I really wanted to read an in-depth investigative report on the Wa drug cartel. I opened Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia, hoping to find information and insight. Instead, from the first pages, I discovered that the Wa druglords are good because they are indigenous to the area where they live. I’m not remotely indigenous to the area where I live but I don’t believe that either situation is inherently morally charged. What is inherently morally charged is whether you sell drugs. I don’t, and I tend to take that as far more important to my character as to whether I’m “indigenous.”
It gets worse. Winn insists that the US is guilty of Wa’s drug trafficking. Why? Well, because the US is guilty of everything. A bear farts in Magadan, and it’s America’s fault. According to Winn, if Americans would have only given Wa “a little bit of food”, they wouldn’t have cooked and sold meth in the first place. It’s apparently America’s duty to prevent people from becoming drug overlords by feeding them. Of course, the idea that anybody would give up the immense fortunes and power brought in by running a cartel in exchange for a bowl of rice is extremely strange but we’ve heard this reasoning before. Whenever there’s a riot here in the US, we are told that the rioters are looting Louis Vuitton stores because they are perishing of hunger.
It gets better. Winn accuses the CIA of attempting to conduct “regime change” in the territories controlled by the cartel. I keep wondering how do people not get bored of this tired old narrative about CIA regime changes? There’s never any proof but that’s not even the point. We are supposed to accept that “regime change” is a bad thing. But why? Nobody ever explains. Regime change = bad, America = bad, indigenous = good.
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The annoying thing is that I really wanted to read about the Wa. I want to know if it’s really a form of a nation-state (which some people claim and I highly doubt). But after encountering the word “indigenous” repeated incessantly in the first several pages, I can’t go on.
I was so looking forward to discussing the Wa here on the blog.
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I encountered, for the very first time today, the phrase “black and brown bodies” in a book.
Kinda wish they’d used that phrase right at the beginning. Would have saved me 128 pages.
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God, I’m sorry. I hate it when it happens. I feel like I’m at work but not getting paid.
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Eh, there are plenty other things to fret about. Was feeling pretty iffy about the book, but kept plugging along anyway, in case anything interesting turned up. That phrase = permission to quit and read something else.
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“the word “indigenous” repeated incessantly”
For those who might not fully understand, in western academia “indigenous” means they are beings of pure light, incapable of evil intent, or as Sailer puts it “above criticism, but beneath agency” so nothing very insightful can be said about them because of colonialism or something….
There’s also a tremendous reticence among academics of writing anything negative about narcotic production or use… (unless it can be blamed on the CIA).
This leaves lots of things that it would be good to know about very under-described (or simply never-mentioned).
There’s a chance that some useful information could be gleaned from the literature on law enforcement/sociology/urban addiction in the region but useful info in English won’t be plentiful and all the countries involved are various types of military dictatorships…. so….
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Sailer really knows how to put things elegantly and memorably. This is spot on.
It’s maddening that people like this author are rewarded with cushy jobs (he’s with the NPR) and everything they write is immediately published no matter how biased. But talented people like Sailer are unpersonned because they notice the unnoticeable.
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Why are narcotics unmentionable now? It hardly seems a “racism” problem, as it affects nearly everyone these days.
Currently reading Quinones’ *The Least of Us* and it is pretty good.
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“Why are narcotics unmentionable now?”
Cause the elite lurves its pick-me-ups (and/or cool-me-downs) and doesn’t want anyone to think of the presence of easily available narcotics as something that can be changed….
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Huh. Every kind of prohibition before, from alcohol to weed to coke, it was ok to demonise it for the lower classes, while the rich still had winkwink nudgenudge free access.
What changed?
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“What changed?”
They no longer pretend to care about the lower classes?
The current CW (never actually spoken out loud) is that it’s good to keep the lower classes drugged up to the gills so that the elite can pursue their entirely noble recreational use.
That would be my guess.
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@cliff
Seems plausible
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I’m partially replying to cliff below, but I think the upper classes need the lower classes to be sober enough to perform service labor for them.
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@Anon: they don’t anymore, though. We are radically oversupplied and importing more every day, as part of the current electoral-college vote-gaming scheme. As long as you have 4x as many laborers as there are jobs for them, you can count on enough of them being sober at any given time.
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Do you recommend reading Sailer at this blog?
https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-are-my-best-quotes/
If it’s the same person, of course.
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Don’t read Unz. Go to Taki instead. Both Sailer and Cole are there.
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Taki demands money. Do you pay them?
Found Sailer here instead:
https://isteve.blogspot.com/
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I accessed it for free for years. Has something changed recently? Does anybody know?
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This same website publishes articles like “The Jewish Plot to Enslave Humanity. At the Roots of Political Judaism” and more ….
Does Sailer blog elsewhere too?
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“upper classes need the lower classes to be sober enough to perform service labor”
That’s what immigrants (especially illegal) are for…. they no longer have any kind of positive interest in the lower classes. They do not need them (though I have the idea that they do financially benefit from the mass drugging of the lumpen class).
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