Apartheid in Perspective

There are many evils that can be charged to the account of the late twentieth- century phenomenon that is commonly called political correctness. One of these is the growing inability to perceive certain historical figures, events, and institutions with anything worthy of being called perspective. In the last century alone, movements and organizations committed to the political philosophy of Marxist-Leninism murdered the bodies of over one hundred million people and the spirits of millions more whom they forced into the dreary, hopeless, slave like existence that passed for life in the police states that flew the red flag. Yet to this day it is far safer for someone in academic or media circles to praise a Communist government, to dismiss the fear of Communism as irrational paranoia, and to say that the Americans were the aggressors in the Cold War, than it is for someone in those same circles to say anything that could be construed as a defense of General Franco of Spain or General Pinochet of Chile even though there was far more freedom and prosperity for the average citizen under either of their regimes than in any Communist country and the number of people tortured and killed by their regimes was far lower than that of any Communist country. Any attempt to put both Communism and the anti-Communist regimes of Franco and Pinochet in perspective is likely to be met with widespread denunciation and accusations that one is engaging in apologetics for “human rights” abuses.

Virtually anything having to do with Africa is similarly protected from perspective by political correctness.

Take the slave trade for example. We know all about it, don’t we? The bad guys, the white Europeans, in the age of exploration came to Africa, where they began to capture and enslave black people, who they shipped overseas to Europe and the European settlements in the Americas, where they were oppressed as drudge labourers.

Suppose, however, we were to broaden our perspective on African slavery by including within our picture of it the fact that slavery existed on the African continent long before European ships arrived on her west coast, that African slavery had begun with African tribes going to war with one another and enslaving each other, that the Arabs had conducted a trade in African slaves centuries prior to Europe’s getting involved, and that one of the consequences of modern European expansionism, colonialism, and imperialism was that the imperial powers ended and outlawed the slave trade in the nineteenth century, and abolished slavery in the territory under their control? Suppose we were to broaden our perspective even further by pointing out that since the end of World War II, which had accomplished a geopolitical realignment around the two new superpowers of the USA and USSR, who forced the old imperial powers to withdraw, slavery has begun anew in parts of Africa where it had been abolished by Britain, France, and the Dutch.? Suppose we were to point out, as Professor Bruce Charlton recently did (1), that due to liberal immigration and multiculturalism slavery has been reintroduced into the birthplace of abolitionism and is largely being ignored by the leftists who promote multiculturalism in contradiction to their professed opposition to slavery in all forms?

From that broader perspective it no longer appears to be a simple Manichean morality tale of evil whites and pure, innocent, oppressed blacks does it?

There is probably no element of African history that is more lacking in perspective than that of apartheid. Apartheid is the word in the Afrikaans language that refers, as its sound would suggest to English speakers, the state of being apart or separate. In 1948, when the Nationalist Party came to power in South Africa, it adopted this term to designate its policy of racial segregation.

The government of South Africa picked a particularly poor time to institute this policy. World War II was over, the revelations of the atrocities of Nazi Germany had given racialism a bad name, the anti-colonial, anti-imperial era was beginning under the supervision of the new progressive superpowers, the Communists were at work trying to fan the flames of anti-racist sentiment into the fire of revolution, and in the United States, now the leading power of the liberal, democratic, West, the Civil Rights movement would soon be underway, which would lead to the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, the model for subsequent anti-discrimination legislation such as the 1968 Race Relations Bill in the UK and the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. The way the tides of opinion were moving, it was inevitable that apartheid would receive widespread condemnation. Interestingly, the one country that understood perfectly well where the Afrikaners were coming from, itself achieved its independence as a country that same year. After the Six Days War in 1967, Israel and South Africa forged a close alliance, signing the Israel-South Africa Agreement in 1975. Today, enemies of the Jewish state liken the measures she has taken to preserve her existence in the face of the constant threat of Arab and Muslim terrorism to apartheid. Her defenders reject the comparison as a calumny, perhaps because they, unlike the country they are defending, lack perspective on apartheid.

It is fitting, therefore, that of those essays with which I am familiar, the one which in my opinion best put apartheid into perspective, appeared in an extremely pro-Israeli publication. The author of the essay was British writer and historian Paul Johnson. In an article that appeared in the September 1985 issue of the American neoconservative monthly journal Commentary, (2) Johnson took the United States to task for the economic boycott of South Africa then underway. It was a “cruel absurdity”, he declared, for the richest country in the world to “deliberately set about destroying the economy of what is in some respects still a developing nation.” (3) The United States had nothing to gain from doing so and much to lose. The only explanation for this absurdity, Johnson argued, was that “assumption that the South African regime is a unique moral evil, whose wickedness is so great that the necessity for its destruction transcends all the rules governing relations between states and, indeed, the dictates of elementary common sense.”

He then proceeded to demolish that assumption by pointing out that South Africa, far from being unique, is “in many fundamental respects…a typical African country.” He gave six examples, the first four of which are 1) that like other African states it was undergoing a population explosion, 2) like other large African states its racial problems were particularly complex and not just a matter of black and white, 3) “population pressure on the land is driving people into the towns, and especially into the big cities”, and 4) like in other African states this creates problems for the government to which the response is typical:

So governments respond with what has become the curse of Africa—social engineering. People are treated not as individual human beings but as atomized units and shoveled around like concrete or gravel. Movement control is imposed. Every African has to have a grubby little pass-book or some other begrimed document which tells him where he is allowed to work or live. South Africa has had pass-laws of a kind since the 18th century. They have now spread all over the African continent, and where the pass-book comes the bulldozer is never far behind. Virtually all African governments use them to demolish unauthorized settlements. Hundreds of thousands of wretched people are made homeless without warning by governments terrified of being overwhelmed by lawless multitudes. In the black African countries bordering on the Sahara, the authorities fight desperately to repel nomadic desert dwellers driven south by drought. When the police fail, punitive columns of troops are sent in. (4)

The fifth example Johnson gave was that South Africa, like all African states, conducts its social engineering on a racial basis. He wrote:

All African states are racist. Almost without exception, and with varying degrees of animosity, they discriminate against someone: Jews, or whites, or Asians, or non-Muslim religious groups, or disfavored tribes. There is no such thing as a genuinely multiracial society in the whole of Africa…African countries vary in the extent to which their practice of discrimination is formalized or entrenched in law codes and official philosophies. Most have political theories of a sort, cooked up in the political-science or sociology departments of local universities. Tanzania has a sinister totalitarian doctrine called Ujaama. Ghana has Consciencism. There is Zambian Humanism, Négritude in Senegal, and, in Zaire, a social creed called Mobutuism, after the reigning dictator. All these government theories reflect the appetites of the ruling racial groups… Apartheid is not a concept which divides the Republic from the rest of Africa: on the contrary, it is the local expression of the African ideological personality. (5)

This, it should be noted, has changed since the change in power from the Afrikaner National Party to the African National Congress in 1994. Not only does the ANC, despite the false image of the “rainbow nation” generated by a deceitful media, practice discrimination against the white South Africans who are currently being eliminated in a Zimbabwesque manner, the ANC is not even representative of all South Africa blacks, being historically a primarily Xhosa organization, (6) although its current leader, Jacob Zuma, comes from the rival Zulu people.

The sixth way, in which Johnson said that South Africa was typical of Africa was in the way it had suffered “at the hands of its politically minded intellectuals”.

Having demonstrated that in all of these negative things Nationalist South Africa was a typical, rather than unique, African state, Johnson then identified four ways in which it stood out by differing from other African states. The first two of these were its wealth, “South Africa has by far the richest and most varied range of natural resources of any African country”, and the fact that it had used that wealth to build a modern economy, the only one of its kind in Africa. The third was that blacks were better off in white-governed South Africa than any other country in Africa. Here another extended quote from Johnson is in order:

Except for the Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Malawi, all the black African states have experienced falls in real incomes per capita since independence. But only in South Africa have the real incomes of blacks risen very substantially in the last quarter-century. In mining, black wages have tripled in real terms in the last decade and are still rising…This helps to account for the fact that there are more black-owned cars in South Africa than there are private cars in the whole of the Soviet Union. The Republic is the first and so far the only African country to produce a large black middle class. In South Africa the education available to blacks is poor compared to what the whites get, and that is one of the biggest grievances the black communities harbor; but it is good compared to what is available elsewhere on the continent…Thanks to mining, again, this modest but rising prosperity is not confined to blacks born in South Africa. About half of South Africa’s black miners come from abroad, chiefly from Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana…The security fences South Africa is now rather anxiously erecting are designed to keep intended immigrants out, not—like the Berlin Wall—to keep people in. (7)

The fourth way in which Nationalist South Africa differed from other African countries is that was “in many respects a free country.” Johnson explained that:

Every other African country has become, or is in the process of becoming, a one-party state. None of them subscribes in practice, or in most cases even in theory, to the separation of powers. Both the rule of law and democracy are subject in South Africa to important qualifications. But it is the only African country where they exist at all. The emergency and security powers enjoyed by the South African government are so wide and draconian that they almost make us forget that the judiciary is independent—very much so—and that even non-whites can get justice against the state, something they are most unlikely to secure anywhere else on the continent. The courts are cluttered with black litigants suing the police, the prison authorities, or other government agencies, or appealing against sentences. (8)

To summarize, the things which the anti-apartheid movement most objected to in Nationalist South Africa – its official racial discrimination, its heavy handed government policing, etc., were all features that the South African government shared with all other African governments, that were not uniquely South African, per se, but rather were typically African. It made no sense, therefore, to single South Africa out for condemnation. The only difference was that in South Africa the governing group was white whereas in all other African countries – now that Ian Smith’s government had fallen and Rhodesia was being turned into Zimbabwe – it was black. Since the conditions for blacks were improving in Nationalist South Africa, to the point that they had an immigration problem from the rest of the continent, whereas they were rapidly declining in the rest of Africa, it made even less sense to condemn South Africa.

Since the ANCs rise to power in 1994, conditions in South Africa have deteriorated for blacks and whites alike. What was a first world country when governed by the Afrikaners is becoming a third world country, in which the white South Africans face genocide and the black South Africans face the deterioration of the rule and protection of law, a failing economy, and a decline into the conditions present everywhere else in Africa. Those South Africans who can, black and white alike, are now fleeing the country, while under Afrikaner rule they were struggling to get in.

What is apparent out of all of this is that South Africa was a better place to live, for blacks and whites alike, from 1948 to 1994, than either any other country in Africa was at the time or than South Africa itself has been ever since.

This does not mean, of course, either that the policy of apartheid made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now, or that apartheid is somehow justified by all of this. What made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now is that South Africa then, the prosperous, Western, country, was largely an expression of the Afrikaner people who built the country, established its institutions, and wrote its laws. As such an expression, the country of South Africa was a country that Afrikaners, other African whites, and African blacks all wished to participate in. Apartheid, of course, prevented the other people living in South Africa, other than non-Afrikaner whites, from full participation, and that is wherein its injustice lies. The difficulty is that apart from apartheid, that South Africa would probably have been impossible to create.

All of which must be taken into consideration if we are to even approach perspective, when it comes to apartheid and the whole South African situation.

(1) http://charltonteaching.blogspot.ca/2013/10/why-do-modern-leftists-pretend-to-be.html


(2) Commentary has been published since 1945 when it was founded by the American Jewish Committee as a replacement for the Contemporary Jewish Record. Its first editor was Eliot Cohen, who was succeeded by Norman Podhoretz in 1960. It was during Podhoretz’s editorship that the journal ostensibly moved to the right, when Podhoretz, initially a Cold War liberal Democrat, grew disgusted with the pro-Soviet, pro-Palestinian, New Left in the 1970s and realigned himself and his publication with the American conservative movement. Hence the label “neoconservative”, which in an American context generally refers to a member of the “New York Intellectuals” who moved from the left to the right in the 1970s and who is usually belligerently militaristic. Commentary gradually became independent of the American Jewish Committee. Its current editor is John Podhoretz, son of Norman Podhoretz, and it remains extremely, to the point of being obnoxiously so, pro-Israel.

(3) Paul Johnson, “The Race for South Africa”, Commentary, September, 1985. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-race-for-south-africa/ (if you wish to view this, you will have to part with some shekels, I am afraid, either a subscription price or the purchase price of the article)

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid.

(6) See Ilana Mercer’s Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011) for more information about this.

(7) Johnson, op cit.

(8) Ibid.

Mandela: Man and Myth

People all around the word love stories. Stories inspire us, entertain us, and teach us. The Greeks called them mythoi, and it is from this word that our English word myth is derived. Our use of the word myth has been largely shaped by positivistic thinking. The positivists believed that human thought evolved from an understanding of the world that is primitive and false to an understanding of the world that is advanced and true through stages of myth, theology/metaphysics, and science. Thus, today, we usually use the word myth in one of two ways. In ordinary conversation we use it to mean a story that is or has been believed to be true but is not actually true. There is a more technical use of the word in which it means a story shared by a large number of people who collectively find some deeper significance and meaning in the story that helps them to make sense of the world, their place in it, and how they ought to live their lives. This is how the word myth is used by various sorts of social scientists and critics.

Around the world today, many people are mourning the death of a man around whom a contemporary myth, in the second technical sense of the word, has been built.

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, was born into the leading clan of the Thembu people in South Africa, on July 18th, 1918. On Thursday, December 5th, 2013, he passed away from a lung infection at ninety-five years of age. Much of the life he lived between those two dates is, for better or worse, a significant part of the history of the second half of the twentieth century. Like many who study and practice law, he was attracted to politics as a young man, and in particular the politics of the African National Congress. The ANC was a party founded a few years before Mandela’s birth that was Marxist-socialist in ideology and which was organized to be the voice and champion of the black African population of South Africa. The young Mandela became an activist for the ANC and in 1961 he was one of the founders and the first leader of the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), an affiliate of the ANC that sought to obtain the party’s ends through guerilla warfare. Arrested the following year, on a charge of inciting strikes, he was later charged on several accounts of sabotage and conspiracy, and sentenced to prison. He would remain a prisoner until 1990, the bulk of his sentence being served at Robben Island, after which he was moved to Pollsmoor Prison and then briefly to Victor Verster from which he was released. After his release, he was made leader of the ANC and in 1994 became President of South Africa when the ANC won that first post-apartheid election. His party has remained in power in South Africa ever since, although he resigned the presidency and the leadership of the party in 1999.

Having briefly summarized the life of Mandela the man in the previous paragraph, let us now turn our attention to Mandela the myth. The first part of the myth has to do with his pre-1994 days as an ANC activist and a prisoner. According to this part of the myth, Mandela was guided by strict moral principles as he fought for a noble cause, and is arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the South African regime had nothing to do with any wrongdoing of his own, but was a politically motivated act of injustice, which so outraged people around the world that it inspired them to take up the anti-apartheid cause and demand both his release and a change to South Africa’s policies.

The second part of the myth has to do with his actions during and after his rise to power in 1994. According to this part of the myth, Mandela was a gracious and forgiving man, who was determined to heal the divisions in his country and create racial unity, and so he insisted upon a policy of fairness and forgiveness towards South African whites and imposed this policy upon those members of his party that wished to seek revenge against the whites until they came around to see the wisdom of his ways, and so created a paradise on earth.

The myth of Mandela is a myth in the sense that it is a story, shared and believed by people around the world, to which a kind of sacred meaning has been attached. The meaning of the myth is that racism can be defeated, that people can overcome the boundaries that divide them, and unite in a harmonious, post-racial, world.

Is the myth of Mandela also a myth in the sense of a story that while widely believed is untrue?

Ordinarily, I would not consider appropriate to ask this question when the man behind the myth is newly deceased. Chilon of Sparta’s maxim, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est (1), “of the dead, speak nothing but good”, is social protocol that has the authority of prescription and tradition behind it, as well as common sense and common courtesy to those who are in their period of mourning. It should also be taken into consideration, whenever one sets out to debunk a myth, whether debunking the myth might actually do harm when the myth accomplished some good. In John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, after the funeral of John Wayne’s character Tom Doniphan, Jimmy Stewart’s character Ranse Stoddard, who had risen in politics to become an American Senator on the basis of the belief that he had shot down Lee Marvin’s villainous Liberty Valance, reveals out of guilt, that it was actually Doniphan that shot Valance. After telling the story, the journalist to whom he is speaking declines to report it, saying “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

In this case, the myth is a pernicious one that both cloaks and feeds a tremendous evil and so it must be debunked. The evil to which I refer is the evil of genocide – the genocide of white South Africans.

Perhaps you are unaware that such genocide is taking place at this very moment. It receives little to no media attention. The Holocaust, which ended almost seventy years ago, is constantly discussed. Occasionally the Holodomor, the Soviet-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930’s, will receive mention. Sometimes the Turkish genocide of the Armenians is discussed. In the 1990’s, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda was headline news. Only a handful of brave writers ever mention the genocide of the white South Africans however.

Yet it is happening nonetheless. In the nineteen years since it took power, the African National Congress has slowly been recreating the horrors of the former Rhodesia after Robert Mugabe turned it into Zimbabwe. White farmers in particular, have been targeted for extermination and they live in terror of the gangs of thugs going around the countryside murdering them. One of the few mainstream media commentators to report on this, the BBCs John Simpson, wrote earlier this year:

There used to be 60,000 white farmers in South Africa. In 20 years that number has halved. (2)

While some of that reduction in number is to be attributed to white farmers fleeing the country in fear, murders take place on a daily basis. There have been at least 3,000 murders and they have been conducted in a particularly brutal manner, often with rape and torture thrown in. Last year, Leon Parkin and Dr. Gregory H. Stanton of Genocide Watch reported:

The South African Government for the last 18 years has adopted a policy of deliberate government abolition and disarmament of rural Commandos run by farmers themselves for their own self-defense. The policy has resulted in a four-fold increase in the murder rate of Afrikaner commercial farmers. This policy is aimed at forced displacement through terror. It advances the goals of the South African Communist Party’s New Democratic Revolution (NPR), which aims at nationalization of all private farmland, mines, and industry in South Africa. Disarmament, coupled with Government removal of security structures to protect the White victim group, follows public dehumanization of the victims, and facilitates their forced displacement and gradual genocide. (3)

It would appear that Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation” is not such a post-racial paradise after all.

There are, of course, many who would say that this is a matter of what goes around comes around, and that the white South Africans had this coming because of the way they oppressed black South Africans in the past. Usually those who think in this bloodthirsty, vengeful, way about an entire race of people are the same people who consider themselves to be too forward thinking and enlightened to believe in such things as the retributive model of justice for individual criminals or the death penalty for murderers, dismissing such ideas as barbaric and regressive. This is what comes from excluding all but one side to a question from polite discussion for decades.

Ever since the National Party in South Africa instituted the policy of apartheid in 1948, Western liberals have treated it as a one-sided affair and have sought to exclude other points of view from the discussion as being beyond the pale. They were not wholly successful in this during the Cold War when the South African government was a valued ally against the Soviet Union, but when the Cold War began to thaw, liberal opinion prevailed, and the West pressured South Africa into releasing Mandela, abandoning apartheid, and holding the general election that led to the rise of the ANC government. Since then all other viewpoints on the question of South Africa have been effectively squelched by the liberals through accusations of racism.

The supporters of Mandela, the ANC, and the anti-apartheid movement were correct to think that they were opposing an injustice, for apartheid was, undoubtedly, an injustice in many ways to the blacks of South Africa. It does not follow from this that the anti-apartheid movement was on the side of justice. True justice, involves doing right by all parties, but the anti-apartheid movement was only concerned with doing right by one party, the black people of South Africa. Piet Cillier of Die Burger once said “What you have unfolding in South Africa is a true tragedy – an irreconciliable struggle,not between right and wrong, but between right and right. The blacks are in the right, but so are the whites.” (4) William F. Buckley Jr. once remarked “Some day, when you have nothing else to do, come up with a solution for South Africa, won’t you? But remember the rules of the game. All the marbles have to end up each in a cavity—you can’t just throw a few of them away, to make the game simpler.” Coming up with such a solution, is precisely what the anti-apartheid movement was not interested in.

Ironically, apartheid itself was an attempt to come up with such a solution. It was not a successful attempt, of course, but it was an attempt, on the part of the National Party, to do right as best they could, by all the various groups that lived in South Africa. Western liberals refused to see any good faith behind the attempt. They insisted that the only just model of society and government was that of a race-neutral, one-person, one-vote, liberal democracy. This model, however, was as much of an injustice to the Afrikaners and other white South Africans (5) as apartheid was to black South Africans. Indeed, it was a greater injustice. Apartheid in theory involved a degree of self-government for other racial groups, however, imperfect that worked out in practice, whereas one-person, one-vote, liberal democracy could only mean the domination of the Afrikaners by the blacks. That liberal democracy, at least in the circumstances of South Africa, is a greater injustice than apartheid can be clearly seen in the fact that apartheid South Africa had a problem with illegal black immigration whereas white Africans have been fleeing from post-apartheid, ANC-governed, South Africa. Ultimately, of course, the greatest evidence that liberal democracy is a worse injustice than apartheid, and one that amounts to insurmountable proof, is the genocide of the white South Africans of which we have already spoken.

The myth of Nelson Mandela makes no sense apart from the idea that apartheid is the supreme injustice. As the organizer and leader of a group that he armed and trained to fight against the South African government, whose life sentence was handed down for acts of sabotaging the property of that government, Mandela was hardly a prisoner of conscience. These are acts that one would ordinarily expect a government to arrest and imprison people over and it is unreasonable to blame a government for doing so.

There is much more that could be said but now is not the time. My purpose here is to burst the myth which had done and is doing so much damage rather than to attack the man. Raised in the church, Mandela long ago abandoned the Christian faith when he embraced the atheistic doctrines of Marxist-Leninism. Let us pray that in his last hours he repented of his sins, turned back to the faith of his childhood, and experienced the grace and forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ.


(1) Chilon said it in Greek, of course, but it is best known in the Latin rendition.
(2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22554709
(3) Leon Parkin and Gregory H. Stanton, “Why Are Afrikaner Farmers Being Murdered in South Africa”, August 14, 2012, http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html
(4) Quoted by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne in his memoirs, Tricks of Memory (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), p. 195. The quotation was from a speech given at a braaivleis (barbecue) hosted by the Afrikaner head of the South African Bureau of Information for the media entourage during Harold Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” tour of Africa. Worsthorne had been assigned to the tour by the Daily Telegraph. He writes that only he and a single American reporter accepted the invitation.
(5) The Afrikaners are a specific nation, white, European in racial origin, Dutch Reformed in religion, who speak their own language, a form of Dutch.

This and That No. 15

My last essay, Christian Orthodoxy Versus the Gnostic Heresy of The Suicide Cult, was the final essay in my 2011 theological series. It is also the sequel I promised back in February to The Suicide Cult. This series has taken longer than I expected or wished to complete. I had planned on posting the final essay on Trinity Sunday. This is the Fifth Sunday after Trinity.

My next series of essays, on the topic of Arts and Culture, will begin with a review of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. Before writing the review I intend to re-read it, although my most recent reading of it was less than half a year ago. I will start my next reading of Eliot's book once I am finished one of the books I am currently reading, Charles Williams' Descent into Hell. I am down to the last few pages of this book so I expect to be finished it, and starting on Eliot's book again tonight. I am also currently reading Simone Weil's Waiting for God and Paul Johnson's Art: A New History. I might review the latter in my Arts and Culture series.

Charles Williams is an author I have intended to read for quite some time but have until recently had difficulty finding copies of his works. I read his War in Heaven last week - which I recommend to anyone who likes C. S. Lewis' space trilogy. Williams was a friend of Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and was with them and a number of others part an informal club of sorts that met at a pub called the Bird and Baby to read and discuss their writings. Like Lewis and Tolkien he was a traditionalist Christian (he was orthodox Anglican) whose views are reflected in his books. He wrote seven novels in total. I hope to read the other five soon.

The news this weekend has been full of the tragic massacre and bombing in Norway. The newsmedia has been placing a great deal of emphasis upon the madman's blond hair and blue eyes. Ordinarily they try to under-emphasize the ethnicity of criminals and terrorists. I wonder why that is?

In case you failed to pick up on it that last question was written with a heavy dose of sarcasm. In this sick-minded murderer the "Great White Defendant" sought after by the Bronx D.A. in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities has finally materialized. He is a bit out of the Bronx D. A.'s jurisdiction however.

The media is reporting that the killer is a "Christian" even a "Christian fundamentalist". That is a curious way of describing someone who said "I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie", described himself as "pro-gay" and was apparently a Freemason. "Christian fundamentalist" appears to be a more inclusive label than we had previously realized.

Whatever the killer's religious views actually were this was, of course, a terrible tragedy and a horrible atrocity. Norway needs our prayers in this time of suffering.

Mark and Connie Fournier of Free Dominion also continue to need our prayers as their legal battles against their persecutors continue. This past week their motion to dismiss the libel suit against them by left-wing blogger "Dr. Dawg" was heard. Dr. Dawg sued the Fourniers because one of their posters, the venerable Peter O'Donnell, called him a Taliban supporter or something to that effect over his position on the Omar Khadr case. If such name-calling now counts as libel, then surely countless people such as Free Dominion's Maikeru, who have been falsely labelled "Nazis" by Dr. Dawg in the past have a case for a libel suit against him. So, for that matter, do I. Dr. Dawg called me an "apartheid supporter". I have declared on many occasions, my sympathy for the Afrikaner people, my disgust with the dishonorable and cowardly Western governments that betrayed the Afrikaners and forced them into their present plight, and my absolute contempt for the ANC, their Communist ideology, and the white-washed former leader of their militant wing the Umkhonto we Sizwe, Nelson Mandela. I never supported their policy of apartheid, however, which I considered unjust but also none of my business, none of the business of the self-righteous, progressive, do-gooder, busy-bodies who were determined to end it, and a lesser injustice to that which was brought about by the rise of the ANC. I suppose Dr. Dawg would call that a "distinction without a difference". Whatever. I have no intention of suing him and if he has any decency he will drop this silly lawsuit against the Fourniers.

The Reality at the End of the Rainbow

Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa by Ilana Mercer, Seattle, Stairway Press, 2011, 319 pages, $24.95

In Jean Raspail’s prophetic novel The Camp of the Saints an armada of decrepit ships containing a million invaders armed only with their own wretchedness slowly makes its way on a long trek from Calcutta around Africa to the coast of France. The eyes of the world are upon France, to see how she will respond. Will she muster up the spirit to defend herself against an invasion of the weak or will she succumb to liberal guilt and offer no resistance? As the armada approaches the Cape of Good Hope the thought arises that perhaps the ships would land in South Africa instead. South Africa is depicted as it was in 1973 when Raspail’s novel was first published – a pariah state, condemned by the world for its racism and apartheid. Her president calls a press conference in which he announces that “not a single refugee from the Ganges will set foot alive on South African soil”. Then a few days later, as the fleet rounds the Cape it is intercepted by the South African navy, which loads the ships up with food, water and medical supplies. All of these are promptly thrown overboard into the ocean and the leftist media is left to debate the Afrikaners motives and to praise the refugees for not compromising their principles and accepting help from the evil racists.

In the course of this episode, Raspail places a very interesting sentence in the mouth of the President of South Africa. In his address to the hostile reporters he says “Just let me make one thing clear: the Republic of South Africa is a white nation with eighty percent blacks, and not—as the world would like to think of us, in the name of some mythical equality—a black nation with twenty percent whites”. The President took it for granted that those hearing his words would never understand them. It is unlikely that many people would. Most people today have never viewed South Africa other than through the tinted lenses of left-wing propaganda which demonized the Republic prior to 1994 and has flattered and praised it ever since.

1994 was the year in which Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa in the first democratic election open to all South Africans of all races. The election was held on the 27th of April, less than a month after my eighteenth birthday and I remember well the huge fuss everybody made over it. I also remember the indignant, self-righteous tones in which South Africa was spoken of by teachers, clergymen, and journalists in the years leading up to that election. This was particularly the case with those who describe themselves as liberals. The term “liberal” is supposed to mean generous and broad-minded but is curiously applied to those who least display these characteristics. William F. Buckley Jr. once said that “liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” This is certainly the case with regards to South Africa and apartheid.

Although liberals may not like it, there is another side to the story of South Africa and apartheid. Occasionally, in the years before the triumph of Nelson Mandela, a courageous conservative writer would present that side in his columns. Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel and Patrick Buchanan and Sam Francis of the Washington Times were examples in the United States. The much-maligned Doug Collins of the North Shore News was a Canadian example. The best treatment of the subject from that era that I have encountered was the article “The Race for South Africa” by British historian Paul Johnson which was published in the September 1985 issue of Commentary. Johnson, argued against the economic pressure being placed on South Africa by the United States on the grounds that South Africa was being singled out for condemnation over things which were in fact (and still are) typical of all African nations when she should be praised for those things which at the time set her apart – its wealth, modern economy, rising real incomes for blacks, and its relative freedom compared to other countries on the African continent.

It has been much harder to find voices questioning the left-wing orthodoxy on South Africa since 1994. A myth has developed about how justice, freedom, and equality have triumphed in the “Rainbow Nation” under the wise leadership of Nelson Mandela. This myth was recently translated into film by director Clint Eastwood in Invictus. It is very seldom challenged.

This is most unfortunate because it is now, more than ever, that the progressive orthodoxy on South Africa needs to be challenged. In the 1994 general election, South Africa transitioned from being a classical republic, with working institutions and the rule of law, to a mass democracy, perpetually governed by a corrupt socialist party, that has brought about cultural decline, economic disaster, and the collapse of the rule of law. Worse, South Africa has changed from being a country in which people were excluded from social equality and full participation in the political process on the basis of their race to being a country where people are targeted for extermination on the basis of their skin color.

One of the very few writers to faithfully report on this transformation for the worse has been Ilana Mercer. Mrs. Mercer’s concern over the state of affairs in South Africa is understandable. It is the country of her birth and the country to which she returned after being raised in Israel. She and her family left South Africa in 1995, moving first to British Columbia here in Canada and then to the United States. It was during her years in Canada that I first encountered her writings in the pages of the Report Newsmagazine. She is now a columnist with WorldNewsDaily and has over the years told the story the rest of the media is not telling in her Friday column there.

Now, after a long struggle to find a publisher, her book Into the Cannibal’s Pot has finally been released. She describes her book, in the final sentence of the introduction, as “a labor of love to my homelands, old and new”, and throughout this fascinating volume she takes her reader back and forth from South Africa to the United States, drawing parallels and contrasts, and uttering warnings which, for the Americans sake, one hopes will not fall like Cassandra’s on deaf ears. The warnings are timely for non-American Westerners as well, for most of the trends she describes can be found – and indeed, have often progressed further – in other Western countries as well.

Into the Cannibal’s Pot is largely the story of a people, the Afrikaners. After describing the epidemic of violent crime that has swept South Africa since 1994 in her first chapter, in her second chapter Mrs. Mercer tells us about the genocide that is being perpetrated against the Afrikaners. It is in this context that she gives us the background and history of this fascinating, widely reviled, and universally misunderstood people.

The Afrikaners are a people, of European stock (primarily Dutch, with some French and German mixed in) who evolved an ethnic identity of their own over centuries in Africa. A hard-working farming people, with a strict Calvinist Protestant faith, they speak a language of their own, Afrikaans.

It is vital that we understand this, because the biggest mistake the rest of the world made concerning South Africa in the 20th Century, was to try and force the South African situation into a pre-made framework of white vs. black. It was never that simple.

The Afrikaners were conquered by the British Empire in the Boer Wars of the 19th Century. Under British Imperial rule, a program of Anglicization was attempted, to try and make the Afrikaners give up their language and culture. This program failed, and it sparked a nationalist fervor among the Afrikaners that gave birth to the National Party which was elected into office in 1948, withdrew South Africa from the British Commonwealth and declared her a Republic in 1961, and which governed until 1994. Although some of the elements of the system had been put into place under British rule it was the National Party that introduced full-blown apartheid to South Africa.

The rest of the world saw apartheid in terms of racial oppression and injustice. All we could see was a country in which a white minority had all the power from which the black majority was excluded. We saw this as being unfair and demanded that the country change to suit our (very recently formed) notions of racial justice. When they refused we put economic pressure upon them and forced them to change.

What we did not see was that for the Afrikaners, who had survived an attempt to erase their ethnicity, and were in the process of securing their independence, the one-person, one-vote, majoritarian democracy the rest of the world demanded that South Africa adapt, would mean their subjugation and eventual eradication.

Unfortunately for the Afrikaners the moment in which they chose to assert their national independence occurred at the same time the anti-colonialist cause was triumphing. Great Britain, France, and the other great colonial powers of Europe, were withdrawing abandoning their colonies, giving up their empires, withdrawing their nationals, and handing power over to governments elected in democratic votes in the newly formed countries that were their former colonies. This did not work out well for these new “countries”. In her fourth chapter Ilana Mercer discusses how the rest of Africa has fared in the post-colonial era and in her fifth chapter, masterfully explodes what she calls “the colonialism canard”, i.e., the myth promoted by celebrity do-gooders and other progressive twits, that all of the suffering and poverty and tribal warfare in present day Africa is the fault of European colonialism.

The world, however, was convinced of the righteousness of anti-colonialism and the South African situation smacked of colonialism to the progressives, even though the Afrikaners were not colonial nationals of any European power, and had no home country in Europe to return to. South Africa was their home country. They had, in fact, been there longer than many of the black tribes. This meant nothing to anti-colonialist, progressives, who smugly and self-righteously condemned the Afrikaners and demanded that South Africa kowtow to world opinion and reorganize itself according to the majority-rule ideal.

William F. Buckley Jr. once said “Some day, when you have nothing else to do, come up with a solution for South Africa, won’t you? But remember the rules of the game. All the marbles have to end up each in a cavity—you can’t just throw a few of them away, to make the game simpler.”

No such solution appeared to be possible. Majority rule in South Africa would have been an injustice to the Afrikaners. Apartheid was an injustice to South African blacks. It was not intended to be such. The word “apartheid” refers to the condition of being separate. The National Party used this term in the sense of “separate development”. The Republic, would be a representative government elected by the Afrikaner nation and other white South Africans. The blacks would be assigned to tribal homelands where they could develop their own forms of self-government. That way the Afrikaners would not be subjected to the injustice of being permanently dominated by the black majority, and the blacks would be able to develop on their own in their own homelands.

While that might sound reasonable on paper there was no way of justly putting it into practice. It required a strict and petty system of racial classification backed up by racial hygiene laws, and, since the white South Africans did not wish to ban blacks from working on their farms and in their factories, curfews and pass-laws that were strictly, and sometimes brutally, enforced by the police.

This is what the world saw in apartheid.

This is what countless people, including Ilana Mercer’s father Rabbi Ben Isaacson protested against.

That is was unjust is undeniable. This reviewer does not deny that and Mrs. Mercer states it frequently throughout her book.

It is a question of which is the greater injustice – apartheid, or the injustice that has resulted from the rise of the ANC to power as a result of the introduction of majoritarian democracy to South Africa. Most people avoid this question. Mrs. Mercer tackles it head on and does not hesitate to give the honest answer.

Which is the greater injustice, being barred from voting in an election or being denied the rule of law and subjected to an onslaught of violent crime?

The ANC has proven unable – or unwilling – to maintain law and order in South Africa and a massive outbreak of violent crime has been the result. In her first chapter, Mrs. Mercer provides illustrations of the brutality of this crime, then provides us with an analysis of crime statistics from South Africa that show how it has become one of the most violent countries in the world and how the South African government and the South Africa Police Service try to disguise this fact. She shows how, even using the ANCs doctored statistics, the rate of victimization for blacks and whites alike is at least three times higher under democracy than under the old regime. She talks about how the ANC has passed and is passing laws that make it harder for people to legally defend themselves against home invasions and other violent crimes that are on the rise. She also takes a look at the racial statistics of crime in both South Africa and the United States which show that the perpetration of violent crime is not close to being equally divided between the races and that while there certainly is a lot of racially motivated crime, it is not, for the most part, committed by whites against blacks, a fact one would never know from the news media.

In her second chapter Mrs. Mercer shows how violence against the Afrikaners, especially the Boer farmers, since 1994 can only be described as a genocide. Over 3000 white farmers have been killed in South Africa since the ANC came to power. The number of Afrikaners murdered each year in South Africa exceeds the total number of blacks killed by the police in the entire history of apartheid. Mrs. Mercer quotes from genocide experts like Dr. Gregory Stanton of “Genocide Watch” who say that the rates and manner in which the farmers are being killed points to systematic extermination. She also shows the genocidal intentions of the ANC from their chants and slogans, and from the words of their leaders.

After the revelations of the second chapter, the third chapter might seem rather moderate. It is about the BEE program. BEE stands for “Black Economic Empowerment” and is an affirmative action program taken to the nth degree. Mrs. Mercer describes it as a “phased process” that “requires that all enterprises, public and private, make their workforce demographically representative of the country’s racial profile” (p. 94) If this sounds reasonable to you, Mrs. Mercer shows how this corrupt policy, under which whites have been forced to sell large parts of their companies to blacks (and lend the blacks the money to buy them) fits in to the ANC’s overall policy towards private property. Private property and the rule of law are two essential components of the kind of productive, civilized economy the Republic of South Africa had prior to 1994. The country can now no longer feed itself, the average standard of living for black South Africans as well as whites, has declined under ANC rule, and a large class of unemployed, poor, whites has developed.

If all of this sounds like South Africa is heading rapidly in the direction in which the former Rhodesia went after Western governments (including, ironically, that of apartheid South Africa) forced Ian Smith’s government to hand over power to a democratically elected government that was soon thereafter be taken over by Robert Mugabe, then turn to chapter four. As bad as Mugabe is, Mr. Mercer argues, the problems his country faces are deeper than just himself and so will survive him. They are problems that can be found all across Africa – including the South Africa of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki who remain saints in the eyes of the Western media long after “Comrade Bob” fell into disgrace.

The person of Nelson Mandela is not a major focus of the book overall but it does come up briefly in this chapter. Here we see the real Nelson Mandela – the head of the MK, the incompetent terrorist wing of the African National Congress, the anthem of which calls for genocide against whites. No prisoner of conscience, he was arrested for attempted sabotage and sentenced to prison for conspiracy against the government. He later turned down that government’s offer to let him out if he would give up violence. Unsuccessful in their attempts to unseat the Nationalist government – it took economic pressure from the rest of the world to do that – his organization was much more successful in terrorizing other blacks who they brutalized with methods like the notorious “necklacing”, involving gas-soaked tires being thrown around people and then set on fire.

Why on earth did Western countries insist that a man like this be released from prison and applaud when he was elected into power?

In her seventh chapter, Mrs. Mercer discusses the betrayal of South Africa by the major English-speaking countries. Although she describes herself as a “classical liberal”, her arguments in this chapter are the arguments of a classical conservative. Liberty requires order, democracy is not the same thing as freedom, can be tyrannical if the proper cultural institutions are not in place to make it compatible with liberty, and is best practiced on a small-scale in say, a city. She draws parallels between the crusade to force majoritarianism on South Africa with the more recent American military campaign to bring democracy to Iraq. Both democratization campaigns worked out badly for the countries involved.

At the same time that the United States has embarked upon a crusade to bring democracy to the world she has opened her doors to mass immigration from the Third World. Mrs. Mercer explains the follies of the American immigration system which is unnecessarily leading to the kind of ethnic strife in America that is killing the land of her birth. What she says of America’s immigration system is also true of Canada’s, and virtually every other Western countries. There are lessons we all can learn from this book.

My only criticism of this book is that in the chapter where she discussed Israel, Israel’s friendship with the Old South Africa and betrayal by the New South Africa, and related subjects, she seemed to send a contradictory message, by pointing to the obvious parallels between the two countries on the one hand, and displaying indignation over the Left’s pro-Palestinian references to “Israeli apartheid” on the other. Unless she wishes to argue absurdly that everything Israel does is intrinsically just, a far better response to the leftists on this point, is to turn their own argument against them. At their insistence, Western countries boycotted South Africa and forced her to change her policies. Those policies were not the most just policies in the world, but the changes we forced upon South Africa have led to chaos, violence, and the death of a civilized country. That is exactly the same thing that will happen in Israel if we force her to give in to the Left’s demands. The parallels between Israel and pre-1994 South Africa make for a strong pro-Israeli, rather than anti-Israeli, argument if used properly.

In addition to recommending this book for personal reading, I would recommend that you talk to your local bookstores and encourage them to stock it on their shelves. Its message needs to be spread more widely than is possible when it is only available for special order.