printI received the following missive from a South African reader.
“Hi Ilana
My wife and I might move from Johannesburg to the US within the next few months. I would very much like to communicate with you regarding plusses and minuses of leaving SA.”
South Africans in a similar predicament may find my reply helpful:
“Rationally and objectively, there are only plusses to being afforded the opportunity to leave South Africa. The facts about South Africa I’ve documented in many essays. These facts, oddly enough, are not always known, processed, or understood by South Africans.
The only question is really how you and your family cope with your good fortune. Some people can’t handle being away from family, friends, and place of birth. They would sooner risk death and a bleak future for their kids than leave. That’s irrational—to me and mine—at least. I am forever shocked at how many South Africans return to that hell hole.
So, it is not the objective facts you and your family must consider, but your psychological grit and resolve to be positive and realize you’ve been afforded a life-saving opportunity. My daughter kicked and screamed at the time—she was 12—but now thanks me for dragging her out of there.
That’s really the most important advice I can give.
Best of luck to those who leave and to those who remain behind, including members of my own immediate family.
Ilana
Update # I (Oct. 23): With respect to my comment hereunder about Dan Roodt’s dismissal of the emigration option for Afrikaners: It is one thing to contend that Anglos are far less attached to South Africa than Afrikaners, and assign the difficulties in departing to this attachment. That’s a valid and true argument. But to claim that immigration is not a life-saving opportunity because, decades down the line, the West will have been turned into another South Africa by its treacherous rulers—that’s wrong, illogical, and, hence, self-immolating.
Right now—and for decades to come— murder rates in suburban Canada, Australia, Europe and the US are negligible. The overall aggregate of 6 per 100,000 for the US (as opposed to between 89 and 120 per 100,000 for South Africa) is a function of factoring in the “contribution” of high-crime areas. When I moved into my home, I inquired at the local police station about the murder rate in my new American community, only to be told that, twenty years back, there was a family murder-suicide. (Since then there has been one Mexican-related brawl resulting in a fatality.)
To a rational person—to whom the sanctity of life is everything—these statistics say it all. I can rest assured that if I haven’t heard from my daughter—far more precious to me than allegiances to a country—she is just busy (or naughty).
A drop in the sea of mass immigration to the West, South African immigration, nevertheless, could help counter the influx from the Third World, and strengthen this part of the world.
There is another serious obstacle to South African emigration. I’m reproducing here the exchange I had on this aspect with Lawrence Auster:
“I asked Ilana Mercer:
If thousands of Afrikaner farmers are being brutalized and murdered like this how is it that they just remain on their farms waiting to be killed? Why haven’t they fled? Yes, it tells of people arming themselves to the teeth, but surely many must have fled, as in Zimbabwe.
She wrote back:
Americans do not understand how hard it is to immigrate. I find most Americans think that if you apply to enter, well then, the U.S., Canada, or Australia will let you in. NOT SO. It is virtually impossible to immigrate legally to the U.S., Canada, and Australia if you do not have the right qualifications or huge sums of money. This of course should make for commentary about our immigration system, which selects for law-breaking, venality, and risk taking, etc. I’ve dealt with that somewhat here [too]. Our refugee policies should favor the Boer, but we favor the likes of the “Lost Boys of Sudan”—more photogenic. Where do you think the Zim. farmers fled to? The U.S.? No. Most left for South Africa, as far as I know. Some might have had British passports. The Boers don’t have that.”
Update # II (Oct. 24): In response to the thoughtful comments of a friend about a possible defining battle for the West looming on the South-African front: I hate to be cynical, but there is no political framework for a fight. There is little hope of the Boers winning, as long as majority rule is the system in place. The only way the Boers (whose leaders relinquished power due the West’s pressure) can achieve self-determination is by seceding. Currently, the designated Afrikaner homeland is Oranje, a bleak, landlocked backwater in the Orange Free State. My friend seems to believe there is fight in the people. I’m pretty up-to-date about matters South African, and all I hear of is cooptation—having no option, the minority population has accepted the decay, and even joined it. A piece written by Dr. Roodt, in particular, even details considerable libertine excesses among a generation of young Afrikaners.
I’d also like to say something to suburban Americans preaching South African resistance: you don’t know what it is to live in fear of your life. Until you have experienced such fear—until you personally know people who’ve been hijacked, raped, murdered, or all of the above, don’t fight by proxy. How naïve and insulated are Americans! They routinely plunge (by proxy) other countries into chaos (Iraq), leaving their poor civilians mired in mayhem, while they continue their suburban existence far away on American soil. Don’t preach the merits of South Africans fighting the good fight until your beloved have been imperiled by killers, who’ll never be apprehended and who rule the roost.
Update # III (Oct. 31): Danie writes from South Africa: “Those who’ve already left have a responsibility to give us hope and not rub our noses in how bad we have it here.”
My answer: As a writer, I have only one obligation and that is to the truth. My mandate doesn’t include making people feel better in the face of reality—not about South Africa, Iraq, tyranny, the consequences of the national debt, etc.