ANC 100 år

I gårsdagens Vårt Land (side 2 - 3) finner vi en av de mest Sør-Afrika-kritiske kommentarartiklene jeg kan huske å ha sett i norsk presse på en stund, skrevet av Jon Magne Lund. Et stykke ut i artikkelen går Lund rett på sak når det gjelder utviklingen i landet etter apartheidregimets fall i 1994: «Men noe skjedde underveis: korrupsjon, nepotisme, tilløp til svart rasisme, forsøk på å dirigere mediene til lydighet. Et digert apparat med politikere og statstjenestemenn fikk stadig større biler, feitere hus og vaner preget av dyr luksus.»

Lund kommer så inn på forfatteren og aktivisten André Brink, som var en ivrig antiapartheid-aktivist, men som i dag fremstår som stadig mer betenkt over utviklingen (dessillusjonert er formodentlig et nokså dekkende begrep). Etter noen betraktninger om dette skriver Lund: «Og så ble det slik man ser rundt seg nå. Ufattelig vold, ufattelig udugelighet.»

Lund avslutter som følger: «Og hva skjer når Mandela om ikke lenge dør? Frykten er at Sør-Afrika skal utvikle seg som nabolandet Zimbabwe, der undertrykkelsen av menneskerettigheter er enorm, likeledes det moralske og økonomiske forfallet.»

Så lang Lund og Vårt Land, som fortjener honnør for å snakke åpent om den bekymringsfulle utviklingen i Sør-Afrika.

For egen regning kan jeg gjerne tilføye at jeg fortsatt heller i retning av å mene at dersom man skal forsøke å gjøre opp et totalregnskap for pro et contra siden 'frigjøringen' i 1994, så har Sør-Afrika gått fra asken til ilden. Dette betyr ikke at jeg mener apartheid var et godt system (som jeg gjerne blir beskyldt for å mene når jeg ymter frempå om disse tingene); apartheid var utvilsomt et uakseptabelt system, både slik og sånn. Det jeg hevder er bare at et svart flertallsdiktatur med ANC ved makten er enda verre. Både for svarte og hvite. Som Ilana Mercer bemerker på side 15 i sin bok (mer om den nedenfor):

«It goes without saying that a condemnation of the New South Africa is not an affirmation of the Old. More crucially, realism is not racism. The undeniable reality is that, a decade since this abrupt transfer of power, the rule of the demos has turned a once- prosperous, if politically problematic, place into a lawless ramshackle.»

Eller som Mercer skriver i sin artikkel Don't Believe Michelle Obama (min uthevelse):

«As "Into the Cannibal’s Pot" demonstrates, South Africa’s democratically elected African leaders are even more committed than their political predecessors—apartheid-era Afrikaners—to restructuring society around race. With one distinction:

More people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.

Americans, who take for granted their domestic tranquility, can’t afford to finesse the fate of the dying Christian civilization at the tip of Africa. “Into The Cannibal’s Pot” compels them to stare into “The Heart of Darkness” that is the New South Africa, and by so doing, offers a cautionary tale:In their unqualified paeans to the will of the majority everywhere, Americans must understand that universal suffrage is not to be conflated with freedom.

As the democratic South Africa (and Iraq) amply demonstrates, political rights don’t secure the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; ink-stained fingers don’t inoculate against blood stains. Extant societal structures that safeguard life and property can always be improved upon. But once these bulwarks against mob rule and mayhem disintegrate, they are seldom restored. A civilized society, ultimately, is one in which the individual can go about the business of life unmolested. If he can’t do that simple thing, of what value is the vote?

The Apartheid-era, traditionally Western legal institutions, however flawed, were preferable to the Rambo Nation’s “rehabilitated” institutions, riven as they are by tribal feuds, fetishes, and factional loyalties. America's intellectual "Idiocracy"—the president and the "Untamed Ids" of the media, liberal, libertarian, and conservative—are egging on revolution in the Middle East. Post-apartheid South Africa should serve to remind this retinue of romantics that stable societies, however imperfect, are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes.

For better or for worse, societies are built slowly from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by people, not by political decree. Our unhappy trek through the wreck of the New South Africa begins with the facts, nothing but the facts.»

Into the Cannibal’s Pot

I fjor høst skaffet jeg meg en bok om post-apartheid Sør-Afrika, nemlig Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Den er skrevet av en tidligere sør-afrikaner og antiapartheid-aktivist, nemlig Ilana Mercer:

Ilana Mercer is a writer, born inSouth Africa to Rabbi Ben Isaacson and raised inIsrael, where the family decided to move after Rabbi Ben Isaacson's anti-apartheid preaching and activism led to their harassment by South African security forces. She is a Canadian citizen currently residing in theUnited States.

Det er altså hennes fars aktivisme som skaffet familien problemer i forhold til apartheidregimet i tiden før 1994, og som gjorde at de valgte å flytte fra landet, men hun har tydeligvis også selv vært aktiv i kampen mot apartheid, og hun er fremdeles av den oppfatning at apartheidregimet var «repressive and reprehensible» (side 19).

Så skulle man kanskje tro at dette er en dame som de fleste her på VD gjerne låner øre til. Vel, la meg ile til og informere dere om at hun er libertarianer med et verdikonservativt grunnsyn, samt at hun referer til og samarbeider med nettsteder som Vdare og AlternativeRight. Hun omtales ellers ofte som paleoconservative, et begrep som altså står i kontrast til neoconservative (mange vil forøvrig mene at neokonservatisme i praksis ikke har så veldig mye med konservatisme å gjøre). Hun er med andre ord det endel her på VD foretrekker å kalle høyreradikal. Dere er herved advart.

Boken hennes har en etter min mening unødig provoserende tittel. Hun forklarer at tittelen er ment som en metafor, og dessuten inspirert av «Ayn Rand's wise cousel against prostrating civilization to savagery», hvilket belegges med følgende sitat av Rand (kursiv som i Mercers gjengivelse på side 9, fete typer tilføyd av meg):

«In America, religion is relatively nonmystical. Religious teachers here are predominantly good, healthy materialists. They follow common sense. … The majority of religious people in this country do not accept on faith the idea of jumping into a cannibal's pot and giving away their last shirt to the backward people of the world. Many religious leaders preach this today, because of their own leftist politics; it's not inherent in being religious.»

Bokens motivasjon

Mercer gir ellers følgende begrunnelse for å ha skrevet boken (hentet fra introduksjonskapitlet, som er tilgjengelig på nett):

«So why is this book so very crucial at this juncture? Simply this: Although grisly horror stories have percolated into the popular press, the emetic facts about the New South Africa have never before been told. They must be! Into the Cannibal's Pot fills this knowledge gap. This book, moreover, is crucial in curbing the naïve enthusiasm among American elites, and those they've gulled, for radical, imposed, top-down transformations of relatively stable, if imperfect, societies, including their own. As the example of South Africa demonstrates, a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure.

In the U.S., a slower, more incremental transformation is under way. It began with a state-orchestrated, historically unparalleled, mass importation of inassimilable ethnic groups into a country whose creed is that it has no creed any longer. American institutions no longer assimilate immigrants.

Rather, they acculturate them to militant identity politics aimed at doing away with merit. Dissolving the American people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, will likely erode American institutions further, and may well replicate on American soil the terrifying conflicts that mar the Third World. Ever the source of deafening demagoguery about the virtues of democracy, American leaders might wish to consider that, “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule.”

Still, American leaders refused to rest until South Africa became a democracy. And before that Zimbabwe. And after that Iraq. (They were not alone. I trace that chain of culpability in Chapter Seven, “The Anglo-American-Australian Axis of Evil.”) The consequences in each case have been catastrophic. While all people want safety and sustenance for themselves, not everyone is prepared to allow those whom they dislike to peacefully pursue the same. This maxim applies both to Mesopotamia and to Azania (the term once used for South Africa by the governing African National Congress). The time is historically ripe to challenge some of the central tenets of liberal democratic ideology through the prism of another democratic disaster: post-Apartheid South Africa.

If the sanctity of life is the highest value in a civilized society, then the New South Africa has little to recommend it. Societies are only as good as the individuals of whom they are comprised; individuals only as good as their actions. Democratic South Africa is now preponderantly overrun by elements, both within and without government, which make a safe and thriving civil society impossible to sustain. The salient feature of mass politics in the New South Africa is a government unable to control itself and unwilling to control a sinecured criminal class. As a consequence, sundered is the individual’s right to live unmolested.»

Apartheid Nostalgia

Og 'frigjøringen' av Sør-Afrika har altså foreløpig kostet drøyt 300.000 menneskeliv. Her er noen utdrag fra avsnittet Apartheid Nostalgia (kursiv i original):

«To most Western observers, the new dispensation in this writer's old home engenders unconditional praise the world over. For them, not knowing whether you'll survive the day is but a spot of bother. Conservative columnists are as prone as anyone else to be nonchalant about the present situation. One of them described South Africa as "the greatest triumph of chatter over machine-gun clatter. It's not perfect, and crime is at an all-time high in South African cities, but at least the massacres are a thing of the past and life goes on much better than before." If by "massacres" our correspondent meant Sharpeville, where in 1960, panic-stricken policemen of the apartheid regime shot dead sixty-nine black demonstrators, why, in democratic South Africa that's the daily carnage quota.

Few realize that during the decades of the apartheid regime a few hundred Africans in total perished as a direct and indirect consequence of police brutality. A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the death toll in “free” South Africa, where hundreds of Africans, white and black, perish weekly. Nor did apartheid’s casualties come close to the ANC’s during “the armed struggle.” Freedom’s forebears “necklaced” 400 non- combatants, and murdered hundreds more - Zulu opposition, state informers and witnesses, rural headmen, urban councilors, “and others perceived to be collaborators of the system or enemies of the ANC.”

"Between 1976 and 1994," writes Giliomee, "state agents deliberately killed between two hundred and three hundred people active in the struggle against the state." It takes the free agents of democratic Azania only five days to deliberately kill as many of their fellow citizens.

Still fewer realize that during the decades of the repressive - and reprehensible -  apartheid regime, which ended officially in 1994, crime rates in South Africa were overall much lower; in whites-only areas they were not dissimilar to those in other Western countries. McCafferty, whose brief it was to compare "the number of murders in the 'Old South Africa' (under apartheid) … to the 'New South Africa' (post 1994)," counted 309,583 murders over the forty-four years spanning 1950 to 1993. In the first eight years of the "new democratic dispensation," 193,649 people were murdered. In other words, under apartheid, on average, 7,036 people were murdered each year, a small number compared to the carnage under the ANCniks: 24,206 annually. The latter is the South Africa Police Service's low-ball estimation, which both Interpol and the South African Medical Research Council have disputed.

The ANC government now claims that matters have improved and that it is winning the war on violent crime. The Democratic Alliance disputes this. The tiny, tokenistic, opposition to the “all-powerful black majority party” puts the ostensible drop in crime down to the fact that fifty-one percent of victims no longer bothers to report crime, given that corruption is rife, arrests rare, and prosecutions and convictions still rarer. Recent findings suggest that the SAPS’s optimistic, homicide statistics are not to be believed. As reported by The Economist, the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation has confirmed the existence of a “pervasive pattern of (police) manipulation of statistic.” By an amazing coincidence, the reported decline in violent crime and the government’s 2004 announcement of its intention to cut such crime have dovetailed.

Doctored or diminished, the SAPS’s statistics spanning 2006 to 2007 reveal that 19,20229 South African lives were lost (population 43,786,11530) compared to the United States 16,57431 (population 303,824,64632). A yearly average of 19,202 murders (under democracy) still constitutes almost three times as many as 7,036 annual murders (under apartheid). Clearly, the era of apartheid remains a Golden Age with respect to the sanctity of life, for blacks and whites alike.»

For ytterligere udrag fra det aktuelle kapitlet, se her.

Svarte og hvite

Det er ikke populært å hevde at de enorme problemene Sør-Afrika har opplevd hele tiden (både før og etter 1994) har med raserelasjoner og raseforskjeller å gjøre. Det er ikke det at historiske, politiske og sosioøkonomiske faktorer ikke spiller en viss rolle; selvfølgelig gjør de det. Men disse faktorene utelukker selvsagt ikke at faktorer som har direkte sammenheng med menneskets natur, også gjør seg gjeldende.

Vi får et hint om dette i NRKs artikkel om jubileet i dag (min uthevelse, lenke i original):

«ANCs 100-årsjubileum er ikke bare en milepæl for ANC, men for all frigjøringsbevegelse i Afrika og hele det afrikanske folket. Vi ser fram til et vellykket jubileum, skriver president Jacob Zuma på ANCs nettside.»

I den ANC-artikkelen som NRK henviser til, bruker Zuma uttrykket «the African people the world over»; en direkte og nokså utvetydig referanser til folk av afrikansk herkomst over hele verden, eller, med andre ord, folk som tilhører den afrikanske rasen (som enkelte altså anser for å være et meningsløst begrep).

Mercer er inne på noe av det samme når hun forteller hva som skjedde da en australsk reporter intervjuet Essop Prahada, Minister in the Presidency (side 101, kursiv hos Mercer):

«When asked why poor whites were not eligible for BEE privileges [BEE står for Black Economic Empowerment, Sør-Afrikas kvoteringsregime], Prahada blasted the aforementioned Australian reporter: "You are sitting here worrying about whites. Our main concern must be the millions of our people living in poverty."»

På side 141 forteller Mercer om selveste Mandela, som i 1992 med knyttet neve synger: «We, the members of the Umkhonto, have pledged ourselves to kill them – kill the whites.»

Dette har man altså i ikke helt ubetydelig grad fulgt opp siden 1994. De av dere som tenker på Mandela som en uskyldsren, afrikansk messias-skikkelse, kan jo bruke et par minutter på å se YouTube-innslaget Nelson Mandela sings about killing whites.

Noen av dere vil kanskje innvende at dette bare er uskyldige talemåter. For det første er dette en form for argumentasjon som ikke klinger like godt i Norge etter 22/7. For det andre er det altså ikke så rent få hvite (inkludert svært mange kvinner og barn) som har fått merke realitetene i denne stofen på verst tenkelige vis.

Andre vil kanskje bemerke at Mandela kan ha vært under press i den aktuelle situasjonen. Mulig det. Men hva sier det i så fall om situasjonen i Sør-Afrika dersom det skulle være slik at selv ikke Mandela kunne sette ned foten og si at dette ville han ikke være med på?

Det har forøvrig en stund nå gått rykter om at sterke krefter i Sør-Afrika forbereder folkemord mot hvite så snart man er kvitt den relativt moderate Mandela. Som Jon Magne Lund spurte i Vårt Land i går: «Og hva skjer når Mandela om ikke lenge dør?»

Andres vurdering av Mercers bok

Her er et lite utvalg av de mange lovordene som er blitt Mercers bok til del:

"If you want to witness the end result of what in Americais called 'diversity,' you must read Into the Cannibal's Pot. 'Diversity' is a euphemism for racial retribution administered mostly by guilty white liberals in universities, corporations, and government. It is a thoroughly collectivist notion that condones punishing the current generation of white males for the sins of the past. It's most extreme form is practiced in post-Apartheid South Africa, and its effects are meticulously documented by Ilana Mercer (who also writes marvelously): rampant black-on-white crime, racist labor laws that have created 'The world's most extreme affirmative action program'; the confiscation of private property; economic socialism; state-sponsored terrorism; and, most sickeningly, the idolization of the corrupt and murderous Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe. The Western media ignore all of this because of their ideological love affair with the communistic African National Congress and, frankly, their support for many of these same policies."

   - THOMAS J. DILORENZO, professor of economics, Loyola College, Maryland, author of the best-selling The Real Lincoln, Lincoln Unmasked, and most recently, Hamilton's Curse

"Ilana Mercer's well-documented, encompassing study is at once heartbreaking, infuriating, illuminating and instructive. Ethnic cleansing is underway in the once great nation of South Africa, but Americans hear nothing of it; they are deliberately shielded by the same parties that served to bring it about, the liberal elites in Western governments and the press who believe that white South Africans 'have it coming.' It is white guilt and the so-called right of black reprisal extrapolated to ghastly extremes; political correctness on steroids, and all in the name of craven progressive ideology. If the West is ever to occupy anything resembling moral high ground - not to mention avoiding this fate itself - it will have to come to terms with its part in South Africa's demise, and the misery, degradation and naked horror of those who now suffer."

   - ERIK RUSH, columnist and author of Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal-America's Racial Obsession. Erik was the first to break the story of President (then Senator) Barack Obama's ties to the militant, Afrocentric,Chicago preacher Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

"Into the Cannibal's Pot is well-written, courageous, and is clearly a strong socio-political tract on South Africa."

   - IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ, Hannah Arendt distinguished professor emeritus,Rutgers University,New Jersey

Konklusjon

Ilana Mercer har skrevet en bok som er skremmende, viktig og veldokumentert. Den viser hva som skjer når ønsketenkning gis prioritet over realisme. Alternativt kan man si at den viser hva som skjer når man nekter å forholde seg til etiske dilemmaer, og i stedet insisterer på at det finnes én og bare én riktig løsning.