Clearly, the West didn't send enough aid:
We Could Have Settled Mars; Our Regime Chose Global Zimbabwe Instead
"Led by DOGE in doing so, the Trump Administration is trying to defund wasteful government agencies and programs, and having at least some success in doing so, even to the point of pushing back against the South Africanization of America. It has cut funding for DEI and, amongst other things, paused USAID spending.
That, in turn, has opened up a whole new can of worms, leading to an examination of what sorts of things America is spending money on at home and abroad. The discoveries have been stomach-churning and headache-inducing. A transgender children’s comic in Peru. The promotion of atheism in Nepal. A chat room for transgender NSA, CIA, and DIA officials to plan sex meetups. $150 million for terror groups. And so on: the worst things imaginable.
But that was all peanuts compared to a related, big revelation: from 1960 to 2013 alone, the West spent a massive $5 trillion on aid to Africa. That’s the equivalent of about 50 Marshall Plans, which rebuilt all of Western Europe after World War II. And that’s just through 2013; in the years since, America has spent around $8 billion a year on aid to various African countries, particularly former British colonies like Kenya and Italian colonies like Somalia and Ethiopia.
None of that needed to happen. Before 1960, when the aid tally begins, Africa was still a relatively stable place, and one that was invested in from Europe while paying for those investments, rather than just being a black pit into which aid dollars went and out of which came refugees and horror stories about corruption, violence, and backwards beliefs.
Such is what imperialism wrought. While many lies have been told about the European colonization of Africa, particularly the Belgian Congo, the truth is that across the continent, Belgian Congo included, the Europeans brought peace from tribal feuds, excellent infrastructure, impartial justice to a degree not seen before or since in the continent, and strengthened economic situations and opportunities. Those, at least, were the benefits for the Africans... There were problems with the system of course, and colonies rarely paid for themselves in terms of tax revenue going back to the metropol, but they did provide military and economic opportunities to both sides of the equation.
What that meant was that the system was at least somewhat stable and productive. Europeans had an incentive to invest in the colonies, particularly in Rhodesia-style plantations or South Africa and Congo-style mineral extraction schemes, but also to care about the internal stability of the colonies, as unpleasantness could lead to unrest that upset those investments, thus necessitating reasonably good administration. So, with the Europeans in charge, Africa developed, profited the colonies and the empires, and there were incentives for just and stable rule in place that, if occasionally failing, were at least better than what existed before and has existed since.
So, why did it fall apart?
I’ve discussed this in-depth before in my numerous articles on Rhodesia and America’s involvement in destroying it, so I won’t repeat myself at length here. A quick summary, however, is this: when they bankrupted and butchered themselves with two World Wars, the Europeans became reliant on America and the Soviet Union, and both powers detested the old order.
Namely, they saw hierarchy and ordered liberty as evil, and needing to be replaced with some form of egalitarianism, with the Americans leaning toward mass liberal democracy and the Soviets toward authoritarian communism. But, as both had the same egalitarian goal in mind, they tended to work with each other to destroy the old colonial order, and only after it was gone did they fight, if they fought at all. This is most clearly seen in Rhodesia, but was equally true of China, Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, Burma, the Suez Crisis, and the Congo. In every case, the Americans and the Soviets aided communist rebels and regimes to destroy the old empires, and in some cases, such as Angola, they fought afterwards. Generally, as in the Congo, they tended to just support the same abominable rebels.
After that destruction of the old empires, little was done by the natives, communists, or Americans to build anything new and functional. Instead, bleary-eyed dictators of the Idi Amin, Macías Nguema, and Robert Mugabe mold took and held power with an iron fist, looting their countries in the process.
Hence, the need for foreign aid. Before Mugabe, for example, Rhodesia was a hugely successful agricultural colony known as the “Breadbasket of Africa” for the massive amount of grain its fertile fields produced. Then Mugabe enacted expropriation without compensation, took the white farmland, and the country starved, necessitating much Western aid to prevent an out-of-control famine. The same is true of the once-rich Congo, of the formerly quite successful Kenyan and Ugandan colonies, of Portugal’s lost possessions, and increasingly of South Africa.
When in the hands of the European powers, in short, the colonies received economic and infrastructure investment that generally built prosperity for the natives, the settlers, and the metropol’s investors for the long term. Now they get “aid,” which is unattached to any economic objective and generally consists of funding for radical leftist causes and money stolen by the ruling clique that ends up spent on foreign cars or sitting in Swiss bank vaults. Or, at least, that’s what they get from the West. The Chinese, with their Belt and Road Initiative, are acting out a much harsher rendition of the old imperial playbook.
Importantly, things didn’t have to be this way. The colonies could have been left in the hands of Europeans, and thus remained relatively prosperous and stable, with America sticking to its domestic affairs, or actually fighting communism, rather than advancing the red flag in the name of egalitarianism and equity.
And what might we have bought with the saved money?
For just half the cost, we could have explored and settled Mars. Yes, really. We could have.
Remember, the cost of aid to Africa since 2012 alone has been around $80 billion dollars, likely closer to $100 billion.
For half of that, a mere $50 billion, we could have embarked on Robert Zubrin’s “Mars Direct” program, even before SpaceX created the Starship rocket that is dramatically reducing the cost of getting to space...
Zubrin’s Mars Direct idea consists of landing small, tested “tuna can” habitats on the Red Planet in which astronauts could live while exploring the planet, testing the soil, and otherwise doing the research necessary for long-term habitation. He envisioned rockets landing small nuclear reactors on the surface to power the bases and water reclaimers on them, growing plants in CO2-filled greenhouses, and eventually building larger bases of brick-covered tunnels...
Further, he envisioned Mars being like colonial settlements rather than modern Africa, meaning a land that uses initial state and corporate capital to build an innovative new society that harvests resources, particularly valuable minerals, so that finished products can be produced more cheaply...
There would be all sorts of problems to overcome, unexpected costs to pay, and dangers to surmount. Further, the likely cost of settlement far exceeds the initial $50 billion figure for the exploration.
But it is certainly within the realm of possibility, and indeed would cost only half as much as our current $8 billion a year aid to Africa...
Mars could be slowly colonized for half the cost of our lighting money on fire by giving it to Africa in each year's budget. Even if the cost doubled since he wrote the paper, and would now be $8 billion a year even with the Starship rocket, that is a cost we can obviously bear, and have borne in a far less remunerative situation (Africa aid). In exchange, we would have a frontier for restless young men to explore and attempt to settle, boundless minerals to exploit and pressures to find new uses for them, and a chance at becoming a multi-planetary species.
The only real tradeoff would be cutting funding for race communism in Africa."
