OPINION:
The latest dust-up concerning President Trump and immigration reminds me that believing Sen. Durbin’s statement requires an ideological imperative. However, in general, modern Western minds usually fail to recognize the colonial period as merely an interruption in millennia of tribal warfare. When the colonialists left, these people groups unwrapped the gift of freedom to rediscover the prehistory norms of crushing civil wars, murderous political intrigues, and pandemics of disease and starvation created by ruling elites from the ascendant tribes as they again strove for power by extinguishing their rivals.
Current rulers use ideologies such as democracy, communism, and Islamic fundamentalism to mask concentration of power in their ascendant tribe. The U.N. assists in promoting legitimacy by granting equal status to all governments, and placing their representatives in positions of authority, regardless of whether people in a country would consider the credentials authentic.
For probably the lower 25 percent or more of 149 societies found in the table called “The Legatum Prosperity Index,” their governance is equivalent to or worse than the virtue and intelligence displayed by urban gangs in Chicago. As someone said about South Carolina in the run up to the Civil War, “It is too large for an insane asylum and too small for a country.” Do we really want to establish a welfare state for such immigrants?
Nolan Nelson
Eugene, Ore.
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