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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Israel is vastly more Jewish (even counting neighboring Palestinians) than South Africa was white. And I’m not sure your analysis of what happened in Portugal is entirely correct, Angola had a very small white population, many other Portuguese colonies had already been lost (eg in India) and the people in the metropole were tired of their tax money being spent and young men being sent off to die in the colonies. In addition, the regime limped along after Salazar’s death and his replacements were widely disliked within the military.

Hydro is correct that the primary reason apartheid was unsustainable is that the Afrikaners were utterly unable to offer anything much to the rest of the non-Bantu population. Not to the indigenous Khoisan, not to the Indians and Cape Colored (who were also officially lesser under apartheid), and not even to the Anglos and Jews, who dominated business but who were systematically discriminated against in government and had to deal with corruption and kickbacks to the Afrikaners (not to mention spurious lawsuits, fines and other harassment) who ran the National Party, all of which built up a huge amount of resentment.

So - unlike the Alawites in Syria - it was unclear to non-Afrikaners in South Africa that they were going to ‘get massacred’ if popular democracy was implemented. Remember also that this was in the early 90s, a decade before Mugabe started seizing white land, and when whites in Botswana, Namibia and so on appeared to be doing fine under black-majority rule.

None of this is to dispute the fact that, yes, a sufficiently motivated bloc of 4 million Afrikaners probably could have held South Africa indefinitely (even under sanctions, given the nation’s bountiful natural resources and the fact that the Israelis and others would have continued buying from them). But there was little popular desire for that, in part because the pressure valve of emigration back to the West was open.