Are all civilizations and societiesd equal? A note from someone who spent a year in....

In college back in the 1970s, Karin McQuillan joined the Peace Corps. Three weeks after graduation that organization flew her to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town.

Forty-some years later, after president Trump made the totally accurate remark that some nations were just unrecoverable sh*tholes, McQuillan was moved to write an article titled "What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right."  Below is an edited version.  (Click the link above to see her original.)

Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health. That was because, in the very diplomatic words of the Peace Corps doctor--long, long before Trump--the place was "a fecalized environment."

In plain English: s--t was everywhere. People defecated anywhere on open ground, and the dried feces were blown with the dust onto...everything: you, your clothes, your food, the water. He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water. Human feces carry parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is--literally--no better than a third-world country. Nor would I have believed that liberals would have managed to teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are both racist.

Senegal was not a hellhole. Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms. But they are not our terms.  Defecating in public is the least of it:  The real problem is that our basic ideas of human relations, and right and wrong, are totally different, and incompatible.

As a 21-year-old Peace Corps volunteer I loved Senegal.  I quickly made friends and had an adopted family.  I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man.  People were open, willing to share their lives--and later, their innermost thoughts.

But the longer I lived there, the more it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese were...different.  The great truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese.  How could they be?  Their reality is totally different.  Nothing in Senegal can be understood using American terms.

Take something as basic as family. Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins. All the men in one generation were called "father." Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives. Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty. (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.) Sex, I was told, did not include kissing.  The idea of love and/or friendship in marriage was unheard of.  Fidelity was not a thing. Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.

What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death. Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives. Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

The idea that stealing was wrong was unknown.  In fact the Senegaliese believed exactly the opposite:  That you were supposed to steal everything you could to give to your own relatives.

A few Westernized Africans try to oppose this tradition.  They fail.

Some Americans have heard about the kleptocratic elites of Africa, but kleptocracy extends through the whole society.  My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies.  All the medicine was stolen by local workers and sold to the local store.  If you were sick and didn't have money, drop dead. That was normal.

In Senegal corruption ruled from top to bottom.  At the post office the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp. After paying the bribe, you still didn't know if your letter would be mailed or just thrown away.  That was absolutely normal.

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic.   One day, as the wait grew in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides collapsed to the ground.  The aides were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working.  Instead of helping the woman they turned their heads to pretend not to see her and kept talking.  She lay there in the dirt.  Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  While that may be true here, or in Christian nations, it's not in Senegal.  It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.

We think the Protestant work ethic is universal.  It's not.  My town in Senegal was full of young men doing nothing.  They were waiting for a government job.  There was no private enterprise.  Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy.  It's also incompatible with Senegalese insistence on taking care of relatives.

All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians.  If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he'd go to another country. The reason? Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you'd have to say yes.  End of your business.  You're not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives. The result: Everyone has nothing.

The more I worked there and visited government officials who were doing absolutely nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal had the idea that a job means work.  A job was something given to you by a relative, giving you a place where you could steal everything and give it to your vast, extended family.

Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa.  So why would I want to bring Africa here?

The greatest gift the Peace Corps gave me is that I love and treasure America more than ever. I take seriously my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on the American heritage to the next generation.

African problems are made worse by our aid efforts.  Senegal is full of smart, capable people.  There's a small chance they will eventually solve their country's problems.  If that happens, it will be because they do it on their terms, not ours.  The solution is not to bring Africans here.

We are lectured by Democrats that we must allow millions of third-world immigrants to become U.S. citizens.  With chain migration we're looking at hundreds of millions.  Democrats tell us that to prove we aren't racist we must import these hundreds of millions, thus putting an end to America as a white, Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation. 

We don't need to prove a thing. 

Leftists want open borders because they hate whites, hate Western achievements, and hate America. They want to destroy America as we know it. 

As President Trump asked, why would we do that?  We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in.  I was happy to spend a year of my life to help the poor Senegalese. I am not willing to give them my country.

Decades later McQuillan saw how an African woman defaulted to her national customs, even when living in one of the great cities of the west:   She saw a well-dressed African woman pause to let her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame cathedral.  And in a classic response, a French police officer, barely ten steps away, turned his head to pretend not to see.

Surely you understand the implications of what you just read.  If not, you can't say you weren't warned.