Writing for Alternative Right.com, “an online magazine of radical traditionalism,” the illustrious Derek Turner, editor of the UK-based Quarterly Review, has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. “Unusually amongst” paleoconservatives, plain conservatives, and left-libertarians, Derek has engaged with the material in the detail and depth his fans have come to expect from him, starting with the distillation of this writer’s paleolibertarianism:
“Ilana Mercer is a well-known controversialist on the American right, who writes a deservedly popular WorldNetDaily column and somehow finds time to maintain both a website and blog.
Her views are probably best described as paleo-libertarian. The book’s provocative title, which probably cost her potential readers, is borrowed from Ayn Rand, but the author tempers capitalist principles with respect for national identities and cultural traditions. Unusually amongst conservatives, she combines Israelophilia and dislike of Islam with trenchant opposition to American military adventurism. Unusually amongst libertarians, she is an outspoken critic of current US immigration policy as subversive of social order as well as fiscal responsibility. She has now turned her sights on her former homeland of South Africa – both for its own sake and because she feels its tenebrous present contains urgent indicators for America.”
Read the complete review, “RSA-USA—Beloved, Benighted Countries,” on AltRight.com.
In it, Derek zeroes in on the book’s salient statistics—the murder, rape, unemployment, food production (or lack thereof), emigration, ratio of taxpayers to tax consumers, etc—that characterize “the nouvelle regime.” Mr. Turner, a most sensitive writer—has also picked up on the things that vex and pain this author: the pathos and paradoxes inherent in Afrikaner—and, by extension, western—identity, “the fraught final days of apartheid,” and “the unresolved tension,” the consequence of “fleeing from a once-beloved country, and leaving behind … fine people, black as well as white, who had not the Mercers’ good fortune of possessing a second passport and remittable funds.”
[The author’s inner-conflict and sense of privacy have, obviously, resulted in some confusion. To clarify: My (WASP) husband, the consummate individualist, was the force of nature that yanked me away from South Africa. I had wanted to remain in that country; my husband could not wait to get out. He was right. He suffers no survivor’s guilt; his wife does, which is what our perceptive reviewer has picked-up.]
Mr. Turner also knows how to make a South African smile by throwing in a fitting Afrikaans bon mot: “the most verkrampte variety of bigot.”
Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa is available from Amazon.
UPDATE I: “She does not offer any SA solutions,” writes Derek. I believe there are no quick-fix “solutions,” as we in the West like them served. But in the final chapter, “Conclusion: Saving South Africans S.O.S.,” the propositions of emigration and secession are explored. (“Look Inside” the book.) And, in particular, emigration under the refugee program is spelled out, with reference to the value of an influx of Afrikaner farmers to the US, in the context of the economic depression: To go by Austrian analysis, farming is one of the nascent industries that is expected to thrive.
“South Africa’s commercial farmers are among the best in the world, if not the best. They have to contend with a plethora of problems—the vagaries of the weather, constant drought, rising taxes on everything from the rain on their trees to municipal levies (for which they receive nothing), and excessively high toll road costs. South Africa’s land tenure laws make it difficult to dismiss workers, let alone remove these workers from their properties, and they are besieged by land invasions and squatters. They are the victims of crop and stock theft, more murders per capita of their group than any other community on earth. They are burnt out, their fences are destroyed, and they are intimidated to the point where many have abandoned their farms.12
Despite a life of graft and grief, most persist and persevere. These are just the kind of men and women whom America, once a frontier nation, needs on its road to ‘financial sobriety.'”
[Page 249.]
Immigration will probably fail to “save South Africans S.O.S.,” not because I have not offered up such a solution—I have—but because of the ill-will and malevolence infesting Western powers, including the American government, whichever the party.
Granted, my exploration of secession is theoretical, rather than a pragmatic. This is because, as I state somewhere in that chapter, it is not for those of us who are safely ensconced in the West to draw up the boundaries of a viable (not landlocked) Anglo-Afrikaner state in that part of the world. The reader should note, moreover, that the kind of solution that would comport with a respect for individual liberties, and the sanctity of life and property are unlikely because of the lemming’s lunacy evinced by left-liberals, both in that country and without it. These are the suicidal sorts who infest the institutions of state and civil society—they are unwilling to entertain the manifest evils of democracy, especially in societies riven by race. This reality is spelled out in the book.
UPDATE II (Nov. 29): Here is an example of the liberal lemming’s lunacy of which I wrote above. Read EUSEBIUS MCKAISER’s “When the Walls Come Down,” published (approvingly) in the New York Times. A South African liberal, MCKAISER’s bit of whimsy offers no analysis, only lamentation over the reality dictated by crime in South Africa.
What can one do when left-liberals, who believe in crying and turning the other cheek, are at the helm? I speak to these philosophical problems in the book. More about this repulsive mindset, pervasive across the West, in “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism.”