The collapse of South Africa?

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nein51
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Not appreciably different here
Redbrickbear
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[ here's a must-read review essay by Helen Andrews, about a new nonfiction book on post-apartheid South Africa, written by an American liberal named Eve Fairbanks, who emigrated there. I've been meaning to publish here the transcript of a long interview I did with a white South African student I met, but I've been holding it for my European Conservative column, which keeps somehow not getting launched. Anyway, here's Andrews, on how the only African nation with an advanced economy and infrastructure is in collapse because after apartheid ended, the new black rulers kicked out the competent whites, and installed their own cronies to run farms, industries, and the like. The trouble is, South African didn't have enough educated, experienced blacks to replace the whites. Here's Andrews, after mentioning Malaika, a young black South African born after apartheid's end, who nevertheless looked at the bright lights of Johannesburg and concluded that whites had electric power because they stole it:

Quote:

South Africa was better situated than any other post-colonial nation in Africa to achieve stability and prosperity. It had abundant natural resources, a thriving manufacturing sector, and the continent's best university system. What really went wrong was this: it took European civilization centuries to get from dirt-floor shacks to working light switches. Behind those advances stood revolutions in science, industry, religion, and social interaction. Those cultural prerequisites were invisible to Malaika as she gazed out the bus window at the lights of Johannesburg, but they turned out to be essential.

This below is exactly what the white South African PhD student told me about life back home:

Quote:

South Africa has come full circle: Under apartheid, electricity was unreliable in black townships; after 30 years of ANC rule, electricity is unreliable everywhere. Middle-class homes own gas generators as a matter of course in case of sudden outages. Even mineral and metal mines, the powerhouses of the economy, cannot count on a steady supply of power, which is one reason why AngloGold Ashanti, a successor company of Anglo American, closed its last remaining gold-mining operations in South Africa in 2020, the end of a streak dating back to Ernest Oppenheimer's founding the company in 1917.
Every suburban home is equipped with fortress-like gates and electric fences to prevent break-ins and push-in robberies, as well as with neighborhood private security to substitute for the ineffectual police. Trucks are robbed on the highway so frequently that the port of Durban is losing business to Mozambique, where the roads are safer. Railroad companies find it impossible to maintain service on lines where vandals have ripped up the tracks to sell for scrap. Food imports keep rising as the country becomes less and less able to feed itself due to misguided agricultural policy, aimed more at redistributing land to favored constituents than to producing crops.
Fairbanks believes that much of this supposed deterioration exists only in the minds of whites. When she is robbed at gunpoint by a gang of young black men and for weeks feels anxiety walking down the street, she goes to "two white therapists," she explains, because "I worried my reaction was irrational and racially biased." Ordinary South Africans don't have the luxury of interrogating so scrupulously their responses to criminality. They just have to navigate their way through increasingly Third-World conditions. Although Fairbanks is not a tourist, having lived in South Africa for more than a decade, she never had to raise a child or operate a business there. Those activities would have made it harder for her to believe that crumbling infrastructure was all in the mind.

After apartheid, many white farms were purchased by the government and redistributed to blacks favored by the regime. As Andrews tells it, Fairbanks writes about a mixed-race man named Michael, who was involved in this land reform project. He became disillusioned after realizing that he was handing over sophisticated farming operations to illiterate subsistence farmers and if he asked them what made them think they were capable of running such a complex operation, they accused him of believing that blacks weren't as good as whites. More:
Quote:

"We blacks saw businesses we thought had no challenges," a failing farmer tells her. "But we were lying to ourselves." There you have it in a nutshell. Black South Africans thought their white neighbors were rich because of the things they had. As it turned out, nice things didn't stay nice for very long without the codes of behavior that kept them nice. Being a white South African looked very easy from the outside, but it turned out to depend on lots of little habits that, even with the best will in the world, would have been hard to explain in advance.

Again, read the entire review essay.
Redbrickbear
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Redbrickbear
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Harrison Bergeron
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Redbrickbear said:

[ here's a must-read review essay by Helen Andrews, about a new nonfiction book on post-apartheid South Africa, written by an American liberal named Eve Fairbanks, who emigrated there. I've been meaning to publish here the transcript of a long interview I did with a white South African student I met, but I've been holding it for my European Conservative column, which keeps somehow not getting launched. Anyway, here's Andrews, on how the only African nation with an advanced economy and infrastructure is in collapse because after apartheid ended, the new black rulers kicked out the competent whites, and installed their own cronies to run farms, industries, and the like. The trouble is, South African didn't have enough educated, experienced blacks to replace the whites. Here's Andrews, after mentioning Malaika, a young black South African born after apartheid's end, who nevertheless looked at the bright lights of Johannesburg and concluded that whites had electric power because they stole it:

Quote:

South Africa was better situated than any other post-colonial nation in Africa to achieve stability and prosperity. It had abundant natural resources, a thriving manufacturing sector, and the continent's best university system. What really went wrong was this: it took European civilization centuries to get from dirt-floor shacks to working light switches. Behind those advances stood revolutions in science, industry, religion, and social interaction. Those cultural prerequisites were invisible to Malaika as she gazed out the bus window at the lights of Johannesburg, but they turned out to be essential.

This below is exactly what the white South African PhD student told me about life back home:

Quote:

South Africa has come full circle: Under apartheid, electricity was unreliable in black townships; after 30 years of ANC rule, electricity is unreliable everywhere. Middle-class homes own gas generators as a matter of course in case of sudden outages. Even mineral and metal mines, the powerhouses of the economy, cannot count on a steady supply of power, which is one reason why AngloGold Ashanti, a successor company of Anglo American, closed its last remaining gold-mining operations in South Africa in 2020, the end of a streak dating back to Ernest Oppenheimer's founding the company in 1917.
Every suburban home is equipped with fortress-like gates and electric fences to prevent break-ins and push-in robberies, as well as with neighborhood private security to substitute for the ineffectual police. Trucks are robbed on the highway so frequently that the port of Durban is losing business to Mozambique, where the roads are safer. Railroad companies find it impossible to maintain service on lines where vandals have ripped up the tracks to sell for scrap. Food imports keep rising as the country becomes less and less able to feed itself due to misguided agricultural policy, aimed more at redistributing land to favored constituents than to producing crops.
Fairbanks believes that much of this supposed deterioration exists only in the minds of whites. When she is robbed at gunpoint by a gang of young black men and for weeks feels anxiety walking down the street, she goes to "two white therapists," she explains, because "I worried my reaction was irrational and racially biased." Ordinary South Africans don't have the luxury of interrogating so scrupulously their responses to criminality. They just have to navigate their way through increasingly Third-World conditions. Although Fairbanks is not a tourist, having lived in South Africa for more than a decade, she never had to raise a child or operate a business there. Those activities would have made it harder for her to believe that crumbling infrastructure was all in the mind.

After apartheid, many white farms were purchased by the government and redistributed to blacks favored by the regime. As Andrews tells it, Fairbanks writes about a mixed-race man named Michael, who was involved in this land reform project. He became disillusioned after realizing that he was handing over sophisticated farming operations to illiterate subsistence farmers and if he asked them what made them think they were capable of running such a complex operation, they accused him of believing that blacks weren't as good as whites. More:
Quote:

"We blacks saw businesses we thought had no challenges," a failing farmer tells her. "But we were lying to ourselves." There you have it in a nutshell. Black South Africans thought their white neighbors were rich because of the things they had. As it turned out, nice things didn't stay nice for very long without the codes of behavior that kept them nice. Being a white South African looked very easy from the outside, but it turned out to depend on lots of little habits that, even with the best will in the world, would have been hard to explain in advance.

Again, read the entire review essay.
I would advise this should be a good warning for regressive American wokies, but that would imply I had confidence in their abilities to use reason and data.
Golem
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Redbrickbear said:




Parasites took over the greatest economy in all of Africa, created by Afrikaners, and continue to destroy it. The ANC are representative of black South Africans, which is an indictment of black South Africans.
KaiBear
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Golem said:

Redbrickbear said:




Parasites took over the greatest economy in all of Africa, created by Afrikaners, and continue to destroy it. The ANC are representative of black South Africans, which is an indictment of black South Africans.
Another Haiti in the making .
Redbrickbear
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Redbrickbear
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Redbrickbear
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KaiBear
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D. C. Bear said:

I think you are talking to a bot.


Good catch.

I can rarely tell anymore .
Redbrickbear
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Harrison Bergeron
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there seems to be a pattern across the world - the US, Europe, Africa .... wonder what it is.
Redbrickbear
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KaiBear
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Redbrickbear said:


'At least for now.'


Someone needs to copyright that phrase and make an easy couple of million bucks.
Waco1947
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nein51 said:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-south-africas-collapse-finally-came-down-to-eskom/

I'm not sure it's possible to discuss SA without sounding like a raging racist. I'll leave it at this; basically every metric shows everyone (black and white) were better off under apartheid.No, aparttheid reduce blacks to 2nd class citizens and ekp the racism going.

My stepson's dad is from SA and I can tell you his family vacillates from sad to angry about what is happening there.
Waco1947
nein51
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Waco1947 said:

nein51 said:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-south-africas-collapse-finally-came-down-to-eskom/

I'm not sure it's possible to discuss SA without sounding like a raging racist. I'll leave it at this; basically every metric shows everyone (black and white) were better off under apartheid.No, aparttheid reduce blacks to 2nd class citizens and ekp the racism going.

My stepson's dad is from SA and I can tell you his family vacillates from sad to angry about what is happening there.


Except every metric shows black and white SAs were better off.
whiterock
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nein51 said:

Waco1947 said:

nein51 said:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-south-africas-collapse-finally-came-down-to-eskom/

I'm not sure it's possible to discuss SA without sounding like a raging racist. I'll leave it at this; basically every metric shows everyone (black and white) were better off under apartheid.No, aparttheid reduce blacks to 2nd class citizens and ekp the racism going.

My stepson's dad is from SA and I can tell you his family vacillates from sad to angry about what is happening there.


Except every metric shows black and white SAs were better off.
Was true in Zim, too....
nein51
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whiterock said:

nein51 said:

Waco1947 said:

nein51 said:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-south-africas-collapse-finally-came-down-to-eskom/

I'm not sure it's possible to discuss SA without sounding like a raging racist. I'll leave it at this; basically every metric shows everyone (black and white) were better off under apartheid.No, aparttheid reduce blacks to 2nd class citizens and ekp the racism going.

My stepson's dad is from SA and I can tell you his family vacillates from sad to angry about what is happening there.


Except every metric shows black and white SAs were better off.
Was true in Zim, too....

They lack the necessary resources to have any other outcome. You can't simply get rid of all the whites in executive positions, replace them with blacks and get a favorable result.

It turns out running an electric grid or water system, for example, takes knowledge that, at this time, black SAs don't have. That's not a knock, btw, I don't know how to do those things either.

There is also, very much, a feeling that "white people did this to us so the white people have to go". You would think a look around at places that were not colonized or not to the same extent would show them that things could be much worse. Look at Ethiopia or Somalia, for example.

However, part of me wants to see the whites just up and leave. Careful what you wish for and all.
Redbrickbear
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KaiBear
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whiterock said:

nein51 said:

Waco1947 said:

nein51 said:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-south-africas-collapse-finally-came-down-to-eskom/

I'm not sure it's possible to discuss SA without sounding like a raging racist. I'll leave it at this; basically every metric shows everyone (black and white) were better off under apartheid.No, aparttheid reduce blacks to 2nd class citizens and ekp the racism going.

My stepson's dad is from SA and I can tell you his family vacillates from sad to angry about what is happening there.


Except every metric shows black and white SAs were better off.
Was true in Zim, too....


Try explaining this reality to your average Dem voter.
Redbrickbear
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Redbrickbear
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Redbrickbear
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whiterock
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nein51 said:

whiterock said:

nein51 said:

Waco1947 said:

nein51 said:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-south-africas-collapse-finally-came-down-to-eskom/

I'm not sure it's possible to discuss SA without sounding like a raging racist. I'll leave it at this; basically every metric shows everyone (black and white) were better off under apartheid.No, aparttheid reduce blacks to 2nd class citizens and ekp the racism going.

My stepson's dad is from SA and I can tell you his family vacillates from sad to angry about what is happening there.


Except every metric shows black and white SAs were better off.
Was true in Zim, too....

They lack the necessary resources to have any other outcome. You can't simply get rid of all the whites in executive positions, replace them with blacks and get a favorable result.

It turns out running an electric grid or water system, for example, takes knowledge that, at this time, black SAs don't have. That's not a knock, btw, I don't know how to do those things either.

There is also, very much, a feeling that "white people did this to us so the white people have to go". You would think a look around at places that were not colonized or not to the same extent would show them that things could be much worse. Look at Ethiopia or Somalia, for example.

However, part of me wants to see the whites just up and leave. Careful what you wish for and all.
Ironically, the larger percentage of white population in RSA makes that dynamic worse than it was in Zim, where whites were 4% of the population. Rhodies HAD to train indigenous mid-level management. Weren't enough whites to run the whole thing. So there actually was a good base of experience and knowledge at independence.

Same is not exactly the case in RSA. Whites were nearly a quarter of the population, enough to run the system directly and primarily tap indige for labor only (to a greater degree than Zim, at least.)

Race relations were much worse in RSA than Zim......
Wrecks Quan Dough
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Redbrickbear said:


That basket case country is one of Russia's BRICS partners.
muddybrazos
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Why cant the US give these people asylum since they're actually facing certain death?
nein51
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You're assuming they want to leave. The worst part is that [in large part] the black farmers don't have the resources to run a large scale farm so it's likely all a waste. They aren't even gaining anything.

I really wanted my 15 3/4 yr old to go visit his homeland for graduation but, right now, I'm just not sure that's safe enough to do.
KaiBear
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Redbrickbear said:


Our media is biased against white people, so what happens in South Africa is largely unknown here.
muddybrazos
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nein51 said:

You're assuming they want to leave. The worst part is that [in large part] the black farmers don't have the resources to run a large scale farm so it's likely all a waste. They aren't even gaining anything.

I really wanted my 15 3/4 yr old to go visit his homeland for graduation but, right now, I'm just not sure that's safe enough to do.
I dont know how safe it is but I have a good friend who just went last summer to do a hunt there and another guy I know is going at the end of the month to do a hunt with the same group. Apparently they fly into Jo'berg and then have to take a short flight out into the bush for the hunting preserve.
nein51
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muddybrazos said:

nein51 said:

You're assuming they want to leave. The worst part is that [in large part] the black farmers don't have the resources to run a large scale farm so it's likely all a waste. They aren't even gaining anything.

I really wanted my 15 3/4 yr old to go visit his homeland for graduation but, right now, I'm just not sure that's safe enough to do.
I dont know how safe it is but I have a good friend who just went last summer to do a hunt there and another guy I know is going at the end of the month to do a hunt with the same group. Apparently they fly into Jo'berg and then have to take a short flight out into the bush for the hunting preserve.

Yeah I have friends that do the safari thing as well. They moved their plans from SA this year to ZIM.
Jack Bauer
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Recent attacks on white farmers in South Africa:

August 3: Duwayne Smith murdered in front of his children. His wife was shot in the back and seriously injured.
August 2: Dr. Carel Nel was murdered on his farm in Biesiesvlei, North West.
July 30: Theo Bekker's throat was slit open. He died on the scene and his wife Marlinda was beaten and hospitalized.
July 28: Mr. Viljoen was brutally attacked on his Curuland farm and hospitalized.
July 25: Pietie Nel was overpowered on his farm by five armed attackers.
July 22: Mike Pattinson (67) was found with multiple wounds on Summerslie farm.
KaiBear
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Jack Bauer said:





Recent attacks on white farmers in South Africa:

August 3: Duwayne Smith murdered in front of his children. His wife was shot in the back and seriously injured.
August 2: Dr. Carel Nel was murdered on his farm in Biesiesvlei, North West.
July 30: Theo Bekker's throat was slit open. He died on the scene and his wife Marlinda was beaten and hospitalized.
July 28: Mr. Viljoen was brutally attacked on his Curuland farm and hospitalized.
July 25: Pietie Nel was overpowered on his farm by five armed attackers.
July 22: Mike Pattinson (67) was found with multiple wounds on Summerslie farm.
Its ok, the victim's were white.

So they deserved it.

Something similiar applies to black on white crime in the US.
Jack Bauer
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KaiBear said:

Jack Bauer said:





Recent attacks on white farmers in South Africa:

August 3: Duwayne Smith murdered in front of his children. His wife was shot in the back and seriously injured.
August 2: Dr. Carel Nel was murdered on his farm in Biesiesvlei, North West.
July 30: Theo Bekker's throat was slit open. He died on the scene and his wife Marlinda was beaten and hospitalized.
July 28: Mr. Viljoen was brutally attacked on his Curuland farm and hospitalized.
July 25: Pietie Nel was overpowered on his farm by five armed attackers.
July 22: Mike Pattinson (67) was found with multiple wounds on Summerslie farm.
Its ok, the victim's were white.

So they deserved it.

Something similiar applies to black on white crime in the US.

You know what's NOT ok? Smiling!



Jack Bauer
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Was there a punchline there I missed??

 
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