- Mercer, Ilana.
Into the Cannibal's Pot.
Mount Vernon, WA, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-9849070-1-4.
-
The author was born in South Africa, the daughter of Rabbi
Abraham Benzion Isaacson, a leader among the Jewish community in
the struggle against apartheid. Due to her father's activism,
the family, forced to leave the country, emigrated to Israel,
where the author grew up. In the 1980s, she moved back to South
Africa, where she married, had a daughter, and completed her
university education. In 1995, following the first elections
with universal adult suffrage which resulted in the African
National Congress (ANC) taking power, she and her family
emigrated to Canada with the proceeds of the sale of her
apartment hidden in the soles of her shoes. (South Africa had
adopted strict controls to prevent capital flight in the
aftermath of the election of a black majority government.) After
initially settling in British Columbia, her family subsequently
emigrated to the United States where they reside today.
From the standpoint of a member of a small minority (the
Jewish community) of a minority (whites) in a black majority
country, Mercer has reason to be dubious of the much-vaunted
benefits of “majority rule”. Describing herself
as a “paleolibertarian”, her outlook is shaped not
by theory but the experience of living in South Africa and
the accounts of those who remained after her departure.
For many in the West, South Africa scrolled off the screen
as soon as a black majority government took power, but that
was the beginning of the country's descent into violence,
injustice, endemic corruption, expropriation of those who built
the country and whose ancestors lived there since before the
founding of the United States, and what can only be called
a slow-motion genocide against the white farmers who were the
backbone of the society.
Between 1994 and 2005, the white population of South Africa fell
from 5.22 million to 4.37 million. Two of the chief motivations
for emigration have been an explosion of violent crime, often
racially motivated and directed against whites, a policy of
affirmative action which amounts to overt racial discrimination
against whites, endemic corruption, and expropriation of
businesses in the interest of “fairness”.
In the forty-four years of apartheid in South Africa from 1950 to
1993, there were a total of 309,583 murders in the country: an
average of 7,036 per year. In the first eight years after the
end of apartheid (1994—2001), under one-party black
majority rule, 193,649 murders were reported, or 24,206
per year. And the latter figure is according to the statistics
of the ANC-controlled South Africa Police Force, which both
Interpol and the South African Medical Research Council say
may be understated by as much as a factor of two. The United
States is considered to be a violent country, with around
4.88 homicides per 100,000 people (by comparison, the rate
in the United Kingdom is 0.92 and in Switzerland is 0.69).
In South Africa, the figure is 34.27 (all estimates are
2015 figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime). And it isn't just murder: in South Africa,where
65 people are murdered every day, around 200 are raped
and 300 are victims of assault and violent robbery.
White farmers, mostly Afrikaner, have frequently been targets of
violence. In the periods 1996–2007 and 2010–2016
(no data were published for the years 2008 and 2009), according
to statistics from the South African Police Service (which may
be understated), there were 11,424 violent attacks on farms in
South Africa, with a total of 1609 homicides, in some cases
killing entire farm families and some of their black workers.
The motives for these attacks remain a mystery according to the
government, whose leaders have been known to sing the stirring
anthem “Kill the Boer” at party rallies. Farm
attacks follow the pattern in Zimbabwe, where such attacks,
condoned by the Mugabe regime, resulted in the emigration of
almost all white farmers and the collapse of the country's
agricultural sector (only 200 white farmers remain in the
country, 5% of the number before black majority rule). In South
Africa, white farmers who have not already emigrated find
themselves trapped: they cannot sell to other whites who fear
they would become targets of attacks and/or eventual
expropriation without compensation, nor to blacks who expect
they will eventually receive the land for free when it is
expropriated.
What is called affirmative action in the U.S. is implemented
in South Africa under the
Black
Economic Empowerment (BEE) programme, a set of explicitly
racial preferences and requirements which cover most aspects
of business operation including ownership, management,
employment, training, supplier selection, and internal
investment. Mining companies must cede co-ownership to
blacks in order to obtain permits for exploration. Not
surprisingly, in many cases the front men for these
“joint ventures” are senior officials of the
ruling ANC and their family members. So corrupt is the
entire system that Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the most
eloquent opponents of apartheid, warned that BEE has created
a “powder keg”, where benefits accrue only to a
small, politically-connected, black elite, leaving others in
“dehumanising poverty”.
Writing from the perspective of one who got out of South Africa
just at the point where everything started to go wrong (having
anticipated in advance the consequences of pure majority rule)
and settled in the U.S., Mercer then turns to the disturbing
parallels between the two countries. Their histories are
very different, and yet there are similarities and trends
which are worrying. One fundamental problem with democracy
is that people who would otherwise have to work for a living
discover that they can vote for a living instead, and are
encouraged in this by politicians who realise that a dependent
electorate is a reliable electorate as long as the benefits
continue to flow. Back in 2008, I wrote about the U.S.
approaching a
tipping
point
where nearly half of those who file income tax returns
owe no income tax. At that point, among those who participate
in the economy, there is a near-majority who pay no price
for voting for increased government benefits paid for by
others. It's easy to see how this can set
off a positive feedback loop where the dependent population
burgeons, the productive minority shrinks, the administrative
state which extracts the revenue from that minority becomes
ever more coercive, and those who channel the money from the
producers to the dependent grow in numbers and power.
Another way to look at the tipping point is to compare the
number of voters to taxpayers (those with income tax liability).
In the U.S., this number is around two to one, which is
dangerously unstable to the calamity described above. Now consider
that in South Africa, this ratio is eleven to one.
Is it any wonder that under universal adult suffrage the economy
of that country is in a down-spiral?
South Africa prior to 1994 was in an essentially intractable
position. By encouraging black and later Asian immigration
over its long history (most of the ancestors of black
South Africans arrived after the first white settlers),
it arrived at a situation where a small white population
(less than 10%) controlled the overwhelming majority of
the land and wealth, and retained almost all of the
political power. This situation, and the apartheid system
which sustained it (which the author and her family vehemently
opposed) was unjust and rightly was denounced and sanctioned
by countries around the globe. But what was to replace it?
The experience of post-colonial Africa was that democracy
almost always leads to “One man, one vote, one time”:
a leader of the dominant ethnic group wins the election,
consolidates power, and begins to eliminate
rival groups, often harking back to the days of tribal warfare
which preceded the colonial era, but with modern weapons and
a corresponding death toll. At the same time, all sources of
wealth are plundered and “redistributed”, not to
the general population, but to the generals and cronies of
the Great Man. As the country sinks into savagery and
destitution, whites and educated blacks outside the ruling clique
flee. (Indeed, South Africa has a large black illegal immigrant
population made of those who fled the Mugabe tyranny in
Zimbabwe.)
Many expected this down-spiral to begin in South Africa soon after
the ANC took power in 1994. The joke went, “What's the
difference between Zimbabwe and South Africa? Ten years.”
That it didn't happen immediately and catastrophically is a
tribute to Nelson Mandela's respect for the rule of law and for
his white partners in ending apartheid. But now he is gone,
and a new generation of more radical leaders has replaced him.
Increasingly, it seems like the punch line might be revised to
be “Twenty-five years.”
The immediate priority one takes away from this book is the
need to address the humanitarian crisis faced by the
Afrikaner farmers who are being brutally murdered and
face expropriation of their land without compensation as
the regime becomes ever more radical. Civilised countries
need to open immigration to this small, highly-productive,
population. Due to persecution and denial of property rights,
they may arrive penniless, but are certain to quickly
become the backbone of the communities they join.
In the longer term, the U.S. and the rest of the Anglosphere
and civilised world should be cautious and never
indulge in the fantasy “it can't happen
here”. None of these countries started out with the
initial conditions of South Africa, but it seems like, over
the last fifty years, much of their ruling class
seems to have been bent on importing masses of third world
immigrants with no tradition of consensual government, rule
of law, or respect for property rights, concentrating them
in communities where they can preserve the culture and
language of the old country, and ensnaring them in a web of
dependency which keeps them from climbing the ladder of
assimilation and economic progress by which previous immigrant
populations entered the mainstream of their adopted countries.
With some politicians bent on throwing the borders open to
savage, medieval, inbred “refugees” who breed
much more rapidly than the native population, it doesn't take
a great deal of imagination to see how the tragedy now occurring
in South Africa could foreshadow the history of the latter
part of this century in countries foolish enough to lay
the groundwork for it now.
This book was published in 2011, but the trends it describes have
only accelerated in subsequent years. It's an eye-opener to
the risks of democracy without constraints or protection of the
rights of minorities, and a warning to other nations of the
grave risks they face should they allow opportunistic politicians
to recreate the dire situation of South Africa in their own
lands.
May 2018 