Open Thread

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

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.