Socialist dysgenics

Lately I've been reading through a 1990s travel book on one of the West's most backward countries, Albania, a place some argue is so backward, it shouldn't really been seen as part of the West but as a poor Asiatic country like Afghanistan.

In The Accursed Mountains (written in 1996) the politically incorrect travel writer Robert Carver pulls no punches about Albania's shortcomings:

"I realised within a few days of arriving in Albania that nothing would ever be done to clean up and rebuilt the country, because that was and would always be "someone else's" job."

"...Albania was a professional client state. It had been bankrupt since its inception in 1913 and had just gone on borrowing money and scrounging goods and aid ever since. None of this was ever paid back; instead, new states of a different political hue were sought. Albanians would wave any flag you like as long as they were paid for it..."

Carver says that life in the isolated mountain villages was particularly severe, with the infant mortality rates at "sub-Saharan" levels, and agriculture almost totally unmechanised, despite generous donations of modern farm machinery by the EU. About the only growth industries in the 1990s were growing dope and smuggling guns into Kosovo.

How to account for this backwardness?

While Albania was probably held back to some degree in the 19th Century by the Ottoman Empire, and since 1945 by communism, this can't really account for the extreme level of poverty and lawlessness that's occurred since the end of communism.

A deeper reason may the dysgenic effect of killing off many of the country's professionals and intellectuals during the communist era.

Like Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha was determined to destroy his country's bourgeios class so as to remove any potential obstacles to establishing an industrialised socialist state.

But in doing so he killed off most of those who were capable of administrating a modern economy and maintaining law and order. Hence once the communists lost power, the industrial economy collapsed with them, and law and order become the preserve of private gangs and ethnic clans.

In affluent western countries egalitarian liberals like to warn us about the potential dangers of believing in genetic differences in human ability, while forgetting the dysgenic disasters that have taken place in the name of radical egalitarianism.