Return to a Darker Age

Michigan

In recent weeks, we have been developing a theme here that the liberal ideals of universal freedom and equality are incompatible with the forward progress of Western civilization.

The United States became the richest and most powerful nation in the world because of a combination of factors that had little to do with the natural rights ideology of the American Revolution:

(1) America had the good fortune to be isolated in the Western Hemisphere and shielded by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from the aggression of rival foreign powers which could have contained its expansion like France and Germany.

(2) America was perfectly positioned to expand into and dominate the temperate heartland of the North American continent and exploit all of its vast natural resources.

(3) America inherited from Britain and the Western world the full suite of European science and technology.

(4) America inherited from Britain and the Western world the greatest cultural achievements of Northern European civilization like a strong work ethic, the rule of law, the competitive ideal, and respect for property rights.

(5) America’s founding population was of above average intelligence relative to the rest of the world.

(6) America was underpopulated and possessed an overabundance of cheap land which attracted millions of enterprising settlers from Britain and Northern Europe.

(7) America lacked an entrenched hereditary class structure because of its unusual geographic circumstances.

(8) America’s religion encouraged high fertility, suppressed intragroup conflict, nurtured strong moral character, and promoted capital accumulation and scientific and technological progress as a way to glorify God.

(9) America’s commitment to racial nationalism and white supremacy moderated the natural rights ideology and restrained its self destructive tendencies.

(10) America’s lack of fidelity to the natural rights ideology facilitated the expansion of African slavery and the conquest of new territory at the expense of the Indians which enriched White America and fueled the expansion of its commerce and industry at the expense of foreign rivals.

Taken together these things were always the secret of America’s success … NOT the fashionable natural rights ideology of the eighteenth century which was latched onto and invoked as a justification to rebel against the British Empire.

The hateful truth is that all men are not created equal. God or Nature has molded the entire world into its present image on the basis of inequality. Natural selection upon hereditary inequality is the mechanism which carves species into races adapted to survive in their unique local environment. This principle applies to every species that has ever existed on this planet and modern humans are no exception.

Generations from now, future historians will look back on the early twenty first century and describe the dogma of racial equality as an irrational anthropocentric conceit and the biggest lie ever told in the history of the world. This one dangerous lie has singlehandedly setback American civilization by centuries.

Meanwhile, those of us who have the misfortune of living through the present era of America’s national decline have been chosen by fate to witness, record, and interpret this series of cascading catastrophes as they unfold on the stage of history. We have been selected by divine providence to explain to future generations why “free society” failed in North America.

A simple and parsimonious answer is ready for them … freedom failed because America was steered by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement into the iceberg that is the Black Undertow.

Like the captain of the Titanic who sailed at maximum speed into the hazardous sea ice of the North Atlantic, America’s national leaders in a moment of world historical hubris in the mid-1960s attempted to absorb the Black Undertow into the national mainstream and invited the nemesis that followed. American civilization was “reconstructed” on the basis of uplifting African-Americans to equality with Whites and collapsed and died from sheer exhaustion a little over half a century later.

Perhaps no city in the “Free States” is more symbolic of America’s national decline and the folly of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation than Highland Park, Michigan:

When Highland Park was founded in 1919, it was the home of Henry Ford’s flagship factory and enjoyed the highest standard of living in North America. In 2012, Highland Park is 93.5 percent African-American and two-thirds of its street lights were yanked down and hauled away last year.

The former industrial metropolis is shrouded in darkness because of the structural inequality that results from the incapacity of African-Americans to maintain civilization:

“Here in Highland Park, that had been true for a while. Over a matter of years, the city accumulated a debt of about $4 million to DTE Energy, the utility company. The city was paying less than half of its $60,000 monthly bill for an antiquated lighting system that was costly to maintain. So the company and city struck a deal. The company could turn off and take away 1,300 of the city’s lights, add 200 lights in strategic locations, and the debt would be forgiven, said Scott Simons, a spokesman for DTE.

The result in this 2.9-square-mile city feels like this: Lights are still abundant along Woodward Avenue, the crowded commercial strip. But a block away, along the quieter, residential streets, lights now remain mostly at intersections. Long stretches of blocks are dark, silhouettes of people are barely visible and potholes appear suddenly beneath tires . . .

“The people were basically left in the dark,” said DeAndre Windom, who was elected mayor in November. He said the disappearing streetlights were the top concern of residents as he campaigned door to door.

“When you come through at night, it’s scary; you have to wonder if anyone is lurking around waiting to catch you off your guard,” said Juanita Kennedy, 65, who said she had installed a home security system and undergone training to carry a handgun in the weeks since workmen carried away the streetlight in front of her house. “I don’t go out to get gas at night. I don’t run to any stores. I try to do everything in the daytime and to be back before night falls.”

Highland Park, home of Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line, was once a well-off enclave of 50,000 residents. Ford left long ago, and Chrysler’s corporate headquarters moved away in the 1990s. Now it has fewer than 12,000 residents — half the size it was just 20 years ago.

So for this city, a shrunken tax base and financial crisis have been long in the making, and the recent national downturn has only made matters worse. More than 42 percent of Highland Park’s residents live in poverty, unemployment is high and the median income here is nearly $30,000 below that of the state.

“To understand our street lighting situation is to understand the wealth that Highland Park once had; it was a situation where we had the best of almost everything and an abundance of lights,” said Rodney Patrick, whose father insisted on moving his family to Highland Park in the early 1950s because of its advantages — its status, in his words, as the shining city on the hill. “But we don’t have the residents to have the luxuries we had when we were a city of 50,000.”

Highland Park is still a “shining city on a hill” in the 21st century … like Spanish Lake or Selma or Vance County, NC or Jefferson County, AL or its larger neighbor Detroit, Highland Park is a “shining example” that the South was right, and that embracing Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement was a terrible mistake.

Kinshasa (formerly Leopoldville) in the Democratic Republic of Congo is another mistake that sounds eerily reminiscent of Highland Park:

Leopoldville experienced the “Return to a Darker Age” a long time ago. As in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Undertow in the United States is systematically tearing down power lines, ripping copper out of streetlights, and cannibalizing the infrastructure left behind by Whites who have been pushed out of their cities.

What happened in the Congo that is so reminiscent of the decline of Highland Park? This excerpt comes from Michela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo:

“The minerals are undoubtedly there, in concentrations high enough to make a metals analyst weep. But the rusting factories scarring Katanga’s landscape, the abandoned yards, the stilled conveyor belts and dour expressions of the few technicians still at work are more accurate indicators of the province’s prospects than any number of statistics-laden company reports …

There has never been a better example of the curse of natural riches than Congo. The mineral belt that fans out from Katanga’s dry savannah into neighbouring Zambia contains copper and zinc in concentrations rival nations can only dream about and enough cobalt to corner the global market …

The Belgians left behind a supporting network, an empire made up of mines, refineries, hydroelectric installations, factories producing anything from cement to explosives and sulphuric acid; town houses for its employees; farms to produce food – even mills to grind flour – for the country’s biggest single workforce: all the elements required to ensure Katanga was one of the world’s most efficient copper-producing units. …

In the healthy years of the early 1970s, with copper output hovering at between 400,000 and 470,000 tonnes a year and production of the far more valuable cobalt at between 11,000 and 15,000 tonnes, Gécamines alone could be counted on for annual revenues of between $700 million and $900 million. Until the world copper price collapsed in 1974, it must have seemed like a bottomless Horn of Plenty waiting to be emptied time and again …

According to an indictment drawn up by the public prosecutor’s office, the former head of Gécamines’ commercial subsidiary unilaterally boosted his monthly travel allowance from an already hefty $15,000 to $30,000 during his final years in office, granting himself an additional $1,000 for every day spent off base. Setting aside several ‘unjustified withdrawals’ which ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars, this system allowed him to pocket 15.5 million Belgian francs in 1991 and 10 million in 1992.

Gécamines’ huge network of associated activities also opened it up to abuse. The company acted as a guarantor for state debts that went unmet, picked up hospital and hotel bills for its executives’ relatives and sent its private planes shuttling across the country at their request. No wonder than by 1990 Zairean copper – so pure, so theoretically easy to produce – actually cost nearly twice as much to produce as its foreign equivalent.

With the firm’s receipts rarely making their way back to Katanga, there were no funds left to maintain and renew the infrastructure left behind by the Belgians. Much of the equipment dated back to pre-independence and was constantly either out of service or being repaired. In the general climate of what is known in French as ‘je m’en-foutisme’ (‘I don’t give a damn’), managers began cutting corners. In the rush to get at the ore, underground tunnels were hurriedly excavated, their roofs held up with a minimum of props. In September 1990, the inevitable happened. The mine of Kamoto caved in, eliminating more than a third of Gécamines’ output at a stroke.

The blows came in quick succession: a round of pillaging, echoing the anarchy breaking out up north; the departure of the company’s experienced Katanga workforce, expelled from Katanga in a bout of ethnic cleansing whipped up by the local governor and condoned by Mobutu, who wanted to send a warning signal to Tshisekedi, a Luba from Kasai, of how bad things could get for his tribespeople; and yet another orgy of looting.

But by then the company had already been crippled by a series of liberalisation measures that launched a new smuggling industry by making it legally possible for any Zairean to set himself up as a copper or cobalt dealer. ‘Suddenly, everyone became a copper miner,’ a white haired Belgian manager, remnant of an expatriate workforce that once numbered 3,000, told me on a visit to Likasi’s copper installations. ‘The whole population began to steal from us.’

He had been in Katanga since 1960 and was clearly a member of that school too old to learn new codes of behaviour with the Africans who were once his country’s subjects. Sitting in his dark office, he barked at his assistant to bring tea and expanded on the uselessness of post-independence government, which, he said, had not built a single house in the nearby town since the colonial power left. ‘Everything here, the roads, the factories, the schools, was left by the Belgians.’ As for the workforce that replaced departing white technicians, his racist contempt ran so deep it was no longer even tinged with anger. ‘Give an African a job and he wants three wives, a nice suit and his status in society,’ he said. ‘But there’s never anything to go with it. No commitment to the job in hand. Most of our workers have seven or eight children and they all have to be provided for. It’s each for himself and devil take the hindemost.’

The corrosive scorn seemed a little more understandable when you considered what it must have been like sitting in that gloomy office year after year, witnessing the systematic cannibalization of Gécamines by its own workforce. Having watched Mobutu and his cronies thoroughly milk the system, officials in Katanga saw little reason to hold back in the canter to self-enrichment. Lorries loaded with cobalt concentrate, officially labelled as ‘tailings’, were dispatched for sale across the nearby Zambian border with the benevolent collusion of local customs men. Vital equipment and spare parts were removed, peddled to operators in Zambia and South Africa who would then cheekily sell them back to Gécamines, the original owners. As one engineer acknowledged: ‘We bought them twice.’ But for this man the most outrageous incident came the day staff turning up for work discovered that 30 kilometers of high voltage cable supplying the plants had been snipped from the giant pylons during the night, presumably to be sold as scrap. ‘The thieves had to switch off the power plant to do it, so the security forces must have been involved. It’s not a job a small operator could have carried out.’ By 1994 around a third of Gécamines production was being smuggled south of the border…

Less obvious, perhaps, because there was little left to steal. It took over thirty years, but by 1994, when copper production had sunk to 30,000 tonnes a year – less than a fifteenth of what it had been at its height – and cobalt output was 3,000 tonnes, the Horn of Plenty had effectively run dry. Revenue was zero. ‘Gecamines,’ in the words of Daniel Simpson, former US ambassador to Kinshasa, ‘was as clean as a whistle. Mobutu had not only killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, he’d eaten the carcass and made fat from the feathers.’ Gécamines was placed on what its chief executives described as ‘a survival program’ and relieved of its crippling tax obligations. With the exception of the occasional quick-in, quick-out joint venture that barely scratched the surface of Gécamines potential or its problems, the concession ground to a virtual standstill, with skeleton crews keeping the facilities ticking over in expectation of some far-off resurrection. In order to restore Gécamines production to about 300,000 tonnes a year, the World Bank had estimated, any investor would have to assume debt in excess of $2 billion and invest another $1 billion.

Driving from one site to another, that figure seemed almost low. This was a landscape of quiet yards, empty skips, mysteriously dripping ceilings; plant after plant that looked as though its sole purpose was to breed rust in industrial quantities. I won’t forget the vision of an overalled worker straddling a grating, pounding slowly with a hammer at a rock too larger to through a giant sieve. It was a job for an industrial crusher, but the crusher was out of order, so with a colleague holding the end of a rope wrapped around his waist to prevent a fall, he was reverting to the oldest mining technique known to man. Watching him sweating, I was reminded of a job told south across the border. ‘What did Zambia use before candles came along?’ it goes. ‘Electricity.‘

Here’s a joke for the African-American residents of Michigan: what did they use in Highland Park and Benton Harbor and Detroit before flashlights? Streetlights.

Highland Park and the Democratic Republic of Congo illustrate that you can have blacks, freedom and equality, and civilization, but you must choose two out of three. If blacks are given freedom and equality, civilization will decline. If you want a civilization based on freedom and equality, you must exclude blacks or practice white supremacy.

Fellow Southerners, you have nothing to apologize for to Yankees and African-Americans. On the contrary, the Reality of Highland Park shows that freedom failed and that Northerners would be wise to abandon the discredited liberal theory of racial equality and emulate the segregated institutions of the Jim Crow South.

Bull Connor and Jeff Davis deserve the apology.

The blacks have been given their chance … 149 years of freedom, 47 years of forced integration, trillions of dollars squandered trying to uplift the Black Undertow through Great Society programs, even the first black president and attorney general in American history.

And the result? In the year 2012, the average single black woman in her prime working years in the United States has a median net worth of $5 dollars. In 2009 dollars, the average antebellum slave would be worth $134,000 dollars.

In BRA, the average single black woman in her prime working years isn’t worth 1 percent of her antebellum value. How much does the free negro cost our society every year? It costs $23,876 dollars to maintain the average Black Undertow prisoner in a state prison every year.

There are far more keystrokes in this direction. The cost of this dead weight upon the United States – this stupid utopian project of turning racial lead into gold through the alchemy of “civil rights” – is truly incalculable. For every dollar that is squandered on the Black Undertow is necessarily taken away and redistributed from someone else who is generating real wealth.

What would happen if we dropped the load? Maybe the streetlights would come back on in Highland Park!