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South Africa : The Ultimate Red Pill
There's been quite a lot of speculation on what Elon Musk's red pill moment was. Some have said it's that the government interfered with his space launches. Others have said its because his kid transitioned from male to female. But it's hard to write the story of Elon without considering where he grew up: South Africa.
South Africa is a cautionary tale. It's the ultimate failure of the progressive experiment.
The decline of South Africa since the end of apartheid has been as stunning as it was predictible. At one point, a small population of 3 or 4 million white South Africans was able to build a suprisingly advanced society. They performed the first human heart transplant. They had nuclear weapons!
But over time, international pressure against apartheid mounted and South Africa became a pariah state. In 1994, the apartheid government caved and allowed blacks full participation in democracy. Optimism was high. F. W. de Klerk, the last white president, even ran for another term. He got 20% of the vote.
The man who won the office with 63% of the vote, and who de Klerk would share a Nobel Peace Prize with, was Nelson Mandela. Today, Mandela is often compared to Gandhi or MLK, but that is not an accurate representation of his earlier years when he viewed himself as a guerilla in the model of Che Guevara. Fortunately for his image, he was arrested in 1962 and imprisoned until 1990, largely avoiding personal involvement in his party's genoicidal rhetoric of "Kill the Boer" and the infamous use of the South African necktie which involved placing a tire around a person and then burning them alive.
Neverthless, as President, Mandela managed to be mostly conciliatory towards whites. The Truth and Reconcilation Committee was an effort to bury the hatred of the past, and was largely viewed as succesful at the time.
But the rot had already started. Mandela's term saw the imposition of huge amounts of welfare spending and affirmative action. There was an influx of illegal immigrants from poor countries nearby, but an outflux of whites and coloreds. As a result, the percentage of whites in South Africa fell from 13% in 1995 to just 7% today.
After Mandela, things would get much worse. Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and the number of South Africans suffering from the disease skyrocketed to a quarter of the population. After him came Jacob Zuma, a polygamist, who would rehash the "kill the Boer" song during a 2012 rally.
Today, South Africa is in shambles. The passenger rail system, which once served 600 million annual journeys, is now essentially defunct. The electricity grid is teetering. Life expectancy and GDP per capita have been stagnant for 40 years, while nearly every other country in the world has seen staggering increases.
Worse, though, is the fate of rural white farmers who have been subject to attacks in which they are tortured for several hours and then murdered. Almost none of these attacks are prosecuted, meaning the farmers can be murdered with impunity. In fact, the government of Cyril Ramphosa, the current president, has proposed seizing white-owned farms without compensation, echoing what happened in Zimbabwe.
It was in the context of all of this, that today the Trump administration said it will grant asylum and a rapid path to citizenship for white South African farmers who flee to the United States. Furthermore, the government will cut off all aid to South Africa.
This will likely hasten South Africa's decline, and it's an acknowledgement that there is no longer anything there worth saving. South Africa is a failed African state, no different than many others. But despite everything, I'm not sure what could have been done differently. Apartheid is morally reprehensible, and at the same time it was the only way to keep South Africa from falling apart. That's all in the past now. It's time for the elves to get back on their ships and sail back to Valinor. And pity the ones that stay behind.
Why not have separate countries? My understanding is there are some (or we’re) largely white areas of SA. Why not divide SA in 1994 between the white and non-white?
Here's a map from 2011.
There are no large contiguous area with a white majority, although perhaps in 1994 it would have been different.
Really 1948. It was the Apartheid government that facilitated mass movement of people between black and white areas of SA, because they believed they could keep blacks on the pass system forever.
Huge self own.
Semi related... the Cape area was largely uninhabited when the Dutch showed up, with just a few thousand hunter gatherers and pastoralists spread out over a huge area. (For a fun project, see how much badgering it takes Claude or ChatGPT to admit that). At the time, the entire population of the South Africa was only about 200,000 people.
Would you subscribe to the implied general principle, though? If a few million Africans snuck into one of the more deserted parts of Wyoming and built a thriving colony there, do you recognise their claim to sovereignty?
Yeah, I think people who have lived on a land since 1652 have some rights. If some Africans snuck into Wyoming and lived there for 370 years, I think I'd feel pretty strongly they have a right to be there.
Turnabout...
Would you subscribe to the implied principle that the people who deserve land are the original settlers of that land? In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even. Will you demand the Bantus go back to the jungle so that South Africa can be rightfully inhabited by hunter gatherers again?
The Bantus were in Eastern South Africa (the bit where most of the modern population live) in 500 AD, the first Boers arrived in the 1650s. They were there for a good thousand years before the Dutch turned up. The Khoisan (or rather, their partial descendents the Coloreds) are still there in the West.
Yes. Thank you for the clarification. The Dutch beat the Bantus to the Cape but there was a small Bantu population in other parts of South Africa before they arrived.
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