The ghost in the box

[shkrobius]

If liberty is inalienable natural right, as we hold it, how can the convicts be deprived of liberty as just punishment? The Bible does not consider imprisonment (as opposed to jailing before a trial) as the lawful mode of punishment. There is no "tradition" justifying this barabarian practice except for the perverted sadism of Germanic pagans,

Comments

[poltorazhyda]

Bravo, Professor! You've reinvented colonialism, and for all the right reasons. Surely, Subsaharan Africa would benefit from importing a managerial class with higher IQs and morality (relatively speaking-despite the depraved condition of our underclass, machete genocide and cannibalism are pretty rare here.) Why make these men (some of whom have great networking, managerial and interpersonal skills) moulder their lives away in prison? And what's the worst that could happen? Could Africa suck any worse?

Of course, you'd need some kind of rudimentary oversight, for the protection of both the colonists and colonized, and some sort of external organizing principle. Profit should do nicely, and you could use it to finance a minimal Western military presence. I mean, judging by the Toyota War and Mike Hoare's experiences, it doesn't take much. And you'd have to have a colonial governor (an intellectual, a man of principles) to prevent excesses.

I've been pushing neocolonialism on these Internets for a while, but I don't have the eloquence or incisiveness to really get it viral, nor the brute force cachet. With you on our side, however, we may actually get somewhere!

>The repatriated slaves who founded Liberia went there for liberty.

And profit!

>For many years it was a prosperous colony; what happened there recently can happen everywhere, as suggested by examples all over Africa.

It has, can and will happen everywhere, as long as the dominant power in global politics is the USDOS, guided by its degenerate Unitarian ideology of "the weak and stupid are always morally right." When the weak and stupid do come to power, and commence consuming the strong and each other alive, we look the other way while sending more financial aid. This process was originally referred to as decolonialization.

[shkrobius]

I reinvented penalcoloniasm, if you wish. I am not suggesting to put American criminals in charge of the multicolored masses in faraway places. All I am suggesting is paying countries fees for penal colonies on their land. If someone makes profit from such an arrangement, very well. If some convicts want to stay and naturalize, it is their own business.

You automatically assume that no one would be interested. I think you are mistaken. What we spend locally on a single prisoner in a day can feed an African family for a month. Our own ghost towns in the Rust Belt go to the great lengths to get prisons, so there are jobs. Other countries cannot compete - exactly why? They can offer barriers much better than barbed wire and steel bars, for a small fraction we spend to erect such barriers domestically, while depriving people of their liberties.

[poltorazhyda]

> am not suggesting to put American criminals in charge of the multicolored masses in faraway places.

They'll soon be in charge, based on various cultural and biological advantages. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man etc.

>If someone makes profit from such an arrangement, very well.

I agree. The only way the whole thing will work is if a profit is made. Fortunately, a dearth of profitability is not on the long list of reasons Africa sucks. Now, with large profits to be made managing local labor and a lack of the governmental micromanagement that makes life in the States so annoying, non-convict Americans will start emigrating to the colonies. We have an excellent historical example: the tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans who went to the Soviet Union to work in the 1930s (Tim Tsouliades' book, The Forsaken, is a great treatment of the topic.) So, the penal component of penal colonialism will quickly shrink.

>If some convicts want to stay and naturalize, it is their own business.

Au contraire, the natives will be fighting to get citizenship, even second-class, in the colonies. It is much better to be a second class citizen in Rhodesia (for instance) than a first class citizen in Zimbabwe (for instance.)

>You automatically assume that no one would be interested.

No, you misunderstand. I think that any normal person, thinking in terms of the overall good, individual good, profit, etc. would be more than happy to support such a project. On the other hand, the drivers of US policy foreign and domestic are hardly normal, or motivated by such earthly concerns. They are New York Times journalists, GS-16 mandarins, Ivy League Colonialism Studies Professors. They are motivated by prestige and budgets, and nothing else.

>I think you are mistaken. What we spend locally on a single prisoner in a day can feed an African family for a month.

Professor, for all the respect I have for you as a thinker, this is a remarkably ahistorical way to put it, since it presupposes both the prisoner and the family to be by definition unproductive and dependent on external sustenance. This is indeed the case today; yet only 60 years ago, the typical African family would produce enough to feed itself and have enough left over to contribute to infrastructure development and export. The whole continent was not only self-sustaining but self-developing and profitable, too. The reasons we've moved away from that situation and into the current hellish one are the same reasons that will keep us from returning.

In other words, is it more humane, profitable and reasonable for Detroit to be what is is now, or what it was in 1960? Yet Detroit is what it is today, due totally to our policies. Why don't we reverse those policies? Well...

[kobak]

Please forgive me for interrupting, but what exactly are the reasons that Africa is not self-sustating or self-developing anymore? Could you briefly elaborate?

PS. Thank you for mentioning "The Forsaken", I found it on Amazon and it does look interesting.

[poltorazhyda]

In brief: the US gained hegemony over the West as a result of WW2. Driven by the Unitarian/Fabian Socialist ideology of its ruling elite, it proceeded to decolonialize the African dominions of its allies. Academically in the 50's and 60's, the rationale was that on one hand, once these colonies ceased being exploited for their mineral and agricultural resources by their evil khaki-shorts-wearing mustachioed overlords, they would develop into high-tech modern nations. Yes, back in the day all right-thinking people in the circles of power purported to believe this shit. On the other hand, the reasoning went, due to inexorable historical forces, the yearning of the African masses to be free from the colonial yoke would make them inevitably throw off said yoke anyway; therefore, it was incumbent for us to set up a counterpart to the Communists who were otherwise sure to take power on the tide of national liberation. These counterparts, instead of spouting the Communist line and having been trained in Moscow would spout a nationalist line and sometimes have been trained in the Ivy Leagues or some cow college. See: Obama's dad, Gamal Nasser, etc. Of course, sometimes we'd go and support a Communist anyway, just because-see Mugabe or Mandela.

At the same time, we would exert a massive amount of pressure on the colonial power via various means at our disposal. Once these guys came to power and set up a nominal democracy, it would be all over. Since they had no legitimacy, and were basically usurping proxies of the USDOS, their only structural incentive was to steal as much as possible before running off into exile. Furthermore, additional funding could always be secured by reselling oneself to the Communists, at least temporarily. If they were so stupid as to actually set up a democracy, it would be even worse-in a tribal society with an average IQ of 70, there is no difference between an election and a census. After a bit, it is inevitable that the machetes will come out.

All the people who actually made things run under the colonial regime got expropriated in order that their goods and jobs could be redistributed to our proxy's supporters. I'm not just talking about whitey-the Indians in Uganda and the Arabs of Tanzania got it in the neck just as bad.

How did we stand by and let all this happen? Well, since the New Deal, our policy is mostly not determined by the President or Congress. It is determined by unelected and unfireable civil servants. In the absence of external oversight or a real-world organizational motive such as profit, each one of these civil servants has only one structural incentive: career advancement via growing his fiefdom. This is done by increasing the perceived problems of whatever it is he's responsible for, and you have to admit that from this point of view, a cannibalistic, dysfunctional Nigeria is a hell of a lot more attractive than just another boring British protectorate.

[kobak]

Thank you. May I ask: and what in your opinion should have been done instead? No decolonization at all (i.e. European empires should have tried to stay in power, preserving the African map of 1945)? Or decolonization, but different? Were there any alternatives?

[poltorazhyda]

The European empires and genuinely sovereign postcolonial states did try to stay in power. See: Indochina, Suez, Algeria, Portugal's African wars, the Dutch counterinsurgency in Indonesia, the Brits in Malaysia and Oman, Rhodesia, Namibia...nobody could resist the US hegemon in its heyday, especially not when we had our former client, the USSR to play bad cop to our good cop. WW1 and WW2 put an end to the era of sovereign European states and led into a global Monroe Doctrine.

[kobak]

I see. So USA actively supported decolonization, and European empires stood no chance. But purely hypothetically -- what would you find a better scenario? Empires surviving, and all of Africa being colonial until the present day, as it was in 1945? Let's say I'm just interested in your personal Poltorazhyda Doctrine (as opposed to Monroe one).

[poltorazhyda]

Yes, I think it would have been much better had Africa remained colonial to this day.

[poltorazhyda]

And not just me. Time Magazine has published this weird anomaly recently: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.html