Forty days on the sea. Through the Caribbean unescorted, when German submarines were trying hard to sink one ship per day and keeping pretty close to the schedule for awhile.
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[Laying in the harbor of Rio] was to be the last time we were to see a city with lights for a long time.
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The port of call was Durban, U. S. A. (Union of South Africa). We had to remember the double meaning of those three letters from there on in. None of us had any knowledge of the place and most of us had never heard of it. We were learning more about the world. Durban is a quaint little jungle village of 300,000 people, with 25,000 automobiles, open-air streetcars, doubledeck busses, big movie houses, skyscraper apartment buildings with automatic elevators, a business section as modern as any American city and a climate about 60% better than Southern California. If you ever do a little embezzling or rob a bank and have to jump the old home town, go to South Africa. They even have good ice-cream!
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The South Africans are large physically, and live on a larger scale than any other British colony or dominion.
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Living in a game country, the attitude toward shooting is much the same as in America. There is probably more per-capita big game hunting there, and they have rifle associations, clubs, matches and an organization which corresponds to our National Rifle Association through which military equipment is available to members.
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When our colored soldiers came ashore the people were somewhat stymied — they wanted to be nice to the Americans, but they didn’t know what to do.
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The problem was solved for the moment by more-or-less declaring that the American colored troops were sort of “honorary Aryans” for the moment and allowing them to use all white establishments for the period of our stay.
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Many native leaders have been campaigning for years for more or equal rights in the government, which of course means the end of white domination politically, should they be won.
Japanese businessmen were also categorized in apartheid South Africa as honorary whites.
I think the essential mistake made by apartheid wasn’t that they had the system they did, but that they tied it to some idea of virtue being attached to race–When the real issue was cultural.
The Boers rightly understood that their (relatively) modern culture and civilization would not survive allowing the native African cultures to dominate it. The solution that they came up with was entirely unfit to address the actual problems they had, and was going to result in national ostracism no matter what. Same-same with the racists in the US–The things they were worried about were not race-based, but cultural. Instead of focusing on this race=virtue thing, they should have instead focused on culture, and on modifying and/or “uplifting” the cultures they rightly grasped that they could not live with.
Wouldn’t have been pretty, either way, but the denouement of what they did try ain’t going to be pretty either, as South Africa de-civilizes over the next few generations. It’s only a matter of time before the Zimbabwe syndrome takes effect, as the barbarians discover that they can’t work the wheels and levers of civilization themselves, and they decide to pull the same cargo-cult machinations that the regime in Zimbabwe did.
I don’t know that the South African whites could have ever made it “work”, absent doing what the US did to the Indians, but the mess created as demographic and cultural reality re-imposes itself on the matrix of what was the nation of South Africa is going to be epic. I’d strongly advise any and all South African whites to get the hell out while they still can, and find somewhere they can live and be successful. South Africa itself is doomed under the current circumstances.
Whether or not “culture” is an independent variable, if so independent of what, and how mutable it is is one of the great questions.
How one discusses it is one of the huge land mines and getting worse. Those political traditions in the US now laying everything on it [neocons, for one, a core belief for them up to a point but now getting redoubled emphasis as little else is left] will have problems with the left going forward. I can’t quite suss out the lines, but there is this much-
If you argue for the equality of all races, it’s just that for whatever reason [even pure environment] some of them developed crappy cultures and need to adopte better ones, and are fully able to do it, should, and will, you’ve largely adopted the tradition of neoconservatism, one brand of liberalism, the more generous side of traditional Western civilization, and for that matter the dominant attitude of French colonial imperialism.
Some on the more liberal side of progressivism known to me actually occasionally take this line too- it’s culture! [implicitly, not race] and can be improved through education, compulsory behaviour modification, relocation, what have you. They can thrown this line at Appalachians and other poor white people too. Get them educated and taught modern values, separated from retrograde communities and families, trained up to the global economy and society. One only has to gently remind them that this attitude was a big part of how Canada regarded its Indians, or note that this policy might not play well among urban African Americans, to stall the culture reform at least for conceptual revision.
For another subset of progressives, the idea that ‘culture’ is separable from race [not identical, just connected and derivative], that it can any more be judged superior or inferior than race can be, is identical with and part of ‘racism’.
One thinks of Silvio Berlusconi, reamed far and wide for claiming Western Civilization was superior.
Or me- a second year undergrad at Toronto’s York University circa 1989. 2nd year Poli Sci, Introduction to Comparative Politics. Our seminar group had just finished the unit comparing British [more standoffish, rule through the local trad leaders, give out British nationality sparingly] and French [more direct, more Gallicized admin structures in more places, give out at least a partial French nationality a bit more, teach everyone to think of "our ancestors, the Gauls"] colonialism. Naive young chap as I was, I ventured that perhaps the term racism be reserved for the more biological, or at least the British assumption that most of its subjects were not ready for Anglo civilization, and some other term be applied to the French policy of assuming their culture was superior but everyone was capable of it.
This troubled our African Canadian TA not a whit, or at least she was a professional grad student and saw the connection between my comment and the subject matter she had just finished outlining. A peer white male student earnestly smiled and said with enthusiasm regarding the French practice, “No, it’s racism”. His smile and tone of voice suggested deep commitment and dedication to hoping I would understand, nothing overtly sinister at all. A teachable moment for him.
True story.
His name was Aryeh. I wish I could remember his surname so as to find out whatever became of him. Sometimes I hope he became a progressive lawyer and then was defenestrated by the law society for not being progressive enough, as has happened a couple of times of late in Ontario.
York University was a pretty Red place even back then, although far from every one of its departments was like that. Even those among the polic sci and history faculty who had trained up in the Marxist wings of those disciplines weren’t like leftists today. Serious enough people, with sense of humour. Like English academic Marxists used to be. But one could have those little experiences with peers that showed the direction of the wind.
I don’t know what to make of it all, but I’m pretty sure I’m living the death throes of Western Civilization, and of liberalism, and perhaps other things. Conservatism is already dead. I think they’ve beaten most of the liberal instincts out of me. I had quite a lot.
As it happens, the more liberal minded South Africans and, on the whole, the entire Rhodesian establishment, had roughly your attitude to this issue.
I did a thought experiment when I was in my twenties long before I had read history or traveled. The thought was, “Where would I choose to live besides the US?” The list in my mind was all Western civilized countries. Interesting to me and I rationalized it was because common cultural heritage would by default present the most home-like environment. I then asked what makes Western Civilization a place where people from around the world want to live or in other words what makes Western civilization ‘better’ than most other choices in the world? My answer was strictly based on the observation that Western countries had a Christian past being at the time relatively homogeneous and high trust. Except for a few foreign countries with high exposure to Western civilization all the others are crap holes.
Now there are fewer countries I would put on the list as Christian influence and trust declines. Plus add to that the dilution caused by the third world invasion of Western countries facilitated by progressive/socialist politics. Import the 3rd world…become the 3rd world.
That being said I look at history and now realize that tyranny, slavery and oppression is the universal human experience for 1000s of years until the recent 2 or so centuries. Western Civilization is unique in all of history and is fading. We have had the great blessing to live during it’s peak, at least in modern times. I pity the next few generations as the world reverts to the mean.
The Rhodesians tried the “shared culture” idea to some extent. Blacks could vote with the same requirements as Whites. Didn’t work.
This guy said that Apartheid was ended because the politicians were blackmailed pedos. The White politicians sold out the rest of the Whites. Hmmm…have you seen any of that in the US??
https://neonnettle.com/features/1503-detective-who-exposed-elite-pedophile-ring-found-dead
This what is happening to South Africans. I WARN YOU. IT’s A TERRIBLE VIDEO. I’m not kidding. You can’t unsee it. It made me feel anxious for several hours after I saw it. I recommend you do not watch it. One last warning. It’s really bad.
https://ctmstorage.blob.core.windows.net/ctmnews/Warning.mp4
This will happen to Whites in the US at some point if things don’t change.