Category Archives: History

NEW COLUMN: How About Intra-Racial Reparations In South Africa?

Africa, History, Race, Racism, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN IS “How About Intra-Racial Reparations In South Africa?” It’s on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Donald R. Morris’s epic tome, The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation, is the all-time PIG (Politically Incorrect Guide) to Zulu history.

In it, Morris notes correctly that the Bantu, like the Boers, were not indigenous to South Africa. They “dribbled south” from some “reservoir in the limitless north,” and, like the European settlers, used their military might to displace Hottentots, Bushmen (his archaic terminology), and one another through internecine warfare.

Indeed, there was bitter blood on Bantu lands well before the white settlers arrived in South Africa.

Westerners have committed the little San people of Southern Africa, the “Bushmen,” to folkloric memory for their unequalled tracking skills and for the delicate drawings with which they dotted the “rock outcroppings.”

The San were hunters, but they were also among the hunted. Mercilessly so. Alongside the Boers, Hottentots and blacks “hunted down Bushmen for sport well into the 19th Century.”

In “the book to end all books on the tragic confrontation between the assegai and the Gatling gun,” Morris places Cape Town’s founder and Dutch East India Company official J. A. Van Riebeeck, on landing at the Cape in 1652, 500 miles to the south and 1,000 miles to the west of the nearest Bantu. Joined by other Protestants from Europe, Dutch farmers, as we know, homesteaded the Cape Colony.

No doubt, the question of land ownership deeply concerned the 19th century trek Boers, as they prepared to decamp from the British-ruled Cape Colony and venture north. Accordingly, they sent out exploration parties tasked with negotiating the purchase of land from the black chieftains, who very often acted magnanimously, allowing Europeans to settle certain areas. Against trek Boers, it must be said that they were as rough as the natives and negotiated with as much finesse.

Still, the narrative about the pastoral, indigenous, semi-nomadic natives, dispossessed in the 17th century of their lands by another such people, only of a different color—this is as simplistic as it is sentimental.

When Boer and Bantu finally clashed on South Africa’s Great Fish River it was a clash of civilizations. “The Bantu viewed the land as entailed property that belonged to the clan. A chieftain might dispose of the right to live on the land, but he could not dispose of the land itself.” The European mind in general could not grasp the concept of collective ownership and “regarded a land transaction as a permanent exchange of real property.”

As Morris observes in his matter-of-fact way, “The Bantu view insured European encroachment and the European view insured future strife.”

South Africa has since reverted to “The Bantu view.” It is thus perhaps inevitable that 21st-century land claims or “restitution” in South Africa are not dominated by individual freehold owners reclaiming expropriated land, based on title deeds kept on record.

Rather, a group of blacks scheming on a particular property will band together as a “tribe,” and pool the taxpayer grants, which its members have received gratis, for the purpose of purchasing occupied land.

No sooner does this newly constituted “tribe” (or band of bandits, really) launch a claim with the South African Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, than related squatters—sometimes in the thousands—move to colonize the land. They defile its grounds and groundwater by using these as one vast latrine, and terrorize, even kill, its occupants and their animals in the hope of “nudging” them off the land.

The latest victim of this guerrilla warfare is a wine farmer, Stefan Smit of blessed memory, gunned down on his Stellenbosch estate, in the Western Cape. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “How About Intra-Racial Reparations In South Africa?“, is now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

Ashkenazi Jews’ IQ: Judaism Itself, The Study Of Talmud, In Particular, Is a High-IQ Activity

History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Judaism & Jews, Logic, Reason

This article reduces the reason for Ashkenazi Jews’ aggregate, genetically based, high IQ to Jewish exclusion and suffering: “selection events”:

… the frequent pogroms to which Jews were subject in Eastern Europe would have been “selection events” which would have selected for correlates of IQ such as future-orientation, social skill, planning and simply the wealth needed to escape. Thus, Lynn argued that, even though Jewish IQ was high before the Holocaust, it was probably even higher afterwards.

There are other reasons for the high IQ in Ashkenazi Jews predating the pogroms and the Holocaust. These have to do with the substantive nature of Judaism itself, not least the premium put on the study and analysis of scripture and certainly the study of Talmud. (I would argue that even the study of our Tanach, which Rabbi Ben Shapiro has mistakenly called Torah, does the brain good.)

At the secular, Israeli secondary school I attended, not enough Talmud was taught, unfortunately. Still, the process of reasoning, called pilpul, captivated me; it’s marvelous—magic, really.

There is the Socratic Method and there is pilpul—“a dialectical method of Talmudic study, consisting of examining all the arguments pro and con in order to find a logical argument for the application of the Law and at the same time to sharpen the wits of the student.”

The Talmud is calisthenics for the mind, for sure, but also sagacious.

Whittling down Jewish thinking and achievement over thousands of years to oppression-generated genetic mutations during the Middle Ages has its flaws. The article, “Are Jews Smarter?”, in the New York Magazine, puts paid to such reductionism:

“To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.”

Remember, too, that the young scholar who did mental gymnastics the best got the prettiest girl …

Democrat Impeachment Ad Invokes … The Founding Fathers (Whom They Otherwise Call Racists)

Democrats, Founding Fathers, Government, History

Thirty five seconds into this Democrat ad for impeachment, launched by one Tom Steyer, these hypocrites invoke the Founding Fathers:

“Our Founding Fathers expected you, Congress, to hold a lawless president accountable.”

These are the very Founding Fathers whom the dim-witted Democrats call racists and bigots and whose statues they defile, deface and wish to remove.

COLUMN: Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya

Conservatism, Democracy, Democrats, Egalitarianism, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood, Political Philosophy

COLUMN: “Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya” is now on Townhall.com. An excerpt:

BERNIE SANDERS, the senator from Vermont, said he thinks “everyone should have the right to vote—even the Boston Marathon bomber … even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, ‘Well, that guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote,’ you’re running down a slippery slope.”

Bernie is right about a “slippery slope.” But the befuddled Bernie is worried about the wrong slope.

Denying the vote to some and conferring it on others is not a “slippery slope.” It’s exercising good judgment.

Insisting that the vote in America belongs to everyone, irrespective: now that’s a slippery slope, down which the slide is well underway.

As it stands, there are almost no moral or ethical obligations attached to citizenship in our near-unfettered Democracy.

Multiculturalism means that you confer political privileges on many an individual whose illiberal practices run counter to, even undermine, the American political tradition.

Radical leaders across the U.S. quite seriously consider Illegal immigrants as candidates for the vote—and for every other financial benefit that comes from the work of American citizens.

The rights of all able-bodied idle individuals to an income derived from labor not their own: That, too, is a debate that has arisen in democracy, where the demos rules like a despot.

But then moral degeneracy is inherent in raw democracy. The best political thinkers, including America’s constitution-makers, warned a long time ago that mass, egalitarian society would thus degenerate.

What Bernie Sanders prescribes for the country—unconditional voting—is but an extension of “mass franchise,” which was feared by the greatest thinkers on Democracy. Prime Minister George Canning of Britain, for instance. …

… READ “Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya” on Townhall.com.