There’s a strange disease that seems to be transmitted by a modern university education: an almost reflexive, self-loathing of the Western and White. It’s not particularly new — Orwell, for instance, wrote about how “a derisive and mildly hostile attitude… is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases” — but it’s if anything intensified.
Witness, for instance the hideously cringey sight of a White liberal crying and begging forgiveness from a plainly embarrassed black Starbucks employee, or the pasty White neckbeard socialist screeching that, “You don’t have a culture! You’re fuckin’ White!”
Such people invariably defend their weird self-hatred by pointing to the Original Sins of Whiteness: colonialism, racism, homophobia…
It’s no use pointing out, as John Cleese has, that colonialism was the default setting for political organisation for 6,000 years. Nor that imperialists such as the Aztecs or the Muslim conquests were far more brutal than almost anything inflicted by Europeans (even the Belgians, for all their viciousness, would probably have flinched at flaying the Congolese alive and wearing their skins).
It’s also no use similarly pointing out that the only places where actual racism and homophobia (as opposed to being a bit uncertain that drag queens fondling children in school libraries is really such a good thing) are rife is everywhere but the White West.
Whenever I hear our modern-day saints – the Cardinals of the new 21st century Church – adding up the injustices and flaws in our society, I always ask them the same question I have asked several times in these very pages; ‘All objective data suggest we are fortunate enough to live in the most prosperous and inclusive society in human history. Can you name a better period to live in?’
As you could imagine, I am always met with crickets. None of these people, who have a bizarre fetish for victimhood and ostensibly solving social issues through meaningless conversation, can name any other time than now.
At best, the “victims” of the White West might blither about “systemic racism” and “microaggressions”. The first is a lie: there is not a single law or institution in the White West which imposes racism (except racism against Whites — which the victim brigade deny is even “real racism” anyway). The second is simply ludicrous: an “aggression” so small as to be literally “micro” is not an aggression at all.
More pointedly, ask these inveterates haters of one of the many great inventions of the White West, capitalism, to point to a successful example of its alternative, socialism (also, as it happens, a creation of the White West).
In retort to my question, I am repeatedly told that Vietnam’s economic boom over the past twenty years shows how socialism is superior to capitalism. Furthermore, they suggest we adopt this model to end all the problems the world is experiencing.
As the old saying goes ‘if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is’. Vietnam is not a shining beacon of hope for socialism. In fact, it’s the opposite.
According to the World Bank, ‘Vietnam’s shift from a centrally planned to a market economy has transformed the country from one of the poorest in the world into a lower middle-income country. Vietnam now is one of the most dynamic emerging countries in the East Asia region.’
Before its switch to a market economy, Vietnam’s GDP per capita US$231, about 70% of its population was living below the poverty line and the economy was on the brink of collapse. The introduction of market reforms in 1986 met with rapid success. Less than a decade later, poverty was reduced to 58%. The successes didn’t end there.
The World Bank reported that, ‘Between 2002 and 2020, GDP per capita increased 2.7 times, reaching almost US$2,800. Over the same period, poverty rates declined sharply from over 32 per cent in 2011 to below 2 per cent.’
In terms of infrastructure, the country went from 14 per cent having access to electricity in 1993 to 99 per cent in 2016.
Health standards also rapidly improved, ‘Infant mortality rates fell from 32.6 per 1,000 live births in 1993 to 16.7 per 1,000 in 2017. Life expectancy rose from 70.5 to 76.3 years between 1990 and 2016.’
After being considered one of the most impoverished countries on earth just 30 years ago, the World Bank says it is now on track to become a high-income nation by 2045.
Spectator Australia
The Vietnamese themselves are in no doubt: 95% support capitalism.
But then, unlike Western elites, they’ve actually lived under its alternative.