South Africa

South Africa is what happens when a country becomes ungovernable. From endemic sexual crime to farm murders, rolling blackouts, and expropriation, the rest is just the details. What has come to be termed “South Africanization” is not the failed development of a Third-World nation such as Afghanistan or Somalia, but the structural de-development of a once fully modern state that had its own nuclear weapons program. President Trump’s support of Afrikaner farmers has brought global attention to the decaying state of the country and is perhaps the most high-level recognition yet that the 1990s “Rainbow Nation” dream is dead. What’s strange about it all is how much of it happened on purpose.

The ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Marxism, fought for control over the means of production. In this de-developing society, the complex social infrastructure that underwrites industrial production ceases to operate altogether. As the economy shrinks, those who can distribute and gatekeep resources begin to hold the real power, and political competition becomes about taking over those gatekeeper roles.

While songs like “Kill the Boer” at rallies tend to grab headlines, the most consequential development of late is the passing of expropriation without compensation into law by the supposedly moderate President Cyril Ramaphosa. In addition to further eroding property rights, it emboldens a widespread movement that sees land redistribution as the sole resolution to the country’s racial conflict and views the presence of any white population as fundamentally illegitimate. The radicalization of race politics is the means through which political fights are won, since it plays on the country’s major divides and wins over those who feel left out of the spoils.

The conclusion is poignant:

The combination of social progressivism with an economic model of managed decline has become orthodoxy in many establishment parties across the developed world. South Africa is a study of the political phenomenon in its advanced stage and a demonstration of what is at stake in defeating it in the rest of the Western world. Flip Buys, leader of the Afrikaner trade union Solidariteit, was likely prophetic when he foresaw that South Africa would become home to the “first large grouping of Westerners living in a post-Western country.”

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Just to add a little color to the South African story – a long time ago, an old English-speaking gentleman who had briefly emigrated to South Africa after World War II told me why he had pulled the plug on that emigration.

He was not comfortable about the way the Black African population was firmly under the thumb of the White Africans in those days. But what made the situation untenable for him was the hatred the White Africans had for each other. A lot of that traced back to the brutal war the English had waged against the Dutch-origin Boer population, including even concentration camps and the use of Boers as human shields.

The evil that men do lives after them. Then there is that old saying about people in a perilous situation needing to hang together … else they will hang separately.

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“Into the Cannibals’ Pot” by Ilana Mercer, a Boer refugee, opened my eyes to this situation some years ago. Highly recommended.

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Now on my Kindle. Merci!

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