Category Archives: South-Africa

Letters From South Africa

Colonialism, English, Ethics, Etiquette, History, Morality, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, South-Africa, The Zeitgeist

Manners are much more than a veneer. The ability to act courteously, professionally, and be mindful of etiquette in dealing with others is a reflection of something far more meaningful: one’s mettle. Columnist George Will once wrote that “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

I began writing commentary in 1998, for an outstanding, hardcore, Canadian community newspaper (which was bought out and brought to its knees by the pinko-neocon media chain that monopolizes opinion in that country). Ever since, I’ve replied to almost every letter received from readers, unless abusive, or unless exchanges became—or become; as this obtains today—self-defeating, unproductive or sapping in any way.

In any event, letters from South Africans are especially precious. Although I’ve done my share (at a cost, professional and personal) for the people I’ve left behind in the Old Country, one is forever plagued by (irrational) survivor’s guilt. Letters help assuage this nagging (irrational) feeling.

This one comes from a man whose identity (shared in the missive) I’ve removed for his own safety:

From:
Sent: Friday, August 30, 2013 2:23 AM
To: ilana@ilanamercer.com
Subject: APPRECIATION INTO THE CANNIBALS POT

Dear Ilana,

I cannot tell you how I got hold of the title of your book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot”. After having read an abstract I immediately decided to order the book. It wasn’t available in the —– Branch (—-, Pretoria) of Exclusive books and I had to wait a week for it. Since then I cannot wait for evening time so that I can lay my eyes on the book.
We are bombarded every day with apartheid and the despicable aspects thereof. And I am the first to admit that it was wrong and that it led to so much sufferings among the black people in South Africa. And government ministers and other officials cannot wait to attribute every inefficiency/misconduct and whatever, to the “evil” of Apartheid. The whole (dark and hopeless) Africa uses colonialism as an alibi for their inefficiency.
What is never said or mentioned is the benefits that colonialism brought for the SA or the continent.

In your book you made mention of the fact that Dr Verwoerd in 1956 said that SA blacks have the best life compared to any African country. I whole-heartedly agree and I once wrote an article which was placed in Rapport about this matter. In fact, with the abrupt power transfer, so many things just “…FELL FROM HEAVEN” for them: High salaries, fringe benefits and whatever. Apart from that they got a country with good infrastructure and numerous other things (which is degenerating day by day). I don’t have to tell you!

But I just want to thank you for this book. For so long I have been waiting for somebody with the guts to have a balanced view. I still refer people to view what is happening in the only (two) African countries which never experience colonialism, namely Liberia and Ethiopia. Liberia is the third poorest country on earth. And Ethiopia is not far from there. Just imagine what SA would have been without colonialism.

It is time my black brothers start acknowledging what benefits it brought to SA. But I know it will never happen because their alibi (and that of the whole Africa) will fall flat. Who will they have to blame then?

I am 60 years old now, ILana. I grew up extremely poor and I had to pay for my own studies. Today I have a BA, BA(Hons) and MBA. I was an officer in the SA Army until 1996 when I took a severance package as a Colonel. I know how much integrity we had in the system. And I am glad that I was part of the “old” system.

Again thanks for your book. You must be an amazing human being.

Best regards

Note: My apology for my poor command of English. I am a boertjie! [Afrikaner]

A Government Of Haters

Government, Homeland Security, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Meet Ayo Kimathi, the Julius Malema of America. Both advocate killing whites; both move in government circles; one in South Africa, the other in America.

You know how perverse the US government has become when one of its employees manages to unsettle the perverts at the Southern Poverty Law Center:

By day, Ayo Kimathi works for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a small business specialist in a unit that buys such items as handcuffs, ammunition and guns.

Off-duty, he calls himself “the Irritated Genie.” He’s a gay-bashing, revenge-seeking black nationalist who advocates on his website – War on the Horizon – the mass murder of whites and the “ethnic cleansing” of “black-skinned Uncle Tom race traitors.”

“Warfare is eminent,” the website declares, “and in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites – more than our Christian hearts can possibly count.”

Ayo Kimathi is bound to remind my South African readers of ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, whose antics I document in Into The Cannibal’s Pot.

“Kill The Fucking Whites” is what Malema’s Facebook page proclaimed, in 2010. Malema has been moving in SA government circles for longer than America’s Ayo Kimathi, but the trend The Cannibal chronicles—and predicts for America—is upon us.

Delusions Of Democracy

Classical Liberalism, Democracy, Elections, Middle East, South-Africa, States' Rights, Taxation

We now have some idea of the strength of Egyptian discontent, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: “22 million …—a large number considering Egypt’s estimated population of 93 million people.” The numbers are derived not from a poll, but from revelations about a “signature-gathering campaign called ‘Tamarod’ or ‘Rebel.'”

Needless to say, this does not constitute good data about public opinion in Egypt—which only a few months back trended toward the Muslim Brotherhood—although the size of the petition and the corresponding demonstrations give an idea of the groundswell across the country.

Some Westerners worry about lack of power-changing political mechanisms in such backward places as Egypt. The worrywarts are deluding themselves that the stagnant politics of the Euro, Anglo-American hemispheres and their protectorates provide these mechanisms.

Delusions of democracy …

When “Vlaamse Blok” (Flamish block), Belgium’s largest party, became too much of a threat to the powers that be in that country, the Belgium Supreme Court declared Belgium’s largest party (“Vlaamse Blok”) a “criminal organization” and ordered its dissolution.”

Lawmaker Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom, has been similarly assailed in The Netherlands, except that he and The Demos stand up to and outfox The Establishment that wishes to bring them into compliance.

An entire book was written about what mobocracy has wrought on the minority of South Africa, now that a dominant-party state has been blessed as free and democratic by the West.

A point made in said book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, is that South Africa’s authentically liberal party in all its permutations has always been more classical liberal than left-liberal. Thus the Democratic Alliance’s Helen Zille is never as contemptible as a left-liberal American Democrat. We won’t insult the woman! I’d sum-up Zille with these words: She tries her best with the few powers she has retained. These powers have been subsumed in the national government, which will always and forever be a social-democratic black affair that represents the needs of tax consumers.

Ultimately, there is not much Zille can do for the whites (and colored) who vote for her, and who pay the lion’s share of the country’s taxes. There is near no devolution of powers to South Africa’s provinces. “The province’s powers are shared with the national government.” Like in the US. We still whimper about states’ rights but we’ve lost these as well as many of our individual liberties.

The tiny racial minority that constitutes the tax base of South Africa has no representation in a country that votes strictly along racial lines, and in which there is no veto power or meaningful devolution of powers to the provinces in which the assailed minority might prevail politically. The aforementioned book points out that the great Zulu chief Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi was one of the good guys of South Africa; the Mandela’s mafia—the ANC—is the bad element. Buthelezi, being a free market man, fought for the devolution of power rather than its concentration in a dominant-party state (the endgame of the ANC and its Anglo-American buddies). He was tarred as the bad guy by the same axis of evil, with the New York Times in the lead.

In any case, we should not look down on the Egyptians from the dizzying heights of our despotic democracies. Can we in the US dethrone our emperor du jour? Not really. Not with any meaningful consequences. Impeachment mechanisms don’t work, and neither do “democratic” elections, because the Democratic and Republican parties have each operated as counterweights in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one entity to the other. As my fellow libertarian Vox Day once observed, no sooner do the Republicans come to power, than they move to the left. When they get their turn, Democrats shuffle to the right. At some point, the zombie John McCain reaches across the aisle and the creeps converge.

“Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn almost got it right when he said, ‘Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.’ Correction: All that can be achieved with only 51 percent of the vote, making the slogan ‘freedom begins at the ballot box’ a very cruel hoax indeed.

At least the Egyptians have stumbled upon an effective way to make their sons of 60 dogs (an Egyptian expression for politicians) tremble in their palaces. Game. Set. Match, Egyptian people.

Low-Wattage US President Clueless About Rolling Blackouts In South Africa

Affirmative Action, Africa, Foreign Aid, Free Markets, Regulation, Science, South-Africa, Technology

Our low-wattage president, Barack Obama, is clueless about the reasons for “rolling blackouts”—“’load shedding’ is the local euphemism,” in South Africa, where, since “freedom,” the electrical grid has been degraded at every level: generation, transmission, and distribution. Distribution is now entrusted to the local, increasingly inept, authorities.

Dumbo has pledged to borrow some more from China, $7 billion to be precise, “to help combat frequent power blackouts in sub-Saharan Africa.”

You’ll find explanations to some of the problems in Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa (pages 99-100):

…pylons and poles are routinely flattened, stolen, and then smelted. Indeed, blackouts and blowouts are intricately connected to the breakdown of law and order. “Up to 100 miles of cables may be going missing every year, destined for markets such as China and India where booming economies have created insatiable demand for copper and aluminum,”[26] reports Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “The result has been entire suburbs plunged into darkness, thousands of train passengers stranded, and frequent chaos on the roads as traffic lights fail.”[27]
As The New York Times saw it, “[t]he country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply.”[28] (My emphasis.) Not quite. I’ve lived through Highveld thunder storms and Cape, South-Easter, gale-force winds. Few and far between were the blackouts. (I purchased a generator in the U.S., after experiencing my first three-day power outage.) No, Eskom, the utility that supplied most of the electricity consumed on the African continent, did not run out of juice. It just ran out of experienced, skilled engineers, expunged pursuant to BEE. “‘No white male appointments for the rest of the financial year,”[29] reads an Eskom Human Resources memo, circulated in January of 2008, and uncovered by the Carte Blanche investigative television program. The same supple thinking went into destroying the steady supply of coal to the electricity companies. Bound by BEE policies, whereby supplies must be purchased from black firms first, Eskom began buying coal from the spot market. Buyers were to descend down the BEE procurement pyramid as follows: buy spot coal first from black women-owned suppliers, then from small black suppliers, next were large black suppliers, and only after all these options had been exhausted (or darkness descended; whatever came first), from “other” suppliers. The result was an expensive and unreliable coal supply, which contributed to the pervasive power failures.[30]

Ideally, the power grid ought to be privatized:

Unlike private firms, state-mediated utilities need not respond to profit and loss signals. So long as they have taxpayer funds to make good their errors, these hydra-headed creatures have the option to produce at a loss. Thus, in a market in which the state has a hand, prices will never fully convey the information they relay in an unhampered market, and will invariably fail in guiding producers to meet consumer demand. Electricity is best entrusted to fully free markets. Only private enterprise raises initial capital voluntarily and applies careful entrepreneurial forethought to all endeavors. Left to their devices, entrepreneurs will, in the long run and in response to price signals, build more capacity—electricity-generating plants—and prices will inevitably fall. Only entrepreneurs in competition with one another have the incentive to satisfy the customer, on whom they depend for their very survival.

From “HOW NOT TO ‘PRIVATIZE’ THE POWER GRID.”

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