Category Archives: Democracy

UPADTE III: The Jew Who Prosecuted Mandela: Percy Yutar Said He Was A South African Patriot

Democracy, Elections, History, Judaism & Jews, South-Africa

“Persecutor” is how my father—once a leading South African anti-Apartheid activist—used to refer to the man who “prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years).” (The Guardian)

But Percy Yutar was his real name. And “some Jewish leaders hailed him as a ‘credit to the community’ and a symbol of the Jews’ contribution to South Africa.”

“Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg’s largest orthodox synagogue.”

In the opinion of my father (Rabbi Isaacson), recent attempts to portray South Africa’s Jewish community at large as having a record of resistance to Apartheid are pure fiction. My father himself was censured many times by the Board of Deputies and other Jewish leaders—told to quit his anti-establishment activities or risk the loss of the rabbinate. Decamping to Israel, as our family did, was prompted as much by ideals as by the constant threats over the loss of a living.

While the leadership of the then-banned African National Congress was festooned with radical Jews, the truth is that most South African Jews (who have a proud and celebrated history in South Africa,) were not behind this noisy minority. If anything, I suspect them of supporting the Nasionale Party, which governed from 1948 until 1994, by the overwhelming consent of the white minority. Like it or not, white South Africans had a functioning democracy (with popular referenda conducted on most important national questions).

I came from a liberal family. Yet other than my father and my cousin (a Black-Sash activist), I hardly knew a Jew who did not vote National Party (NAT). American paloeconservatives have kibitzed about the South African Jewry’s liberalism. Where from? What do they know? Did they ever survey the community back in those days?

Online sources such as Wikipedia and The Virtual Jewish Library assert the community’s liberal voting patterns. They do not argue it. As far as I can see, they do not provide statistical support for this alleged liberal voting record. I’d like to see some substantiation of these so-called “enlightened” voting patterns.

I am convinced that these depictions are cunning, after the-fact attempts to portray the Jews as more liberal than they in fact were. Yes, Jews have always been socially altruistic, but not to the point of self-immolation. This was a community with vast wealth. Risking the riches they so richly deserved is what Goyim do; Jews not so much. UPDATED II: Risking the future of The Children: that’s not what Jews do. I bet you that, if they preached Progressive Party in public, the same Jews probably voted NAT.

Again, father and cousin aside, I did not know a Jew who did not support the Nasionale Party.

Some members of my family were business tycoons. The same family spawned pig farmers, Jews who lived on the land starting in the early 1900s. (Yeah, funny, I know; they farmed pigs, but didn’t eat ’em.) We’d get together for dinners, during which not even young, outspoken family members (invariably attending medical or law school) ever expressed dismay at the undemocratic nature of South African politics.

I recall vividly when my cousin, a land developer and a pig farmer, decided to emigrate to England after the son of his most loyal farmhand burgled the family homestead and attempted an attack on the family. My cousin was outraged. How could this young black man betray him so? (I could see a few reasons, not least of them the squalor in which farmhands and their families were housed. Free “housing,” yes, but not pretty. I would never have argued this in his company. It was just not done.)

The Jews I knew were what we called verkrampte. (Hard core)

Chris McGreal of The Guardian confirms my suspicions:

“The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel’s struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism. … The Jew in South Africa sided with the Afrikaners, not so much out of sympathy, but out of fear sided against the blacks. I came to this country in 1946 and all you could hear from Jews was ‘the blacks this and the blacks that.'”

UPDATED I (Jan. 31): THOSE OF YOU who’ve read “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” know that the book speak favorably about the strong Afrikaner-Israel connection, and that the book thinks Percy Yutar did just fine by putting the Marxist Mandela away for his crimes against civilians (for the most).

UPDATE (Feb. 1): Percy Yutar died age 90, in 2002. As this New York Times report tells it,

“According to many South African historians and writers, Mr. Yutar’s vigorous persecution of blacks in the 1960’s was linked to his Jewish background. Glenn Frankel, the author of ‘Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa,’ said that Mr. Yutar saw the trial as a patriotic opportunity, especially because some of Mr. Mandela’s co-defendants were Jews. … ‘Who better to prosecute Jewish traitors than a loyal Jew?’ Mr. Frankel wrote, describing Mr. Yutar’s thinking. ‘Who better than he to put things right and prove that not all Jews were radicals hell-bent upon overthrowing the government?'”

Mr. Yutar, one of eight children in a family of Lithuanian immigrants, was born in Cape Town on July 29, 1911. As a young man, his left hand was caught in an electric mincing machine when he was working in his father’s butcher shop, leaving his hand badly mangled.
He attended the University of Cape Town on a scholarship and was awarded a doctorate in law. Jews, however, were not welcome in the higher echelons of South Africa’s civil service, and Mr. Yutar settled for a job tracing defaulting telephone subscribers for the postal service. Still he persisted in his legal career and slowly moved up the ladder to junior law clerk and junior prosecutor. Eventually, he became deputy attorney general for the Transvaal Province and gained a reputation as an especially ambitious and energetic prosecutor.

UPDATED: LaHood Is Still In The Egyptian Hood

America, Barack Obama, Bush, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Islam, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Russia

Egypt’s road to majoritarian politics—which is what America demands for that country—is stalled at the military dictatorship stage. The latter is probably preferable to a people’s republic governed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafist al-Nour Party, which won the ballot in the newly installed democracy. [BBC]

It is a fact—and three of the Republican presidential candidates will applaud it—that America runs community agitators across the world. These Republican- and Democratic Party Saul Alinskys (neoconservatives and neoliberals) work to incite democracy and undermine order. This has obtained with respect to both Bush, Obama (who are, to all intent and purposes, non-identical, evil ideological twins), and before them.

Could Egypt’s leader, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, be hip to the ill-effects of American community organizing abroad? Egyptian authorities have stopped Sam LaHood from leaving Egypt.

In addition to being the son of Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois, LaHood heads the International Republican Institute, an American-backed democracy-building group. (Neocon meddlers.)

He is “one of six Americans working for the Republican Institute or its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute.” Obama had a fit. Ditto the Republicans. LaHood’s their operative.

Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican from Virginia who serves on the House Appropriations Committee, said the Egyptian government continued to flout American efforts and to undermine democratic rights. “This is out of control,” Mr. Wolf said on Thursday. “If the administration follows the law, there’s no way they can continue the aid.”

(NYT)

A tug of war between Washington and Cairo over American aid for Egyptian human rights and democracy-building groups goes back to the era of former President Hosni Mubarak. To maintain control over organizations that might pose potential challenges to his government, Mr. Mubarak required nonprofit groups to obtain licenses, which were almost never issued.
Instead, the generals have echoed the Mubarak government’s refrain that any unrest was the work of “foreign hands.” Often, the military-led government has pointed specifically at Washington, suggesting that the United States was financing Egyptian groups behind the frequent turmoil in the streets.

(NYT)

And the aforementioned Generals may have a point. Ask the Ukraine (“Orange” Revolution), Georgia (“Rose”), Lebanon (“Cedar”), Kyrgizstan (“Tulip”), etc. Attempts to foment revolution are probably underway in Belarus, Russia, Iran, Syria (pending).

UPDATE (Jan. 30): “The God that Failed,” via Nebojsa Malic:

Parallel to the open warfare, the Empire continues its cloak-and-dagger efforts to subvert target states through “color revolutions.” The latest target is Russia, where questionable claims of electoral fraud have been used as a pretext for the “White” revolution – planned, organized and financed by Washington.
The troubles with these faux-revolutions are many. One of the most pernicious, of course, is that they undermine the very concept of democracy as a system of government by consent. In the virtual world of the Empire (and its EU extension), only those that serve and obey are “democrats,” regardless of what they actually believe and how many votes they get at the polls. As Philip Cunliffe observed several years ago in Serbia, “what counts as democracy is what the EU decides is democratic, and the democrats are those who are anointed by the international community, regardless of who actually receives the votes.”
It is bad enough that the Empire made democracy a religion, and a false one at that. Now it is going around the world subverting that very religion, leaving millions of cheated, angry people in its wake. Worse yet, the tendrils of this approach are showing up at home, from street protests to party primaries.

UPDATED: Amy Chua’s Serbian Slant

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I have only now gotten around to reading Amy Chua’s “World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.” In my own book, I merely referenced a secondary source on World On Fire. So far, I have found Chua to have an original, creative mind, a rare thing these days. Hers is truly an original thesis. But she goes wrong in many ways—not least in her error-filled, left-leaning, biased analysis of the history of South Africa’s “market-dominant minority” (chinglese for market-dominating minority). In World On Fire, Chua also claims that Croatians were a “market-dominant minority” that infuriated the less able Serbians, hence their so-called “aggression” against the Croats. Our friend Nebojsa Malic has something to say about that:

AMY CHUA’S SERBIAN SLANT

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Examples proving this old adage are legion. On this occasion, I’d like to mention two.

First, an ad-hoc group of European lawyers (the Badinter Commission) up and decided to wipe a country out of existence. Just like that, they declared the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia “in dissolution” – a concept reminiscent of what happened to the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, on whose ashes Yugoslavia was first established. Next, in January 1992, the Commission decided that only Yugoslavia’s “republics” – administrative subdivisions created by the Communist government and given state-like powers had the right to seek recognition as independent states. It was this ruling that made the bloody Wars of Yugoslav Succession inevitable.

This decision is hardly mentioned in the mainstream narrative created subsequently in the West. According to the official story of Yugoslavia’s “dissolution” (rather, dismemberment), the evil nationalist Serbs suddenly decided to attack everyone else, motivated solely by bloodlust and bigotry, and it was only the belated intervention of the white-knighting “international community” that brought peace and justice to all.

Ten years after the Yugoslav tragedy began, Yale scholar Amy Chua published a book called “The World on Fire,” in which she argued that democratization and marketization brought resentment of majority populations against “market-dominant minorities” such as the Chinese or Jews. That ought to have been an easy argument to make. But Chua then reached to Yugoslavia for confirmation of her thesis, and made a mess.

Relying on the official narrative, she argued that Croats were the “market-dominant minority” resented by the Serbs, who went on a killing spree out of sheer frustration (see p. 172-75). Granted, Chua used all sorts of caveats, but her example was still completely and entirely wrong.

Here is the problem. Slovenians and Croats, whose separatism ignited the Succession Wars, were not “market-dominant minorities” at all. There was an economic imbalance between their republics and the rest of the country, but that was the result of the political arrangement created by the Communist regime of Josip Broz, a.k.a. Tito, rather than any inherent proclivity towards business or finance.

Resentment between Croats and Serbs was first nurtured by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose plans for expanding into the Balkans were thwarted by the emergence of an independent Serbian state in the 19th century. While Austria-Hungary was still feudal, Serbia was a free principality of yeomen farmers and merchants. Furthermore, Serbs living in Austrian territories had been granted yeoman status in exchange for Military Frontier service as early as the 17th century. They were also Orthodox Christians, which annoyed the staunchly Catholic empire. Moreover, Croats’ national identity came to be defined entirely by Catholicism, and marked by vicious bigotry directed against the Serbs. Economics really didn’t figure much into it.

In 1914, given a pretext by the assassination of its heir by Bosnian revolutionaries, Austria-Hungary launched a war to obliterate Serbia. It failed. In 1918, having returned from the brink of extinction, the Serbs were determined to secure their freedom from Austria once and for all; their regent saw the solution in a union with “brotherly” Catholic and Muslim Slavs. He either did not know or chose not to care that Catholics and Muslims might have harbored a grudge against the Serbs for ousting the empires – Ottoman or Austrian – in which they had enjoyed privileges.

Yugoslavia never got a chance. In 1941, it was invaded and dismembered by the Axis. Within weeks of its establishment, the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia launched a program of mass murder against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies – in that order. The Serb-led Royalist resistance was eventually betrayed by London. The US and UK instead recognized the Communist resistance, led by Josip Broz Tito, as the new government.

Croat-Slovene in origin, Tito reordered the country according to a 1928 Communist platform, which eerily echoed the Nazi partition. No wonder: both sought to keep the Serbs (or “Greater Serbian bourgeois imperialists”) in check. Tito did it by creating “republics”: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia. He also further divided Serbia, establishing two provinces, Vojvodina in the north, and the Albanian-dominated Kosovo in the south. Kosovo was initially supposed to be ceded to Albania, but the feud between Tito and Stalin (and Albania’s Enver Hoxha) interfered.

Under Tito, Slovenia and Croatia (not even all of it, but the area around Zagreb) treated the rest of the country as little more than the source of raw materials and cheap labor. While the Slovene Edvard Kardelj, one of Tito’s closest henchmen, ran experiments like “socialist self-management” on the rest of Yugoslavia, Slovenia was untouched. Though Yugoslavia was allegedly “Serb-dominated,” the majority of cabinet posts in the federal government were held by non-Serbs, as late as 1990.

The reform drive initiated in the 1980s by the Serbian Communist leader Slobodan Milosevic became popular not because of “nationalism”, but because it sought to reverse this colonial relationship within Yugoslavia. Milosevic, a banker with Western experience, clashed with the Slovenian leadership over the mercantilist set-up of the Yugoslav federation.

At that point, however, the Berlin Wall came down. That had two consequences: the collapse of Communism all over Europe (and eventually the breakup of the USSR), and the rise of Germany as an actual European power. Without the Soviet Union to keep them in check, and Yugoslavia’s neutrality no longer important, the American and European powers were free to interfere in Yugoslav affairs – and they chose to back the separatists.

Cut off from their resource base, however, both Slovenia and Croatia eventually withered on the vine. Slovenia initially managed to preserve its capital by rejecting the “shock therapy” transition strategies implemented elsewhere, but after joining the EU in 2004, their reserves ran dry. Croatia racked up $60 billion in foreign debt, and sold off most of its tourist capacities and agriculture to foreigners. Just last weekend, Croatians voted to join the EU, in desperation seeing the listing Brussels Titanic as a lifeboat.

Twenty years ago, the Badinter Commission’s decision made Yugoslav bloodshed inevitable. Ten years later, Chua’s reliance on official accounts merely undermined her thesis. In both cases, the problem arose from preferring the conjured narrative over actual facts.

****

Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

UPDATE: Chua has serious lacunae in her analysis of the “whites” of South Africa. She seems proud of the Chinese edge, though. Writing provocatively and intelligently as she does, and getting away with it to become a mainstream sensation—this demands certain obedience to what Nebojsa Malic calls the accepted narrative.

UPDATE II: Pat Buchanan And MSNBC’s Pygmy (Like Snakes Crawling Out of Hibernation)

Christianity, Democracy, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa

“Pat Buchanan and MSNBC’s Pygmy” is my latest WND.COM column. Here’s an excerpt:

“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.” So decreed MSNBC president Phil Griffin about Patrick J. Buchanan’s grand historical synthesis, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will American Survive to 2025?” Mr. Griffin was justifying the banishment from the network of one of the last authentic conservatives in mainstream media.

If I were not already persona non grata within the mainstream, I would be worried.

In an exchange with this writer, Mr. Buchanan had mentioned that his “18,000-word chapter on ethnonationalism and tribalism and the surge of both throughout the Third World—as well as our own declining world—tracks pretty much with what” I had written in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” published in May of 2011.

Buchanan’s towering text concludes as follows: “We were one nation. We spoke the same language, learned the same history, celebrated the same heroes, observed the same holy days and holidays … were taught the same truths about right and wrong, good and evil, God and country. We were a people then. That America is gone. Many grieve her passing. Many rejoice. But we are not a people anymore.” (Page 424.)

America, as Mr. Buchanan observes, was eaten away by the acid of the 1960s revolution, “with its repudiation of Christian morality and embrace of secularism and egalitarian ideology.”

South Africa was relatively unaffected by that revolution. It was a staunchly traditional Christian country. Stores closed on Sundays. Television came late to the place but so did pornography and the gay rights movement. In South Africa, the influence of Christianity receded after the 1994 democratic transition.

Whereas “Americans are no longer a people,” by contrast, the Afrikaners, as illustrated in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” still linger as a people, clinging to what Barack Obama would indubitably deride as their bibles, their guns and their bigotries.

Dubbed the white tribe of Africa, this organic nation has, however, ceased to exist as a nation-state, dissolved by democratic decree. The sundering of state sovereignty has, in turn, exposed Afrikaners to ethnic cleansing, a familiar feature of democracy a la Africa. …

Read the complete column, “Pat Buchanan and MSNBC’s Pygmy,” on WND.COM.

The book discussed, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Don’t forget those reviews; they help this cause.)

A Kindle copy is also on sale.

Still better, shipping is free and prompt if you purchase Into the Cannibal’s Pot from The Publisher.

UPDATE I (Jan. 13): Prof. Ole Jørgen Anfindsen (his Wiki bio is here) has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot on a Norwegian webzine. Prof. Anfindsen blogs at HonestThinking.com. If only I had Norwegian. (Or maybe not .)

UPDATE II: In reply to a reader (snaketrapper) on WND: Had this reader read my book, which references Prof. Hoppe’s “Democracy,” and carries advance praise from him—he might be better informed about this writer’s views and her understanding of the country of her birth, where members of her family, Christian and Jewish, still reside. But, of course, the assorted snakes that have crawled out of hibernation to comment about a book (written by a Jew) that they have in all likelihood not read (or a short column that doesn’t give the right answers to all their questions)—are more interested in asserting uninformed, unfounded, collectivist, irrational biases against the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” than reporting on the issues addressed in the book. I refer this reader to the section in the book titled, “A strategy for Survival.” I will add this: If I have learned anything from writing this book it is this: Anti-Semitism and collectivism are alive and well.