Finbarr O’reilly of Reuters reports: “At least 450,000 white South Africans, 10 percent of the total white population, live below the poverty line and 100,000 are struggling just to survive, according to civil organisations and largely white trade union Solidarity. South Africa’s population is about 50 million. …”
“South Africa’s unskilled whites find themselves on the wrong side of history, gaining little sympathy from those who perceive them as having profited unfairly during the brutal apartheid years.
Trade union Solidarity says there are around 430,000 whites who live in squatter camps. Around the capital Pretoria alone there are 80 squatter settlements. There are over 2,000 much larger black squatter camps across South Africa.
Formerly comfortable Afrikaners recently forced to live on the fringes of society see themselves as victims of ‘reverse-apartheid’ that they say puts them at an even greater disadvantage than the millions of poor black South Africans.
This feeling of victimisation and abandonment by the state has forged at the camp a collective sense of fatalism, isolation and firm reliance on their Calvinist religion. Each of the camp’s ramshackle huts and tents is adorned with religious paraphernalia and an Afrikaans language bible.” …
Finbarr O’reilly’s photojournalistic effort was featured in the New York Times too where one reader wrote correctly as follows:
Lower middle class people living close to the line have been discarded by the governments Black Economic Empowerment policy which forces companies to hire people with black skin.
After the 1994 elections a lot of white people lost their jobs and have clearly never recovered. The BEE policy has resulted in poor performance across the board especially from a governmental service delivery perspective, as highly skilled and qualified people with years of experience were replaced by people who were black but lacked the necessary qualifications or experience.
As usual, Adriana Stuijt, a pro-Afrikaner activist living in the Netherlands, posted the most poignant post at the NYT:
“The important point completely missed by the photographer and by the journalist is the fact that these aren’t ‘whites’- these are Afrikaners, a 3-million-strong minority. There are two kinds of ‘whites’ – the wealthier mercantile English-speakers who can flee the country with their British passports when times get rough; and the Afrikaner artisan-working class, which have no familial ties to their Northern-European roots and have a very difficult time emigrating to other countries. I am also appalled at the fact that the photographer took pictures of these very young and vulnerable children: Afrikaner children are being widely targeted by kidnapping gangs in South Africa. Basically these Afrikaners, being poor, have clearly lost all their privacy-rights as far as this photographer was concerned. Did the man at least make a donation to the only private charity which is allowed to help these Afrikaner people by law, namely Helping Hand of the Solidarity trade union movement? The ANC-regime denies these Afrikaners all food-aid, and many also are denied the right to medical care in public hospitals. Many of these Afrikaner women give birth inside their own shacks without any medical help. And according to a recent documentary by Dutch investigative journalist Saskia Vredeveld, they are so chronically underfed now that the newborns are beginning to die of malnutrition.
[SNIP]
My book is timely. Last week, I completed Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa. It’ll soon be off to the publisher.
Want a measure of how bad America’s duopoly is; of the extent to which the criminal governments under which we Americans groan have run the country into the ground?
Unpack the significance of this tidbit: The African National Congress (ANC), the dominant party governing my homeland South Africa from 1994 in perpetuity, manages a public debt that is only 23 percent of GDP. According to The Economist, debt in SA “has started rising sharply again and is expected to reach 40 percent of GDP by 2013.”
For the benefit of the pigmentally touchy, I use “ape” as a pejorative that applies to both Bush and his philosophical heir, BHO. To lovers of primates; parrots are the superior species.
If offended, substitute with fleas. I once did: “As Dr. Johnson said, ‘There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea. ‘Neoconservative (Bush) or Progressive (Barack); louse or flea — a pest is still a pest.” —ILANA (October 30, 2009)
“The Vuvuzela And World Cup: A Symbol Of The End Of Civilization”: This is interesting comment by one of Larry Auster’s readers; I’ve been urged to comment about it by one of ours. Here’s my problem with sweeping, slightly hysterical deductions about the incessant horn blowing at the Soccer World Cup as a symbol of the destruction of western civilization: As a writer who reasons rather than emotes, I’m not mad about indulging in such deductions. For one, the leap from horn-blowing to civilizational demise omits some rather crucial in-between steps such as I have been covering in my South Africa essays.
(I sincerely hope that this is what draws you to this site over others: immutable fairness—reasoning from fact and first principles, and not from symbolism. You known how to show your love.)
In any event, read Patrick H’s comment, and have at it (or at me, for that matter):
“I am wondering if you are going to comment on the inadvertent (and thereby revealing) comedy of the destruction by liberalism of the World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa.
The agent of liberal destruction is a horn. Specifically, a long plastic device called the vuvuzela. The employment by South African spectators of the vuvuzela as incessant accompaniment to the soccer matches on the pitch has–and I must insist I am not exaggerating–destroyed the experience of viewing the games almost completely. The use–constant, unrelenting–of this, ah, instrument, by thousands of fans produces a tuneless monotonous drone or hum that operates at the level of a roar (a bit like a bunch of great big kazoos might do–but without any melody). And it simply never stops. The effect on television presentations is remarkable. It sounds like the games are being played in a hive full of thousands of gigantic bees. All other sound is effectively eliminated: crowd roars come through dimly–probably because the vuvuzela-ists drop their horns to join in the collective huzzah when an occasional ball wanders near the net–but chants are gone. Singing: gone.” ….
UPDATE (June 16): As a courtesy to one of my readers I commented in passing on this topic. Larry Auster and one of his readers have decided to die on a molehill over my criticisms off this tack, framing it, grandiosely, as an “objection.”
They’d like to commandeer my blog to indulge this pettiness. Sorry.
I care not a whit as to how conservatives argue—increasingly they sound to me as irrational and emotional as liberals.
Larry’s reader claims the missive was farce; fair enough. Yet Larry wishes to continue debating the thing (on my blog) as if it were not; as though horn blowing as emblematic of a liberal/atavistic society were a serious argument.
Both refuse to plug their logical lacuna—explain European soccer hooliganism. It’s not that hard. The idea, moreover, of proceeding from the particular to the general is surely predicated on galvanizing more than one fact in support of your case. In the case of South Africa, that too is easy.
As one wag put it, “South Africa has blown it,” but I’d argue—and I’d have facts, not feelings, on my side—that it’s not necessarily the noisy horns that signify the end of civilization there and the triumph of liberal egalitarianism; it’s the piling bodies, looting of land and property, radical affirmative action (BEE), etc.
PORTUGUESE GIRL IS. Don’t go changing your overlapping teeth, anonymous. That’s the habit in the USA, where everyone sports an overbite stacked with mega white, veneered blocks, created in some monster tooth factory.
* Greece players have money stolen from hotel
* Chinese journalists robbed in SA
* Arrests after foreign journo robbery
* Foreign journos robbed ahead of World Cup
* Security firms make killing from World Cup
What goes for the reconstituted South African Police Force, a corrupt, illiterate, and ill-trained force, riven by feuds, fetishes, and factional loyalties, is organized enough to go after “right-wing militia.”
Taking a page out of the unholy American hymnbook, an extremist—in the eyes of the law and the propagandized at large—is any patriot who doesn’t approve of pillage politics, loss of all individual liberties and, in the case of South Africa, a massive transfer of assets from owners to non-owners while, simultaneously killing off the former.
THE OUTRAGE HERE is that the arrest is linked to an email I too received, which did no more than speak of what is underway in South Africa and attach images of harpooned, raped, sodomized, skewered, white victims. Notice that the authenticity of the so-called subversive material has not been denied by the arresting authorities.
“APA – Cape Town (South Africa) South African police this week swooped on members of an extremist right-wing organisation, the Suidlanders, as part of an investigation into plans to sabotage the soccer World Cup, APA learns here Sunday.
Raids have taken place in Pretoria and Mpumalanga and come in the wake of heightened racial tensions after the murder of white supremacist leader, Eugene Terre’Blanche and the recent outbursts by African National Congress Youth League president Julius Malema. [No arrests of his ilk, so far.]
Earlier this week, the police also swooped on the Worcester home of Frederick Rabie, a former lieutenant colonel in the old civilian force commandos, in the Cape Province. He was arrested and police discovered an arms cache, including explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition at his house. The bust comes a week after the arrest of the head of security at the Worcester Magistrate’s Court (in the Western Cape Province), Henry Harding, following the discovery of a cache of explosives, firearms, ammunition and drugs in underground storerooms at the magistrate’s court.
Rabie was given bail and will appear in court on Monday.
The police investigation into the suspected sabotage plot is linked to an e-mail calling on foreigners to boycott the World Cup that is being circulated worldwide. It talks of a war against white South Africans and carries graphic details and bloody photographs of white victims of crime. Claiming to reveal information suppressed by the South African Police Force (SAPF) and the media, the e-mail urges foreigners to stay away from South Africa during the World Cup.
Claiming that the country is on the verge of a full-blown revolution that would lead to civil war, the website says : ‘The time has come for people to realise they cannot be on the sideline any longer and everybody’s participation is needed to defend the last bastion of a true Christian nation against total annihilation.’
Sources this week confirmed that alleged plans by right-wing elements to ‘destabilise’ South Africa in the run-up to the World Cup were being taken “seriously”. Police spokesman Colonel Vish Naidoo refused to comment on the investigations, but said that the security forces were prepared for any eventuality during the World Cup.”
[SNIP]
BACK HOME, AND according to William N. Grigg’s update on the Hutaree prosecution:
“the Hutaree defendants, U.S. District Court Judge Victoria Roberts provides extensive excerpts from the evidence. This includes redacted transcripts of conversations in which militia David and Joshua Stone, Michael Meeks, and Kristopher Sickles talk about killing judges and law enforcement personnel.
The ellipses littering the transcript are tangible evidence of cherry-picking by the prosecution.
Even orphaned from context, however, the recorded conversations don’t amount to evidence of a criminal conspiracy, but rather a tendency to engage in the worst kind of self-deluded, adolescent locker-room braggadoccio.” [sic]
UPDATE: I’m growing tired of the Comments Section always plumping for the Republicans, no matter how I and others have labored over the years to show that once in power, there is not an iota of difference between the parties. Really tired. Why should I advertise for the creeps? I’m also tired of adding links to my work to show that, for example, reports maligning patriotic Americans were begun under Bush.
Read up. Search under “Republicans” in BAB’s archive and under the Articles archive on the main site.
Violent, vicious rape, compounded by the very real risk of HIV infection, are a feature of female philanthropy in Africa, and in Haiti—that “Piece Of Africa Transported To The New World.” However, so deeply silly is the prototypical, progressive white woman, in her fantasies (let’s be honest; these are sexual) of rescuing the world, that she discards this reality.
Or, rapes reality with fictitious political constructs to exonerate her rapist and solve her inner-conflict. Vox Day and his readers are particularly funny in their responses to this not-so-funny stale tale of a self-styled scholar and do-gooder, who travels to Haiti on a rescue mission, only to get raped repeatedly and viciously by the flesh-and-blood object of her advocacy and idiotic projections.
Her rapist could probably have had his way with her, but he preferred to hurt her. Badly. Why? Because the freewheeling, uninhibited spirit this woman so admires moved him in that direction; the act turned him on! Still, all she, Amanda Kijera, takes away from this is a renewed commitment to her oppressed oppressor.
• To the usually incredibly skeptical Van Wijk: It is my tendency not to believe this sort of female’s tales of familial abuse. Repressed memory syndrome; satanic ritual abuse: This type of woman would have experienced them all … in her own family. Our educational, cultural and political milieus nurtures the febrile imaginations of feeble-minded fems. To be considered abusive by their relative, it would have been sufficient for Kijera’s kin to be white, christian or conservative.
• George: About the “PMV – Presidential Medal of Victimhood”; rest assured that among Anderson Cooper’s carefully color-coded select “CNN Heroes,” a place will be found for “Women who Went Back For More.” Perhaps AC will even film the ladies as they venture into the lion’s den, much as he films himself swimming with Great Whites.
The calm, detachment of the voice of a member of the forensic team negates the scene being surveyed: a slaughtered, white South African family, one among many like it. For the edification of racism spotters in the West, in Mandela’s South Africa, the assailants are as ethnically distinct as their victims. (I am waiting on a translation from our Afrikaans readers.)
Regular readers and visitors: Send others to Barely a Blog and to www.IlanaMercer.com (archived under “South Africa”). The blog and the main site are repositories for facts and analysis about what’s underway in the once glorious South Africa.
For our South African readers, this weekend I will post on activism and resistance.
Ms. Mercer,
Are those committing and condoning these atrocities, as well as those wholly apathetic to the mass serial murders, a purely racial entity crossing all, most, or many tribes? Or is this mainly the result of just the ANC’s strict devotion to the Communist modus operandi?
I’m looking forward to your book on S.A.
What you see unfold in SA is more the former than the latter. Since Westerners, for the most, are without racial hatred and are all racial liberals, they cannot fathom—or defend against—such white, hot hatred. Afrikaners tried, but were sold down the Orange River for their crude attempts.
What stares back at you from these mutilated remains? Racial hatred, of course. The South African Institute for Race Relations, in all its sanctimony, is awaiting “scientific evidence; research” to prove the point. I’m a pretty level-headed rational writer, but sometimes the truth is there in the handiwork of the devils who do the deeds, not in double-blind studies or “well-controlled” surveys.”
(I’ve been drawing on some of their factual work for my own book, but overall, they have been deniers of the racial aspect of Boer murders. That is criminal negligence. Unjust. And worse.)
Update II (April 25): To Myron’s comment on SA gaining acceptance with the Left. The Left and what goes for conservatism in the USA have always backed the barbarism that the New SA entails.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS.Anonymous’ comments have been illuminating (although, please see posting instructions; email must be provided; it stays anon) as he understands Afrikaans. The narration, anon has pointed out, is from July 1986. I should have known that the thorough police work we heard narrated over the visual was suspect as it is no longer likely in the New improved SA.
What we are hearing over the tape is the kind of forensic work you see on TV (CSI), a feature of the Old SA. These old timer policemen have been given the pink slip. The fact that the bodies evince no mutilation—and this is reasonable conjecture, I believed—goes to the fact that punishment was very likely under the old SA, or the regime, as Americans would call it. The murderer/s would have been caught and HUNG (unless an American or Swedish human rights organization intervened on their behalf). That’s a deterrent. The death penalty has been abolished in the New Barbaric South Africa.
Update III (April 26): Thanks to Phil for his translation. He writes:
Here is the translation of the voice on the Video clip. First of all this is an official Police Video. It appears from the background voice that two policemen are present. I do not know who first raised the alarm but suspect that these two arrived after the police who were initially called, handed it over to them. It is an emotionless description of the crime scene, so there are no guesses or opinions offered by them. My Afrikaans is not great, but here goes:
It is a murder scene. In front of you is the body of a white man with a tire on his chest and a bed cover thrown over him. He has multiple stab wounds to the chest. It looks as if this is the spot where he was murdered. According to a doctor it occurred about four hours ago Here we see the face. The stab wounds in his chest can be clearly seen. (Now takes hand) You see the left hand of the man with stab wounds from the attack. The thumb is almost cut off. The right hand shows similar injuries. (camera closes in on torso) There is also a stab wound on the right side of his chest.
(Now moves to following morning!) It is July 03 1986 at 10:20 am This door (a backroom in on the property) was broken open (presumably by the police) at 09:20am where we discover the body of a woman and two schoolchildren. The child is hanging from a rafter. The woman is also hanging from a rafter. Her clothes are disorderly as a result of the attack. You can see that the belt used with her trousers is broken and she is bruised on her side and also badly on her face. (Camera points to thin rope with loop on the floor) This rope was used to strangle them before hanging them up.
The schoolboy has rope between his chin and front bottom teeth, but on closer examination you can see the main part of the rope embedded in his neck.
(Camera turns to schoolbag lying on the floor next to murdered young girl) The school bag suggests that she had just returned from school when this occurred. (Camera now turns on to schoolgirl) The mark that we can see on her neck was caused by the thinner rope. The neck shows the rope bruises.
(The camera now goes to the room occupied by the live in domestic servant. They notice the tie may have belonged to murderer) and the general untidiness of the bed. The woman may have been initially tied up here. (the camera pans the premises and shows the back door close to where the man was murdered and says so)
The camera now goes back to the woman who is being taken out on a mortuary gurney.) The detective shows the short thinner piece of rope used to strangle her, still on her neck, saying the same. (The camera now pans the back area of the house) Here we see the back area of the house. There is a bar and a snooker room there.
And that is it!
It may seem brutal but this is really quite tame compared to what is now going on here now. At this moment, a one year old toddler is lying in the Sunninghill Clinic in a critical state with a fractured skull. She was at home with her minder (also attacked) when they were home during a “House Robbery” Yeah, that’s what it is called and it! It happens all the time. To get an up to date perspective on the current situation visit www.AfricanCrisis.com . The story of the toddler features there. To see the names of the murdered farmers go to the Dutch site www.censorbugbears.com.
It looks like this place is in serious trouble. The problem with a genocide is that people only seem to notice it once it has happened!
Regards,
Phil
The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), a respectable think tank, has a hard time seeing convincing proof of crimes of racial hatred in the mutilated, violated remains of thousands of rural white South Africans (scroll down to Update III). The SAIRR is, thankfully, prepared to disbelieve the ANC when it warms of the impending nationalization of productive land, and then quickly retracts the rumor:
“Earlier this week the Institute’s new Unit for Risk Analysis described the proposed nationalisation of agricultural land in South Africa as a potentially cataclysmic event for South Africa’s economy. The Government has subsequently denied any intention to nationalise private property. We have reason to doubt their assurances and warn again that the nationalisation of agricultural land is now a published government proposal, that it follows a trend that saw the nationalisation of both mineral and water rights, and that it follows previous efforts to introduce far reaching expropriation legislation. The likelihood of the Government adopting this policy proposal is therefore something that South Africa’s domestic and foreign investors should be very aware of.
In a statement released to the media this week the Unit for Risk Analysis warned that the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform had proposed two future land use models for South Africa in their Strategic Plan 2010-2013. The precise wording of their proposals is as follows:
“To facilitate this discussion, the Department is proposing two options: all productive land will become a national asset and a quitrent land tenure system either with perpetual or limited rights is envisaged. This may require an amendment to Section 25 of the Constitution. All tenure legislation will be subsequently reviewed and brought under a single national land policy framework. Option two will focus on a review of current tenure policies and legislation in order to maintain the current free-hold title system but within the ambit of a land ceilings framework linked to categorisation of farmers. Option two will also investigate a State Land Management Board to facilitate the management of State owned agricultural land and leases.”
On the first model, which proposes declaring all productive land as a national asset, we commented that, ‘Inherent in the proposal is that ownership of the land will [then] rest with the State. The State would then have the authority to declare who could work the land, for what purposes, and under what conditions.’
The second model suggests placing a ceiling on how much land individual farmers can own while maintaining a freehold land tenure system for South Africa. Regarding this proposal we warned that, ‘Commercial agriculture in South Africa depends on significant economies of scale to remain competitive. Undermining that efficiency via limited land holdings risks many serious repercussions, such as a steep reduction in agricultural investment and a commensurate fall in agricultural employment which will in turn drive up levels of rural poverty and provide an impetus for greater rural to urban migration.’
Relevant to both proposals we added that, ‘Government assurances that the proposals were merely a mechanism for taking failed farms back from black farmers were a red herring to conceal the State’s more plausible intention to wrest control of agricultural production from white commercial farmers,’ and that, ‘It is ironic that the Government would use its own failed land reform programme to justify the seizure of remaining productive land in the country.’
We forecast that if either of the proposals is adopted, South Africa will experience repercussions that will damage the commercial farming industry in South Africa.
The Government and the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform have responded to our warnings by saying that there is no plan to nationalise South Africa’s farms. The Government has further stated that it respects private property rights and that this will not change. We have little confidence in these assurances and believe them to be an effort to mislead the public and the media.
In part, this is because the Government’s assurances are so obviously contrary to their own written and published plan. While various government officials in the last 48 hours have said that the plan does not talk about ‘nationalisation,’ it does talk about private owners ceding control of their land to the State which will then lease that land back to the farmers. The Government’s proposal also identifies the need to alter Section 25 of the Constitution which deals with and guarantees private property rights.
A second reason to doubt the Government’s assurances is that this latest policy proposal appears to follow an established trend of the State seizing control of what it regards as important ‘national assets.’
In 2002 through the Minerals and Petroleum Development Act, the Government took custodianship of all mineral rights in the country thereby ending private ownership. Mining companies had to re-apply for those rights in order to continue mining. This legislative step did significant harm to the mining industry in the country and to investor sentiment, particularly in the mining sector.
Similarly, the Government took control of all water resources in the country through the National Water Act of 1998. The previous distinction between public and privately owned water was eliminated, making all water a ‘public asset.’ Water allowances were imposed and the Government handed itself the authority of managing the country’s water resources.
What we are now seeing in terms of the Government’s proposed land seizure scheme is therefore a logical progression of government policy that has sought to bring under state control what it regards as important ‘national assets’.
The third reason to doubt the Government’s sincerity is that this latest proposal appears to be a continuation of a pattern of thinking that gave rise to the Expropriation Bill of 2008. The Institute published extensively on the bill, which would have given the State the authority to seize any fixed or movable property ‘in the national interest’ without paying compensation. Ahead of the 2009 elections the Government declared that the controversial Bill would be shelved.
The Government has recently admitted that 9 out of every ten land reform projects that it has managed have failed. Under these circumstances it is unlikely that this same Government will be able to successfully manage South Africa’s entire commercial farming industry. This is particularly so if they erode the capital value in agricultural land, which is important collateral that farmers have against which to raise loans to run their businesses.
We are therefore of the view that if either of the two proposals goes ahead then South Africa will experience a steep reduction in agricultural investment. This will translate into a commensurate fall in agricultural employment which will in turn drive up levels of rural poverty and provide an impetus for greater rural to urban migration.
Further we expect that South Africa’s ability to meet its food needs will be undermined. This will see knock-on effects on downstream food processing industries with corresponding falls in employment and investment. Upstream supply industries will see their markets shrink as demand for their products falls. South Africa will be forced to import a greater portion of its food needs, placing pressure on both the current account deficit and on food price inflation.
The above repercussions will see more poor rural people flocking to urban areas. The Government’s ability to meet service delivery demands will be compromised even further than it already is. In an environment of escalating protest action against Government on the peripheries of large urban settlements, this will pose a further challenge to the hegemony of the ANC.
It is uncertain to what extent the Government and the ANC identifies these risks. Certainly sentiment within the Government and the ANC ignored similar warnings on skills, mining, health, education, security, electricity, and labour market policy for which South Africa paid a heavy price. It is quite possible that the Government may therefore proceed with this scheme only to try and reverse the policy as its negative effects become more apparent.
It is also possible that the Government may identify these repercussions but proceed regardless in order to achieve what they may see as the more important end of breaking the back of white commercial agriculture and handing farms to black farmers. On this score the ANC leadership’s recent support for incitements to shoot and kill white Afrikaans farmers is pertinent. Certainly the Government’s attitude to white skills in the civil service suggests that they are willing to sacrifice performance for racial ideology.
We must also warn against regarding the second of the two proposals as a lesser of two evils. Destroying the economies of scale that make South Africa’s commercial agriculture sector viable will result in precisely the same consequences as we have spelt out above. Keep in mind that when Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe commenced its land reform programme it also commenced with a proposal of ‘one farmer, one farm’.
We therefore warn our readers and subscribers to take this latest policy proposal seriously, to identify the likely consequences of the proposal, and to prepare for the eventuality of the State going ahead with seizing all or part of South Africa’s agricultural land holdings. We caution strongly against taking Government assurances to the contrary to heart particularly when viewed against the track record of that same Government in nationalising mineral and water rights and in proposing legislation to seize any fixed or movable property without paying compensation.
* Frans Cronje and Catherine Schulze
Update I (April 19): Plans for the collectivization of farms are underway amid the carnage. Every online news page is full of death and suffering. Here are two additional news items that appeared alongside the story Conrad posted:
Please help us. It’s all good and well that we intellectualize this issue in the comments section, but I am afraid we need more “tangible” aid. I want to get out of here but I don’t have the money or skills to leave.
Getting the word OUT is not merely intellectualizing. Most Westerners have no idea of the reality of life in sainted Mandela’s South Africa. Many of my South African readers, on the other hand, prefer to write to me personally. To which I say: why do you want to discuss life in that country with someone who already knows the awful facts? I’ve committed to keep the facts alive and current on this blog (despite a lack of time and resources) with the hope that the more public they become the greater the awareness of the need for a solution to the assault on ethnic white South Africans.
Search this blog (under South Africa) and you will find that I have discussed the options of immigration. I have also covered Canada’s courageous landmark granting of refugee status to a repeat victim of black South Africa. The gentleman in question was without resources, but was resourceful. I cannot recommend a course of action. All I can do is provide information. See the following posts for examples:
What about Argentina for South African farmers, who are among the best in the world?
I am still awaiting my friend activist Dan Roodt’s call to action. It is his to make: He (not I) lives in the heart of darkness. However, and I say this cautiously, the white minority under assault needs to begin to organize. Think: How organized is the criminal enterprise renamed the South African Police Service—a mostly illiterate, ill-trained force, riven by feuds, fetishes, and factional loyalties? This lot is seizing fire arms from law abiding citizens and selling them for profit to other criminals.
“Only 70 miles from a 2010 World Cup football stadium, a farmer’s wife and a boy aged 13 learn to defend themselves with lethal weapons. They say thousands of white landowners have been killed by Zimbabwe-style marauders; their black rulers accuse them of belligerence and right-wing tendencies. Aidan Hartley reports on the war of words you won’t read about in your World Cup holiday brochure.”
“Bella wakes. She hears a strangled, gurgling sound. It’s the dog, she thinks.
‘Peter, there’s something wrong,’ she says to her husband. Noises emerge from the room of her mother-in-law, who’s 98 and confined to a wheelchair.
It’s 1am. Bella gets up and walks out of the bedroom. In the hall she sees a young man who at first she thinks is her son. Except he’s black, wears a balaclava and is pointing a gun at her.
‘He comes for me,’ says Bella, her hand before her tear-stained face.
‘He’s going to shoot me! I trip as I run back to the bedroom. Peter comes to the door but he has nothing in his hand, no pistol. I hear a gun go off. I hear my mother-in-law screaming. I lock the door and telephone my son. I tell him: “I think they shot Pa!”’
Two men are outside the bedroom window with a rifle. She loads the pistol Peter keeps by the bed.
‘I take the gun and say, “Come on! I’ll shoot you!”’
Back in the hall she finds Peter dead, a trail of blood across the kitchen floor. Her mother-in-law Gerda is bruised and beaten.
‘I can’t tell you how hopeless I felt,’ Bella says. ‘I will see it in front of me for weeks, months, years.’ …
Days after Peter is cremated, the attackers return. The survivors are sleeping elsewhere by now, so the gang finds only the dogs in the house. They torture the animals with boiling water before soaking them in petrol and setting them on fire. [A fate that is not reserved for dogs and would have befallen their owners had they been in residence.--IM]
I ask Bella for a motive and she says a group of black South Africans who are squatting on their farmland have repeatedly threatened them.
After the family find the dogs, Bella’s son Piet calls the police. Weeks later the attackers are still at large; police arrested one man in connection with the killing but he was later released.
I am in her home. The bullet holes are still clearly visible. I ask her what she is going to do.
‘If we stay here they will kill us. You can’t say this was a dream, or rewind what happened. They want our land.’ …
…. Driving around Mpumalanga Province, east of Johannesburg, in what used to be the Transvaal, I found myself called by the farmers to a string of grisly murder scenes. In some the blood was still drying on the furniture or the street. In others, witnesses gave me accounts of killings involving rituals of extreme brutality: of victims boiled alive, forced to kneel and shot execution style and tortured in ways so unimaginable they are too horrendous to print. The same goes for the many pictures I have been shown of the barely identifiable corpses and horrific crime scenes.” …
Update: WHAT WOULD GLENN SAY? I wonder what Beck the Boer basher say, in his histrionics, about KK (Kommando Korps) “formed to provide self-defence training for Afrikaner communities who feel under threat in today’s South Africa. Most of them came from the capital, Pretoria, which the government wants to rename Tshwane to reflect its pre-colonial, African history: an example of what the Afrikaners regard as the dilution of their historic identity.” [Boers built the place, so of course it should be renamed for the Bantu.]
Glenn: “OMIGOD, KK is short for KKK.” (As if everything begins and ends with the American perspective.)
“The KK was set up 20 years ago but has struggled to bring in new blood or funding in recent years. It runs training camps across the country to provide a pool of potential combatants if a war is declared against the Afrikaner people. In the meantime, unpaid KK operatives in military-style uniforms defend vulnerable white communities against what they describe as ‘a guerilla war’ and ‘genocide.’”
Before the KK, “Boer farmers were organised into farm militias known as Commandos. These defended rural communities from assault and, just over a century ago, they formed the vanguard of the rebellion against the hated British Empire. … In recent years the government has moved to disband the Commando units as part of a security plan to improve policing nationwide.”
Update II (April 16): About the link provided by our South African readers to images of the killings. I have seen the pictures. In my heart I have hoped hard that what I saw has not been inflicted on humans (or animals) and that these were forgeries (it’s hard to come by sourcing). Sadly, I fear I am wrong. What I have seen in the mangled flesh is the handiwork of pure evil. Again, I have not used these images out of respect for the victims, but also, mainly, becasue they are not sourced. I will allow them on the blog.
Moreover, as readers of this space know, I keep three lead blog posts open at any given time for comment. Of the three that propagate to the IlanaMercer.com’s front page, I will try and make one about South Africa, my homeland and my homies. We will keep the topic alive.
Regular readers and visitors, I hope, will send others to Barely a Blog and to www.IlanaMercer.com (archived under “South Africa”). So that blog and main site become a repository for facts and analysis about what’s underway in the once glorious South Africa.
“Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) that seeks the establishment of a homeland for the Afrikaners of South Africa, was alone at his homestead over the Easter period, when two farmhands bludgeoned the sixty-nine-year-old separatist to a pulp with pangas and pipes. Based on hearsay—and their abiding sympathy for savages—news media across the West are insisting that the motive for the murder was a “labor dispute.” …
… The brutality of the racially motivated murders of white farmers in South Africa, and, increasingly, of whites in general, is one aspect of these crimes. Mr. Terre’Blanche was unrecognizable. Two weeks before he was slaughtered, seventeen-year-old Anika Smit was raped, her throat slashed sixteen times and her hands hacked off and removed from the scene.
Both acts of butchery were unremarkable in Mandela’s South Africa.
The dehumanization of the victim—Crimen injuria in South African law—is another feature of these feral acts. When they were finished with him, Terre’Blanche’s killers pulled down the old man’s pants, exposing his privates. Slain white farmers are often displayed like trophies by their black killers.
Mr. Terre’Blanche was a victim of a farm murder, plain and simple.” …
Malama “threw a BBC journalist out of a press conference, accusing him of ‘white tendency’ and calling him a ‘bastard,’ ‘bloody agent’ and ‘small boy.’”
The BBC, chief obfuscator on matters South African, is made to eat dirt by a Frankenstein that is of its own creation. The West pushed for raw democracy in South Africa, and is now recoiling in horror at its former proteges and at what they’re, predictably, doing to the place.
Update I (April 10): The Funeral.
To our reader in the Comments Section: I did not see the Nazi salute in the footage I watched of Eugene Terre’Blanche’s funeral. However, I have never claimed the AWB was a savory organization. What I said is that as volatile as Terre’Blanche was, he and his cause (self-determination for whites) had come to appear civilized—civilized and prophetic—as compared to the people of whom he had warned, now running the country.
In the interviews I’ve watched, I saw gleeful black folks in Ventersdorp; and dignified resigned Afrikaners. That’s all I saw.
Now, is the AWB multicultural and non-racial; no. They believed that were South Africa—a country built by Boer and British—to fall into the hands of a black majority, it would go the way of the rest of Africa. That’s why they were separatists. Theirs was not a racial war but a war of self-preservation and survival.
Americans who’ve long since forgotten what it is to fight for their national life—and life—think that such South Africans were having fun fooling around with Nazi-looking insignia. Yes, there is unsavory stuff about the AWB. I did not understand nor sympathize with them back in the day. But I recognize now that the drive behind such an organization was a desperate attempt to forestall black majority rule, as it was believed that should that come to pass, the country they loved would be lost.
Were they right? You tell me.
Update III: I have very little patience for the South African Institute for Race Relations in all its sanctimony. I’ve been drawing on some of their factual work for my own book, but overall, they have been deniers of the racial aspect of Boer murders. That is criminal negligence. Unjust. And worse.
Nevertheless, the SAIRR teases apart some of the dynamics behind the uptick in the ANC’s racial incitement against whites (using barbarian front man, Malema):
the party is acutely aware that its support base of poor black South Africans has begun to turn against it. Violent protest action against the ruling party is now commonplace around the country.
In order to shore up support in the black community the ANC increasingly appears to be seeking to shift the blame for its delivery failures onto the small white ethnic minority, which today comprises well under 10% of the total population of South Africa. Here parallels may be read to the behaviour of Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe when that party realised that its political future was in peril. The ANC Youth League’s recent visit to Zanu-PF which saw it endorse that party’s ruinous polices are pertinent here.
Note: You can incite racial violence all you want in my neck of the woods, or among most white South Africans; murder will not be resorted to. Boer are being killed en masse because there are a lot of blacks who want to kill them.
From hereon in the much-anticipated press release descends into the same liberal clichés and solecisms.
“… a resurgent right wing will be numerous. It is most unlikely that this right wing will take the form of camouflage clad henchmen on horses in shows of force.”
OMIGOD. Would that such a resurgence took such a form; why would putting the fear of God into men with murder on their minds be so bad? How is a show of force from an attacked minority a bad thing when the alternative is to put your faith in a fat, functionally illiterate, corrupt constabulary that roots for Malema?
These people (SAIRR) make me sick.
More useful facts:
• the ANC depends greatly on the tax income paid by white South Africans to balance South Africa’s books.
• it depends entirely on the food produced by a small number of white farmers to feed the country.
• white South Africans still dominate the skills base of the country.
• and most importantly, much white opinion since the early 1990s has been moderate. White South Africa has been willing and often eager to cooperate with the Government in building an open, non-racial, and prosperous South Africa
Update IV (April 11): The British Daily Mail has decided that the raised arms at Terre’Blanche’s funeral are Nazi salutes. Is it so, or is it the interpretation of media that have not bothered to inquire what the raised arm means? I myself do not know. The flag emblem, as explained on the AWB website, isn’t intended as Nazi insignia.
Here’s what we know which belies the stupid, malevolent fixation of a hostile, ignorant media: This tiny minority is being systematically killed off; this tiny minority doesn’t wish to exterminate, a la Nazis, the 38 million blacks surrounding it; all the AWB wants is a place they can call their own, in the country they founded, away from those who want to kill them.
Have I distilled the facts without the fanciful? I think so.
Update V: To geniqu4u, thanks for writing:
• I hope you get my book when it’s out. I compare the number of deaths in detention under 40 years of apartheid with the number of murders in the New South Africa. More people die in ten weeks under Mandela’s SA than died in detention over 40 years of white rule. Ordinary blacks are missing the old SA. That’s how bad it is.
• Africa was immeasurably improved under colonialism; before that it was a morass of tribal internecine warfare of unimaginable cruelty; there were no roads, no infrastructure, education, health care, security. As I’ve written in “Blaming Colonialism Invalid, Even In Academe,” “Colonialism, dependency and racism—all highly politicized constructs—are beginning to be seen as humbugs, untrue and unhelpful, in explaining—and hence, helping—the Third World. What was once ‘conventional wisdom that brooked no dissent,’ in the words of Lawrence E. Harrison, is rarely mentioned today in intellectually respectable quarters. South Africa’s black population’s longevity, education, and numbers were markedly increased under white minority rule. Naturally, to describe reality is not to condone apartheid.”
• I don’t know where you get your data on African farming methods, but not one point you make is factual. South African blacks were never anything but subsistence farmers who had often done untold damage to the land, stripping it via indiscriminate grazing. The Afrikaner has been, in general, a good custodian of the land and the natural environment. There is no commercial, large-scale farmer in the world like the Afrikaners, who’ve turned an arid, impossible-to-farm land into oases with technology, innovation, dedication, and hard work. There isn’t a farmer who loves his live stock more than the Afrikaner. Most of the white-farmed land being seized under the land distribution policies of the ANC and given over to blacks has gone to seed. Beautiful, high tech installations taken from their owners (who feed the country, nay, the continent) and given to blacks have been reduced to rubble. The cruelty to the live stock is beyond belief; cattle dying of thirst, hunger and disease. I tell it in my book.
TimesOnLine: “South Africa’s white-dominated farming unions have greeted the threat of nationalisation with alarm. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, when multi-racial elections were held, 15m acres of farmland have been transferred to black ownership. Much of it is now lying idle, creating no economic benefit for the nation nor its new owners. Last year South Africa became a net importer of food for the first time in its history.
Update VI (April 12): Glenn Beck joined the ignoramus media by referring dramatically to the rise of extremism in South Africa, gleaned at a glance from the so-called Nazi-like salute at the funeral of Eugene Terreblanche. Thus, in order to conclude that the non-violent gathering of people at the funeral was the party deserving of condemnation—Glenn required nothing more than a symbolic gesture from them. Ignorance is bliss.
The insularity of American headline makers is alarming.
