Interesting the comparison between Cote D'Ivoire and Liberia, how the latter did not have the "benefit" of being colonized... [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiqaNDRSgIA"]Jared Taylor Explains White Man's Disease - YouTube[/ame] .
Always love hearing the racial realist Jared Taylor speak. Black Africans benefitted greatly from colonialism, but for black "people" and anti-racist/anti-White people to accept that truth would be going against their entire agenda to demonize the White man.
The way I hear it, this was Pres Lincoln's idea - to repatriate Blacks to Africa. What a noble idea to return slaves to their homeland and out of slavery. Too bad they couldn't have all been returned. Bringing slaves to America was a crime against humanity. The flag of Liberia:
I think it's true, though the problem isn't in the genetics. Certain cultural traits do translate into better adaptability. A culture that values education and literacy will always do better than a culture that values thuggery. What made Japan a success was that under the leadership of the emperor they made a concerted effort to learn what Europe knew -- study Europe, adapt their technology to their own uses. Mexico never did that, they never looked at working cultural models and adapted them to their own use. Culture is in essence a technology and like technolgy, the best models work for everyone while the poorer models don't. Flexability and early adoption of superior models of any technology is almost always a good thing. Africa never adopted the European models of statecraft and therefore they've been the victims of intertribal warfare since the end of the colonial era. What Europe and America got right is to put nationalism ahead of "tribalism" in the sense that one's overarching concern was that all of Great Britain or all of America was one nation of many tribes. (we've gotten away from than via various "pride groups" that demand that the greater whole give to them for oppression) So rather than waste potential in the constant infighting for "our people" as happens in Africa, we spent our resources in building a large integrated nation that worked for all tribes. It comes down to a few cultural traits: value for education and literacy a sense of the nation as its own "supertribe" rather than a collection of competing tribes adaptability of the people to new ideas from elsewhere respect for the innovators and entrepeneurs who improve things Any nation that does such things will be better off than any nation that doesn't.
Originally called Monrovia the colony became the Free and Independent Republic of Liberia in 1847. Monrovia founded in 1822 and was named so to honor President Monroe, a supporter of the colonization of Liberia. Lincoln Presidency Timeline 1860-1865 (a 2-term President)
Do you think that Africa's continued inability to grasp European methods has more to do with "cultural friction", not genetic shortcomings? It is getting awfully diffucult to explain away some of Africa's lingering epidemics by blaming "culture".
Western "civilization" (oxymoron?) is the most short lived, destructive and brutal dictatorship in history. rip.
Sadly, africans seem to have adopted the european method of 'hiding behind a rock and pulling a trigger' to it's own detriment, bringing them down to european standards of what it means to be a man ie cowardice.
Look at eastern europe. Bosnia and Serbia for example. Failure to adopt a singular national identity causes explosive deconstruction the second that that nation loses a strong leader. That's what happened when the Brits left Rwanda -- they had TRIBAL identities over and above their national identity -- they were Hutus and Tutsis rather than Rwandans. In Eastern Europe, we have a lot of the same stuff. I've already mentioned Yugoslavia, but any of the other provinces of the old soviet state have similar things going on -- Chechans value being Chechan moreso than being Russians, so they kill Russians and Russians kill them back. Now, given that such tribalism can occur ANYWHERE, you are faced with one of two possibilities First, all humans are prone to fight rather than cooperate with those that are different from them. Second, Africans commit genocide, and eastern europeans commit genocide, but African genocide is genetic while it's not genetic in Slavic Eastern Europeans. I supposed you could try to get away with saying that Slavs are just really really pale Africans, but I think that's pushing things to the point of silliness.
BTW it was Belgium who left the Congo, not Great Britain. Europe destroyed itself twice in one century and still managed to invent or create virtually everything the world uses in day to day life - toilets, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, computers, modern democracy, etc. - all during the same 100-year period of carnage and destruction. As for the more backwards members of the European community like Belarus or Ukraine, at least the vast majority of their people live in plumbed and electrified houses, and boast highly educated populations capable of inventing aircraft, like the world's largest, the AN-225, thanks to the Ukrainian design bureau Antonov. You see, even the most backwards European country (Ukraine) still managed to indigenously create the world's largest aircraft. See where I am going with this? .
Here's a startling difference for you to consider: disease. In Europe, the most prevalent forms of disease could be eradicated through a few relatively simple measures: antibiotics, sewage systems, and sanitary food preparations. Africa, however, has diseases caused by parasites that are transmitted through disease vectors. Malaria moves from person to person via mosquitoes, which are quite difficult to out and out eradicate, while the plasmodium parasites require expensive and powerful drugs to kill (also, because they're eukaryotes like us, that means drugs that can kill them also have a much greater likelihood of hurting us, whereas drugs effective against bacteria are much less likely to do so, due to differences in metabolism). Further, viruses and bacteria can be vaccinated against, whereas that is impossible with eukaryotic parasites. We know this is a problem. WHO and UNICEF have concluded that sub-Saharan Africa has a GDP 32% lower than it would be if malaria was eradicated in 1960 (not that that was necessarily even possible)(source), while other parasites also wreak havoc on the population, causing widespread economic damage by either outright killing people or removing them from the workforce (hard to build something when you're bedridden by an organism eating your liver!). Additionally, livestock in Africa have to deal with numerous parasites which are often deadly to the livestock, such as various botfly maggots, worms, and unicellular organisms. Whereas European livestock, much like European humans, had to contend mainly with bacterial and viral diseases which are much easier to contend with, parasites in livestock are much more difficult to eradicate. The loss of livestock is a financial burden and a healthcare burden (loss of nutrition, as most African livestock consists of ruminants, which convert plants that are inedible for humans into edible calories via milk and meat and manure for fertilizing vegetables and staple cereal crops). To say nothing of the prevalence of HIV in Africa (which makes sense; it's where the disease originated and there's a whole lot of misinformation in the continent that helps spread the disease), which also drains the economy either through forcing the import of expensive drugs or by removing someone from being efficient in the work force. And these diseases are much, much, much worse than war. The top four wars in the 20th century killed less than 100 million people combined; the top four diseases (of which malaria is one) of the 20th century killed 400-750 million people. The diseases in Africa represent a constant drain on the workforce and the development of the nations there, which Europe and North America were not subject to, whereas Africa has been dealing with these scourges (as have Central and South America, which also exhibit some of the same problems as Africa). Additionally, consider the debt burdens of many of the nations in sub-Saharan Africa, which are often some of the worst in the world. Hard to invest in technology booms when excess money has to go to interest payments on debt. So, between those two millstones, Africa's development is on a much more difficult road than Europe and North America, and I'm not even mentioning long-term effects of colonialism (such as the necessity of those loans to those African nations).
Even if a few basic shortcomings like tropical disease or inability to domesticate animals stifled Africa's creative genius, they still have thousands of years of catching up to do. Law and order, property rights, inventiveness, trade specialization, civil service; these unique qualities have never been a part of African life and are seen as foreign imports. Europe ended its hunter gatherer phase almost 5,000 years ago, while probably two thirds of Africa are still hunter gatherers. But what I want to know is this: Why was Japan able to adopt science, industrial methods and a modern economy so quickly, in spite of Japan having few natural resources and no experience with European ways? Africans were exposed to Europeans and their "magic" long before the Japanese, yet in spite of plentiful resources they have accomplished nothing.
All of those things are significantly hindered when a good portion of the population is suffering from debilitating disease. It's hard to invent things when an organism is harvesting your red blood cells for food. Or drilling through your eyes. Or devouring your liver. Uh, you're demonstrably wrong about the latter half of your statement. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles require IMMENSE amounts of land in order to be successful. Africa has a great deal of agriculture and livestock, it's just that it is much harder to do those to provide significant excess to liberate people from agricultural work, due to the aforementioned diseases to both humans and livestock. Japan doesn't have that many indigenous diseases that cause problems on the scale of malaria in Africa. Japan also had a strong, centralized government and an ethnically homogeneous population in addition to strong cultural ties with China and its bureaucracy, whereas Africa is an ethnically diverse continent that had most of its native government apparatuses destroyed by European colonialism that utilized Africa for the purposes of extracting resources for the home markets while also trying to encourage European styles of agriculture and livestock husbandry (here's a hint: it screws things up tremendously because European style irrigation and livestock husbandry creates huge pools of stagnant water which breed mosquitoes, which spread malaria). So, Africa also has the problem that the current generation only has the methods of resource extraction as tools for creating wealth outside of agriculture, for the most part. Hence, all the coltan, diamond, and gold mines in the Congo. Disease takes its toll in horrible ways. Plus, again, enormous debt loads stifle innovation due to excess money being siphoned off to pay interest payments rather than indigenous investment, in addition to a lot of problems that are environmental in nature (persistent droughts brought on by utilizing European style agriculture, which doesn't work too well in that region of the world, for instance). Africans are perfectly capable people; immigrants from Africa are often very successful people (illustrative anecdote: one of my coworkers hailed from Nigeria and was a doctorate in chemistry, and was promoted to an assistant manager position in an R&D chemistry lab) and are often quite innovative people (the same aforementioned fellow streamlined a process for the plants that saved some several million dollars in lost revenue); it's not the people, it's the systemic problems resulting from centuries of colonialism (remember, Japan was never directly colonized by Europeans, unlike Africa), horrible diseases, and the like.
Oh, hey, look at this, too: http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/a-23-2006-04-09-voa1-83130107.html Wow, 75% of farmland in southern Africa has lost nutrients needed for growing crops. That means that crops aren't growing as well, making economic returns on agriculture drop. Which means that growth of other infrastructure goes down, because money that could be spent on highways, laboratories, factories, or other capital-intensive, wealth-growing facilities are lost to simply keeping bellies full. I can guarantee that Europe's advancement would slow to a crawl if their 75% of their farmland had lost extensive amounts of nutrients. To paraphrase Napoleon: a nation advances with its stomach.
My bad; turns out malaria is such a horrific scourge that nations plagued by it have economies only 1/3rd as large as those without it! http://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/cidhav/52.html Turns out malaria is so horrific as to prevent economic growth. And it's also been the scythe most responsible for human mortality; it has killed more human beings since humans have been around then any other cause has. It is estimated that half of all humans who have ever died have died either directly due to malaria or indirectly (weakened immune system allowed other diseases to finish someone off, or secondary effects such as starvation or dehydration). Other parasites are also enormous burdens on the economy, such as schistosoma trematodes, which are responsible for schistosomiasis. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2480844/ The annual loss in Africa as a whole is nearly $446 million dollars. So, again, this is an enormous burden on Africans. I'm not even including such wonderful diseases as river blindness or sleeping sickness, but you should be getting the idea. Sticking your nose in the air and saying "feh, pathetic savages" is pretty stupid and fails to note the causes behind significant problems. How can property rights flourish when people are on death's doorstep and need food? How can they flourish when so many people are rendered so poor by rampant disease? How can trade specialization grow when so many people have to be farmers and manual laborers because there's such high job turnover in those areas as to make it necessary for a large proportion of the population to engage in those jobs? How can law and order thrive when such basic necessities as food, clean water, and a good bill of health are so difficult to procure? How can civil service flourish when most of the population is so crippled? Yet, when Africans are elsewhere, where such horrible diseases are notably absent, they excel wonderfully. Clearly, it's not that they're Africans that's the problem, but being home to some of the most horrific diseases on earth that is. So, are you getting what I'm trying to impress on you? Lack of development is hardly a surprise when the people are continually subject to the most prolific killer of humanity. If Europe in the 20th century were subject to such a disease, there wouldn't have been such advancement.
