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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Why? Here’s why South Africa failed where Israel until now has succeeded, and it has nothing to do with the specific ethnicities involved:

White South Africans refused to become Israel. All the Boers (and the English) had to do is retreat to the Western Cape, which could have easily become an 80%+ white + cape colored + Asian ethnostate in perpetuity, just like most of Israel proper is by far supermajority Jewish. Why didn’t they? Because white South Africans were (and are) addicted to cheap black labor. They didn’t want to give up the farms or replace cheap workers with vastly more expensive white ones. They wanted a society where even a member of the white lower middle class had a gardener and a maid and a nanny to look after the kids. Israel, of course, supported and backed South Africa until the end.

They could have preserved it, they chose not to. It is what it is (claims of their immense suffering are largely overblown, not that I’m a huge fan of modern South Africa). Posts like this just symbolize a certain kind of bitterness that isn’t backed by historical fact. The wider question is even more ridiculous, because ethnic and tribal preference, which is what “apartheid ethnostates” do and are, are common around the world.

Malaysia explicitly privileges ethnic Malays over Chinese and Indians in every facet of public life, state contracting, welfare, housing, jobs, and politics. Brazil under socialist government privileges black over white for medical school places, for government jobs. America did too for a long time. Gulf Arab countries have Arab migrants (let alone Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi) who have lived there for generations without citizenship or political or other representation, officially stateless. These are all on a spectrum. Palestinians in the West Bank lead lives that are not particularly poor compared to others of their background in the rest of non oil rich Arab lands. They do not suffer the way that North Koreans or Eritreans do.

do you believe that all lawful residents within a country's borders are entitled to equal rights and equal treatment under the law?

Almost nobody believes this and almost no country practises it. Not America, not India, not Brazil, not China, not Russia.