’s government seized? Maybe the Catholic Church should consider the Suleiman I or Attila the Hun for sainthood next.

But Popes and cardinals alone cannot be blamed for such absurdities. Politicos have been lavishing Nyerere with praise for many decades. Nyerere has received the UN’s Nansen Refugee Award, the Lenin Peace Prize (the irony of this prize is perhaps more fitting for one like Nyerere), the Joliot-Curie Medal of Peace, the International Simon Bolivar Prize, the Gandhi Peace Prize. Nyerere assembled a shelf full of second or third-rate prizes like these. Academia kissed his feet, too. He received twenty-three honorary degrees from universities around the world. Let’s not forget the journalists. The New York Times, NPR, and Time Magazine all published adoring pieces.

By any standard not warped by political dogma, Nyerere did very little to merit recognition. One success that is often discreetly overlooked is that he led Tanzania to victory in a war against Uganda; and while this is a genuine accomplishment, perhaps Nyerere’s only true accomplishment, it hardly seems fitting for a man who had received so many peace prizes. He also orchestrated a successful coup in the Seychelles, which yet again makes his peace prizes seem farcical.

If one were to place Julius Nyerere’s life under a critical lens, it becomes plain to see that the same disappointments and catatonic expectations that mar all of Sub-Saharan Africa also apply to him. Just as the majority of the continent is dependent on Western aid, so is the career of Julius Nyerere dependent on the white man’s self-deception; he looks to a critical observer like a cardboard cutout, smiling stiffly and artificially, propped against a university gate or the window of an international aid organization loosely tied to Marxist causes. He seems more like a marketing ploy than a man. Nyerere’s career is the very definition of contrivance. Western intelligentsia were so desperate for an African poster boy that they were willing to manufacture one whole-cloth by taking a backwater mediocrity like Julius Nyerere and attempting, quite literally, to turn him into a saint.

The Big Conundrum

This is not the first time such things have happened. Nelson Mandela is another African with a checkered career that the intelligentsia praise to hagiographic excess. The question as to why the intellectuals are so desperate to beat an African hero out of the proverbial bush is not hard to answer. They need one, desperately. The whole structure of leftist philosophy is built around the idea of human equality: that people are fundamentally equal and that the institutions of this earth are what prevent this equality from being realized. If there is a disparity in one group of people over another, then according to the logic of the progressive left, this difference is attributable to racism, classism, sexism, or some other institutional phantasm haunting the halls of power. The problem, however, is that the nations of Africa have received so much help from nations that are considerably richer and more powerful, that this idea is becoming difficult to defend.

This is not to imply that Africa and its realities alone will be enough to put an end to leftist egalitarianism. I suspect such thinking will always exist. There will always be naïve people in this world as well as those who refuse to believe what is true out of a pigheaded resistance to the obvious. After all, there are still some people who think the earth is flat. But the intellectuals, the ones who are not dogmatic or naïve, are the ones starting to have doubts, even if just on a subconscious level. They need an African hero because they desperately need to justify their beliefs to themselves.

The alternative would be for them to admit that helping nations south of the Sahara is a waste of time not due to any trick of the weather, soil condition, colonial grievance, or lack of substantive investment, but because of the Africans themselves. And for a leftist, this is an unthinkable conclusion. Men must be made equal or the whole edifice of leftist thought comes crashing down.

This is why the intelligentsia have given us Julius Nyerere: an affirmative-action hero from an affirmative-action continent; a man who glows from head to toe with the holy radiance of inability.

 

 

REFERENCES

[1] Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair. 2006.

[2] Smith, William Edgett. Nyerere of Tanzania. 1973.

 

“Yellow” Journalism

Sarah Jeong is a Korean-American, thirty-something social media socialite with black-rimmed glasses and short, pink hair. She is the latest model Marxist pulled straight off of the progressive assembly line — a graduate of Berkeley and Harvard Law. She has written nothing of any significance; nothing of any particular wit or insight. Based on her Twitter statements it becomes abundantly clear that despite her imposing educational credentials, she not only looks like a Starbucks barista, she almost certainly has the IQ of one, too. With that in mind, it’s not too hard to see why the New York Times hired her recently.

If we were to define the term Europhobic as an irrational fear of European people and their culture, then it is beyond all doubt that Jeong is a Europhobe. She attended universities founded by dead white men, she works for a newspaper founded by dead white men, her mother country is free today because of dead white men, and yet she spends seemingly half her life on Twitter deriding white men. One of her rants included a fake graph showing how white people give off a mysterious doggy smell when it rains, which is especially rich when you consider that she comes from a country that still eats dogs. Remember that the key word in our definition is irrational.

Perhaps the only thing more disappointing than a once reputable newspaper hiring this pink-haired harpy is how conservatives have so terribly missed the mark with this one. The right-wing parts of Twitter and Gab are trying to fan the flames of outrage. They desperately want to get Jeong fired. I can’t blame them, of course, because nothing would make me feel better than to see Jeong lose her job for racist remarks: a full-fledged progressive, anti-racist losing her job because of racism.

But if the irony seems too thick and sweet to be true, then it almost definitely is. It’s important to keep in mind where the word originated. Racism was a term conjured up by Marxists to get ethnic minorities to help them tear down the power structure of the West; it’s a continuation of the class struggle dynamic, carried over to racial, rather than economic classes. The left created the word and as such they get to determine the parameters under which it gets used; and logical consistency is not one of those parameters. They are more than happy to use the term against their enemies while smugly dismissing any criticisms that they might meet the criteria for racism as much as their enemies. Reactionaries must etch this point into their skulls like they would the Lord’s Prayer or the maxims of Confucius: leftists are not concerned about logical consistency. They are concerned first and foremost with power, and they will use any means necessary to seize it.

Remember, dear reader, you’re just a prole from a fly-over state so you don’t have enough power to hold them accountable for their logical inconsistencies. They control Cornell and Harvard, they control the New York Times and the Washington Post, they control the NSA and the FBI — what do you control, silly altar boy?

In true Confucian fashion, we have to spend a moment to rectify names, or in more modern parlance, clarify our terms. Since we know that racism is the domain of ethnic minorities looking to undermine a European, hierarchical power structure, the term is wholly inadequate for right-wingers looking to criticize left-wingers. Jeong is an ethnic minority, living in a Western country, where European people are still currently the majority and Western culture is still the prevailing zeitgeist. Under these conditions, it doesn’t matter how much venom and acrimony she flings like a shit-slinging simian at passing white people, the word racist will never phase her. If anything, it becomes a term of endearment for her. This is why those Democrats-are-the-true-racists criticisms often made by baby boomers never persuade anyone: they accept the leftist ethic of racial equality as a desirable goal.

Reactionaries need a term that paints the line of division between the left and us much more starkly, much more distinctly than a leftist buzzword like racism can do. We on the right aren’t fighting for a world of racial equality, or for a melting pot, or for a multicultural globo-homo panoply of rainbow sexualities. We are fighting to preserve our heritage. We are fighting to preserve the West. This is why I prefer the previously-mentioned term, Europhobe. Whether or not Jeong hates the idea of racial equality is something we cannot, and should not bother to prove. All we have to prove is that she hates us, the white people of the world. And she has already admitted to that.

Once we have clarified things in this way, it’s obvious that the editors of the New York Times will never fire Jeong for Europhobia because they themselves are Europhobic. They want to tear down the power structure of the West and replace it with their egalitarian, fairy-dust-and-unicorns fantasy land. The morals underlying their ideal state are all just castles built in the sky and their end game is some intangible, far off speck in the human imagination, like Atlantis or El Dorado or Prester John. Don’t get suckered into defending leftist ethics by default. Don’t waste your time accusing leftists of racism.

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, we don’t want to beat progressives at their own game. We want to change the game entirely.

Sunday Thoughts (2018.07.22)

The other day, in a painfully white, fluorescent office, I listened to three doctors talk among themselves. They were chuckling over Trump’s recent visit to the United Kingdom, the royal snub by princes Charles and William, the rotund orange balloon, a petty likeness of Trump, floated over London to protest the visit. They smiled smugly and said that the Brits could keep him, each doctor quietly assured that every one in the room agreed with the idea wholeheartedly. Bear in mind that I work for a very prestigious organization; one that might be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard or Yale. I’ll leave the particulars to your imagination. Here, every one takes for granted that civilized, intelligent people must support things like equality, inclusion, and an impotent redistribution of wealth. I’m a silent reminder that no, not quite every one here feels that way. But, of course, I have to lock away my protests in the quiet iron cage of my mind — stating them openly would be the end of my career.

As I listened to them talk, I could see a candle-lit parlor filled with men and women speaking French in powdered wigs. Among polite society every one more or less agreed that reason was supreme, and that the enlightenment would usher in an era of fair government, gender equality, and freedom from the petty superstitions of the Catholic canon. The women fanned themselves and thought that kings were so silly and outdated; why can’t people govern themselves just as well as a tyrant? After all, look at America! The men chatted over glasses of port about their daydreams where women had as much education and power as a man. After all, look at Elizabeth and Maria Theresa! The few bishops there in that good company admitted, among confidants and drinking buddies only, that there were a lot of old, outmoded traditions that could be shaved away from the Christian core. After all, Christ himself said all people, Jew or Gentile, are one in him!

Egalitarianism is not new. It’s mankind’s oldest temptation. At least, it’s mankind’s oldest civilized temptation, and there have been many well-intentioned philosophers who have had to drink a bowl of hemlock for giving in to this temptation. From the powdered wigs of 1789 to the powder white coats of doctors at one of America’s most aristocratic institutions, every era has its well-intentioned idiots — and every era has its Jacobin ready to hack off a few heads to try to make mankind something purer than it can ever be.

Clean Streets, USA

Imagine a hellish landscape. Think of Detroit. Picture the hollow, flaking buildings with graffiti scrawled over them and weeds growing through the pavement. Picture the needles, the crack pipes, the spent shell casings. Picture the thousands of smashed out windows. No, this isn’t a television ad to make you feel sorry for inner-city black children. The black community can blame itself for Detroit. The point I’m trying to make is that when a sensible man thinks of good government, he does not think of Detroit.

He might think of other places, of course. He might think of stately Corinthian pillars or the mirrors of Versailles. If he were feeling especially ironic he might think of Capitol Hill. For a more exotic twist, he might imagine the old emperors of China and their silk banners and seasonal palaces. Whatever he imagines, suffice it to say, he won’t be thinking of a place with crackheads mooching outside of a liquor store.

Good government is rooted in authority, and authority is rooted in good imagery.

This isn’t just a pet theory of mine; there’s science behind this. In a 1982 paper, two sociologists named Wilson and Kelling published what has come to be called the “broken windows” theory of criminology. If an abandoned building at the end of the block has a broken window that doesn’t get repaired, it can invite more broken windows. The shattered glass in turn invites the local graffito to spray his girlfriend’s name over the wall. She’ll have three other children with three other men after he gets thrown in prison, but he’s too young and far too dumb to know that. The gathered graffiti invites squatters. The squatters inevitably draw in the prostitutes, the crack fiends, the gang wars. As the dominoes fall, one small sign of decay invites a dozen others, not just by attracting the kind of people who are comfortable with disorder, but by driving out those who are inclined to be orderly.

Normally I don’t pay much attention to sociologists. I’d probably rather listen to sheep bleat. But unlike most theories dreamed up by nasally professors, the broken windows theory has been put into practice and worked.

In 1993, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani appointed an acolyte of Kelling, a man named William J. Bratton, to serve as police commissioner. Together the two men knuckled down on public drunkenness, graffiti, fare dodging, illegal nightclubs, and panhandling. They went after everything New York had become famous for. As it turned out, the new policy was strikingly effective: not just petty crime, but all crime in New York City declined for more than ten years.

This has ruffled the undies of more than one soy boy commentator. At first glance, a leftist ought to love the broken windows theory because it appears to make men powerless. Men seem to be mere products of their environment; the more broken windows, the more innocent black men who could have been brain surgeons will get thrown in jail. One of the most common dogmas of the left is their pig-headed belief that men are born a blank slate, a tabula rasa, and so if a man is evil, it’s due to his circumstances. So why isn’t the left fawning over the brain child of Wilson and Kelling?

The first reason is one that I mentioned already. The theory does not stipulate that the drafty windows and dilapidated buildings lead to crime; it could just as easily be assumed that those who are criminally inclined will be attracted to such places. It’s the pollen that lures the bees, or the jewel that unmasks the thief, so to speak.

The second reason is that the theory vindicates norms that the scruffy-headed, free-bleeding left would rather not see vindicated. Graffiti, like those tattoos on the neck of your local Whole Foods cashier, is not just another form of cultural expression: it’s a sign of a disorderly mind, the kind of mind that brings about social degradation. The squeegee man on the corner isn’t just trying to make ends meet, he’s most likely a crackhead looking for a quick fix. The woman snorting coke in a nightclub bathroom probably ought to be settling down with a man, having kids, and tucking them in at that hour of the night. The theory makes it clear that communities work best with traditional values, not the kind of values pushed by mewing social justice warriors. Family, church, country clubs, fresh-cut lawns, open windows and unlocked doors — the stuff dreams are made of.

The last reason is that Rudy Giuliani was a Republican. The left hates it when the other side does well because, to the ideologue, his struggle with us has to be all-or-nothing.

Needless to say, a battalion of Sterns and Bergs, doctrinaire professors, and know-nothing journalists have started firing their howitzers at the broken windows theory. It’s racist, of course, like all things these days, because it affects black neighborhoods more than white ones. It’s elitist. It’s bigoted. It’s Hitler. One of their more humorous claims is that cracking down on petty crimes works briefly and then results in a defiant upsurge in convictions for those crimes later.

Singapore canes people for spitting excessively on the street, and to date it has not reported any spates of defiant saliva chuckers. Getting hit by a rattan cane hurts, after all. Nor has Pyeongyang had to arrest too many people for loitering. The few who do are never heard from again. That puts a real damper on the idea of standing on the corner with a squeegee. No, strict laws, strictly enforced don’t lead to sudden and mysterious spikes in crime. That’s more likely to be seen with laissez-faire law enforcement.

Anyway, what is it about the broken windows theory that’s so captivating? It’s not because I care about New York, you could stake your life on that. It’s not because I have any interest in cleaning up black neighborhoods, either. I think it fascinates me because it exemplifies a principle so fundamental to human nature that people tend to overlook it; at least, modern people, raised in the social justice milieu of the post-fascist West. The people of the past were not quite as confused on this matter. Authority, if it is to be an authority at all, must respect itself as an authority.

The West is struggling with this simple truth. A police station with flaking paint and prostitutes milling around outside is a station that sends one message to the world: we do not believe in ourselves. Parents who ask their children how they should be punished say one thing: we do not believe in ourselves. A neighborhood that never sweeps up shattered beer bottles and never mends potholes: no belief.

The left and right are split most clearly in their level of self-confidence. The right-wing is authority that recognizes its own importance and also its responsibilities. The left-wing is a nagging, impetuous doubt of authority. It’s always the same ethic, reimagined and reinterpreted for the times, but ultimately the same: the haves versus the have-nots. The aristocrat, the have, stomps his shiny boots on the peasant, the have-not. The white man takes his whip to the black man. The straight man oppresses the non-conforming genderless she-whale. Historically, this theory is all smoke and mirrors but it makes for good theater.

The left-wing must doubt all authority, even its own. If one of these have-not groups were to seize power the clockwork would spin mechanically to the next target. If a black nationalist party murdered or frightened away every last white man in South Africa, the left would immediately begin with the rich-black versus poor-black dichotomy. Or maybe dark-blacks versus light-blacks. If the blubbery she-whales took over at Yale the various forms of gender non-conforming people would turn on each other, like those with blue hair versus those with braids. It never ends. It never relents. Liberalism is the politics of disharmony.

And if the problem is always the same, the solution is the same, too. Egalitarianism, the great cudgel of the left, is always there to break up good order and harmony. Pull back the silk screen that the left uses to shield their ideas and you find nothing but knives and chains.

The liberal longs for pacifism. But he’ll never campaign to disarm your enemies, he just wants to disarm you. The liberal longs for racial justice. But he’ll bend every law in the book on behalf of his preferred color. The liberal longs for worker’s rights. But he’ll trample the employer’s property rights for a few pennies’ worth of compensation. The liberal longs for gender equality. But he’ll never admit that women are miserable without families and they certainly won’t be opening any peanut butter jars.

The liberal agenda is the cold kiss of the void. His pacifism leaves you vulnerable to invaders. His sense of justice overturns law. His economics is the economics of robbery. His gender equality is the death knell of the family. If you think this is hyperbole, if you think I’m being unreasonable or unfair to the left, just look at Detroit. Or any major American city today.

It’s the same illness, the same medicine, and the same quack doctor rushing there to treat it. What chance does America stand when this is the same disease that leveled Rome, carved up the British Empire, and murdered the Romanovs?

I can’t answer that question. But I can begin to see a solution, dimly, somewhere out there in the misty regions of history.

Maybe it’s time to set aside our apologies and guilt. Maybe it’s time to start cleaning up our streets again.