The Thin Veneer of Civilization by Mark Tapson
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-thin-veneer-of-civilization/
The Left is turning us into a “sh*thole country.”
During a White House meeting with Senators in January, 2018, then-President Donald Trump reportedly questioned the reasoning for allowing immigration from “shithole countries” such as Haiti. This triggered the pearl-clutching mainstream media, and charges of racism flew fast and furious, including from Haiti Ambassador to the U.S. Paul Altidor, who said Trump’s language was based on “clichés and stereotypes rather than actual fact.”
Today Haiti is a shithole country, and that is not a racist cliché or stereotype but actual fact. It is a failed nation in a state of emergency, becoming a dangerous power vacuum in the Caribbean. Awash in violence and chaos, the country is run by a heavily armed gang whose messianic leader Jimmy Cherizier is grotesquely and justifiably nicknamed “Barbeque.”
Even reports of cannibalism have surfaced amid the current chaos, including videos on social media showing at least one gang member gnawing on a human leg from a burning corpse. An anonymous journalist on the ground told The Daily Express, “We have seen images of gang leaders eating people they have killed. We have seen images of people being tortured when they are kidnapped.”
As Horowitz Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes, Haiti is a failed state because it lacks “a legitimate government or a functional society,” and its police force is barely distinguishable from the murderous gangs it is supposed to control. The police there actually spawned “Barbeque” Cherizier, a warlord now the most powerful man in Haiti, who has orchestrated or been involved in a number of massacres of the Haitian people.
Predictably, left-wing elites blame Haiti’s long history of anarchy and corruption on European-driven slavery and colonialism. But as author Rod Dreher noted recently, a government minister told journalist Robert D. Kaplan in 1994 that the widespread Haitian practice of voodoo – a polytheistic folk religion derived from West African animism, with no central authority or institutional structure – is “the central fact explaining their country’s chronic misery,” as Dreher puts it. He continues:
If people within a social order believe that they have no real moral agency, and that their fate lies in the hands not of a God of reason and justice, but of an irrational spirit with a mercurial will, then it will be hard to build ordered social structures and ways of life.
Haitian Protestants, Dreher adds, “say the country’s founders brought a curse on Haiti by consecrating it to demons in the slave revolt that sparked the Haitian Revolution… that eventually overturned despotic French colonial rule” in 1791.
States succeed or fail because of the cultural beliefs and practices that underlie them. Those beliefs and practices either empower the people to achieve community, freedom and prosperity, or keep the people mired in fragmentation, savagery and poverty. Haiti is a failure not because of Western rule that ended over 200 years ago but because it lacks the elevating values and practices that propelled Western civilization to greatness.
Now the open-border globalists of the left are salivating over the prospect of a mass exodus of potential Democrat voters from Haiti fleeing the war zone. While some pundits argue that the Biden administration may turn away Haitian refugees in order to look tough on illegal immigration in time for the election, the New York Post published a leaked email from border agents in Miami warning, “The Coast Guard may not be stopping Haitian sail freighter[s]. They will just be escorting them into land [ports].” The email added, “With the breakdown of the government in Haiti[,] repatriating Haitians may not be happening for the foreseeable future.”
Of course they won’t be repatriated. The Biden administration has no intention of ever repatriating anyone who is here illegally. Untold numbers of Haitians will likely be bused throughout the country like other illegals which the administration has prioritized over our own citizens. Will every immigrant fleeing Haiti be a violent cannibal like “Barbeque” Cherizier’s gangsters? Of course not. Will some Haitians bring with them a perpetually broken culture of corruption, crime, and chaos? Of course. Just last Friday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that state law enforcement had intercepted a vessel coming to the coast carrying dozens of Haitian migrants, as well as firearms, drugs and — interestingly — night vision gear. Mass migration from Haiti will bring more social instability and disorder.
As one can see in the sobering example of Europe, mass migration – not immigration that is legal, controlled, and discriminating (in the sense of good judgment) – from cultures that do not share Western values has civilization-corroding consequences. But this is exactly what the Progressive left wants throughout the West.
The only country in the world that Democrats would condemn as a “shithole” today is America, a country whose Founders, Constitution, Judeo-Christian values, and capitalist prosperity they deeply resent and despise. It is a country and a civilization they actively have been trying to destroy by, among other means, fomenting lawlessness and disorder through pro-crime policies such as the defunding of police departments, no-cash bail, criminal justice reform, the decriminalization of shoplifting, and sanctuary cities. Add to this the left’s support for the violent anarchy of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and pro-Hamas Jew-haters; the justification of looting as “reparations”; the relentless aggravating of racial animosity; the push for “equity” and “restorative justice”; and a half-century of successful assaults on such cultural institutions of stability as the nuclear family, religious faith, and national pride, and you have a nation brought to the brink of civilizational failure.
The signs of civilizational degeneration are legion. Last week a video capturing a teenage brawl in Missouri went viral; in it, one girl is seen savagely beating another, including pounding her head on concrete, in a clear attempt to kill her. As usual, none of the other youths bothers to intervene because they are too busy recording the sickening violence on their cell phones to be shared on social media. As of this writing, the victim, who is white, clings to life in a coma. The perpetrator, who is black, has been arrested, but we all know the legacy media will bury this story and she will not face the justice she deserves, because under the equity-driven Biden administration there is a two-tier system of justice in America – another sign of civilizational decay.
Incidents of subhuman brutality and mob voyeurism like this are shamefully routine in America now, because civilization is breaking down – and it is a half-century of Progressive subversion that has brought us to this point. (We have not yet descended into Haitian gang-style cannibalism, although as I wrote recently, there are hints that the left is laying the groundwork for the normalization of it).
When I was a boy, my favorite author was Edgar Rice Burroughs, the prolific creator of Tarzan of the Apes, John Carter of Mars, and other pulp fiction heroes. ERB, as he is known, noted on more than one occasion in the series of Tarzan novels that Tarzan, who was actually the son of royalty and who became a cultured, educated English lord, would sometimes feel the irresistible call of the wild, shed “the thin veneer of civilization,” and return to roam the jungle once again. This reflects the Rousseauian fantasy of “the noble savage,” in which the state of nature is idealized as good and pure, while civilization is seen as degrading and corrupting.
The prosperity and leisure afforded by modernity is in some ways corrupting, but the reality is that the true state of nature is feral, selfish, and amoral – the survival of the fittest. The elevating state of civilization is our buffer – and a thin one at that – against what Hobbes called the war of all against all. But that kind of disintegration into savagery is the state of society toward which we are headed in America as the far-left Democrat party rips away that thin veneer of civilization to keep the masses atomized rather than unified, at each other’s throats, and under the totalitarian control of those in power.
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