Things are very bad in South Africa:
When the scourge of apartheid was finally smashed to pieces in 1994, the country seemed to have a bright future ahead of it. Eight years later, in 2002, 60 percent of South Africans said life had been better under apartheid. Hard to believe — but that’s how bad things were in 2002. And now they’re even worse.
When apartheid ended, the life expectancy in South Africa was 64 — the same as in Turkey and Russia. Now it’s 56, the same as in Somalia. There are 132.4 rapes per 100,000 people per year, which is by far the highest in the world: Botswana is in second with 93, Sweden in third with 64; no other country exceeds 32.
Wait, Sweden?
The Swedish police recorded the highest number of offences – about 63 per 100,000 inhabitants – of any force in Europe, in 2010. The second-highest in the world.
This was three times higher than the number of cases in the same year in Sweden’s next-door neighbour, Norway, and twice the rate in the United States and the UK. It was more than 30 times the number in India, which recorded about two offences per 100,000 people.
On the face of it, it would seem Sweden is a much more dangerous place than these other countries.
But that is a misconception, according to Klara Selin, a sociologist at the National Council for Crime Prevention in Stockholm. She says you cannot compare countries’ records, because police procedures and legal definitions vary widely.
There are other factors, too.
Anyway, back to South Africa:
Before the end of apartheid, South African writer Ilana Mercer moved, with her family, to Israel; her father was a vocal opponent of apartheid, and was being harassed by South African security forces. A 2013 piece on World Net Daily quotes Mercer as saying, with all her anti-apartheid chops, that “more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.” The South African government estimates that there are 31 murders per 100,000 people per year. Or about 50 a day. That would make South Africa the tenth most murderous country in the world, outpacing Rwanda, Mexico, and both Sudans. And that’s using South Africa’s official estimates — outside groups put the murder rate 100 percent higher. Choosing not to trust the South African authorities is a safe bet — South Africa’s government, which has been led by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress since the end of apartheid, is outstandingly incompetent and corrupt.
Of course, de facto one-party rule doesn’t promote integrity. Unemployment is 25 percent, but President Jacob Zuma, of the ANC, recently spent $24 million of public money to add a pool and amphitheater to his private home. Not long after the story broke, he was elected to a second five-year term. Think-tank theorist Leon Louw, who helped defeat apartheid, calls the crime and corruption “a simple manifestation of the breakdown of the state. The government is just appallingly bad at everything it does: education, healthcare, infrastructure, security, everything that is a government function is in shambles.”
He adds — citing “anecdotal data” — that “most people don’t bother to report crimes.”
It appears that South Africa is about the most dangerous place you can be outside a war zone. What’s more worrying is the chance that it might become a war zone. Nelson Mandela was able to hold the “rainbow nation” together, but he’s passed on. Now, according to the human-rights organization Genocide Watch, South Africa is at pre-genocide stage 6 of 8: “Preparation.”
Genocide? Of which tribe?
With the country skidding toward anarchy, naturally, the people want to know whom they should blame. In 2010, a prominent member of the African National Congress named Julius Malema revived an old anti-apartheid song whose lyrics — says Genocide Watch — call for genocide: “Shoot the Boer, shoot, shoot.” “Boer” means “farmer” in Afrikaans; colloquially, it means “white South African.” Malema was ejected from the ANC and convicted of hate speech; he has since formed a new opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, which is currently the third largest party in parliament. Seven months after Malema’s conviction, President Zuma sang the genocide song himself, leading a crowd in a musical chant: “We are going to shoot them with machine guns, they are going to run… The cabinet will shoot them, with the machine gun… Shoot the Boer, we are going to hit them, they are going to run.” Watch the video on YouTube — it is surreal. Nelson Mandela’s successor, the president of South Africa, addresses a crowd of — according to the Guardian — tens of thousands, in a giant stadium, and calls for the murder of what amounts to about 10 percent of his constituents. Among the audience, uniformed members of the military dance.
According to Genocide Watch, the murder rate among South African white farmers is four times higher than among South Africans en masse. That rate increased every month after President Zuma sang his song, for as long as accurate records are available: The police have been ordered to stop reporting murders by race. The police have also disarmed and disbanded groups of farmer-minutemen, organized to provide mutual security. Consequently, says Genocide Watch, “their families” have been “subjected to murder, rape, mutilation and torture.” Meanwhile, “high-ranking ANC government officials… continuously refer to Whites as ‘settlers.’”
Josh Gelernter recommends that the settlers form their own Singapore-style city-state.
I was reading the Duck Enlightenment and there was a tweet either from him or someone he follows that quoted U2′s Bono as comparing the singing of “Shoot the Boer” to Irish people singing Irish protest songs and that “they really don’t mean it”.
I had this Irish au pair nanny, a little fat thing of 5’2″ and 200 pounds. But all the aux pairs from the same agency would hang around together.
This was like the second generation of aux pairs during the 90s. The first had been mostly Nordic girls, and some of the families had learned maybe it was better if the girls spoke English. So there was this second wave of English Nannies, until that one killed the child she was watching, claiming she was worked into a frazzle.
So, anyway, this Irish imp would have the other British nannies over, and she would play this IRA music that had words something like (not actually but more or less) “Fuck the Bastard British, let’s blow them all to hell,” and I would sort of glare at her, and she would return this mischievous sense of “Boy I’m dancing on the couch now with my shoes on now.”
But I gotta just think when the President of South Africa joins in to “Shoot the Boers,” the effect on the general population is just a little bit different than a nanny trying to get a rise out of some British friends.
But make no mistake about it. This girl was IRA Irish.
There was bombing on the London tube as evening rush hour was going on. I challenged her about it and she said, “They had to. Major wouldn’t talk.”
And I loudly said, “And you killed me, men on the way home from work to their families, because Major wouldn’t talk?”
She hung her head.
Hard to say if she went back to Ireland with a less radical view of the IRA, probably. But even harder to say if getting back there renewed it once she was amongst the Irish instead of some liberal whites in Boulder.
But even though she might have played those songs just to bug the British girls, I have no doubt the core group of her Irish peers didn’t agree with both the message in the songs and any actions the IRA took prior to 9/11.
But if you look on web site of Engels-Volkers, an international realty firm, there’s some really cheap prices on luxury real estate in South Africa. You can get some really large properties, thousands of hectares, for a bit more than 5,000,000 dollars. And most of the properties for sale are in the western Cape.
But it’s a German firm, but with an international viewership. And there are 4,600 German properties for sale on it, 10,000 Spanish (due to what is going on in Spain and the “holiday” nature of most of those properties, they were built to sell to northern Europeans), and about 1,500 each in Italy and the US.
And 5,600 in South Africa. I sort of spend a bunch of time viewing different properties around the world as I fantasize about winning the lottery and moving here or there. There seems to be an exceeding high percentage of farms and hunting lodges for sale compared to any other country.
Can you imagine some foreigner not being aware of the information contained in this article and then buying one of these places after going on some Potemkin Village sort of tour led by the realtor and then finding out the hell he had gotten himself into.
There is a movie with John Malkovich called Disgrace. I leave a link to it that you can stream. It pops up a lot of junk ads and just kill them. Click the arrow in the player. I have adblocker on a Chrome browser so I don’t see the ads.
The synopsis from IMDB says, “After having an affair with a student, a Cape Town professor moves to the Eastern Cape, where he gets caught up in a mess of post-apartheid politics.”
It’s far worse than that. He gets attracted to a lighter colored student and asks her on a date. She doesn’t really want to but goes anyway. He takes her to his place and while she isn’t happy about it, he has sex with her, and it is a definite sort of “not saying no doesn’t imply consent”. Her friends rat him out to the administration and he gets fired.
With the end of apartheid and things being as they are in J-burg, he has no prospects in the city with the loss of this teaching job. So he heads to the country where his daughter lives, a lesbian who raises dogs and has a market garden.
They are attacked by three black men. He is knocked unconscious and she is raped. She ends up pregnant. And they experience stone walling with the black authorities now in charge of the region. She decides not to prosecute and to keep the baby. She signs her farm over to the control of the local black guy who is the patriarch there. And wants her father to leave. She feels she has no other option. If she aborts the baby and prosecutes her rapists then she believes at some point they will kill her. But by having the baby then she is part of the kin thing of the group.
So this movie is deeply symbolic of what Boers experience in South Africa. In every review of the movie the crime and violence of what happened to the daughter is often taken as a tit for tat with her father taking liberties with the college student even though the two cases are night and day and the university authorities severely punished him for a regret rape. It is almost like the world has this “They had it coming attitude”.
And in a bigger picture, much the same can be said for all whites. To believe in some post-racial utopia where all live in harmony is idiocy. Variations of this movie will play out over and over.
Reports from the front lines: Mike Smith’s Political Commentary.