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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.
I have a proposition for you: We hand all political power in the US over to the blacks. As a white guy, you'll probably be forced to live in a designated area an hour outside a major city, where you'll be forced to take a bus in every day to do manual labor for ten bucks an hour. You will be barred from most public accommodations, and will have to get official permission before traveling anywhere outside your home; even going to work will require you to present proof that you actually have a job. Your own political power is nonexistent, and the government doesn't even pretend that you have anything resembling civil rights. The tradeoff is that the United States sees unprecedented GDP growth. Do you take this bargain?
No, of course not. Nowhere did I say that apartheid was good. Nowhere did I say that blacks benefited from apartheid. What I said about apartheid was this:
Now, 30 years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is falling apart. There is extreme corruption, extreme discrimination against whites, and murder and torture whites without prosecution.
I don’t think “they had no choice” is a fair assessment of the situation. Even assuming you take ‘retreat to the Western Cape’ off the table, there were other options.
For example, in Namibia and Botswana, in Zambia too to an extent whites kept a lot of land and even political influence. Even today it’s likely most of the good arable farmland in all three of those countries is operated by white farmers. But the white populations were far smaller there.
The goal should have been something like modern-day Indonesia, China or the Philippines, where Chinese minorities control the vast majority of the economy and are very disproportionately wealthy and powerful, but in which native resentment is managed and they still have some ownership of the political system. 85% of the richest people in Thailand, 90% in the Philippines, somewhere in the region of 80-90% in Malaysia are Chinese. In Indonesia, the Chinese are 2-3% of the population but have more than 70% of private wealth in the country.
There are rare, every-few-decades incidents of sporadic violence against the Chinese minorities, but rarely anything like a medieval pogrom or even something on the level of the LA riots more than once or twice a century (excluding the highly volatile postwar period which saw the social order upended entirely, there was mainly 1969 in Malaysia and 1998 in Indonesia, which were both localized).
Only one African nation actually considered trying this plan in earnest - Rhodesia. But its proponents were overthrown in the democratic vote by fearful whites under Ian Smith who began the process that led to the civil war, and by the end of that enough resentment had built up that it was impossible.
I think this is a good argument.
But, to state the obvious, the level of violence in South Africa society is on the order of 10-100x that of Thai, Filipino, or Malay society. The risk of pogroms and anarcho-tyranny is simply much higher in South Africa.
And market dominant minorities haven't worked as well in Africa. Consider, for example, the fate of the Indians in Uganda.
Perhaps. There were also the Arabs of Zanzibar, as per Addio Africa. But consider also the Lebanese in Nigeria, who have been remarkably powerful for decades now and still haven’t been pogromed. Consider also that whites are still happily market dominant minorities in much of Southern Africa, including (to an extent that might - but shouldn’t - surprise you) in Zimbabwe, many of which have seen no substantial or organized anti-white violence in decades. A white man would have become democratically elected president of Zambia a few years ago were it not for the law on needing (as I recall) both parents born in the country to be eligible.
Like all peoples Africans can be whipped up into violent ethnic hostility, but I don’t think their ethnic resentment is particularly strong. I have always felt that both Indians and Chinese are educated into more soft-resentment for Europeans than Africans, who in my experience mostly don’t think about white people at all. Even in South Africa, there is more racial hostility between Zulu and Xhosa, between native Bantus and immigrants from Central Africa, and between black and Indian South Africans than there is between black and white South Africans.
A fact I find fascinating is that until (IIRC) 2021, every member of a Zimbabwean Olympic swim team was white.
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