Several weeks ago, the South African parliament voted to alter their constitution to allow the state to expropriate white-owned lands without compensation. This decision was accompanied by the usual leftist gaslighting and equivocation – right after declaring that “the state should be the custodian of the land,” EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) leader Julius Malema “assured” the people that “no one will lose their house.” In the very next breath, he clarifies, “all we are saying is that they will not have ownership of the land.” “They,” of course, refers to the whites who the EFF accuses of “stealing” their land hundreds of years ago. “The time for reconciliation is over. Now is the time for justice,” Malema told the parliament. “We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land.”
So, like Robert Mugabe did a decade ago in Zimbabwe, the South African government will be confiscating the lands of the white farmers who are also the major force sustaining their economy. They will most likely be reeling from the effects after some time without these white “oppressors,” as Mugabe did in Zimbabwe, who eventually plead with the white farmers he chased away to come back and rescue his failing economy. Talk about “biting the hand that feeds you.”
Of course, this development is only the latest in a long campaign of white genocide that has been progressing ever since the African National Congress (ANC) took power in South Africa and white Afrikaner rule was ended. Many white South Africans have been tortured and murdered at the hands of black terrorists, often in extremely brutal ways. Meanwhile, the government looks the other way, and even openly encourages these murders. Ilana Mercer writes in her book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot”:
In the new South Africa, there is a renewed appreciation for the old slogan, “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,” chanted at political rallies and funerals during “The Struggle” (against apartheid). ANC youth leader Peter Mokaba is credited with originating the catch phrase. Mokaba went on to become a parliamentarian and a deputy minister in the Mandela cabinet. By the time he expired in 2002 at the age of forty three (rumor has it of AIDS), Mokaba had revived the riff, using it liberally, in defiance of laws against incitement to commit murder. Given the mesmerizing, often murderous, power of the chant ─ any chant ─ in African life, many blame Mokaba for the current onslaught against the country’s white farmers.
Mokaba’s legacy lives on. Late in February of 2010, a senior member of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) ─ a competing socialist, racialist political party whose motto is “Africa for the Africans” ─ set-up a page on the social networking site Facebook. For all to see were comments such as the following, written by one Ahmed El Saud:
“Kill the fucking whites now!!! If you afraid for [sic] them, lets [sic] do it for you. In return, you can pay us after the job has been done… text us … We are not afraid for [sic] the whites like your own people… its disgrace [sic] … he ask you and you dont [sic] want to… we will do it Mandela! [sic].”
Other messages matched the savagery of El Saud’s sentences, if not their syntax. One boasted of “an army of 3000 people ready to kill white people within a day if it were called upon to do so.” Western Cape PAC chairman Anwar Adams, the responsible functionary, refused to remove the page. Needless to say, his sinecure has not been affected.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) took a pixelated page out of the PAC’s Facebook. Days later, this post appeared on a Facebook page under the name of ANC Youth League president Julius Malema:
“You fucking white pigs. Malema is our leader. He will kill (President Jacob) Zuma within the next six weeks. “Look ahead, my fellow black people. We will then take our land, and every trespasser, namely white whores, we will rape them and rape them till the last breath is out. “White kids will be burned, especially those in Pretoria and Vrystaat. Men will be tortured while I take a video clip and spread it on YouTube,” read one post. It continued: “Its [sic] true what Malema said, silently we shall kill them … Police will stand together … our leader will lead us to take our land over. Mandela will smile again. “White naaiers, we coming for you! Households will be broken into and families will be slaughtered.”
Likewise, the international news media refuses to cover these murders and dismisses anyone who raises concern over the plight of South African whites as “racist” for even suggesting that white genocide is actually taking place in some part of the world. Fortunately, word is starting to get out (soon in the form of a new documentary by independent journalist Lauren Southern), but the anti-white killing spree shows no signs of subsiding. Mercer writes:
Not so long ago, mere mention of the deliberate murder of whites in South Africa—country folk and commercial farmers, in particular—was called “racist.” “Raaacist!” the media collective brayed when candidate Trump retweeted a related “white genocide” hashtag.
It’s still “racist” to suggest that the butchering of these whites, almost daily, in ways that beggar belief, is racially motivated. Positively scandalous is it to describe the ultimate goal of a killing spree, now in its third decade, thus: the ethnic cleansing of white, farming South Africa from land the community has cultivated since the 1600s.
Be thankful for small mercies: At least the international media monopoly is finally reporting facts, such as that just the other day Andre and Lydia Saaiman, aged 70, were hacked to death in Port Elizabeth. (Imagine being chopped up until you expire.)
Or, that the elderly Bokkie Potgieter was dealt a similar fate as he tended his small, KwaZulu-Natal holding. Potgeiter was butchered during the October “Black Monday” protest, which was a nation-wide demonstration to end the carnage. Internationally reported as well were the facts of Sue Howarth’s death. The 64-year-old pharmaceutical executive was tortured for hours with … a blowtorch.
This black-on-white murder spree has been ongoing since a dominant-party political dispensation (mobocracy) was “negotiated” in my homeland for South Africans. (Learn about “The American Architects of The South-African Catastrophe.”) But while the criminal evidence is at last out in the open, the motive for these hate crimes is only mumbled about for fear of offending the offenders.
But why is all of this happening? What could motivate such a vindictive campaign of ethnic genocide and the silencing of all dissent against it? The answer lies in a number of myths about South African history that are incessantly brought up by anti-white leftists as a “justification” for the anti-white policies being enacted today in South Africa.
Clearing Up The Record
The typical leftist understanding of South African history goes something like this: blacks were the original owners of South African land and were living in peace and prosperity until evil whitey showed up, kicked them off their land, and instituted a racist and oppressive apartheid regime. Then Nelson Mandela and the ANC came along and ended apartheid, and the South African government now is in the process of taking the country back for its rightful black owners. As such, the whites being robbed and killed are simply getting what they deserve, and the ANC government is simply giving back to South African blacks what was rightfully theirs to begin with.
But does this narrative comport with the historical facts? Let’s start from the beginning. What actually happened when white settlers first colonized South Africa? Did they kick out the indigenous black population, as is often claimed? Let’s take a look at the facts – first, is it even correct to assume that blacks were the “original” inhabitants of South Africa? Jack Sen of the European Knights Project writes:
Where is the archaeological proof that blacks ‘settled’ South Africa?
Apart from a few scattered archaeological remains found of black culture in the far northern Transvaal prior to 1652, it is generally agreed that blacks and whites were contemporary settlers of South Africa.
I use the term “Settler” loosely, because blacks never ‘settled’ South Africa; their presence was nomadic. Blacks were itinerants who travelled from place to place with no fixed home.
Whole capital “cities” of grass huts could be moved if grazing was exhausted. They had no demarcated areas, no fences, no borders, no maps, no title deeds to proof ownership of any land apart from a verbal claim and mutual understanding that their temporary presence in a certain area in a certain period of time constituted “ownership” of the land.
They left behind no foundations of buildings, no statues, no roads, no rock paintings, not a single proof of “settlement” of the land prior to the whites settling South Africa.
The only rock paintings were made by the Bushmen and the Hottentots (Khoi-Khoi and San) in the caves they temporarily occupied. Blacks were pastoral-nomads and the Bushmen/Hottentots were hunter-gatherer-nomads.
It turns out, then, that blacks were not in fact the “original settlers” of South Africa, but were largely nomads who occasionally ventured into South Africa to graze their herds. But otherwise, they demonstrated little intention of claiming the land they temporarily used as their own property, and had “no title deeds to proof ownership of any land apart from a verbal claim and mutual understanding that their temporary presence in a certain area in a certain period of time constituted ‘ownership’ of the land.” So while one might argue that black South Africans had “first use of the land,” few if any objective links exist today to clearly demarcate which land was truly “theirs” in the sense of actual property ownership. But what happened when whites settled South Africa? Sen continues:
Whites, on the other hand, built cities, railroads, dams and a first world country comparable to the best in Europe and the new world…their legacy speaks of a people who intended to live there for a thousand years, if not eternity.
To claim that ‘the whole of Africa belongs to Blacks’ is absurd. It is like an Italian claiming the whole of Europe belongs to Italians, including Norway.
In fact, the pyramids of Egypt are proof of white settlement going back thousands of years—and also the Phoenicians settling Carthage and the Greeks settling Alexandria.
The Arabs settled North Africa soon after the Prophet Mohammed died and the whites settled Southern Africa from 1652 onwards. Today there are three Africas as Dr. Eschel Rhoodie calls it in his book “The Third Africa” (1968)… Arabic up north, Black in the centre and Whites at the south…
The white settlers of the Cape first came face to face with the Bantu around 1770 on the banks of the Great Fish River, 120 years after Van Riebeeck came to the Cape and 1000 km east of Cape Town.
Although the Dutch did come into contact with various other nomadic tribes fairly early on in the settlement process, the interaction was initially peaceful. The Khoikhoi (or Hottentots), for instance, traded cattle and vegetables to the Dutch in exchange for European craftwork and other assorted goods. As the Dutch settlers began homesteading new lands, however, the Khoikhoi began to resist and took to attacking Dutch settlers and stealing cattle, which sparked a series of wars between the Dutch and the Khoikhoi, in which the latter were decisively defeated. Were the Dutch settlers the aggressors here? Only if one ignores the fact that they were the first ones to actually homestead the land by establishing objective, tangible markers to indicate their ownership. While the nomadic Khoikhoi tribes may well have been the first users of the land, by failing to establish objective links to prove their ownership in their seasonal absence from the land, they effectively forfeited their ownership claim to the Dutch settlers. For the burden of proof in any property dispute falls not on the current possessors/users, but on the one provoking the conflict. The Dutch settlers, by claiming land on which there was no indication of an owner, cannot be said to be the ones provoking the conflict. Rather, it is the nomadic herders who, in failing to clearly demarcate the boundaries of their grazing lands and attacking and stealing from the Dutch who then settled the land, must be considered the aggressors.
Now let’s take a look at the Natives Land Act of 1913, the law that is often cited by those who accuse whites of “stealing” land from black natives. More from Sen:
There is a common belief in South Africa that the Natives Land Act of 1913 shoved blacks on reserves (‘7 percent of the land’) and ‘prohibited them from buying land in white areas’. That ‘whites forcibly removed blacks to these reserves and that these reserves were on the worst land in the country with no mineral riches and that whites kept all the best land and minerals for themselves’.
[…]
Black tribal areas, secured, not defined, by the 1913 Land Act.
First of all the biggest Platinum reserves in the world run through the former Black homeland of Bophuthatswana (North West province).
The former Nationalist government had no problem allocating this area to the Tswana tribes for self-rule—although they already had a massive country called Botswana given to them by the British. It was originally part of South Africa, called Bechuanaland.
Blacks further got another two massive countries from the British called Lesotho and Swaziland. There goes their 7 percent.
So were black indigenous peoples “kicked off” their land by the evil colonizing whites? To the contrary, it seems that they were actually granted additional lands by the white settlers – land which was secured, not taken away, by the 1913 Land Act.
Sen explains more regarding the geography and climate of South Africa:
When one compares the rainfall map of South Africa and anybody with elementary knowledge of South Africa will tell you that the largest part of South Africa is called the Karoo. It is a semi desert comparable to Arizona or Nevada in the USA.
Blacks never even entered this area let alone settled it. Whites made it blossom and created successful sheep farms producing meat of world quality.
Black “settlements” are found on the north and east coast of South Africa. The East Coast has a sub-tropical climate and the north a prairie-like climate with summer rainfall and thunderstorms. An exception to this is the Western Cape with a Mediterranean climate and winter rainfall.
The northern and eastern part of South Africa with its beautiful green grasslands and fertile soil is where the blacks eventually coalesced and this is the land they chose for themselves. Their eventual homelands were found on the land they inhabited out of their own free will.
The Afrikaners even have a song praising the greenness of Natal, called “Groen is die land van Natal” (Green is the land of Natal). It was perfect grazing area for the cattle herding blacks.
So it is not only blatantly false that the Boers kicked indigenous black people off their rightfully owned lands, but we can see that these “white oppressors” actually allowed them to have the best lands, while the Boers ended up settling primarily in desert areas which the indigenous blacks for the most part never attempted to homestead themselves.
But what about Apartheid? Don’t black South Africans deserve reparations after all the oppression they endured under Apartheid? Surely we must recognize the white Afrikaner regime as evil and unjust, like all the respectable voices out there, must we not? A look at the historical realities on the ground, however, calls this narrative into question. Here’s another excerpt from Mercer’s “Into the Cannibal’s Pot”:
Except for Rhodesia before Mugabe, minority-ruled South Africa, with all its depredations, offered Africans more than any other country on the Dark Continent. Patterns of migration have always functioned as clues to social reality. Then as now, “black migration patterns into South Africa far exceeded black migration patterns out of South Africa.” Granted, entering African migrants were not “voting with their feet” for apartheid, but they were certainly voting for law and order and a livelihood.
In the “first twenty three years of apartheid, between 1948 and 1971, the South African economy grew at a rate of 4.5 percent.” Of course, in the famous words attributed to both Disraeli and Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Duly, Marxists put the high growth rate down to exploitation. However, when “exploitation” was replaced with “liberation” – and Africans broke free of the colonial yoke to gain political independence – they promptly established planned economies, in whose shadow nothing could grow, plunging their respective countries into despair and destitution.
[…]
While black Africa and East Europe circled the drain due to communism, South Africa was experiencing an economic explosion, courtesy of the NP’s [National Party’s] conservative economics, which columnist Andrew Kenny cautiously commends for “guarding some important aspects of private enterprise and protecting some vital areas of democracy,” to say nothing of maintaining the rule of law. An oasis in the African desert, South Africa’s economy grew at an annual rate of six percent during the 1960s. Time Magazine, BPC (before political correctness), crowned H.F. Verwoerd, the architect of this prosperity – and of “separate development” – “one of the ablest leaders Africa has ever produced.”
In his submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, F.W. de Klerk, who received a Nobel Peace prize for surrendering South Africa to the ANC, corrected the record: “Apartheid was not only about white privilege but also about development and redistribution of income from whites to blacks. The economy had grown by an average of 3.5 percent per year under apartheid, the black school population grew by 250 percent in the first twenty-five years of apartheid, and the black share of total personal income had nearly doubled from twenty percent in the mid-1970s to thirty seven percent in 1995, while that of whites declined from seventy one to forty nine percent.” As bad as the Bantu Education system was, it vastly improved black literacy. Twelve years into the Nationalist government’s rule, the rate of literacy among the Bantu of South Africa was already higher than that of any other state in Africa, or that of India.
So we see that the Apartheid regime, for all its “discrimination” and “racism,” nonetheless was a vast improvement for the lives of many black Africans in South Africa – so much so, in fact, that many black Africans were choosing to move to South Africa for the higher standard of living that many experienced there compared to that of their homelands. A similar observation can be made today regarding Western, white-populated countries in general. For all the talk of “systematic racism” and “oppression” that SJWs love to go on about, the fact remains that many non-whites choose to move to these countries as well in spite of that. This is, of course, a fact that these SJWs are well aware of, since they are also fond of encouraging open borders and mass non-white immigration to Western countries. In short, the left simultaneously condemns white countries for “racism” and “oppression” while supporting unrestricted access to the benefits of white countries for non-whites. Again, talk about “biting the hand that feeds you.”
The entire legacy of European colonization in South Africa, in fact, can be summarized essentially the same way as that of apartheid. Economic development and higher standards of living, for one – Mercer writes:
From their plush apartments, over groaning dinner tables, pseudo-intellectuals have the luxury of depicting squalor and sickness as idyllic, primordially peaceful and harmonious. After all, when the affluent relinquish their earthly possessions to return to the simple life, it is always with aid of sophisticated technology and the option to be air-lifted to a hospital if the need arises.
Is there any wonder, then, that “the stereotype of colonial history” has been perpetuated by the relatively well-to-do intellectual elite? Theories of exploitation, Marxism for one, originated with Western intellectuals, not with African peasants. It is this clique alone that could afford to pile myth upon myth about a system that had benefited ordinary people.
What is meant by “benefited”? Naturally, the premise here is that development, so long as it’s not coerced, is desirable and material progress good. British colonists in Africa reduced the state of squalor, disease and death associated with lack of development. To the extent that this is condemned, the Rousseauist myth of the noble, happy savage is condoned. Granted, Africa’s poor did not elect to have these conditions, good and bad, foisted on them. However, once introduced to potable water, sanitation, transportation, and primary healthcare, few Africans wish to do without them. Fewer Africans still would wish to return to Native Customary Law once introduced to the idea that their lives were no longer the property of the Supreme Chief to do with as he pleased.
It “is an absurdity to assert that cannibalism, slavery, magical therapy, and killing the aged should be accorded the same ‘dignity’ or ‘validity’ as old-age security, scientific medicine, and metal artifacts,” noted anthropologist George Peter. While old habits die hard, most “people prefer Western technology and would rather be able to feed their children and elderly than kill them,” he notes in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. And the West largely eliminated “many of the worst endemic and epidemic diseases in West Africa.” Ask Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of South Africa’s former president Thabo Mbeki. He has admitted that “the average African is poorer [today] than during the age of colonialism.”
Even so—and whether they stay or go—the blame for all the ills of this backward and benighted region falls on Westerners. One dreadfully off-course notion has it that the colonial powers plundered Africa and failed to plow back profits into the place. This manifest absurdity is belied by the major agricultural, mineral, commercial and industrial installations throughout the continent. The infrastructure in Africa was built by the colonial powers. Far from draining wealth from less developed countries,” as P. T. Bauer richly documented, in Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion, “British industry helped to create it there.”
Not enough? Still think colonialism was evil and oppressive? How about the lower rates of violent crime against both whites and blacks? After all, #BlackLivesMatter, do they not? Mercer continues:
Few realize that during the decades of the apartheid regime a few hundred Africans in total perished as a direct and indirect consequence of police brutality. A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the death toll in “free” South Africa, where hundreds of Africans, white and black, perish weekly. Nor did apartheid’s casualties come close to the ANC’s during “the armed struggle.” Freedom’s forebears “necklaced” 400 non-combatants, and murdered hundreds more – Zulu opposition, state informers and witnesses, rural headmen, urban councilors, “and others perceived to be collaborators of the system or enemies of the ANC.” “Between 1976 and 1994,” writes Giliomee, “state agents deliberately killed between two hundred and three hundred people active in the struggle against the state.” It takes the free agents of democratic Azania only five days to kill as many of their fellow citizens
Still fewer realize that during the decades of the repressive – and reprehensible – apartheid regime, which ended officially in 1994, crime rates in South Africa were overall much lower; in whites-only areas they were not dissimilar to those in other Western countries. McCafferty, whose brief it was to compare “the number of murders in the ‘Old South Africa’ (under apartheid) … to the ‘New South Africa’ (post 1994) counted 309,583 murders over the forty-four years spanning 1950 to 1993. In the first eight years of the “new democratic dispensation,” 193,649 people were murdered. In other words, under apartheid, on average, 7,036 people were murdered each year, a small number compared to the carnage under the ANCniks: 24,206 annually. The latter is the South Africa Police Service’s low-ball estimation, which both Interpol and the South African Medical Research Council have disputed.
[…]
Doctored or diminished, the SAPS’s statistics spanning 2006 to 2007 reveal that 19,202 South Africa lives were lost (population 43,786,115) compared to the United States’ 16,574 (population 303,824,646). A yearly average of 19,202 murders (under democracy) still constitutes almost three times as many as 7.036 annual murders (under apartheid). Clearly, the era of apartheid remains a Golden Age with respect to the sanctity of life, for blacks and whites alike.
In summary, it is clear that contrary to mainstream opinion, colonization and apartheid were indisputably net positives for both the white settlers as well as the “discriminated-against” blacks. On the other hand, the rise of universal democracy in South Africa under Nelson Mandela and the ANC has ushered in violence, chaos, and the beginning of the end of South African economic prosperity. Even if it were true that white Afrikaners/Boers “owed” anything to black South Africans for any “oppression” they may have inflicted upon them, that sum has been more than paid in full in the form of the higher living standards, economic opportunity, and physical safety that blacks enjoyed under the apartheid regime compared to what they undoubtedly would have suffered had they thrown off the “yoke” of “colonial oppression” as many other African colonies did during the 20th century. There is no reason why white South Africans today should have to pay anything for their forefathers’ “crime” of making South Africa great.
In Defense of Property Rights
But even if it’s true that black South Africans were wronged in the past by white settlers, would that justify the actions of the ANC in expropriating the land of white farmers today? Is there a “libertarian” case for reparations here? Absolutely not.
As mentioned before, the burden of proof for rightful property ownership falls on those provoking the dispute over the property in question, not on the present users or possessors. Even if white settlers did “steal” land from indigenous blacks hundreds of years ago during colonization, the burden of proof today would fall on the people who wish to expropriate the land from white South Africans, not the other way around. One who wished to “reclaim” such land today would have to prove a superior objective link to the property in question to be able to justly take it from its present owner, which after the passage of several centuries becomes practically impossible due to all the exchanges the property goes through as well as the passing of the original victims and those connected to them. It is highly doubtful that any of the terrorists in the EFF/AMC who are murdering Boer farmers and expropriating their property can actually prove a legitimate claim to the lands they are expropriating.
Walter Williams made a similar argument in an article a few years ago regarding reparations to African-Americans which can also be applied in the case of South Africa:
First off, let me say that I agree with reparations advocates that slavery was a horrible, despicable violation of basic human rights. The gross discrimination that followed emancipation made a mockery of the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution. I also agree that slave owners and slave traders should make reparations to those whom they enslaved. The problem, of course, is that slaves, slave owners and slave traders are all dead. Thus, punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is out of the hands of the living.
Punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is not what reparations advocates want. They want government to compensate today’s blacks for the bondage suffered by our ancestors. But there’s a problem. Government has no resources of its very own. The only way for government to give one American a dollar is to first — through intimidation, threats and coercion — confiscate that dollar from some other American. Therefore, if anybody cares, a moral question arises. What moral principle justifies punishing a white of today to compensate a black of today for what a white of yesterday did to a black of yesterday?
[…]
There’s another thorny issue. During slavery, some free blacks purchased other blacks as a means to free family members. But other blacks owned slaves for the same reason whites owned slaves — to work farms or plantations. Are descendants of these slaveholding blacks eligible for and deserving of reparations?
When African slavery began, there was no way Europeans could have enslaved millions of Africans. They had no immunity from diseases that flourished in tropical Africa. Capturing Africans to sell into slavery was done by Arabs and black Africans. Would reparations advocates demand that citizens of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya and several Muslim states tax themselves to make reparation payments to progeny of people whom their ancestors helped to enslave?
Reparations advocates make the foolish unchallenged argument that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That’s nonsense that cannot be supported by fact. Slavery doesn’t have a very good record of producing wealth. Slavery was all over the South, and it was outlawed in most of the North. Buying into the reparations argument about the riches of slavery, one would conclude that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth of the matter is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our nation were places where slavery flourished — Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia — while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.
As Williams demonstrates, the idea of reparations for long-passed historical injustices is unjust in principle, practically untenable, and based on a surface-level understanding of American history. The same can be said in the case of South Africa – even if it were true that the white settlers hundreds of years ago were brutal oppressors toward the indigenous blacks, it would be impossible to rectify those injustices via coercive redistributive policies without perpetrating even worse injustices and provoking perpetual property disputes. Thomas Sowell summarizes this problem in his book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.”
While the lessons of history can be valuable, the twisting of history and the mining of the past for grievances can tear a society apart. Past grievances, real or imaginary, are equally irremediable in the present, for nothing that is done among living contemporaries can change in the slightest the sins and the sufferings of generations who took those sins and sufferings to the grave with them in centuries past. Galling as it may be to be helpless to redress the crying injustices of the past, symbolic expiation in the present can only create new injustices among the living and new problems for the future, when newborn babies enter the world with pre-packaged grievances against other babies born the same day.
If we wish to live in a peaceful society where property norms are respected and upheld, the “mining of the past for grievances” to justify coercive redistributive policies must stop. The shifting of the burden of proof in property disputes onto present users/possessors must stop as well. For such a norm will generate endless amounts of social conflict, in direct contradiction to the very purpose of property norms. Whether in America, or in South Africa, there is no principled case to be made for race-based reparations for historical “injustices.” Private property rights, not emotional appeals to “social justice,” must be the governing principle of society.
Against White Genocide
So what is the endgame for the ANC Marxists in South Africa? Do they genuinely believe that their anti-white policies will actually result in economic and social prosperity, despite what has occurred in the neighboring country of Zimbabwe when similar policies were enacted? Perhaps. After all, we can never underestimate the economic illiteracy of Marxists like the ones that comprise the ANC. The more probable and obvious motivation is their utmost hatred for white people. Indeed, this is one of the two major things that drive the left: their anti-white racism, and their love for “free stuff” acquired by theft. Those driving forces, in addition to the South African government’s success at utilizing the historical grievances among the black population, is a recipe for a full-blown campaign of white genocide, tacitly approved by the silence of the mainstream media in the West.
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
[1] Killing members of the group; [2] Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; [3] Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; [4] Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
In the case of South Africa, 1-3 are undoubtedly occurring, with the rampant torture and murder of white people and the expropriation of their land by the state. While leftists often scoff at the idea of white genocide when it is more generally brought up to describe the anti-white policies taking place in Europe and the United States, in South Africa it is undeniable, which is why they are forced to resort to such pathetic attempts at arguments such as citing unreliable murder statistics from the South African government. Supposedly, they claim that these statistics are insufficient to show an explicit targeting of white farmers over the rest of the population. However, to believe this argument, one would have to be completely ignorant of what South African leaders in the EFF and ANC have actually been saying. As in the case of Islamic terrorists, we perhaps ought to take the murderers at their word when they clearly express their motives for their acts. White genocide in South Africa is a very real thing.
What happens when a country wipes out the very people who made it great and prosperous in the first place? Whether by outright mass murder or through migrant invasions and dysgenic economic policies, one thing that certainly occurs with any major demographic upheaval is the transformation of the culture. As Pat Buchanan once observed about the United States’ recent history, “no nation has undergone a demographic change of this magnitude and remained the same nation.” In the case of South Africa (and also Zimbabwe) it is abundantly clear that the cultural values of those who have taken power in the aftermath of their “liberation” from white colonial governments are opposed to private property, free markets, low-time preference, and every other principle conducive to a civilized society. As Zimbabwe has seen its socialist economy collapse in the face of hyperinflation, widespread poverty and unemployment, and plummeting productivity following the fall of Rhodesia and the expulsion of the white farming population, so too will the ANC communists in charge of South Africa reap the consequences of their anti-white policies.
Similar observations can be made to a lesser extent regarding the situation occurring in the United States and Western Europe. As the demographic makeup of Western countries has gotten more “diverse” (read: less white), have Western countries become more or less free? Are property rights more strongly or more weakly upheld? Has economic interventionism at home increased or decreased? It isn’t hard to figure out the answers to these questions. Governments throughout the West are expanding their welfare states to accommodate state-dependent non-white immigrants, cracking down on free speech to appease perpetually offended Muslims (under threat of the terrorist’s veto), and actively promoting ethnomasochism for the sake of “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” Sure, many of these developments can be traced to the problem of diversity itself, and the low-trust society that it foments. From general observations regarding the political and cultural attitudes of many non-white immigrants in Western countries, it cannot be denied that most of these people embrace political and cultural values that are at odds with a free and prosperous society. “Racist” or not (and NAXALT arguments aside), the fact remains that white people, on the whole, have a much greater tendency to uphold values that are conducive to private property norms and the kind of society that results from the upholding of these norms. It stands to reason that the elimination of whites from the very countries that they built over generations will have detrimental effects on those countries’ ability to sustain the kind of culture that enabled them to prosper in the first place.
The other threat presented by white genocide lies in the motivation of vengeance and envy derived from the “mining of historical grievances” mentioned by Sowell earlier. In the case of South Africa, it is apartheid. In the case of Germany, it is the Holocaust. In the case of America, it is chattel slavery and the Jim Crow Laws. Whether these grievances are legitimate or contrived, the danger of them being invoked for the purpose of generating perpetual class grievance and conflict remains the same. This danger is another lesson that Americans and Europeans ought to heed from the tragic situation occurring in South Africa. No society at war with itself can last long as Pat Buchanan writes:
Not only do we disagree on God, gays and guns, but on politics and ideology, morality and faith, right and wrong. One-half of America sees the other as “a basket of deplorables. … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots.”
How, outside an external attack that unites us, like 9/11, do we find unity among people who dislike each other so much and regard each other’s ideas and ideals as hateful and repellent?
Democracy requires common ground on which all can stand, but that ground is sinking beneath our feet, and democracy may be going down the sinkhole with it.
While the death of democracy is not something libertarians should mourn, the death of the “common ground” that enables it is also a threat to society at large. As such, Buchanan has also warned that “the spirit that produced the war in the 1860s, and lasting division in the 1960s, is abroad again. A great secession of the heart is underway.” As racial and ethnic tensions continue to rise in the West, his warning is becoming much harder to ignore by the day. Will the West, fueled by anti-white hatred and white guilt, continue to destroy itself? If the lessons of the South African white genocide are not heeded, Western civilization will be plunged into dire straits. The West, unfortunately, is already headed down this path. Mercer observes the parallels between South African racial politics and American racial politics:
Over the span of decades, bolstered by intellectuals who are not necessarily intelligent, America’s political class has been tinkering with the country’s historical majority-minority composition. The consequence of the mass importation of poor, Third World immigrants is that minorities intractably hostile to the host culture are on their way to consolidating a permanent majority. The Democratic Party is this nascent majority’s political organ, offering a platform of preferential policies for a voting bloc whose “interests are viewed through the prism of racial affiliations.” As sure as night follows day, the American democracy will then come to resemble that of South Africa, where racial voting is the rule. Those who think a bill of rights (South Africa has one too), proportional representation and periodic elections will obviate this peril might want to think again.
Mercer goes on to discuss the insights of Hans Hermann Hoppe in his book “Democracy, the God That Failed,” observing that the very nature of democracy itself facilitates the kind of civilizational chaos occurring in South Africa. Hoppe affirms this observation in his endorsement of Mercer’s book:
Egalitarianism leads to democracy; democracy leads to socialism; socialism leads to economic destruction, and democratic socialism in multicultural societies leads to death and democide. This, in shocking detail, is what Ilana Mercer illustrates superbly in her case study of post-apartheid South Africa.
For Europe and America to stave off the looming fate of white genocide that has already materialized in South Africa, the anti-white agitation of Marxist intellectuals and perpetually outraged minorities must be recognized as the threat they are. White guilt must be set aside, and both whites and non-whites alike in the West must realize that it’s okay to be white. Most importantly, the contribution of whites to the creation of Western society must be recognized. Hoppe explains in his speech on “A Realistic Libertarianism”:
[B]e and do whatever makes you happy, but always keep in mind that as long as you are an integral part of the worldwide division of labor, your existence and well-being depends decisively on the continued existence of others, and especially on the continued existence of white heterosexual male dominated societies, their patriarchic family structures, and their bourgeois or aristocratic lifestyle and conduct. Hence, even if you do not want to have any part in that, recognize that you are nonetheless a beneficiary of this standard “Western” model of social organization and hence, for your own sake, do nothing to undermine it but instead be supportive of it as something to be respected and protected.
And to the long list of ‘victims’ I would say: do your own thing, live your own life, as long as you do it peacefully and without invading other people’s private property rights. If and insofar as you are integrated into the international division of labor, you do not owe restitution to anyone nor does anyone owe you any restitution. Your coexistence with your supposed ‘victimizers’ is mutually beneficial. But keep in mind that while the ‘victimizers’ could live and do without you, albeit at a lower standard of living, the reverse is not true. The disappearance of the ‘victimizers’ would imperil your very own existence. Hence, even if you don’t want to model yourself on the example provided by white male culture, be aware that it is only on account of the continued existence of this model that all alternative cultures can be sustained at their present living standards and that with the disappearance of this “Western” model as a globally effective Leitkultur the existence of many if not all of your fellow ‘victims’ would be endangered.
White genocide, whether in South Africa, Europe, or America, must be stopped for the survival of Western civilization. White lives matter.
