Isegoria

The US State Department — with its satellites in the “international community” — could rule the Third World, if it wanted to, Mencius Moldbug asserts — but the current situation is a perfect reflection of bureaucratic imperatives:

Bureaucracies tend to maximize their impact. They are often quite shy about expanding their authority, especially if it is formal authority — because once you take authority over something, you have essentially taken responsibility for it. Bureaucracies are not fond of responsibility. Who wants to be responsible for the Third World?

Perhaps the dirtiest secret of decolonialization is that bureaucracies prefer the postcolonial model to the colonial model, “advice” and “aid” to actual rule, because the postcolonial model generates more jobs. Vastly more Westerners are involved in failing to run the Third World, than ran thee same countries successfully when they were colonies.

For example, to run Egypt — a country of 10 million people, then — Cromer had about 1000 British civil servants. If you count all the Western diplomats, development experts, NGOistas, and the like, for whom the present parlous state of Egypt provides employment, how many do you get? A lot more than 1 per 10,000 Egyptians, I suspect. How many Westerners are employed in bandaging and rebandaging the permanent ulcer of Africa? Um, a lot.

The Third World, as a government program, is just another permanent money hole on the balance sheet of the developed world. Just as with any business they operate, governments — Western governments — have turned their colonies into operations whose goal is to employ as many civil servants as possible. Any type of efficiency or success is a menace to these programs, not a boon.

Good government is always small government, and small government does not scale as a jobs program. If you have one Canadian Cromer running Guantanamo City like a startup, there is no room for everyone’s students to go to Toronto and get jobs. You probably don’t need more than a hundred Canadians to rule Guantanamo City. Colonial regimes are simply too good — they achieved remarkable and unprecedented bureaucrat-to-subject ratios.

Whereas if the Canadians say “yes” to the Guantanamo People’s Party, allows elections, and thus replaces the professional Canadian administrators with illiterate Haitian demagogues, they create a jobs boom in the Guantanamo-advising business. For every administrative position that disappears, ten will be created in aid and development assistance. It may not be in the interest of Canada, or Guantanamo City, to bring about this change — indeed, it isn’t. But it is surely in the interest of whatever Canadian agency is running Guantanamo City.

Thus the practical problem with “charter cities” is that no one wants them: not the host regime, not the international regime. For both, they simply work too well. Colonialism had to die not because it didn’t work, but because it worked too well.

Mencius Moldbug has a question for Paul Romer, who is currently promoting the notion of charter cities:

Suppose your good Mr. Castro says yes, and you get your Guantanamo City up and running, with its Haitian population and Canadian proconsuls. It is, of course, a smashing success, with investment galore.

And then, in ten years, a mob of Haitians gathers in the beautifully landscaped central square, wearing coloured rosettes and throwing rotten eggs, all chanting a single demand: democracy for Guanatanamo City. The Canadians, all in a tizzy, call you. It’s the middle of the night in Palo Alto. You pick up the phone. “What should we say?” the Canadians ask. “Yes, or no?”

If they say yes — what, in ten years, will be the difference between Guantanamo and Haiti? If they say no — what do they say next? You’ll notice that you have no answer to this question. Hell has little pity for those who decide to forget history.

The charter-city proposal fails, Moldbug asserts, because it will never be tried, and if it is it won’t work:

Why is the Third World a kleptocracy, rather than a capitalist utopia? Let’s take Cuba, renowned worldwide for the purity of its revolutionary ideology. In their promotion of European and Canadian tourism, the Castros have proven canny, avaricious and unromantic businessmen, fine evidence that they were always just thugs and never believed in the whole caper to begin with. Even without Professor Romer, it’s quite clear that the Chinese model is extremely profitable and effective. Cuba doesn’t need Guantanamo, and it doesn’t need Canadians — it has no shortage of competent administrators. It could set up a special economic zone anywhere. Why doesn’t it?

The answer is that the existence of any such entity would constitute an immediate political threat to their regime. Why does socialism abhor private corporations? Because a corporation is a power structure which is not subject to official authority. In a Communist propaganda state, dependent on the continuous mass adulation of its subjects, no such independence is tolerable.

In more kleptocratic regimes, such as are found in Africa, the problem is even simpler and cruder: everyone in government steals. Anyone in government who does not steal is a threat, because his hands are clean while everyone else’s are dirty. He might go to the Americans, and they might make him President. And any enterprise which cannot be stolen from is a threat, because every other enterprise will demand the same privilege.

If Professor Romer expects these types of regimes to cede him a tract of uninhabited land, he is dreaming. All Third World nations are saturated with anticolonialist religion, which will trivially recognize his proposal for exactly what it is, and provides the best possible basis for directing political violence against it. That’s how the Third World got to be the Third World, after all.

The English word for “charter city” is colony, Mencius Moldbug notes:

The fundamental observation of colonialism is that non-European societies thrive under normal European administration, at least in comparison to their condition under native rule. This observation was obvious during the colonial period. Since, it has only grown more so — at least, to those who can handle the truth.

If this observation is “condescending,” so is Professor Romer’s proposal. If it is invalid, so is Professor Romer’s proposal. If it is neither, Professor Romer’s 18 minutes should be invested in introducing, explaining, and defending the original observers — not on passing it off as his own “radical idea.”

The most casual inspection of history reveals the observation’s truth. By any comparison with colonial government, precolonial regimes provided extremely poor service. Spend a little time with the Ashanti or the Mahrattas. So have postcolonial regimes. Rent a room at the Grande Hotel Beira sometime. If you remain trapped in your outdated, 20th-century thinking and prefer statistics to intuition and narrative, the observation is still so obvious that it is impossible for me to imagine any set of governance metrics which could conceal it.

Moreover, Professor Romer’s other distinctions are obviously without substance. The claim that there is any serious distinction between a “colony” and a “charter city” founded on “uninhabited land” is preposterous. Many great colonial cities, such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Singapore, were founded on uninhabited land. So in general were the original colonies of the antique era — the Phocaeans didn’t conquer Marseilles, they created it.

And so was Hong Kong, a Crown Colony of the British Empire. Which, built on uninhabited land, by some miracle survived almost intact into the 21st century. It is not that the fluke of history which preserved this living fossil “reduced world poverty.” It’s that the destruction of all the world’s other Hong Kongs — ie, “decolonialization” — created “world poverty” as we know it.

More precisely, decolonialization created the Third World. The project of Professor Romer’s own intellectual and political establishment, the American and Americanized “scientific” experts in growth and development. What we need here is not a “radical idea.” It is a simple apology. Alas, hell will freeze over before.

Moldbug cites Time magazine’s Come Back, Colonialism, All Is Forgiven:

“The river is the artery of Congo’s economy,” [river-raft "pilot" Malu-Ebonga "Le Blanc" Charles] says. “When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations — cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 3,000 people, 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned.” Using a French expression literally translated as “on the ground,” he adds: “Everything is par terre.”

In 1955, Time described the Boom in the Jungle:

There was plenty of darkness in the Congo during the 19th-century “scramble for Africa,” when Baudoin’s great-granduncle, Leopold II, staked out his monarchical claim to the uncharted Congo Free State. Leopold’s rubber gatherers tortured, maimed and slaughtered until at the turn of the century, the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.

Today, all has changed. Nowhere in Africa is the Bantu so well fed and housed, so productive and so content as he is in the Belgian Congo.

In little more than a generation of intense economic effort, the Belgians have injected 20 centuries of Western mechanical progress into a Stone Age wilderness. The results are staggering: in forests, where 50 years ago there were no roads because the wheel was unknown, no schools because there was no alphabet, no peace because there was neither the will nor the means to enforce it, the sons of cannibals now mine the raw materials of the Atomic Age.

Belgian brains and Bantu muscle have thrust back the forest and checked the dread diseases (yaws, sleeping sickness, malaria) which sapped the Bantu’s strength. In some areas, the Congo’s infant-mortality rate is down to 60 per 1,000 — better than Italy’s figure. More than 1,000,000 children attend primary and secondary schools — 40% of the school-age population (compared with less than 10% in the French empire).

The Belgians taught the Bantu to run bulldozers, looms and furnaces, to rivet ships, drive taxis and trucks. Girls with grotesque tribal markings etched into their ebony foreheads sell in shops, teach in schools, nurse in hospitals. Already thousands of natives in the Congo’s bustling cities earn $100-$150 a month — more than most workers in Europe, and small fortunes by African standards. They buy sewing machines, phonographs and bicycles in such profusion that Sears, Roebuck has recently put out a special Congo catalogue.

The Belgians compare the Congo with the state of Texas, though in fact the Congo is bigger and far richer in its natural resources. The Congo’s gross national product has tripled since 1939. Money is plentiful. Belgian investors take more than $50 million a year in dividends alone. Once the Congo depended exclusively on mining and farming; today it manufactures ships, shoes, cigarettes, chemicals, explosives and photographic film. With its immense reserves of hydroelectric power (a fifth of the world’s total), the Belgians expect the Congo to become “the processing plant for all Africa.”

The Congo boom makes its cities grow like well-nourished bamboo shoots. In six years the Negro population of Elisabethville has jumped from 40,000 to 120,000, Costermansville from 7,000 to 25,000, Stanleyville from 25,000 to 48,000. But the pride of the Congo is Leopoldville (pop. 370,000), a bustling, modern metropolis that is spreading along the south bank of Stanley Pool (see map).

Leo, as the Belgians call it, has tripled its population in the past six years.

These colonial regimes were by no means perfect:

But to assert that their average quality of government service was anything but far better than either their predecessors, or their successors, is a political distortion of history which I have no trouble at all in comparing to Holocaust denial. Far more people were murdered in decolonization and postcolonial violence than in the Holocaust. Moreover, only a few fringe nutcases deny the Holocaust — whereas anticolonialism is a core tenet of everyone’s college education. Oops.