Redstate

By Skanderbeg Posted in Archived — Comments (14) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Life is full of surprises. One appeared this morning in the guise of the following headline and story:

Living in Britain is now more dangerous than the Balkans

(H/T - Theo Spark)

Well, that sure is a bit of a role reversal from what we've been led to expect. Of not the least interest is to note that our domestic europhile socialists are always praising the "western European model" for its "humanity" and its "serenity" - those folks need to get out more, since their delusions are falling apart with the utmost rapidity.

Let's look at the items in the story a little more closely.

You are more likely to be assaulted, robbed and burgled in Britain than in the region of southeast Europe once synonymous with war and gangsters, according to a report by the United Nations [!! - ed.] Office on Drugs and Crime.

Your car is at least ten times more likely to be stolen in Britain than in Albania, Croatia or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Figures on vehicle theft were particularly telling. In Britain, 1,330 vehicles in every 100,000 are reported stolen annually, compared to 166 in Croatia, 113 in Macedonia and just 90 in Albania.

Western Europe suffers from double the amount of burglary, over four times as much assault, and 15 times as much robbery as the Balkans, the report revealed.

(Emphasis mine on that last - as noted above, it's not just Britain that compares unfavorably on this count.)

Things have changed drastically in recent years. While the smug übermenschen of western Europe have been hectoring both us and the "new Europeans" about how to organize things, their own houses have been falling apart while the houses of those they hector continue to improve.

Since this report does in fact come from the UN, there is some b.s. further down that is no more than the usual flatulent idle speculation - that somehow the lower incidence of crime in the Balkans is due to less "income inequality." The weird part is that this in contravention of their own report. The Balkan wars and crime boom occurred right after the collapse of communism - when incomes were very equal because everyone was left destitute. As things have simmered down and the old moral corruption of communism has faded - and as economies have started to grow - the crime boom has gone bust.

You can even find this in the article:

Bringing criminals to justice is also more likely over there.

There are more police and more public prosecutors in Albania than there are in England and Wales, per head of population.

There is no mystery here - when you decide to enforce the law and commit the necessary resources to doing so, crime collapses.

This is of course good news for one of the most systemically ruined regions on Earth - in many parts of the Balkans, the sun is coming out for the first time in centuries.

But if you want a domestic lesson from this, I'd say that it is the following - and it's from the above, but it's not about the numbers of police and prosecutors you hire alone. That's an effect produced by having the will to tackle the problem head-on. Or if you prefer, what this story shows is....

Crime does not flourish due to poverty or "income inequality." Crime flourishes when a society lacks the will to take the mission of enforcing the law and suppressing crime seriously. No excuses.

Our Balkan friends have managed to restate the obvious for us.