Category Archives: Democracy

The Afrikaner Shanty Towns Of South Africa

Africa, Democracy, Race, Racism, South-Africa

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.

ANC More Prudent Than DP & GOP

Africa, America, Debt, Democracy, Economy, Republicans, South-Africa

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.”

By that time the apes that have collapsed our country’s economy will have incurred a debt in excess of our national income.

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)

UPDATED: Wilders Wins Big

Democracy, Elections, EU, Glenn Beck, IMMIGRATION, Islam

The malfunctioning media is compounding its always objective reporting with breathless adjectives—“huge,” “stunning,” “shocking” and “peroxide-haired politician”—all to express “subtle” dismay at the election victory of Dutch populist Geert Wilders. My mother, a loyal Wilders supporter, alerted me to this “huge” good-news story:

Wilders yesterday stunned the Netherlands by coming third in general elections – a historic vote that could see him enter a coalition government.

Best known for his strident attacks on Islam, Mr Wilders’ electoral triumph sent shock waves through the country’s large immigrant communities and sounded the death knell for the image of the Netherlands as a bastion of tolerance.

The shock-factor was all the greater as the peroxide-haired politician had appeared sidelined during the election campaign, as the mainstream parties focused on how to deal with the nation’s economic woes and immigration slipped down the political agenda.

Yet Mr Wilders made the strongest gains in Wednesday’s election, doubling the number of seats for his Freedom Party to 24. The pro-business VDD party – which Mr Wilders left to set up on his own – won 31 of the 150 seats up for grabs, pipping the Labour Party of former Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen by a single seat in the narrowest ever electoral victory.

Cohen’s platform, I believe, is in the tradition of the Judenräte.

Let’s hope Glenn Beck doesn’t repeat his affront to this Dutch patriot.

UPDATE: “How can the pitchfork folks who elected this man be so stupid as to imagine Islam poses any threat to the tolerant Dutch way of life?” Preposterous. That’s me paraphrasing the PBS’s apoplectic correspondent in the Netherlands.

The far-right Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders, grew from nine to 24 seats in the 150-seat parliament following Wednesday’s vote. Wilders wants to ban Muslim face veils and the building of new mosques in the country of 16.6 million with a Muslim population of 1 million.

Paul Ames, GlobalPost’s Belgium-based regional correspondent, said Wilders built on people’s fears about the influence of Islam on the Netherlands.