Mozambique is Everything that's Wrong with Africa:

Mozambique is a veritable paradise.  The temperature ranges from 50-80 degrees year-round.  Almost the entirety of the country is arable land, with five major rivers.  Half the country is along the coast giving all sorts of foreign trade opportunities.  It has vast reserves of natural gas, aluminum, and other precious resources.  The country has more landmass than Turkey.  Mozambique is probably a better place to live than France, and definitely a better place to live than the American South, if only there weren't any Africans there.

The business opportunities one could have in Mozambique are enough to make one salivate, and yet across all of history the place has been nothing but a backwards dump.  In the beginning there were hunter-gatherer bushmen or whatever populating the area, before they were driven out and displaced by the comparatively advanced bantu herders.  I'm not even sure if farming was ever adopted by the natives there or if they just stayed nomads grazing cattle from there on.  In any event, the region went nowhere, typified by warring tribes, with only a few coastal cities being founded by Arab traders who mostly dealt in slaves sold to them by various warlords.  The Portuguese took over and used the area as a waystation for their shipping needs into India and other more profitable places, but due to continuing conflict with the Arabs they actually abandoned the area to take care of itself.  No major population of Portuguese ever settled in the area, and then only in a few trading ports which looked outward instead of inward to the vast fertile lands of the region.  Once Muslim power waned the Portuguese were left with these trading ports sort of by default.  They had never amounted to anything and now that the slave trade was over they had even less use than before.  Some attempt was made to modernize Mozambique by building roads and railroads that connected to genuine civilizations like Rhodesia and South Africa, but Portugal was so poor and backwards it had little time for far off lands like Mozambique and could barely take care of itself.

Portugal had done nothing for or against the natives of Mozambique.  This was about as benignly neglectful as a colony can get.  I suppose this is legitimate grounds for a revolutionary war, if your motherland doesn't even seem to be aware of your existence and refuses to develop your economy by investing any modern know-how or good governance, you may as well go your own way.  But the particular breed of revolutionary war Mozambique settled on was communism.  Portugal gave up largely without a fight once Mozambique rebelled, since they seriously didn't care about the region and it had never been profitable for them.  Afterwards the communists took power and went about massacring the democratic leaning side in a giant twenty year long civil war.  They also ethnically cleansed all the Portuguese out of their country and now have a near perfect 99% black bantu population.  The war ended in 1994 with the switching of the nation to a democracy, which it has been ever since, and became relatively peaceful.  So this was the first chance Mozambique has had to actually develop its economy from, basically, nothing.

What have they done with this opportunity?  Essentially nothing.  There has been massive economic growth, but it's all been eaten up by massive population growth.  The median age of a Mozambiquean is 17 years old.  90% of the population is not of an age where it can expect to provide for itself.  And the fertility rate, still at 5.5 per woman, shows no signs of slowing down.  65% of the population is engaged in subsistence farming, no more advanced than when the Portuguese found them in 1500.  There's still no serious infrastructure.  No sanitation, water, or electricity for anyone except a few favored groups in the major cities.  The country is ranked 116 out of 176 in corruption, so the government can't get anything done because all the money is absconded with.  The IMF and other parties have made so many loans to the country, all of which were never paid back and eventually forgiven, that it's hopeless to ask for any more.  They drove out the only intelligent and technologically capable population they could have leaned on at the start of their revolution, and the natives had never been educated in anything to begin with.  Only half the country even shares a single language, Portuguese, the rest speaking various tribal tongues.

Today there are 25 million people in Mozambique.  Their GDP per capita is a pitiful $1,400, but even that is a major increase from where they began.  This is a country bigger than France, with as good a climate or better.  France has 66 million people.  So yes, Mozambique can keep churning out the kids and the sky is really the limit for now.  Over 90% of their arable land is still untouched and just left to the wilderness.  But this is just a waste of an opportunity.  If they stopped reproducing like rabbits and turned their farmland over to western interests who would put in technologically sophisticated commercial farming practices, they could have a massive agricultural surplus, export their crops to the world at large using all of their wonderful rivers and port towns, and import as much western decadence as they wanted for their relatively small population in exchange.  They could live like kings over there, never mind just having water, toilets and electricity.  Instead they're going to breed and breed, subsistence farm over the entirety of their land, and get virtually nothing out of it save base survival.

If the people of France moved to Mozambique it would become a world power and sit on the freaking UN security council.  Instead it's one of the poorest nations on Earth.  For no damn reason.  Just because the people and the administration are so feckless that they can't or won't capitalize on any of their innumerable business opportunities sitting all around them.

If a bunch of racists could just be allowed to invade and conquer Mozambique, drive out the natives (don't worry, the population density of Africa is so low that it can easily take in another 25 million people, the whole continent is going to balloon upwards to 4 billion people just from its native birth rate, so 25 million is just a drop in the bucket) and rename the country Vinland, we'd end up the richest and most enviable jewel of the world.  But because the various established powers of the world are anti-colonialism, this dream scenario can never come to be.  Instead we have to sit and watch as this wonderful land breeds nothing but poverty, corruption and misery for the rest of time.  If only Portugal had treated Mozambique seriously and settled it like we settled the USA, we wouldn't be having this conversation.  But they found more profit in the sugarcane in Brazil and, being a small nation themselves, understandably invested what resources and manpower they had into developing their more promising colonies.

Mozambique could have been France 2.0.  Instead it has no accomplishments.  The majority of its inhabitants are still in the neolithic period of subsistence farming.  And because we're all too cowardly to Make Mozambique Great Again we're going to just let it stay that way, rotting on the vine.  How does this policy help the world?  Why is this the fruit of the enlightenment?  Shouldn't we compare and contrast how much better we made Australia, Canada, the USA, New Zealand and other colonies to what happened in Mozambique and other places we neglected and eventually returned to the natives?  Mozambique has a better climate than Canada or Australia could ever dream of.  It has way better natural resources.  It's practically the garden of eden over there, the whole damn country is farmlands or pasture.  But it's sitting at $1,400 per capita.  Unbelievable.

The belief system of the world is losing us entire continents of beautiful soil in beautiful climates.  We're stuck freezing our toes off in Scandinavia, Siberia, and Canada, or burning up in the American South or the Mojave desert or Australia, while Mozambique is sitting there with better weather than California year-round.  We live in all the shittiest environments and make them bloom and prosper anyway, while they live in all the best environments and do jack squat with them.  Where does this make sense?  If aliens landed how would they explain what the hell we're doing with this planet?

It's like we're ancient Egypt and we literally worship crocodiles and cats and crap, putting animal interests above our own.  Mozambique couldn't possibly put up a military fight against us.  We could conquer the whole country in a couple days.  In a few years we would pull a Meiji Restoration type construction project on the whole place and get its infrastructure up to snuff.  Then we would clear the forests and put in the giant automated tractor farms, unleash our giant hordes of cattle on the highlands, start horizontal drilling our new natural gas supplies, put dams on the rivers, by God it would be beautiful.  It would look like the fall of the Berlin wall with cranes everywhere putting up new buildings as far as the eye can see.  All the beachfront property you could ask for at no price, you could just homestead the damn area.  San Fransisco quality living environments for free.

But nope, human rights come first.  We can't take from others.  Like in some daycare facility the schoolmarms are lecturing us about being nice to Sally and sharing our toys.  When the pioneers settled America they fought a thousand times as hard, struggled just to survive malarial swamps and frigid New England winters.  Most of them starved to death or were butchered by Indians or swept away by disease.  Even so they were hardy enough to pull through and gradually, over the course of centuries, we transformed that wild frontier into the greatest nation to ever live.  Skyscrapers everywhere, Nobel prizes and Olympic medals raining down on us like no tomorrow, the center of entertainment with Hollywood, Activision-Blizzard, Magic: The Gathering, inventing all the sports like Baseball and Basketball the world plays today.  What a land.  What a nation.  What a legacy.  And yet there sits Mozambique, where maybe a couple dozen people would have to die to completely conquer it, our modern medicine would mean nobody starves or catches an infectious disease, and we'd be rich in a few years instead of a few generations.  And we can't take it.  It's further out of our reach, more impossible a conquest, than the pioneers faced settling America.

Because we've been taught to be nice to Sally and share our toys.  So we can't do anything anymore, and our ancestors are just sitting there perplexed as 2/3 of our population sits around unemployed with nothing left to do.  Since we're not allowed to have any ambitions anymore or achieve anything, everyone's just swilling alcohol and snorting cocaine all day, and our lifespan is actually going down.  America's largest employer, trucking, is about to be automated out of existence.  All those tough rough men are going to have nothing to do in the next few years.  Get them together and they could conquer Mozambique in a week.  Instead they'll probably all die of overdoses over the next few decades.  The feminization of our country, the infantilization of our country, means it's unthinkable to emulate the valor and industry of our ancestors.  We aren't allowed to achieve glory or greatness anymore.  All we can do is hold people's hands and feel their pain.  The highest moral paragon of America is someone who invents a new electronic chatting device so everyone can waste their time yakking to each other about nothing every day.  We could be building a 1,000 year Reich over there right now, with monuments taller than the Burj Khalifa.  Instead we're hooking up at gay bars.

At a certain point you wonder if it isn't even about philosophy.  Surely no group of people could be changed so thoroughly just by being told night is day and up is down.  Common sense should have been enough to discard any philosophical system that wouldn't let us settle Mozambique like we settled America.  The obvious profit to be had, the obvious modernization and civilization we could revolutionize the area with, just makes it so much of a no-brainer, that really, is it even possible that anyone could deceive us into thinking this is 'wrong'?

At this point I'm more ready to believe that chemicals in the water are reducing our rational faculties to near zero and flooding us with so much sissy namby pamby ness that we're all going to end up gay, frolicking with pet kittens, or weaving daisy chains for each other's hair.  That's apparently the only thing modern America wants to be or think about -- transgenders and gay pride parades or bust.  We've been totally defanged and denatured.  We have nothing in common with the brave men and women who settled the west, who fought through Valley Forge, who stood at point blank range at Antietam and simply leveled each other with volley after stubborn volley.  There's more drive, more competence, more self-confidence, more masculinity, in the little finger of someone pictured in 1900 than anyone living today.  They stood like they were somebody.  They wore clothes that made them look like they were somebody.  They were physically fit to the point of gauntness, but all of it steely muscle.  They were all doing something concrete.  Not some goddamn fruity human resources department, or accountants, or sales managers, or all these awful fake jobs everyone gets these days.  They were fucking blacksmiths, carpenters, factory workers, cowboys, farmers, soldiers.  We built the Empire State Building in one year.  When World War II began, we owned five or so carriers.  When it ended we had one hundred carriers, and this despite Japan trying to sink as many as they could throughout the conflict.  Can you even imagine the America of back then compared to today?  Today we have ten carriers, and we'll be lucky if we can even secure enough funding to modernize that fleet over the remainder of the century.  We only have one 21st century worthy carrier, the Gerald Ford, which hasn't actually even been commissioned yet.

We're going backwards, backwards, backwards.  We're actually losing the war on disease, as old infections like tuberculosis return and new incurable forms of all the previous diseases proliferate.  We're losing the very southwest we fought multiple wars to conquer from Mexico back to Mexico, without firing a single shot.  In San Jose they can egg our women and beat our skulls in with rocks and our police just sits by and watches as the events unfold.  The police captain is a member of La Raza and is just smirking as 'his' tribe humiliates ours.  We've gone from Washington and Jefferson to Obama and Clinton as our presidents.  Wages haven't risen since 1970 despite some of the greatest technological innovations in the history of the world and massive productivity gains from computers and the internet.  Divorce and adultery hover around 50% of every marriage, an infinite step backwards from how relationships worked up until 1950.  Sexually active people are more likely than not to have STD's, again a detestable, disgusting step back from our Christian roots which stressed and enforced virginity until marriage.

A country that used to have full employment and the slogan 'go West, young man' now has a 64% labor force participation rate, and that's at half the working hours of people who lived in 1900.

Home ownership used to be a given, alongside ownership of your own land that was economically productive enough to support your entire family and then some.  Now both are nigh impossible, and half of millennials are still living with their parents.

Crime, which used to be under control, is now back on the upswing, and more vicious and despicable crimes than we could even imagine in the past.  Just recently a group of muslim immigrants imported their wonderful custom of gang raping a five year old, and just to add insult to injury urinated in her mouth at the end of it.  Name me a time that happened in 1950, 1900, 1850, 1800, 1750, 1700, 1650, or 1600.  And name me a time these animals weren't strung up and butchered immediately afterwards by the enraged populace.  Now we sit by passively and probably they'll get three years in prison at worst.  Disgusting.  Utterly depraved.  We aren't even willing to defend little girls anymore.  Once little girls aren't safe in your country, you should just be nuked off the face of the map, and that's where America stands.  We're simply at the bottom of the barrel now.  God can't even conceive of a way to degrade us any further.

People in the past had no time for drugs, they were busy chopping down trees and draining swamps so that they could enjoy the relatively easier task of plowing fields.  Now over 50% of the population is just wasting its life away in a perpetual hazy buzz.  Despicable.  Shameful.  How can they look their parents in the face who invested so much into their upbringing to only amount to this?

The majority of white Americans think their children's lives will be worse than theirs were.  This should be physically impossible, given the progress of technology on all fronts.  But we've devolved morally so quickly and so deeply that it is indeed possible.  In fact we're watching the reality of it in real time.  Our lives really are worse than the whites who came before us.  We can't have decent family lives like everyone starting in 1600 used to enjoy.  We can't get any jobs, or if we do their pay is pathetic and can't buy us the houses and land that our ancestors could easily afford.  It used to be that men alone could work and provide for enormous families of a wife and thirteen kids, now even if the wife works people max out at one child.  Our lifespans are decreasing due to our own bad habits in an age of medical miracles.  It's no longer safe to go outside or interact with anyone, so we huddle in our shells and watch television.  You can get fired from your job for insisting on the most basic truths, like men and women are different, and men cannot simply become women by stating that they are.  There was more respect and tolerance for truth tellers in Rhode Island in the 1600's than we have today.  There was real freedom back then, not 50% tax rates and regulations banning everything under the sun.  But also not the license to sin which is apparently the only freedom Americans are interested in anymore.

Freedom loving families that want to live like our ancestors could take over Mozambique and create a new USA just as good as the original one was, but we're not even free to do that anymore, because the militaries of all the world would get together and blow us out of the water.  They won't do anything to advance civilization, but they sure as hell won't allow anyone else to do what's needed either.  Veritable dogs in the mangers.

In an era which should be full of hope, with cheap energy, gene therapy, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, all these great inventions just around the corner, all we can do is look around us in despair at our self-created hell.  How does philosophy go this wrong?  Stalin could do better than this.