Earlier (2014) John Derbyshire Asks: Endemic Corruption—The Ukraine Is Ex-Soviet, But What Excuse Do Black American Politicians Have?

One of the first things I had to say about the Russia-Ukraine war, back in February when it had just broken out, was that it is the first of any significance to be fought in demographic modernity, between two technologically advanced nations which both have low fertility, a declining workforce, and a swelling number of geezers.

That's interesting in itself, and I'm sure I shall return to it. Here though is another, not necessarily related, observation about this war.

Consider all the countries of the world. From that set, remove all the black African countries. Then remove the nonwhite East and South Asian and Pacific countries. Then remove all the majority-Muslim countries. Then remove all the Latin American countries with a large nonwhite component in their populations. What are you left with?

Well, you are left with countries that you couldn't help thinking of, if you lined 'em up, as white European in their core populations. I don't mean geographically European: Australia and Argentina would be in there, too. I mean demographically European.

OK, put aside for a moment that set of countries you just gathered, get on the internet and bring up Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. Every year Transparency International scores all the countries of the world for corruption, as best that can be done. Then they show a ranking, with the least corrupt countries ranked number one, the most corrupt ranked number 180.

The most recent ranking they have published is for the year 2021, last year. Ranked number one, the cleanest country, was Denmark, followed by Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, and Sweden. Ranked number 180, the most hopelessly corrupt, was South Sudan, with just above it as slightly less corrupt, Syria, Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and North Korea.

Now pick up that set of demographically European nations I started with. Working your way up from the bottom of Transparency International's ranked list—which is to say, from South Sudan heading up towards Denmark, at what point do you begin to encounter demographically European countries, countries on my starting list?

I just tried it out for the 2021 rankings. The first hit is Russia, ranked 136. Russia is tied in the scoring with Mali, Liberia, and Angola, just ahead of Myanmar, Mauritania, and Pakistan.

Continuing on up the rankings towards Denmark, the next demographically European countries you encounter is—drum roll, please [drum roll]—Ukraine! She's ranked number 122.

If you keep going up the rankings you get to Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina equal ranked at 110; although since both are heavily Moslem, I'm not sure we should count them. Continuing on upwards, there's Moldova at 105, then Serbia and Argentina, equal ranked at 96.

So of all the world's demographically European countries, easily the most corrupt are Russia and Ukraine.

Conclusion: Not only is this war being fought between two countries in demographic modernity—low fertility, lots of geezers—it's also being fought between two extreme outliers on the scale of corruption for demographically European countries

Yes: For those of us addicted to statistical tables, this is a very interesting war.

The over-representation of black African and Caribbean countries

Please give to VDARE.com Legal Defense Fund here—earmark your gift to individual cases.

Recently I wrote that February 25, 2022 could be a very hard day for VDARE.com, and it was: the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear our petitions for certiorari in VDARE Foundation vs. City Of Colorado Springs and also in our second case Brimelow vs. New York Times.

I discussed the issues involved here:

• Will SCOTUS Uphold The NEW YORK TIMES’ License To Lie?
• LEFT ON VERGE OF HUGE ANTI-FIRST AMENDMENT VICTORY—Unless SCOTUS Takes Up VDARE Vs. COLORADO SPRINGS

SCOTUS’ implicit answers:

• Yes, the New York Times does indeed have a License To Lie;
• Yes, the Left (in the shape of Democrat and cuckservative-controlled local governments) are newly free to deny police protection to Patriot Dissidents, exposing them to Antifa violence, whereas they cannot do this to minority agitators.

Note that I say “implicit.” SCOTUS did not actually rule in these cases. It just cravenly evaded them.

The New York Times rejection is deeply disillusioning to us at VDARE.com, but is perhaps not, in the end, in vain. “The Supreme Court is going to revisit SULLIVAN,” a noted First Amendment lawyer told me about our New York Times case. “But not for you.”  (So much for Equality Before the Law).

SULLIVAN—the disastrous Civil Rights Era SCOTUS decision that distorted the law to protect black activists and broke with other Common Law jurisdictions like the U.S. and Canada to invent the idea that falsehood in itself was not libelous—is clearly doomed. The recent extraordinary behavior of Clinton-appointee Judge Jed Rakoff, in effect directing the jury in Sarah Palin’s libel case against the New York Times, was widely interpreted as a desperate effort to keep the License To Lie alive [Sarah Palin’s defamation case against the New York Times could spell trouble for the First Amendment on appeal,  by Richard Labunski, Baltimore Sun, March 4, 2022].  (NOTE: When the US Regime Media says “First Amendment,” it means its License To Lie. Free Speech is doing just fine in other Common Law Jurisdictions without SULLIVAN).

In fact, we established our key point when Judge Katherine Polk Failla

See, earlier: The Fulford File: “You Swine Happy Now?” MSM, Complicit In Disgruntled Minority Massacres, Desperately Suppressing VA Shooter’s Race

Weird that the media didn’t cite Ketanji Brown Jackson’s height and weight as her most important characteristics. When it came to THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN ON THE SUPREME COURT, it was all about her race. But after a guy shot up a New York City subway car this week, the last thing the media wanted to tell us was his race.

For more than three hours after the attack, we got urgent alerts: Suspect at large! Police request public’s help! Be on the alert for a male, about 5’8″, 160 lbs.

In this particular case, the media’s rule of never telling us the suspect’s race (unless he’s white) was more deranged than usual. This wasn’t a carjacking. It wasn’t a shooting at a block party. It wasn’t an attack on an Asian or Jew. This crime had all the earmarks of a terror attack—smoke bombs, fireworks, a gas mask, and about a dozen people shot while trapped in a subway car.

The police desperately needed the public’s help, but most people were looking for a Middle Easterner.

At least we knew it wasn’t a white guy! If it had been, reporters would have worn out the “W” on their computer keyboards. There would have been rampant speculation that it was a Proud Boy, as top administration officials reminded us that “white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not al-Qaida—white supremacists.” (President Joe Biden June 2, 2021)

We’re always told “wokeness” is just about being polite and that those who ridicule it are trying to “discredit the claims of traditionally marginalized groups for respect.” (Thomas Zimmer, history professor, Georgetown University) Or they are engaging in “white backlash.” (Seth Cotlar, history professor, Willamette University)

[SIDEBAR: Don’t go to college, kids!]

No, wokeness is real. And it can get us killed—when, for example, off the top of my head, a murderous psychopath is on the run and the media refuse to tell us what he looks like.

At the New York Police Department’s first press conference on the subway attack, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell [Tweet her] came up with an all-new circumlocution to convey the relevant information without saying “black male.” She said: “… we will describe him as an individual, he is being reported as a male black.”

“A male black”! That’s so much better than “black male” when identifying a criminal.

By the time of the evening press conference, Sewell had settled on an even dumber description,

Earlier: Donna Zuckerberg's Woke Classics Mag Denounces Pericles' Anti-Immigrant Citizenship Law of 451 BC

“We are citizens of our age as much as of our countries,” as Schiller  remarked, and one of the purposes of studying old books is to overcome temporal provincialism: the prejudices of the present. Our enemies certainly know this; that is why they have initiated the #DisruptTexts movement to “protect” young people from exposure to Classical literature. But even those determined not to be robbed of their heritage might experience difficulty in first approaching ancient civilization and its literary monuments. Guillaume Durocher [Tweet him], a dissident commentator not formally trained in the classics, has made the task easier by producing a readable book based on his own study of six Greek authors: the poets Homer and Hesiod, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. This self-published work is The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Classical Greece.

VDARE.com readers will be sympathetic to Durocher’s civilizational concerns and pleasantly surprised at what he found: Aristotle expressed himself plainly  in his Politics on the subject of diversity and mass immigration; i.e., it was, in the end, disastrous for the host nation:

Dissimilarity of stock is conducive to factional conflict, until a cooperative spirit develops. For just as a city does not arise from any chance multitude, so it does not arise in any chance period of time. Hence those who have admitted joint settlers or late settlers [of different stock] have for the most part split into factions. [Politics, Book 5, Chapter 3]

Aristotle cites eight examples of ethnic conflict that arose from the imprudent admission of “dissimilar stocks” to Greek city-states. In some cases, the older group was forced to expel the newcomers en masse; in others