The safest countries in the world are European democracies such as Switzerland, Austria and the Scandinavian nations. They are closely followed by Australia, New Zealand and Japan. But the safe places also include largely Muslim countries, such as Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The United States doesn’t even make the top 40 list of safest countries, for obvious reasons.
What do the safest countries have in common? One thing is that they’re racially homogenous. I’m not saying that racial homogeneity is a necessary ingredient for public safety, but it is associated with it.
The safe countries also have a wide divergence of political systems. Some, like the European states and our Down Under friends, are democracies. The Muslim countries obviously are not democracies, but they’re very tough on crime. The tolerance of a place like Singapore for even the mildest crimes, like pickpocketing or smoking weed, is pretty much zero. (The latter is punishable by death.) These countries are definitely on the FAFO extreme.
The Muslim states often are criticized by civil rights defenders for being too tough on their citizens. While it’s true, they argue, that Singapore is safe, they ask the rhetorical question, “Would you trade the freedoms you have in the U.S. for the safety that Singaporeans have?” It’s a good question. It’s also a premise being tested right now in America, as Donald Trump moves us toward a more authoritarian government. Trump has always been very tough on crime (ironic, in my view, since he is himself a criminal). This has been one of his attractions to voters, especially those in rural areas where crime is low; they take one look at a city like Oakland and decide they don’t want to descend into that. If the government got really tough on crime and cracked down on it, Singapore-style, these rural MAGA voters figure it won’t impact them at all, since the places where they live—Coeur d’Alene ID, Jackson MS, Gainesville GA, Provo UT—have very low crime rates, and most people are law-abiding. Corporal and capital punishment, they figure, is for bad people in blue cities, not for them, so they have nothing to fear if the government turns authoritarian.
Well, I’ll leave it to sociologists and criminologists to figure out why some countries have such low rates of crime, but I do know one thing: countries like the U.S., where we put so much emphasis on “rights” and so little on “responsibilities,” are always going to have a high crime rate. The “rights-responsibilities” spectrum has got to be in balance. When a country, or, more specifically, a county like Alameda and a city like Oakland, ideologically declares itself to be “progressive,” and elects politicians of that persuasion, there’s automatically going to be an imbalance in the rights-responsibilities spectrum, which will be tilted on behalf of predators and evil-doers.
This is something that Muslim countries have figured out. We, on the other hand, have not. These Muslim countries certainly have a lot to answer for, with their horrible anti-Gay and anti-woman policies, and we should keep the pressure on them to lighten up and give people more freedom. But freedom for gays and women does not equate to freedom for thugs to break the law. We can encourage both the right to live one’s own life as one wishes, and the expectation that every citizen will bear the responsibilities entailed in being free. We need to get really tough on crime and anti-social behavior, while at the same time fiercely protecting the rights of women and the LGBTQ coalition. This is something we can accomplish now, if we have the courage to admit that the woke-progressive cult has been an utter failure.
Steve Heimoff