February 8, 2010

“Culture matters. Race doesn’t.”
by Bill Levinson

The Third World is well known for voting against Israel in the United Nations General Assembly, and it is time to discuss the previously unmentioned elephant in the living room. These countries resent people of Euro-American background, and Jews in particular, because they remind them of the cultural inferiority that relegates their people to short lives of disease, poverty, violence, and abject squalor. Although no civilized person would say, as Pat Robertson did, that Haitians did “something” to deserve a catastrophic earthquake, Lawrence Harrison’s “Haiti and the Voodoo Curse” shows what Haitian culture has done to make the country among the poorest on earth while neighbors like the Dominican Republic and Barbados enjoy rising standards of living.

Haiti has received billions of dollars in foreign aid over the last 50 years, and yet it remains the least developed country in the Western Hemisphere. Its indicators of progress are closer to Africa’s than to those of Latin America. It has defied all development prescriptions.

Why? Because Haiti’s culture is powerfully influenced by its religion, voodoo. Voodoo is one of numerous spirit-based religions common to Africa. It is without ethical content. Its followers believe that their destinies are controlled by hundreds of capricious spirits who must be propitiated through voodoo ceremonies. It is a species of the sorcery religions that Cameroonian development expert Daniel Etounga-Manguelle identifies as one of the principal obstacles to progress in Africa.

Harrison concludes that “Culture matters. Race doesn’t,” and the exact same argument applies to Palestinians who live in squalor while their primarily Jewish neighbors enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the region.

Of course the Palestinians in Gaza and to a lesser degree the West Bank hate Jews. The typical Jew lives in a nice house with modern appliances and utilities, and he or she drives a modern car. The Jew’s per capita income is anywhere from $26,000 to $32,000 per year while that of a Palestinian in Gaza is less than $1000 per year; one Jew produces more than 30 times as much wealth as a Palestinian. This is a daily reminder of the total inferiority of Palestinian culture: the society’s shared values, beliefs, and ways of doing things. The Palestinians lie in the gutter by their own choice, and they look up with resentment at the Jews who walk past on the sidewalk.

Third World nations are not poor because they lack natural resources. More than 100 million Japanese live in an area the size of California, but Japan is so mountainous that very little is usable for agriculture, habitation, or anything else. That is why Japanese have become so comfortable living in close quarters with other people, and why their homes are far smaller than anything an American would prefer. Japan’s per capita income is still among the highest in the world because Japan adopted Euro-American culture in the mid 19th century. A feudal country with medieval technology chose to transform itself into a Westernized nation that, within a mere half century, could take on and defeat a European Great Power in a major war. Japan’s real tragedy is the fact that its warlords still thought in terms of taking over land and resources when Japan’s growing industries could have produced all the wealth the country needed, including more than enough wealth to buy whatever raw materials it needed.

Pre-1967 Israel has almost no natural resources, and it certainly lacks the oil wealth of its Arab neighbors, but it is among the richest nations in the region. That is because the Jewish immigrants brought Euro-American culture that promotes diligent work and technological innovation, including ways to turn deserts into gardens. While Israel’s dirt-ignorant, primitive, and savage Arab and African neighbors still batter women to death with stones while they cripple people for life by cutting off hands and other body parts, Israelis discover ways to help paraplegics walk again.

Common sense says that people who look for and discover ways to restore damaged limbs and bring unprecedented mobility to paraplegics are going to be far wealthier than those who think in terms of whipping, mutilation, and stoning. Israel’s self-earned wealth and prosperity are daily reminders to Israel’s Arab and African neighbors that most of the latter’s poverty is entirely of their own choosing, and that they deserve to live in filth and squalor. As the old saying goes, you make your bed and you lie in it.

A look at Freedom House is a good indicator of whether a country will be poor or rich; wealth tends to correlate with political freedom and civil rights. Haiti is, for example, rated “partly free” while Somalia, the place where a girl was stoned to death in a stadium, is rated “Not Free.” Although the earthquake in Haiti requires a charitable response from the civilized world–”there but for the grace of God go I”–Haiti and Somalia have chosen a low standard of living so that is what they deserve. Now consider Israel’s Arab neighbors, most of which are similarly homo sapiens by birth but subhuman by choice.

Country Per capita GDP (IMF) Freedom House rating
United States $46K Free (highest freedom rating)
Japan $33K Free
Israel $28K Free
Saudi Arabia $23.4K Not Free *
Iran $11.2K Not Free *

Egypt $6K Not Free
Jordan $5.6K Partly Free
Syria $4.9K Not Free
Sudan $2.4K Not Free
Somalia $0.6K (CIA Fact book) Not Free

* Qatar, which is “partly free,” has the highest per capita GDP. With a population of only 900,000 living on top of “black gold,” even the Beverly Hillbillies would be on top of the list. On the other hand, oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Iran have lower per-capita GDPs than resource-poor Israel and Japan. This attests to the inferiority of their societies and culture, and that is why they hate the Jews. (Perhaps the Japanese are too far away to hate conveniently.)

The following excerpts leave no doubt as to why Third World culture is inferior and why the Third World deserves to live in dirt, squalor, and poverty until it adopts superior Euro-American culture. Colonialism may have a bad name–and a Congolese under the rule of Belgium’s King Leopold would admittedly have been better off had the white man never appeared on his continent–but British colonialism is why India is now the world’s largest democracy with a growing industrial base and standard of living. Euro-American colonialism would be good for the Third World as described in Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.” (At the time, Japan and the United States were the only advanced nations that were not almost exclusively Caucasian.) Change the title to the non-racist “Western Civilization’s Burden” and the content is 100 percent applicable today.

At the very moment [Thomas] Aquinas was telling his fellow Europeans how faith and reason could coexist, his Iranian counterpart, the leading Arab philosopher Ghazzali, concluded that the treasure of ancient texts represented social dynamite. The study of science and philosophy, he wrote, was harmful because it would shake man’s faith in God and undermine the Muslim religion. Accordingly, the ruling caliph of Baghdad, to demonstrate his piety, ordered the burning of all manuscripts in the city’s great library. Muslim scientists, tightly controlled by the ruling theocracies, had access to the ancient science texts, but were ordered to use any of the knowledge they gained only for religious purposes (Ernest Volkman, Science Goes to War, p. 60).

As Indiana Jones pointed out in Raiders of the Lost Ark, people who read books tend to be far more advanced than people who burn books, and this underscores the reason why most Muslim-majority countries are still squalid, largely illiterate, and poverty-stricken garbage dumps. Many of Israel’s Jews can in contrast read backward (Hebrew) as well as forward, and that is why Israel is so far ahead of its Muslim-majority neighbors and will continue to be ahead until the latter adopt the superior culture of their Jewish neighbors. The following story underscores the Dark Age ignorance and superstition that the Arab world has chosen for itself.

Newspapers in the Arab world circulate at less than one fifth of the rate in developed countries. Only 1.6 percent has Internet access, Arabic books represent less than 1 percent of the world’s production (with a predominance of religious books), even though Arabs make up 5 percent of world population (Trudy Rubin, “Arabs’ best stragegy: reform from within,” Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader, 12/28/03).

The bottom line is that Arab culture is inferior to Judeo-Christian culture, and it shows in the relative poverty of the Arab world even in oil-rich countries. Third World culture is inferior to Euro-American culture. Culture is a choice and not a race, and the bottom line is that the Third World has chosen to remain ignorant, superstitious, destitute, and squalid.