One American’s Odyssey

The Baron’s recent graphs about population growth in Sweden got one of our readers reminiscing about the changes in his thinking over the years since childhood. It’s a transformation that many Americans can identify with…at one time or another, most of us went through a similar sea change in the way we saw the rest of the world.

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It’s obvious now that First World’s chickens are coming home to roost. An evil brew of Marxist social engineering combined with our Judeo/Christian ethos in the West has created mechanisms in the Third World which have triggered these various population explosions. As a result of our unintended consequences grave threats now confront us.

I’m not by nature an isolationist. However, I’ve grown increasingly convinced that all those nickels which UNICEF pilfered from me and others (when I often went without my milk for the day as a child to “feed the children”) were naïvely misguided.

And I began wondering about this much earlier than 9/11...
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During the 80s and 90s I’d begun to notice how, with few exceptions, nations which Americans had sacrificed to help most often were the same countries which seemed to hate us the most profoundly. It was a shock when I went to Europe for the first time — 1980-81 — and found it to be a nest of anti-American hatred. Germany, France, and to a lesser extent the UK all featured a venomous regard for anything American. This was also a period when it was clear that the Muslims were gunning for us after a number of hostile events had occurred, e.g., the 1974 oil “crisis” or the 1979 revolution in Iran. There were many more, including murders of Americans in terror attacks.

I began to think that the theory which underlay our foreign aid policy, coupled with our largesse as a nation, had done much to empower people we thought to be friends but, who, in the end turned out to be our enemies.

If it hadn’t been for our aid-money , medicine, engineering, etc., much of Africa, most of the Muslim world, and Asia would be much sicker. They would also be much less productive and far less populous than they are now. Ironically, many have observed that our own population trends now are going in the opposite direction.

It certainly seems to be long past the time to reconsider all of our “do-gooder” projects. Recently you’ll recall Bill Gates and Warren Buffet joined forces to lavish sixty to eighty billion dollars on malaria eradication and clean drinking water projects. These staggering sums will flow into the coffers of people who are most likely to become even more our enemies.

If the past serves as any indication, I surmise that the most benefit will accrue to various Communist and Muslim societies. As such, rather than being a moral “obligation” or “good deed” on our part, we will have instead engaged in the most thoughtless and staggering orgy of self-destruction the world has ever known.

Have we learned nothing?

— JS