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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38009 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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South Africa is going particularly badly. I read a book review here: https://thepsmiths.substack.com/p/review-south-africas-brave-new-world

The most interesting sections:

…in the Khayelitsha squatter settlement, outside Cape Town… the DA [Democratic Alliance, an opposition political party] had made inroads thanks to the tireless activism of township workers fed up with the warlord-rule of local ANC councillors… One ANC councillor, De Putch Elise, held a meeting where his DA opponents attempted to speak about Elise’s alleged abuse of his housing allocation powers to punish DA supporters. Elise drew a gun and in full view of the crowd shot six of the DA activists, wounding five and killing one… the police declined to lay charges against Elise.

He (Mandela) declared that the solution to continuing violence in KwaZulu-Natal was for everyone to join the ANC… In 1995 he told a May Day rally that if the IFP continued to resist the ANC he would cut off all funding to KwaZulu-Natal, the most populous province. This was a completely unconstitutional threat which had to be quickly retracted. Similarly, when he dismissed Winnie from government he failed to read the constitution and thus had to reappoint her and later dismiss her again. Visiting Tanzania, he announced that: “We are going to sideline and even crush all dissident forces in our country.”

That's one hell of a villainous statement, even if something is lost in translation.

Mandela also made a lot of genuinely very big-hearted speeches pitching a “rainbow nation” vision of South Africa and begging whites not to flee the country, but every time the interests of justice conflicted with those of the ANC, he showed himself to be a party man first and foremost. The most revolting examples of this are two incidents in which independent prosecutors were investigating ANC atrocities (in one case a massacre of dozens of protestors, the other case an incident where some Zulus were kept in a cage inside a local ANC party HQ and tortured for months), and Mandela staked the full power of his moral authority on blocking the inquiries. In the case of the massacre, Mandela went so far as to declare that he had ordered the gunmen to shoot, which everybody knew to be a lie, but which meant that any attempt to pursue the coverup would mean taking down Mandela too. Nobody had the stomach to face that prospect, so the prosecutors dropped the case.

Who could've guessed that former terrorist leader Mandela was not a very nice fellow? It then mentions South Africa's staunch support for Zimbabwe during its problem-period of economic collapse, ethnic cleansing and so on. This was under Mbeki's de facto leadership of South Africa.

The second, even more catastrophic event that caused the South African government to lose the sheen of respectability was the AIDS epidemic and their response to it. The story of how Mbeki buried his head in the sand, embraced quack theories on the causes of AIDS, and condemned hundreds of thousands of people to avoidable deaths is well known at this point, but Johnson’s book is full of grimly hysterical details that turn the whole story into the darkest comedy you’ve ever seen.

For example: I had no idea that Mbeki was so ahead of his time in outsourcing his opinions to schizopoasters on the internet. According to his confidantes, at the height of the crisis the president was frequently staying up all night interacting pseudonymously with other cranks on conspiracy-minded forums (an important cautionary tale for all those… umm… friends of mine who enjoy dabbling in a conspiracy forum or two).3 These views were then laundered through a succession of bumbling and imbecilic health ministers such as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma4 or Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang who gave surreal press conferences extolling the healing powers of “Africanist” remedies such as potions made from garlic, beetroot, and potato.

I wonder if there are any dictators posting on /pol/ or whatever the modern conspiracy forum is. And of course there's the tacit encouragement of victims of child rape getting HIV:

The horror of it all is that by this point there were very good drugs that could massively cut the risk of mother-child HIV transmission and somewhat reduced the odds of contracting the virus after a traumatic sexual encounter. There were a lot of traumatic sexual encounters. A contemporaneous survey found that around 60 percent of South Africans believed that forcing sex on somebody was not necessarily violence, and a common “Africanist” belief was that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS, all of which led to extreme levels of child rape. The government then did everything in its power to prevent the victims of these rapes from accessing drugs that could stave off a deadly disease. At first the excuse was that they were too expensive, then when the drug companies called that bluff and offered the drugs for free, it became that they caused “mutations.”

After Mbeki disappears, we get Zuma as a new interesting personality. He's basically the South African Trump, except more based.

The last chance to stop Zuma was a credible-seeming rape accusation from a family friend. The ANC pounced on this, and initiated a high-profile criminal trial. This incensed Zuma’s supporters, who insisted that the prosecution was politically motivated (given that over the past decade the ANC had all but stopped prosecuting rape cases in society more broadly, they may have had a point). The trial was a total debacle. Countless thousands of young activists showed up outside the courtroom wearing t-shirts with slogans like “One hundred percent Zuluboy,” “Burn the bitch,” and “Zuma was raped.” When summoned to the witness stand, the president-to-be performed war dances and led the crowds in song. The prosecution collapsed after the accuser's story was found to be inconsistent on numerous points, and a triumphant Zuma rode the backlash all the way to the presidency.

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