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This Will Not End Well
Julius Malema, leader of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters party.
Do you pay much attention to events in Africa? Me neither. It appears, however, that South Africa is determined to head down the same bloody path as Zimbabwe – that of radical Land Reform and racial retribution.
On February 27, the South African parliament voted 243-81 to begin the process of amending the country’s constitution to allow for confiscation of white-owned land without compensation. The motion was put forward by the Marxist party — the Economic Freedom Fighters — and supported by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party and the new president Cyril Ramaphosa (who just took office on February 18). This is bad news, not just for the white landowners but also for ordinary South African citizens and especially the poor (of which there will be more if this policy is implemented). It is also bad news for the entire African continent as South Africa is one of the few African nations with anything resembling a modern economy.
Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) gained its independence in 1980 and, to date, that first day of independence was probably the high-water mark for the nation. It quickly became a one-party nation run by the far-left Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and its demagogic leader Robert Mugabe. Early on, he implemented a toxic blend of statist economic policies, racial resentment and retribution, and government corruption, culminating in the confiscation of white-owned property.
In 1973, the per capita GDP of Rhodesia was $1,432 which has fallen to $1,081 as of 2017. I’ve included a couple of graphs which illustrate this economic decline but economic statistics tell only part of the story. In recent years, Zimbabwe has experienced epidemics of diseases such as cholera (not to mention malaria and plague) which have long since been brought under control in the developed world.
This 2005 article by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof describes how ordinary black Zimbabweans wish they could get back the white, racist government that had oppressed them prior to 1980 in order that they and their families might have enough food to live and survive. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe, which peaked shortly after the 1980 independence at 60.97 years (men & women combined) fell precipitously to a low of 44.06 years in 2002, although thankfully it has begun to rise in the last few years.
The first graph shows the GDP per capita for South Africa, Zimbabwe, and several other African nations from 1960 to 2012 as a percentage of the world average GDP per capita. The second graph compares the GDP per capita of Zimbabwe to other sub-Saharan countries from 1980-2014 with certain recent eras of Zimbabwe color-coded (pink = Land Reform, grey = Hyperinflation, light blue = government of national unity).
It seems that South Africa, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, has been able to avoid the sort of racial acrimony experienced in Zimbabwe upon the end of the archaic and evil apartheid system and the start of majority rule. Unfortunately, it looks as if that will not remain the case. There are few worse policies any nation can pursue than to murder and/or run off its most productive citizens but that appears to be the path that South Africa is set to embark upon. This article provides a much more knowledgeable take on the situation than I could.
I came across this story on the Instapundit website a couple of days ago and since then I’ve been searching without much success for articles about this in the US press. That is disturbing to me because this seems like a very big deal.
Published in General
Couldn’t get past the preamble. How about linking to an article that doesn’t yell “alt-right” and/or “far-right” every other sentence in a blatant attempt to poison the well before they bother to get to the facts?
Lots of provocative polemic, very little provocative data.
Some attempts to nuance “Kill the Boers” away, though that neo-Nazi news service Reuters had this to say:
Then there is this:
https://www.afriforum.co.za/wp-content/uploads/Report-Farm-attacks-and-farm-murders-in-South-Africa1.pdf
It is apparently hard to get accurate data on farm murders from the government.
FWIW, the fact check organization which that link takes you to is about 25% funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
It was quite breathless. What interested me was:
“Ultimately, the alt-right’s white nationalist field trip to South Africa is not really about Africa, but shoring up a domestic policy agenda which is anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and anti-Muslim. This is evident from the start of Southern’s interview with Molyneux, who immediately describes her reporting as a “possible glimpse [into] what happens when whites slide into the minority” in the West.”
Would you say that this is why the plight of SA white farmers gets such emotional traction when reported in the West? I think it’s possible.
(Also I don’t see the situation in SA as any kind of plausible view of an American future : because it is not a function of race, per se, but of the aftermath of Apartheid and its precursors. Imho.)
Luckily, there are no lingering racial grievances here.
Coming soon to California.
No, if current trends in California continue, whites will be a minority by midcentury.
Not a function of race? But I thought Apartheid and its precursors were about race.
Apartheid itself was an expression of human greed combined with the human tendency to see different as less than. Iow greed that used difference as an excuse to take because it could.
The marker used this case was ‘race’, but I don’t see it as fundamentally different from societies that use religious (or caste) identities in the same way. Which is of course jmho.
The aftermath, in this case, is particularly thorny because the (in this case racial) minority took so much from the majority. And the two groups remain fairly distinct. Neither of these conditions is true in the US – I don’t see it really happening in any substantive way.
(Unless Americans suddently discover class as a meaningful marker. Which I think is unlikely.)
Can we mark the calendar for the dates when we’ll start to see articles claiming the crop failures and “unexpected” low crop yields are the result of “Climate Change”?
I think the situation of SA is an expression of tribal culture. According to Dennis Prager, the Catholic Church had an incredibly hard time converting the German tribes because when their missionaries said, “Though shalt not murder.” The Germans responded looked at them like they had three heads and said, “When you are stronger. You are supposed to take what you can. What’s with this whole, ‘though shalt not murder thing.’ You are crazy.”
Isn’t that the basic Zulu attitude? Isn’t that the normal human attitude?
And the response of the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, was that they would give all of the people in the Germanic tribes the right to decide. But if they didn’t choose Jesus, their heads would be in a bucket, while their bodies would remain outside it.
Anti-refugee? If the white farmers survive the expropriation of their land, they will either be internal refugees trying to set up an defencible enclave – which some of the Suidlanders are prepping for – or they will be refugee refugees. How is raising sympathy for the whites of SA’s plight being “anti-refugee?”
As to “anti-immigrant,” I believe that the “alt-right” would welcome the white farmers of SA should they wish to enter, say, the US, or Canada.
Charity begins at home.
In this case with the refugees and migrants they already have.
Perhaps begin by charitably deporting the criminals among them.
Can you give me some citations for that belief? Most of the spread of Christianity after Constantine was a mix of strong-arming and peaceful argument.
I have no knowledge of the veracity of his claims regarding the Germanic tribes. But when it came to strong-arming, Christians did kill non-Christians for being non-Christians.
I’ll give the claim some plausibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Crusades
But of course it will be perfectly safe for urbanized, non-farmer whites once the mobs get going. Because “cut the throat of whiteness” is not a function of race, per se.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAE27IMVivg
It truly doesn’t seem as clear as Afriforum might say:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284596974_Race_class_and_violent_crime_in_South_Africa_Dispelling_the_'Huntley_thesis
Or
https://www.timeslive.co.za/ideas/2017-11-02-even-in-death-south-africans-are-racially-divided/