Category Archives: Criminal Injustice

Update III: Tossed and Gored By Gore Vidal

Constitution, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Democrats, Homosexuality, Intellectualism, Liberty, Literature, Military, Propaganda, Reason, Terrorism, The State, The Zeitgeist, War

Despite his surprisingly mundane and misguided ideas on politics and economics, brilliant belletrist Gore Vidal, at 83, still manages to dazzle with his original insights. In a country in which homegrown retardation is more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism, that’s quite something.

Vidal recently gave an interview to the British Times from which it was clear that he no longer sees signs of the divine in Obama. Nevertheless, absent from the dismal score card he gave the president was a realistic appraisal of the putative gifts of Obama, a charmer who was elected based on his ability to sweetly say nothing much at all.

To his credit, Vidal is scathing about Obama’s talismanic, “solve that [war] and you solve terrorism” treatment of the Afghanistan war. At the same time he wants to see Obama, Lincoln-like, lord it over the people (especially with respect to health care). But those kinds of images go with the homoerotic territory.

In any event, his weak protestations over Obama are the least interesting of Vidal’s comments, the ones about Timothy McVeigh and the love that dare not speak its name the most interesting.

Read the interview.

Update I (Oct. 1): Some respect for Gore Vidal, please. He belongs to a generation of intellectuals who SERVED. Bravely. As a matter of interest, “Some 450 out of 750 Princeton graduates in the class of 1956 served in the military.” Samuel Huntington, one of America’s greatest scholars, served in the army. “All four of the Kennedy brothers served in the military; not one of the thirty Kennedy cousins has.” [Excerpted from Are We Rome?The Fall of An Empire And The State of America by Cullen Murphy, 2007, p. 82.]

Most of the neocon-minded war mongers have not served.

Of course, “our freedoms,” such as they are, do not come courtesy of our armed forces leveling this or the other far-flung protectorate abroad. That’s yet more neocon nonsense on stilts. Cheap sloganeering.

Update II: The proverbial Orwellian Ministry of Truth decrees how the peons think about the issues of the day. When it comes to Timothy McVeigh they’ve had the same degree of success as in ensconcing Rosa Parks as the new Founding Mother of America.

Vidal is rare and courageous in recognizing the legitimate effrontery against life and liberty that motivated McVeigh to commit his crime. He is also unique in acknowledging that McVeigh was not a rube, but a thoughtful man who had fought for his country and was familiar with its foundational principles and documents. Here is McVeigh on the American experiment gone wrong (haven’t you read the interview?):

I think it all has to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the misconception that the government is obliged to provide those things or has the jurisdiction to deny them. We’ve gotten away from the principle that they were only created to secure those rights. And that’s where, I believe, much of the trouble has surfaced.

The characters involved in the Waco massacre—our “brave” law and order officers and their puppet masters—deserved to be put to death too, but were not. Vidal has my respect for recognizing what the decidedly mediocre mind of a Rich Lowry has been incapable of. If Vidal were of a younger generation (like myself), his iconoclasm would have consigned him in mindless America to obscurity.

Update III: MORAL/INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENCE. Conflating the causes for which McVeigh committed his cruel crime against agents and family of an oppressive government is akin to conflating MY causes with those of, in Myron’s taxonomy of the evil, the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin,” and I would add Al Gore (to round off the profile, and to poke at the humorless).

What sort of moral relativism is this? What kind of messy thinking is this? The causes and theories of the Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin (and Al Gore) were wrong on their logic and facts; McVeigh’s causes and motivation, if not his deeds, were right. What’s so hard about that? Kudos to Vidal, however confused he is about all else, for recognizing this.

Updated: White South African Granted Asylum In Canada

Canada, Conservatism, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, Republicans, South-Africa

He was called a “white dog” and a “settler” by his black countrymen, and was attacked seven times by said people, including three stabbings inflicted during muggings and robberies. Then he moved to Canada, which has granted him refugee status. Now “Brandon Huntley, 31, originally from Cape Town, South Africa” gets to live where his life will not be imperiled daily.

The British Telegraph reports on this landmark case: “It is thought to be the first time a white South African man has been granted refugee status in Canada claiming he was the victim of black aggression.”

“‘I find that the claimant would stand out like a ‘sore thumb’ due to his colour in any part of the country,’ tribunal panel chair William Davis was quoted as saying.”

The Ottawa Sun reveals more than the British paper is prepared to:

The decision also took into account testimony by Laura Kaplan, 41, the sister of Huntley’s lawyer, who immigrated to Canada last year from her native South Africa.

Laura Kaplan testified about being threatened by armed black South Africans and the torture of her brother Robert in 1997 when a gang of black men broke into his house, tortured him for eight hours, shot him three times and left him for dead.

Davis said the evidence of Huntley and Laura Kaplan “show a picture of indifference and inability or unwillingness” of the South African government to protect “White South Africans from persecution by African South Africans.”

Reuters is quick to second the “The African National Congress’ response: “The ANC views the granting by Canada of a refugee status to South African citizen Brandon Huntley on the grounds that Africans would ‘persecute’ him, as racist,’ the party said in a statement.”

That’s rich. The sadistic atrocities described in this article could not possibly be a manifestation of seething racial hatred, now could they?

On the status of mercy in America I quote the American Renaissance: “there has been a trickle of South Africans applying for asylum in the United States on the grounds of racial persecution. Almost all have been deported.”

Update (Sept. 2): The Republicans, the Party of Lincoln, are least likely to feel sympathy for the plight of South African whites.

Here’s a relevant excerpt from my book, © Into the Cannibals’ Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa:

Ronald Reagan favored ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, together with a tough resistance to communist advances in the Third World. But political pressure, not least from the Republican majority, mounted for an increasingly punitive stance toward Pretoria. This entailed an ‘elaborate sanctions structure,’ disinvestment, and a prohibition on sharing intelligence with the South Africans.

For advocating ‘constructive engagement,’ members of his Republican party issued a coruscating attack on Reagan. Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., in particular, stated: ‘For this moment, at least, the President has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America.’ Republicans had slipped between the sheets with the fashionable left.

The radical Republicans like to forget how completely conservative Reagan was about forcing change in South Africa. Conservative and wise. There is not one Republican, bar Ron Paul, who is as weary of democracy and mass society as was Reagan.

In Memory Of Murdered Men & Women For Whom Kennedy Never Spared A Thought

Africa, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Media, South-Africa, The West

Ted Kennedy (see “Ted’s Dead: Sacred Cow Syndrome Strikes”), the great humanitarian, never piped up about the craven carnage of murder and mayhem in my homeland, South Africa. Why would he? The slaying is done by Africans; the worst fate is often reserved for Afrikaner and English men, women and children, who’re being culled preponderantly and disproportionately to their population numbers.
Kennedy excelled at perpetrating the narrative of the officially excluded and oppressed. His worldview did not expand to accommodate Un-PC realities. As the obscene orgy over the passing of Kennedy, at a ripe age, proceeds shamelessly, mull over a truly tragic waste of lives.

Silent Acquiescence In Daily Terror
Written by PARATUS
Friday, 28 August 2009

South Africa is experiencing extraordinary levels of violent crime. Since the country’s democratic transition in 1994, some 300,000 South Africans have been murdered. Much of this crime is unprecedented in its brutality and is directed at the elderly and the young. Bizarrely, much of the Western media are silent about the calamity which has befallen South Africa. Is this an intentional oversight to avoid accusations of racism or denigrating one of the few African democracies? Or, are the Western media – and, by implication, its consumers – disinterested in accounts of murder and bloodshed far removed on the southern tip of a forgotten continent?

Marinda O’Dell was a compassionate and hardworking occupational therapist at a school for disabled children in Krugersdorp, an hour’s drive north west of Johannesburg. In early August, two young men entered her house just after lunchtime, bludgeoned her 17-year-old daughter unconscious, and cut Marinda’s throat. Marinda became one of the 50 people murdered on an average day in South Africa.

Last month, Cobi Venter, a dedicated anti-apartheid campaigner, and her husband George, an 78-year-old entrepreneur, were brutally murdered in their middle-class suburban home in Port Elizabeth. Six men forced their way into the Venter’s home, which had been barricaded after a previous robbery attempt. George was struck several times with a hammer, tortured and dragged by his feet from room to room, and then killed. After witnessing the terrifying events, Cobi was gang-raped and fatally beaten to death.

According to the Venter’s son: “Blood was on the walls of every single room in the house; it was on the ceilings. It was like evil just exploded there – I mean, all eight of the main windows were smashed as well.” Veteran policemen cried at the scene.

More than ten years ago, Anne Paton, the wife of the celebrated late anti-apartheid author, Alan Paton, fled South Africa in terror. A number of her friends had been murdered, and she was almost killed by two robbers who throttled and assaulted the then 70-year-old as she was enjoying an afternoon nap. Realizing that the government was unwilling to protect its taxpayers and citizens, she finally left South Africa . At the time, she wrote:

I love this country with a passion, but I cannot live here any more. I can no longer live slung about with panic buttons and gear locks. I am tired of driving with my car windows closed and the doors locked, tired of being afraid of stopping at red lights. I am tired of being constantly on the alert, having that sudden frisson of fear at the sight of a shadow by the gate, of a group of youths approaching—although nine times out of 10 they are innocent of harmful intent. Such is the suspicion that dogs us all…

While some people say I have been unlucky, others say: “You are lucky not to have been raped or murdered.” What kind of a society is this where one is considered “lucky” not to have been raped or murdered—yet?”

While difficult to believe, it appears that the level of brutality employed by criminals is on the rise in South Africa. Deputy national police commissioner, Andre Pruis, recently announced an investigation into the excessively violent nature of crime in the country.

Especially at risk are the elderly and the young. According to official South African Police Service (SAPS) figures, in 2007/08 (the latest 12-month period for which data have been released) an average of 30 children were murdered every week. During a typical year, as many children are murdered in South Africa as the number of all people murdered in both the United Kingdom and Germany , notwithstanding the fact that the latter two countries have a combined population of 141 million, compared to 48 million in South Africa.

The risk of being murdered in South Africa today is almost six times as high as in the United States . Compared to the United Kingdom , the risk is 19 times higher, while the risk is an incredible 40 times higher than in Germany.

Sexual crimes are also at intolerably high levels in South Africa. Gang-rape and the rape of toddlers and even infants has become a common occurrence. Only countries at war suffer as much sexual violence as South Africa , Doctors Without Borders said in March in a global report on rape.

According to the SAPS, children are the victims of 41 percent of all rapes and attempted rapes reported in the country; approximately 60 a day. Over 15 percent of all reported rapes are against children under 11, and another 26 percent against children 12-17 years.

Given that a large proportion of all violent crime – but sexual offenses in particular – go unreported, the true figures are likely to be substantially higher. A bizarre belief among some African black men that sex with a virgin can cure HIV/AIDS is further fueling the high levels of child sexual exploitation in South Africa.

According to Max Coleman’s authoritative book, “A crime against humanity: Analyzing repression of the Apartheid State ”, published by the South African Human Rights Committee, 21,000 people died in political violence in South Africa during apartheid. Included in Coleman’s figures are deaths due to SA Defence Force actions in Angola , security force action in South Africa , and intra-black (or “black-on-black”) killings.

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, over 300,000 people have been murdered in South Africa . To put this horrifying number into perspective, it is sobering to recall that the United Kingdom suffered 383,000 military deaths during World War II, after years of intense fighting across France , Germany , and the Mediterranean basin.

An epidemic of criminal violence has afflicted South Africa since its first non-racial franchise in 1994. Yet, as one astute observer points out: “This story has been largely ignored by the mainstream media in the United States and the Western world, in order to perpetuate the Mandela myth of the wonderful New South Africa.”

Why are the Western media largely silent about South Africa ’s crime wave? Is it for fear of being thought ‘racist’, notwithstanding the fact that most victims of violent crime in South Africa are black? Is it for fear of blemishing the miracle of South Africa ’s (relatively) peaceful transition to democracy, having to admit that the value of reconciliation on which the “rainbow nation” was built has given way to mistrust and animosity? Whatever the reason, the Western media is doing its consumers a disservice by ignoring the tidal wave of violent crime which has engulfed South Africa.

“My child has been murdered; he lies in the room at the back and there is blood.” With these words the father of the 29-year-old Gericke Smit, an attorney, had to report his son’s death to an ex-policeman. Gericke was killed in Pietersburg last month by two men who battered him to death, striking him across the head with shovels more than 18 times.

Every day – every hour, even – men, women, and children in South Africa are being murdered in their homes. They share the faces, the names, the broader history of the best in the West. When will this daily terror be reported in the daily news of the West?

[This writer, WND.COM, and a woman named Adriana Stuijt are the only journalists I know who’ve covered the killing fields of South Africa with any consistency. My near-complete book does justice to the topic. Please read our Articles Archive and blog entries under “South Africa.”]

In Memory Of Murdered Men & Women For Whom Kennedy Never Spared A Thought

Africa, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Media, South-Africa, The West

Ted Kennedy (see “Ted’s Dead: Sacred Cow Syndrome Strikes”), the great humanitarian, never piped up about the craven carnage of murder and mayhem in my homeland, South Africa. Why would he? The slaying is done by Africans; the worst fate is often reserved for Afrikaner and English men, women and children, who’re being culled preponderantly and disproportionately to their population numbers.
Kennedy excelled at perpetrating the narrative of the officially excluded and oppressed. His worldview did not expand to accommodate Un-PC realities. As the obscene orgy over the passing of Kennedy, at a ripe age, proceeds shamelessly, mull over a truly tragic waste of lives.

Silent Acquiescence In Daily Terror
Written by PARATUS
Friday, 28 August 2009

South Africa is experiencing extraordinary levels of violent crime. Since the country’s democratic transition in 1994, some 300,000 South Africans have been murdered. Much of this crime is unprecedented in its brutality and is directed at the elderly and the young. Bizarrely, much of the Western media are silent about the calamity which has befallen South Africa. Is this an intentional oversight to avoid accusations of racism or denigrating one of the few African democracies? Or, are the Western media – and, by implication, its consumers – disinterested in accounts of murder and bloodshed far removed on the southern tip of a forgotten continent?

Marinda O’Dell was a compassionate and hardworking occupational therapist at a school for disabled children in Krugersdorp, an hour’s drive north west of Johannesburg. In early August, two young men entered her house just after lunchtime, bludgeoned her 17-year-old daughter unconscious, and cut Marinda’s throat. Marinda became one of the 50 people murdered on an average day in South Africa.

Last month, Cobi Venter, a dedicated anti-apartheid campaigner, and her husband George, an 78-year-old entrepreneur, were brutally murdered in their middle-class suburban home in Port Elizabeth. Six men forced their way into the Venter’s home, which had been barricaded after a previous robbery attempt. George was struck several times with a hammer, tortured and dragged by his feet from room to room, and then killed. After witnessing the terrifying events, Cobi was gang-raped and fatally beaten to death.

According to the Venter’s son: “Blood was on the walls of every single room in the house; it was on the ceilings. It was like evil just exploded there – I mean, all eight of the main windows were smashed as well.” Veteran policemen cried at the scene.

More than ten years ago, Anne Paton, the wife of the celebrated late anti-apartheid author, Alan Paton, fled South Africa in terror. A number of her friends had been murdered, and she was almost killed by two robbers who throttled and assaulted the then 70-year-old as she was enjoying an afternoon nap. Realizing that the government was unwilling to protect its taxpayers and citizens, she finally left South Africa . At the time, she wrote:

I love this country with a passion, but I cannot live here any more. I can no longer live slung about with panic buttons and gear locks. I am tired of driving with my car windows closed and the doors locked, tired of being afraid of stopping at red lights. I am tired of being constantly on the alert, having that sudden frisson of fear at the sight of a shadow by the gate, of a group of youths approaching—although nine times out of 10 they are innocent of harmful intent. Such is the suspicion that dogs us all…

While some people say I have been unlucky, others say: “You are lucky not to have been raped or murdered.” What kind of a society is this where one is considered “lucky” not to have been raped or murdered—yet?”

While difficult to believe, it appears that the level of brutality employed by criminals is on the rise in South Africa. Deputy national police commissioner, Andre Pruis, recently announced an investigation into the excessively violent nature of crime in the country.

Especially at risk are the elderly and the young. According to official South African Police Service (SAPS) figures, in 2007/08 (the latest 12-month period for which data have been released) an average of 30 children were murdered every week. During a typical year, as many children are murdered in South Africa as the number of all people murdered in both the United Kingdom and Germany , notwithstanding the fact that the latter two countries have a combined population of 141 million, compared to 48 million in South Africa.

The risk of being murdered in South Africa today is almost six times as high as in the United States . Compared to the United Kingdom , the risk is 19 times higher, while the risk is an incredible 40 times higher than in Germany.

Sexual crimes are also at intolerably high levels in South Africa. Gang-rape and the rape of toddlers and even infants has become a common occurrence. Only countries at war suffer as much sexual violence as South Africa , Doctors Without Borders said in March in a global report on rape.

According to the SAPS, children are the victims of 41 percent of all rapes and attempted rapes reported in the country; approximately 60 a day. Over 15 percent of all reported rapes are against children under 11, and another 26 percent against children 12-17 years.

Given that a large proportion of all violent crime – but sexual offenses in particular – go unreported, the true figures are likely to be substantially higher. A bizarre belief among some African black men that sex with a virgin can cure HIV/AIDS is further fueling the high levels of child sexual exploitation in South Africa.

According to Max Coleman’s authoritative book, “A crime against humanity: Analyzing repression of the Apartheid State ”, published by the South African Human Rights Committee, 21,000 people died in political violence in South Africa during apartheid. Included in Coleman’s figures are deaths due to SA Defence Force actions in Angola , security force action in South Africa , and intra-black (or “black-on-black”) killings.

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, over 300,000 people have been murdered in South Africa . To put this horrifying number into perspective, it is sobering to recall that the United Kingdom suffered 383,000 military deaths during World War II, after years of intense fighting across France , Germany , and the Mediterranean basin.

An epidemic of criminal violence has afflicted South Africa since its first non-racial franchise in 1994. Yet, as one astute observer points out: “This story has been largely ignored by the mainstream media in the United States and the Western world, in order to perpetuate the Mandela myth of the wonderful New South Africa.”

Why are the Western media largely silent about South Africa ’s crime wave? Is it for fear of being thought ‘racist’, notwithstanding the fact that most victims of violent crime in South Africa are black? Is it for fear of blemishing the miracle of South Africa ’s (relatively) peaceful transition to democracy, having to admit that the value of reconciliation on which the “rainbow nation” was built has given way to mistrust and animosity? Whatever the reason, the Western media is doing its consumers a disservice by ignoring the tidal wave of violent crime which has engulfed South Africa.

“My child has been murdered; he lies in the room at the back and there is blood.” With these words the father of the 29-year-old Gericke Smit, an attorney, had to report his son’s death to an ex-policeman. Gericke was killed in Pietersburg last month by two men who battered him to death, striking him across the head with shovels more than 18 times.

Every day – every hour, even – men, women, and children in South Africa are being murdered in their homes. They share the faces, the names, the broader history of the best in the West. When will this daily terror be reported in the daily news of the West?

[This writer, WND.COM, and a woman named Adriana Stuijt are the only journalists I know who’ve covered the killing fields of South Africa with any consistency. My near-complete book does justice to the topic. Please read our Articles Archive and blog entries under “South Africa.”]