Thursday, September 16, 2021
From a white Canadian entrepreneur who has lived in Joburg and Cape Town for the past decade:
I'm enjoying your articles because they show the arc of learning that should come with any travel experience. Bringing in Baartman, Park, Mandela, etc. Nice range of characters and time periods.
It's too bad that some of your readers seem more committed to their biases than open to learning from your lived experiences on the ground, in the place itself. And some of the comments, of course, betray a vicious ignorance which leaves such a bad taste in your mouth. Gee whiz. Yah, why bother writing for such assholes.
Meanwhile, they're screaming "White genocide!" from their fart-infused recliners, dumping Velveeta mac-in-cheese in their laps when they don't read about the racial holocaust they've been imagining. And you're walking around in Camps Bay, in Sea Point, in Kloof, the Waterfront and...well...the white people are just chilling, sipping locally grown wine on their ocean facing apartment balconies, perfectly content with their station in life. "If this is what white genocide looks like," say the white people sampling tapas at La Parada in Hout Bay, "then I want some too!"
But, yah, shame. It seems like some of those readers only valued writing that re-confirmed their prior opinions about things. What a waste of their literacy.
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9 comments:
Sorry to see you leave Unz because of idiot commenters. It is in the nature of poets to be sensitive.
Some people are too childish to think that anti-black racism and black dysfunction can both exist. To pretend the former did not exist in *Apartheid South Africa* is delusion on an epic scale. If any group monopolises political power, they will tend to abuse it.
What will happen, long-term, to SA is an interesting question. In Malaysia they have a workable compromise - the Chinese create the wealth, and the Malays tax it via a bloated bureaucracy and affirmative action. The result is still a First World country.
Of course, in Malaysia the Chinese are 40% of the population and the Malays are vastly more functional, on average than SA blacks. So stuff like keeping the electricity supply up, and providing clean drinking water is easily doable.
Something like that, but maybe less functional, should be possible in SA.
The danger is that some Malema style demagogue will always have an incentive to gain power by promising wholesale expropriation. That will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but the demagogue will have gained power and riches and only his lowly voters will suffer.
Yep, there is no White genocide in South Africa. The Afrikaners, who don't want to speak English in South Africa, go overseas to badmouth South Africa in English, and the people overseas believe them. Crime is very violent in South Africa, but I won't go into the reasons for that because I'll sound too negative. All I'll say is guess how the 10% kept the 90% in check. Hint: its similar to how the Spartans kept the majority Helots in check.
Hi gT,
You say, "Crime is very violent in South Africa, but I won't go into the reasons for that because I'll sound too negative."
Do explain. Thanks!
Linh
Hi jimmyriddle,
Is there any chance of the Western Cape and Northern Cape breaking away to form its own country in, say, the next five years? I'd think that's the ideal solution for the people in this area, of any color.
Linh
Ok, you asked for it. First I have to build up some context. In Congo the colonialists introduced the practice of chopping hands off. Google the history behind the name Antwerp in Belgium, it means " to throw the hands", in other words chop off the hands and throw them away. That is the practice that Belgium introduced to the Congo regions, and which is still practiced there to this day, usually the hands are chopped off at an angle on the forearm, you can see some beggars on the street corners in South Africa with those injuries sometimes. The Germans done the well known genocides in Namibia. So now, between the highly civilized nations of Belgium and Germany, lies the highly civilized country of the Netherlands, from which the Dutch in South Africa came.
In South Africa at the turn of Apartheid I was always intrigued to read about the different torture methods criminals employed in different regions. Then I was further intrigued to learn that different Police security branch units preferred different torture methods, and these correlated with the same torture methods the criminals in those regions employed.
Furthermore, it soon became apparent that the Ndebele Zimbabwean criminals practiced some seriously diabolical arts. Then it turned out that these originated from the North Korean trained Shona battalions in Zimbabwe, who practiced it on the Ndebele. During Apartheid, the most violence always occurred in KwaZulu-Natal, that is where the farm murders are highest today.
The pattern was clear, the criminals learn from what was done to them. So they employed such enhanced interrogation techniques when questioning their victims about bank card pin codes, firearm locations, and the like. Quite often they just torture and kill and rape for the fun of it. Most of the violence is Black on Black violence, as in the States, but occasionally Whites do get targeted. White farmers are easy prey, they live one family per farm, with roughly 50'000 farms spread out across South Africa, so the farmers are dispersed from each other, they are not clustered together for security.
Combined with the high unemployment levels in South Africa, its obvious why South Africa is in the grip of the current low level civil war all the time.
The death of Eugene Terreblanche (surname means White Earth), the founder of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB -Afrikaner Resistance Movement) was particularly interesting. He had a habit of sharing his bed with traumatized White youth from broken homes, to comfort them he said. Anyway, he raped one of his farm workers and the guy came back with a friend to pay Eugene a visit. The police found Eugene dead on his bed with his pants round his knees. Eugene's speeches were legendary, he was into speech and drama and acted in plays. The way he used to thunder, pause in his speeches, and raise his finger, Hitler would have been proud. Except Eugene was definitely a Brownshirt SA and not an SS. I doubt Eugene was welcome in Orania as he was not 100% White.
Hi gT,
Many thanks for this. It is certainly an education for me. Please never hesitate to share your knowledge of South Africa with the rest of us.
Thanks again,
Linh
re "Capexit", rationally they should have done that before 1992.
There are so many difficulties now. Even if it could be done without massive violence and rebellion, only select secessionits are recognized by the West, based on ruling class interests - Kosovo yes, Somaliland no, Golan Heights yes, Crimea no etc
Then the Afrikaners in the rest of SA would have to give up everything, including 200 year old roots. It's like telling Ohians and Kentuckyans to go back to the 13 states. It is probably the best long-term option for whites and Coloureds and Indians, but it is a big ask, while the status quo is still survivable.
gT - Blaming Leopold for all Congolese savagery is trite. Right now, the Bakongo are eating MButi pygmies. They don't.consider this cannibalism (when they eat fellow Bantu, they do consider it such). That is hardcore racism, and with roots going all the way back to the Niger-Congo expansion.
Che Guevara had some spicy things to say about that, which would horrify most of the kids who wear the t-shirt.
Also Ryszard Kapuscinki's Another Day of Life has some descriptions of the CIA/BOSS backed FNLA Bakongo militia cannibalism in Angola.
Agreed, the cannibalism is not from Antwerp, but the chopping of the hands business most definitely is. Some say over 10 million Congolese were wiped out by the Belgians, that is a genocide which is just not talked about. The Niger-Congo expansion has got to be stopped at the borders of the Cape by the Cape going independent, else they are just going to do there what they have done elsewhere.
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