Category Archives: South-Africa

The Cannibal In Chronicles By Clyde Wilson

Affirmative Action, Colonialism, Free Markets, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism, South-Africa, The West

Clyde Wilson has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South favorably in the March 2012 print Issue of Chronicles, A Magazine of American Culture. Writes Professor Wilson:

“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans. I have always thought that a strong justification for freedom of speech and press is the possibility, however small, that a lonely voice telling an unwanted truth might be heard. Such a speaker requires intellectual courage—the rarest of all forms of courage. The feisty, independent-minded libertarian columnist Ilana Mercer has that courage—in spades—as she chronicles the drawn-out murder of civilization in her native South Africa. She not only describes what is happening, she tells us how it came about and what it means. This is one libertarian who knows that the market is wonderful, but it is not everything. …”

CONGRATULATIONS ARE in order to Chronicles’ peerless editor, Tom Fleming, for his “Daily Mail Blog,” which you can follow from Barely a Blog’s Blogroll.

UPDATED: Philosopher Jack Kerwick On the Compelling & Conflicted Cannibal (At Last, An Analytical Review Of My Book)

America, Classical Liberalism, Democracy, Ilana Mercer, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Reason, South-Africa

This dazzling review of my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is a credit more to the mind (and moral clarity) of the reviewer than the book under review. In his New-American review, Jack Kerwick, Ph.D. (more about him below), zeroes in with unusual perspicacity on the palpable tensions in the book, without losing sight of the effort as a whole. All in all, he thinks I cleared the hurdle:

Ilana Mercer’s, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, is an unusual book. Yet it is unusual in the best sense of the word.

At once autobiographical and political; philosophical, historical, and practical; controversial and commonsensical, Cannibal succeeds in weaving into a seamless whole a number of distinct modes of thought. This is no mean feat. In fact, its author richly deserves to be congratulated for scoring an achievement of the highest order, for in the hands of less adept thinkers, this ensemble of voices would have fast degenerated into a cacophony. By the grace of Mercer’s pen, in stark contrast, it is transformed into a symphony. …

… Burke had famously said that the only thing that was necessary for evil to triumph was for good men to do nothing. Though Mercer is not a man, sadly, she is in much greater supply of that “manly virtue” that Burke prized than are many — even most — male writers today. Burke unabashedly identified the wickedness of the French Revolutionaries for what it was. Similarly, Mercer courageously, indignantly, exposes the evil that is the African National Congress and its collaborators. In fact, her book may perhaps have been more aptly entitled, Reflections on the Revolution in South Africa. …

…It is tragic that Ilana Mercer was all but compelled to leave the country that for much of her life was her home. Yet South Africa’s loss is America’s gain. As her work makes obvious for all with eyes to see, the richness of Mercer’s intellect is as impressive as the soundness of her character.

THE COMPLETE REVIEW is at The New American.

“Jack Kerwick graduated with a BA in religious studies and philosophy from Wingate University in Wingate, NC in 1998. He received his MA in philosophy from Baylor University in Waco, Tx., the following year, and in 2007, he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Temple University. Kerwick specializes in ethics and political philosophy. His doctoral dissertation, ‘Toward a Conservative Liberalism,’ was a defense of the classical conservative tradition, a tradition of thought usually and widely perceived to have been fathered by Edmund Burke. Kerwick drew from Burke for inspiration, but also from David Hume and, perhaps most importantly, the twentieth century British philosopher Michael Oakeshott.” (Source: About.com)

Jack’s blogs is At the Intersection of Faith and Culture at Beliefnet.

Discovering Jack’s work (and friendship) has been a blessing. Unfortunately, Gulliver is surrounded by
pygmies.

UPDATE (March 2): AT LAST, AN ANALYTICAL REVIEW. After reading Dr. Kerwick’s review of Into the Cannibal’s Pot, which has since been published at “American Daily Herald: veritas, libertas, pax et prosperitas, as well as at “The Moral Liberal,” a new fan of Jack’s writing wrote this:

“Upon looking at some of your book’s other reviews, I couldn’t help but think that while some of what has been written is true, the forest was missed for the trees, so to speak.”

Indeed, most reviews of the book are contents-driven, strictly descriptive reviews of what is, flaws and all, essentially an analytical text. Odd that.

As Peter Brimelow noted in his exquisitely sensitive Foreword to “Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture,” “… Yet, somewhat to my surprise, it is actually quite rare for this most emotionally intense of columnists to draw on such personal experiences. What seems to motivate Ilana, ultimately, is ideas.”

‘South Africa’s Bloody Freedom’

Africa, Conservatism, Constitution, Crime, Journalism, Media, Political Correctness, Race, South-Africa

There is none so complex and politically charged an issue as the new South Africa. Cosseted American journalists, for the most, can’t and won’t deal with it honestly. Barbara Simpson, WND colleague and beloved KSFO talk-show host, is not a member of the pack. In reviewing “Into the Cannibal’s Pot – Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Barbara castigates “a world media” that are “complicit in the massive, politically correct cover-up of the gradual destruction of that country.”

In her WND column, “South Africa’s Bloody Freedom,” this grand lady reaches beyond the remit of the Mandela-worshiping masses, among whom are the insular, petty, provincial penmen of the American conservative press (pulp and pixels).

I was especially interested in her book because I’ve been to South Africa twice, not as a tourist, but spending time with people who live there, talking with them, seeing how they live, reading local newspapers and seeing it, not through rose-colored glasses, but as it is. It led me to pursue the horrors of Zimbabwe as well. The pattern is clear and almost identical.
Unfortunately, the blindness of our country continues, most recently with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg traveling in Africa.

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.