South Africa

Open Thread

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Leo XIV reaffirmed that marriage is between one man and one woman and that the unborn are humans with rights.

This is going to make a lot of Lefties and Progressive Catholics upset.

But, fret not! I’m sure he’ll also deplore the continuing war in Gaza before too long … OTOH he also spoke up for the persecuted Christian minority in the Arab world so maybe even that won’t be forthcoming in a manner pleasing to the Left.

Oh, well: Catholics gonna Catholic. And the Pope is Catholic.

The Trump Administration, by highlighting the increasing racism of the South African government, is clearly trying to force that government to climb down. I hope it works; because only death and poverty result on the current trajectory.

Keep in mind what happened in South Africa: after the end of Apartheid and the assumption of black majority rule, it was supposed to operate like magic in making everything peachy for the black population. Not kidding: the only thing that made life bad for blacks was Apartheid. This is what was asserted and firmly believed…especially in the larger West. Of course it didn’t work that way. It couldn’t work that way. While white South Africans were much better off than black South Africans, their per capita income would work out to pretty impoverished for Americans. Around the time Apartheid ended, South Africa’s per capita GDP was less than four grand a year. Sure, whites got more than that…but we’re still talking sub-Alabama money. There wasn’t enough money for everyone in South Africa to even be working class, let alone middle or upper. The only way South Africa was going to get rich – under any system – was via decades of hard work and frugal living. Apartheid actually held back South African wealth creation…once it was gone, if everyone got to work – especially given the massive foreign investment which would eagerly jump into a free and rule-of-law South Africa – then within 40 to 50 years, South Africa could easily have been on par with Europe in income.

But what happened was that the magic didn’t happen, nobody insisted that everyone get to work and it all became an increasingly strident blaming of white people while what money there was got looted and transferred to the bank accounts of the new, politically-connected black elite (and some of the old white elites who ran apartheid…don’t forget that; they cut their deal with the new leadership to keep rich and privileged…and do note that it is “kill the Boer, kill the farmer ” the race-baiters shout…not “kill the rich, white jerks who work with the ANC”). There have been increasing attacks on whites with little or no police response, political rhetoric designed to incite violence (and, man, I bet they want whites to respond; it would be all the excuse they need) while poverty and disease spread and South Africa’s infrastructure collapses towards Third World status. There would have been eventual massacres of whites. There still might be. Trump is trying to nip that in the bud.

All of this ties into the basic assumption that white people are inherently evil. We’re not native to any land. We are nothing but thieves and oppressors. Our lives mean nothing and nobody is to be upset if a white person is robbed, beaten, raped or murdered. This isn’t something we can allow to continue – not in any nation. A whole series of lies has been ingrained into the Western mind and we must cut it out – racism is wrong no matter how its done. Whites are not to blame for non-white poverty. The only way out and forward is for everyone to obey the laws and get to work. Together. As one humanity. Whatever happened in the past can’t be fixed and so it should just be moved on from.

It is Like the Sun After the Storm

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Things are changing so fast we can’t keep up with them all. On the matter of South Africa, my go-to has been an account on X, @ConCaracal. He’s a South African who has been grinding away trying to reform the increasingly racist South African government. Over the past few years, especially, the South African government has become increasingly strident in its hatred of whites. There are now more race-based laws on the books than under Apartheid. This shows that the primary complaint the ANC really had with Apartheid is that they didn’t have that power for themselves. It has been a fairly bleak battle for white South Africans and, indeed, South Africa recently enacted an entirely unconstitutional law to confiscate white-owned farms without compensation. This is the path Zimbabwe went down and so we all knew where it was going. And then, Trump.

Did you ever imagine you’d see the day that the American Secretary of State would call out Third World racism? We’re not supposed to mention this, guys. Remember, we’re the bad guys and we have to allow tin pot Third World tyrants do whatever they want. This was a gigantic earthquake in foreign affairs…and while it has caused little notice in the USA, it has been noticed in South Africa – as Conscious Caracal said:

The key take away here is the same for everything – we didn’t have to do what we were doing. All this time we’ve been bending the knee to Third World tyrant-thieves and we could have just called them out on it. Now, this doesn’t solve South Africa’s problem – the country is in horrid shape and the ANC does need it’s enemy (white people) to justify continued power. Its not like they can stop stealing from the Treasury, right? Keep in mind that the whole farm confiscation thing is absurd – the government of South Africa is the largest landowner in South Africa…if they want to pass out land to black farmers, they’ve got millions of acres to spare. But that doesn’t generate race-hatred. But pressure from the Trump Administration will be crucial in the fight to turn South Africa into a rule of law nation.

And on and on and on like that. We’ve been essentially destroying ourselves for decades, internally and externally, in service of some mythic belief that the US is the bad guy. That white people are the bad guy. That Christians (and, recently, Jews) are the bad guy. That the very creation of our nation is an unforgivable sin. And now it just stops…because we’ve got a President who doesn’t want to play that game. And it is glorious.

South Africa’s Failed Promise: A Warning for the USA

Mark Noonan1 Comment

How are things in South Africa? Not too well:

The peace of a normally tranquil suburban road near South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, is being shattered by the sound of drilling.

These are not prospectors looking for a new source of the country’s mineral wealth, but workers digging for an arguably more precious resource: water.

Private boreholes – like this one being excavated in Garsfontein – are springing up across the wealthier neighbourhoods in the country’s economic heartland, where taps have been running dry.

Why have they been running dry? Not for lack of water – it is for lack of power to keep the pumps running:

South Africa’s state power utility Eskom may have to increase power cuts to an unprecedented level this winter, a company executive said on Thursday, as the country grapples with its worst power crisis on record.

This is leading to some interesting, new experiences of South Africans (aside from having to drill their own wells):

The death toll from a cholera outbreak in South Africa has climbed to 26 in recent days, with dozens more hospitalized while frustration mounts over the government’s response to the disease, which is common in several areas of Africa but rarely spreads in this country…

…Analysts point to chronic power outages that have left economically impoverished areas of South Africa without electricity for up to 12 hours a day as winter takes hold in the Southern Hemisphere.

The South African government response? Blame (and punish) whitey:

Newly-drafted regulations in South Africa are sparking anger over water usage for white people. The nation continues to grapple with the idea of race quota politics aimed at addressing the inequalities caused by apartheid.

Last month, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) government published draft regulations that would implement race quotas for the allocation of water use licenses for businesses.

South Africa is a civilization in collapse. And it is rather sad – I had some hope early on that they’d avoid what the rest of Africa went through when it transitioned to majority black rule. Mandela, especially, impressed as he did speak strongly for racial reconciliation and then, most incredibly, voluntarily left power when he could have easily set himself up as yet another African “President for life”. I figured that after a while of trying Socialism (the ANC emerged out of Communism, of course) wiser heads would prevail and they’d get to work building the wealth necessary to raise the black majority up to First World economic standards. South Africa is a very large country (doesn’t look like it on the map, but its more than 471,000 square miles) which is just slopping over with natural resources. It also inherited a functioning, First World economic system and infrastructure. All it would have taken was work – lots and lots of hard work. And time: at least a century to fully complete the process.

But who wants to work and take all that time?

After Mandela, the ANC opted for favoritism and graft. They took the wealth of South Africa and spent it on themselves and their cronies. This did have the benefit of keeping the ANC in power against its weak and divided opposition but that money was supposed to be spent extending the economic system and infrastructure to black South Africa. It wasn’t spent on that – and over the last decade or so, they didn’t even allocate enough money to maintain the infrastructure they inherited…and so the power and water crisis. And as that crisis deepens the ANC is opting for ever more strident racial politics – it is all whitey’s fault! The legacy of Apartheid! Aside from their proposal to dole out water based on race there is also a growing movement to confiscate white-owned farms (white South Africans do own most of South Africa’s agricultural land) – this is a page out of Zimbabwe.

And it is useful to recall what happened in Zimbabwe. As the post-white government there floundered deeper into corruption and economic decline, they confiscated almost all the white-owned farm land and passed it out to cronies. The drawback here (aside from the injustice) is that these people had no idea how to run a modern, cash-economy farm. Most native African farmers are still subsistence farmers – that means they grow enough for themselves with a small amount leftover to sell for the goods they can’t make themselves. There is a huge difference between subsistence and market agriculture and you can’t just willy-nilly switch from one to the other. You have to learn how to modern farm – and it takes time to do so.

In the end, those confiscated farms (which used to be a breadbasket for Africa) collapsed under mismanagement. The white farmers mostly left but some stayed…on the small plots they were able to keep these (mostly older) white farmers set to work, and taught young black Zimbabweans how to farm. In a few years, these small farms were doing great and while still white-owned, the now very aged white farmers were pretty much retired while the black farm workers were doing well. The Zimbabwe government had a response for all this: confiscate the farms and kick out not just the few remaining white farmers, but also the skilled black farmers working the land. These farms then, too, collapsed under mismanagement.

This is what many in South Africa are proposing to repeat.

And it all comes down to racism, though not as the Global Racial Narrative holds. It isn’t whitey keeping people down. Sure, under Apartheid (and Jim Crow here in the USA) that was the case…but once Apartheid (and Jim Crow) are gone the whole thing becomes a matter of learning and working.

The learning is rather crucial. You don’t just know how to do things. Everything you know was taught to you. You were instructed, even if you don’t remember it. Everyone has to learn.

The economic system and structure of South Africa on the glad morn when Apartheid ended was the product of Dutch and English knowledge applied to South African conditions over a period of centuries. It didn’t just happen – and it wasn’t stolen from anyone. When the Boers showed up in what became Orange Free State there simply wasn’t much there. They reached agreement with some local chiefs about where they could settle but other chiefs were marauding through the area and the Boers had to fight them to secure their lands. That done, they just set to work. It wasn’t easy. They were pioneers in what was mostly a howling wilderness; they had to learn how to farm and work the land to best effect. And they did so.

Make no mistake about it – from the get-go the Boers considered black Africans inferior and would not admit them into Boer society outside a subservient role. They did treat blacks unfairly. You can’t forget that nor undo what happened. But what is crucial to understand is that the Boers worked – they built up out of nothing a modern, functioning society. Around the edges of this society lived black Africans…who also started to learn. But the learning curve was steep and the Boers were exclusionary so there was no full imparting of knowledge from Boer to black African. But there was some and over time black Africans started to enter the modern society the Boers (and, later, the British) were building in South Africa. But most did not; weren’t interested, didn’t like the whites (for good reason) and so kept to their immemorial ways.

But the thing about old ways is that they can’t compete with modern ways. As South Africa went ever higher, more and more black Africans wanted a piece of that pie. The Boers, though, didn’t want to give them a piece and so developed Apartheid. They did want black labor, but not blacks as social equals. Part of this was, of course, sheer malevolent racism…but they also knew that to turn over the country to black Africans would be a disaster. Black Africans wouldn’t know how to run it – just in a practical, day to day sense. It takes time for a people to integrate into new ways of doing things. The Romans governed Britain for more than 350 years – bringing all sorts of social and material advancement to what had been a very backwards people. When the Romans pulled out, the British people forgot how to make bricks.

Bricks. You know: simple rectangular things anyone can make.

Except not everyone can make them. You need the skills – and you also need the settled, regular economic and political system which allows people to take the time to make things like bricks. When the Romans exited they took the skills and the system with them. At the end of Apartheid the black majority simply wasn’t ready to do things like maintain and expand a modern, electrical production and distribution system. White South Africans knew how – and the post-Apartheid government should have had these whites instruct. Instead, they systemically fired the white workers and replaced them with blacks who didn’t have the first clue and only got the job because they were cronies of some ANC power broker.

We’re not supposed to say that, don’t you know? That is, we can’t say that a population of black people is incapable. But it is what it is. Certainly, part of the reason they were incapable was white refusal to teach them over a period of decades. That was grossly unjust – but once again, it is what it is. For whatever bad or good reasons, the black majority simply didn’t know what needed to be done. To get them to the level of the white South Africans was going to take a long time. But nobody can campaign on a promise that you grandchildren will be doing great. The political reality of the sudden transition to black majority rule was always going to be: “vote for me and everything will be perfect”…soon to be followed, after inevitable failure, by “that wicked minority has sabotaged us.”

And it is racism – now just directed at the white minority instead of the black majority. The only way the ANC can fix South Africa’s problems is to enact policies which will eventually lead to ANC political defeat. Can’t have that, right? Much easier (if you’re rich, juiced in and have a government-supplied power generator) to just keep with the current system behind your walled and privately-guarded neighborhood while everything outside goes to hell in a handbasket (yes, Ruling Classes are that cruel and indifferent: they really don’t care how much suffering there is as long as they stay rich – not for nothing did Our Lord say the love of money is the root of all evil). I can easily see the ANC eventually going for anti-white pogroms…which will lead to lots of death and destruction and increased poverty for poor blacks, especially. But what of it? As long as the bosses keep theirs…and as long as the Global Elite looks the other way because the last thing the Global Elite wants is for everyone to pay attention to what is going on in South Africa.

Here’s the bad news – they are bringing this to the USA. Via affirmative action placement in all our institutions and an increasingly brazen racial spoils system the physical infrastructure of the USA collapses in pace with the social collapse as racial animosity increases because people are perceiving that there is a double standard (almost Apartheid-like double standard) in how people are treated by the system. Just as in South Africa, it is unsustainable. Eventually you either have to have people who know what they’re doing, or the infrastructure falls apart (you know; like with bridge collapses and train derailments)…and as the racial divide becomes more stark in how people are treated, social cohesion collapses as people break up into warring tribes, each just looking to loot a bit more than the other tribes.

If we want this to stop then we simply have to stop it. All racial considerations must be dropped. In fact, probably best if we made racial categorization illegal; that is, explicitly forbidding people to take race (or gender, religion, orientation, etc) into consideration on any decision. Merit must be the absolute dictator – from kindergarten to the heights of economic and political power. Anyone who can’t cut it…well, they can’t cut it. Maybe the reason they can’t cut it is because of some injustice in the past. Doesn’t matter. Either you can, or you can’t. If you can’t, then the world still needs ditch diggers…be a good ditch digger and maybe your kid will go to college and be one of those who can cut it higher up the ladder. Sorry that life can suck at times – but all work is honorable and we’re trying to build for the future, not make you feel better today.

What we certainly can’t do is go on as we are – because if we do then in 10 years we’ll have “load shedding” for electricity use as cholera spreads…and while a corrupt Ruling Class steals the last nickel we have. Better for a time a of reality – where we simply call things as they are, and build up from where we are, not where we wished we were.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan8 Comments

Heirs is out! Book VI of the series. It picks up about 12 years after Kings and Queen – so, the kids introduced as being between five and seven in the last series are now all growed up…and not at all believing the silly stories mom and dad have related. I very much enjoyed writing it and Book VII: Empress which rounds out this particular adventure…though I’ve already got large amounts written for Books VIII through XIII (with VIII and IX almost completely done: my concentration at the moment is actually on Book X; though I keep filtering over to Book XI because it is turning out to be such a fun story). As you may imagine from the title, Heirs is about, well, the heirs – specifically using Bryce and Rossalyn’s son George, Fred and Celeste’s son James; there is also Tancheri, the Crown Princess of Valcinia (intro’d in Kings and Queen as a six year old) and another girl you get to meet in Heirs. Of course our four main heroes play huge roles, too…but outside the prologue, they don’t show up for a while. I’ve also continued on with some bad guys from the past with judicious additions of new bad guys. Get your copy!

Found out about this thing called the Volkstaat in South Africa. Apparently, just before and after Apartheid came to an end, one Afrikaner pol decided that the Afrikaners – the white descendants of the Dutch who first settled South Africa – should have their own place. So, he and others purchased some land in the middle of the South African nowhere (on the map, South Africa looks small – it is actually huge and while there are thickly populated parts, there are also large swaths of howling wilderness, especially in the west north of Capetown) and set up shop. A few decades later it is a town of about 2,000 people, so far largely ignored by the South African government and it is growing prosperous. Like all Boer towns, it is neat as a pin.

And it is doomed.

I’m sorry to say that, but reality must be faced here. To me, of course, it is people just living their own lives – and so I’d leave them alone. But that won’t happen. Naturally, they are merely put down as racists (even though I, as a white American, would not be allowed to live their, either; they only allow Afrikaners) – and, who knows?, maybe they are racist. Doesn’t matter as they don’t go out and look for black people to harass. The site they picked was chosen precisely because it was horrible…but humans being human and with hard work as the command, their horrible spot is now a nice spot. And the South African Ruling Class won’t be able to tolerate it for long…especially as South Africa decays with rising crime and rolling blackouts, they can’t afford to have any community of regular folks living well (the Ruling Class, behind carefully guarded walls continues to live well, naturally). The whole existence of such a place is a standing challenge to South Africa – which was supposed to usher in a multi-ethnic utopia once Apartheid vanished. You realize how impossible it will be for South Africa to survive under ANC rule if people can point to a community up from literally nothing at the time Apartheid ended while Johannesburg can’t even keep the lights on? On that level, it doesn’t matter what skin color the people are – if they were all black, they’d eventually be targeted. That they are white will just make the targeting easier. And they will be targeted. I wish I was wrong. I hope I prove in error. But as South Africa falls apart the white minority will be subjected to looting and violence as the ANC tries to stay in power.

The people of Portland, OR voted for commie Democrats who let crime run wild. The voters chose this because among all other horrors, the worst would be to thought of as a Republican. Elections do have consequences, though. And one of the consequences of voting for commies who believe that crime is the result of racism is that you then get crime so rampant that even a store like Wal Mart, which moves so much product that in most places the shoplifting doesn’t matter, is closing down all their Portland locations…I feel zero sympathy: they wanted this. Now they’ve got it.

Antifa/BLM domestic terrorists have been trying to shut down construction of a new police training facility in Atlanta. And I don’t mean by holding protests marches and filing lawsuits…they been vandalizing and assaulting people connected to it. Nearly everyone connected with the Antifa/BLM actions are from out of State and almost all of them are white (and upper class white). You’d think the FBI would take a glance at this, but they aren’t. They’re too busy tracking down granny who took a selfie outside Pelosi’s office on 1/6. But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is on it – and they made 23 arrests. Including a lawyer who works for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The kicker: guess who the FBI asks to determine if you are a terrorist? The Southern Poverty Law Center. The Antifa/BLM types do what they do because they are protected by the FBI…and part of what the Antifa/BLM types do is denounce you to the police for wearing a MAGA hat. We really do have an American Gestapo…and they’ve got plenty of stool pigeons.

I love Mexico – place, people, food: all awesome. But I’ve stayed out for years and I won’t be going back any time soon: Four Americans were kidnapped after they drove into northern Mexico. The Cartels are simply bloodthirsty – you could be killed on a lark by them. Not worth the risk.

Thinking About South Africa

Mark Noonan10 Comments

We noted this in the comments earlier:

White South African farmers will be removed from their land after a landslide vote in parliament.

The country’s constitution is now likely to be amended to allow for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation, following a motion brought by radical Marxist opposition leader Julius Malema.

It passed by 241 votes for to 83 against after a vote on Tuesday, and the policy was a key factor in new president Cyril Ramaphosa’s platform after he took over from Jacob Zuma in February.

Mr Malema said the time for ‘reconciliation is over’. ‘Now is the time for justice,’ News24 reported.

The worst thing Europe did to Africa wasn’t colonialism – it was providing them Marx. It is amazing the applicability of Marxism – the work of a 19th century European Jew who never worked a day in his life is being used by 21 century black African to justify an act of idiocy. Basically, if you’ve got a dumb idea, just filter it through Marx and it will seem like you actually thought of something.

This will end badly – the land will be taken and mostly handed off to various cronies of those in power who won’t have the foggiest notion of how to make the land pay. The poor of South Africa won’t just remain poor, but will actually become poorer. And once you set down the path of injustice, you’re really not going to get out of it easy.

To be sure, this path of injustice was first pioneered by the white South Africans…remember, the Boers moved into the Transvaal, etc because they wanted to keep the slavery which the British Empire had abolished. Later, after gaining independence from Britain, the white South Africans erected Apartheid…which wasn’t really Apartheid because it wasn’t a set up where whites would live with whites and blacks with blacks but, rather, a mechanism where the whites could keep their cheap, black labor while denying said labor any political rights. It was pretty much a duplicate – carried to a further extreme – of the Jim Crow laws in the American South. Now there are those in South Africa who are looking for some payback…and they are suckering the poor by telling them that if the whites are expropriated, they’ll all be well off.

It is a rather sad end to it all – when Mandela was freed and Apartheid came down, I had my doubts…but then Mandela rather rose to the occasion and I hoped that a genuine, pluralist Republic would emerge in South Africa. But even early there were warning signs…those who didn’t want to forgive and forget and who were willing to stir the pot of resentment for political gain. Over time, especially since Mandela’s death, these forces have grown stronger and now appear to be firmly in the saddle in South Africa…where a corrupt ANC government is desperately looking for an expedient to justify it’s continued rule. Well, here it is: bash whitey! Whitey might, indeed, deserve some bashing and it is absurd that the white minority still owns quite so much land…but this way of race-hatred and uncompensated expropriation is the evil way to go about things. And the curious thing about evil acts is that they don’t actually work.

The thing is, it would take at least 100 years for the black population of South Africa to reach the economic level of the white population of South Africa. The cultural capital of the two groups was vastly different when Apartheid came down – for a variety of reasons, not least of which was direct, white suppression of the formation of cultural capital among South Africa’s black population. But however it got to be that way, that is the way it was…and only a great deal of time and hard work was ever going to erase the difference.

The ultimate mistake of it all – the gigantic error – was Apartheid; a system of racial oppression and exploitation. That most white South Africans today had nothing to do with erecting or maintaining that system is irrelevant. It was still the error – and errors always have to be paid for, one way or another. It would have been better paid for at the end of Apartheid by the surrender of a great deal of wealth…now it will be paid for by the seizure of that wealth. And, worse, the seizure won’t make anyone happy. It will impoverish the white population, but won’t enrich the black population. It will impel ever more extreme demands, of course…once it doesn’t work, we’ll start to see more and more racist conspiracy theories floated to explain why expropriation didn’t work…and thus more and more violence directed at the now-despised minority.

There isn’t much we, as Americans, can do about this. I can only advise white South Africans to consider moving – at least to Cape Province, but even that will probably only be a temporary expedient. Probably leaving South Africa will be the only way to be safe. It is a shame that the sins of the grandfathers will be visited upon the grandsons, but that is how the world can work, at times, when wicked people get rolling.