race – Page 3 – praag.org

Wits University concerned about rise in racial consciousness in South Africa

The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies on Friday expressed concern at the number of racial incidents across South Africa over the past few months.

“South Africa has not entered a post-racial, colour-blind era,” centre director Professor Melissa Steyn said in a statement.

“These incidents make it clear that transformation is not a linear process, and that we should not assume that the passage of time since the 1994 transition necessarily translates into a steady, concomitant erosion of racism and racially abusive behaviour.”

She highlighted some of the incidents including the so-called “blackface” saga where two white University of Pretoria (UP) students dressed up like domestic workers and smeared black paint on their faces in August. UP launched an investigation into the incident but the outcome was not yet known.

Another incident outlined by the centre made headlines on Thursday.

Two white Netcare 911 paramedics attending a road-rage incident in Johannesburg are accused of not attending to the black injured man, who was bleeding from axe wounds, and instead only attending to the white attacker.

After video footage of the scene emerged, Netcare 911 suspended the two paramedics not for the allegation, but instead for leaving the accident scene prematurely.

This month, another incident that made headlines was a white Cape Town dentist who allegedly beat a black gardener with a sjambok. The assault case in court is pending.

In Limpopo, an animal clinic and an office park came under fire after allegations of toilet segregation emerged. The SA Human Rights Commission is investigating both matters.

“While South Africans are shocked by such acts of thoughtlessness, hostility, and violence, we cannot afford to dismiss their significance simply as that there is a handful of ‘bad apples’ out there,” said Steyn.

“It is clear that it is time to seriously take stock… We need to develop a vocabulary to unpack differences, and become more cognisant of what may be required of us to build a society in which all people feel valued, respected, and safe.”

Black-white racial gap in USA now bigger than in 1970 South Africa

Whites, on average, believe that anti-white racism is a bigger problem than anti-black racism.

Many white Americans say they are fed up with the coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. A plurality of whites in a recent Pew survey said that the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.

Bill O’Reilly of Fox News reflected that weariness, saying: “All you hear is grievance, grievance, grievance, money, money, money.”

Indeed, a 2011 study by scholars at Harvard and Tufts found that whites, on average, believed that anti-white racism was a bigger problem than anti-black racism.

Yes, you read that right!

So let me push back at what I see as smug white delusion. Here are a few reasons race relations deserve more attention, not less:

The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)
The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.
A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.
Black students are significantly less likely to attend schools offering advanced math and science courses than white students. They are three times as likely to be suspended and expelled, setting them up for educational failure.
Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school have been imprisoned.

All these constitute not a black problem or a white problem, but an American problem. When so much talent is underemployed and overincarcerated, the entire country suffers.

Some straight people have gradually changed their attitudes toward gays after realizing that their friends — or children — were gay. Researchers have found that male judges are more sympathetic to women’s rights when they have daughters. Yet because of the de facto segregation of America, whites are unlikely to have many black friends: A study from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that in a network of 100 friends, a white person, on average, has one black friend.

That’s unfortunate, because friends open our eyes. I was shaken after a well-known black woman told me about looking out her front window and seeing that police officers had her teenage son down on the ground after he had stepped out of their upscale house because they thought he was a prowler. “Thank God he didn’t run,” she said.

One black friend tells me that he freaked out when his white fiancée purchased an item in a store and promptly threw the receipt away. “What are you doing?” he protested to her. He is a highly successful and well-educated professional but would never dream of tossing a receipt for fear of being accused of shoplifting.

Some readers will protest that the stereotype is rooted in reality: Young black men are disproportionately likely to be criminals.

That’s true — and complicated. “There’s nothing more painful to me,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson once said, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

All this should be part of the national conversation on race, as well, and prompt a drive to help young black men end up in jobs and stable families rather than in crime or jail. We have policies with a robust record of creating opportunity: home visitation programs like Nurse-Family Partnership; early education initiatives like Educare and Head Start; programs for troubled adolescents like Youth Villages; anti-gang and anti-crime initiatives like Becoming a Man; efforts to prevent teen pregnancies like the Carrera curriculum; job training like Career Academies; and job incentives like the earned-income tax credit.

The best escalator to opportunity may be education, but that escalator is broken for black boys growing up in neighborhoods with broken schools. We fail those boys before they fail us.

So a starting point is for those of us in white America to wipe away any self-satisfaction about racial progress. Yes, the progress is real, but so are the challenges. The gaps demand a wrenching, soul-searching excavation of our national soul, and the first step is to acknowledge that the central race challenge in America today is not the suffering of whites.

– Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist

In USA, Tom and Jerry cartoons now carry ‘racism’ warning

Tom and Jerry cartoons on television are being accompanied by a warning that they may depict scenes of “racial prejudice”.

The classic cat and mouse cartoons, some made more than 70 years ago, carry a warning for subscribers to Amazon Prime Instant Video.

There have been claims of racist stereotyping in the depiction of a black maid in the cartoon series.

A warning at the beginning of the cartoon, displayed by Warner Brothers

Amazon’s warning says such prejudice was once “commonplace” in US society.

Tom and Jerry, once a staple of children’s television on British television, is being presented with a cautionary note about “ethnic and racial prejudices”.

‘Trigger warnings’

Amazon’s streaming subscription service, formerly branded as LoveFilm, includes the cartoons in its comedy collection.

But Tom and Jerry: The Complete Second Volume is accompanied by the caution: “Tom and Jerry shorts may depict some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society. Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today.”

The wording is similar to disclaimers accompanying some collections of the cartoons on DVD.

The warning was attacked as “empty-headed” by cultural commentator and professor of sociology, Frank Furedi, who said it was a form of a “false piousness” and a type of censorship which “seems to be sweeping cultural life”.

“We’re reading history backwards, judging people in the past by our values,” said Prof Furedi from the University of Kent.

Tom and Jerry was first produced by the MGM film studio in 1940. The cartoons, directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera and produced by Fred Quimby, ran until 1957, with carefully choreographed chase scenes set in the homes and gardens of suburban America.

There were more than a hundred short films made in this original series, winning seven academy awards. These included the Cat Concerto in 1946, the Two Mouseketeers in 1951 and Johann Mouse in 1952.

In the subsequent decades there have been numerous re-launched television versions of the series, with varying styles and varying degrees of critical approval.

The claims of racism are longstanding. When the original versions were shown on US television in the 1960s some scenes were edited.

There have also been complaints about the characters smoking cigarettes, with changes made to recent screenings.

‘Superb’ animation

Steve Abrahart, senior lecturer in animation at De Montfort University, said the quality of animation in the early Tom and Jerry films was “superb”.

The cartoons are still seen as being among the best made, he said.

But Mr Abrahart said the attention to detail of the early versions was lost in some of the later re-makes.

On the question of the portrayals of race and ethnicity, he said today’s animation students were not shocked by what they saw in old cartoons.

He said they understood how attitudes changed over time.

As well as racial stereotypes, he said there were questions about the representation of women and other nationalities in animations from the 1940s.

The idea of running warnings ahead of potentially upsetting moments in films or books has become a controversial topic in US universities.

There have been calls for the use of “trigger warnings” which could flag up to students that they are about to come across descriptions of physical brutality, aggressive language or sexual violence.

The suggestion that these should be inserted into lessons about classic texts has angered some academics.

Prof Furedi said calls for such trigger warnings were a form of “narcissism”, with the concerns not really being about the content of a book or work of art but about individual students asserting their own importance.

“A tolerant society needs to discuss disturbing art,” he said. – BBC.COM

‘Racist HP Lovecraft’s name should be dropped’ from World Fantasy awards

The board of the World Fantasy awards has said that it is “in discussion” about its winners’ statuette, modelled on the late HP Lovecraft, after calls for the trophy to be changed due to Lovecraft’s “fundamental racism”.

Over the past four decades, the prestigious fantasy prize has been won by writers including Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe and Haruki Murakami. It comes in the shape of a bust of Lovecraft, the creator of the Cthulhu mythos and prolific writer of weird fiction, who – 2011’s best novel winner Nnedi Okorafor was stunned to discover – was also the author of a poem that gives an unflattering description of black people:

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

– H.P. Lovecraft, On the Creation of Niggers (1912)

At the time, the Nigerian-American author wrote of her conflicted feelings over the fact that “a statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honours as a writer”. Now her fellow author Daniel José Older has launched a petition calling for the organisers of the prize to make the late African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler the inspiration for the statue rather than Lovecraft.

Older has almost 2,500 signatories to date, including Okorafor and other authors; he writes that while Lovecraft “did leave a lasting mark on speculative fiction, he was also an avowed racist and a terrible wordsmith”, and “it’s time to stop co-signing his bigotry and move sci-fi/fantasy out of the past”.

The novelist told the Guardian that while he reads Lovecraft himself, and appreciates “aspects” of his work, “there’s no reason, in 2014, to have a man who enthusiastically advocated for genocide be the face of fantasy’s greatest honour”.

“People have been debating whether Lovecraft being a racist matters or whether it’s his writing that should be at issue. I’m saying: both matter. After decades and decades of deeply embedded racism being prevalent in the fantasy genre, it’s time to make courageous moves against racism, and that includes not championing a vile racist,” said Older.

Okorafor, who was not involved with setting up the petition, said she loved the idea of Butler replacing Lovecraft, also suggesting the late Diana Wynne Jones as a possible option, “or some sort of mystical creature or plant”.

She also welcomed the controversy as an occasion for opening an important discussion. “I think seeing all aspects of authors like this (especially when it manifests clearly in the author’s work) will help us be better able to deal with issues of race. Instead of pretending it’s not there or feigning colour-blindness, it’s better to DEAL with it. Talk it out. See it. Accept it,” she said. “It’s not comfortable to question someone you idolise. It raises emotions. The practice of cognitive dissonance abounds. There are uncomfortable arguments. Snarky rebuttals and retorts are written. These are growing pains.”

Older said there had been “thoughtful and brilliant points made on all sides and some ridiculous, nonsensical trolling” in response to his suggestion, adding that he “wasn’t surprised that some folks took personal offence to the petition. Lovecraft has long been fandom’s favourite racist and it’s always fascinating to watch people tie themselves in all sorts of rhetorical knots trying to justify appalling hatred on the one hand and sloppy prose on the other.”

One lengthy defence has been offered by Lovecraft expert ST Joshi, who writes of “the significant question as to whether racism should be regarded as so much more significant a moral, intellectual, and personal flaw than many other stances one could name”, and of “the further absurdity of thinking that Lovecraft’s undeniable racism somehow negates his immense talents as a writer and also negates the many virtues – intellectual, aesthetic, and personal – that he displayed over his life”.

A Salon article by the writer Laura Miller saw the self-avowed Lovecraft fan write that “we need to be able to accept the truth that even great artists – greater ones than Lovecraft, certainly – have their ugly sides, and that ugliness can be inextricable from their greatness. Art, being human, is an expression of the whole self. This isn’t the same as accepting Lovecraft’s racism. You can acknowledge, contemplate and discuss that racism without feeling obliged to reject the work as a whole.”

She adds: “When Joshi writes, ‘If Nnedi Okorafor and China Miéville [another WFA winner who objects to the trophy] are so offended at owning the WFA, they should simply return it and be done with the matter,’ he is essentially telling writers like Okorafor that they must accept an honour from that community in the form of a man who considered [black people] to be ‘semi-human’ and filled ‘with vice’. Suck it up, or get out. I’m pretty sure this is not the message the World Fantasy Convention meant to send when they gave Okorafor the prize in the first place.”

The board of the World Fantasy awards, which will be held in November in Washington, DC, said it “has been and continues to be in discussion about the future of the award statuette”. – The Guardian

Everything is racist now, even bras

Something’s changed, subtly but swiftly, over the past couple of months. Suddenly there are charges of racism absolutely everywhere, from seemingly everyone, irrespective of whether those accusations are grounded in reality. This isn’t entirely new, obviously, but it has intensified as of late.

by Mande Wilkes

And I’m tired of it.

While I can concede that some people are racist, and some systemic racism lingers, it’s hardly rampant or pervasive. On the whole, black Americans and white carry on together just fine.

To claim otherwise, actually, is to hurt children — black children, specifically. How must it feel to be a kid and to be told, over and over again from the get-go, that the world is out to get you? While it’s not causative, it isn’t hard to understand, then, why black youth suffer from high rates of incarceration, poverty, drug use and teen pregnancy. Honestly, had I grown up with the world at my ear, telling me I’m despised, I can’t be sure I wouldn’t have had a rockier time of it.

There are consequences, is what I’m saying, when you convince a whole segment of America that they’re hated. Not for nothing, one of those consequences could be that a black teen, having been brought up to believe that racism is everywhere, might behave defensively when approached by a white cop. In that instance, we can’t discern whether the issue was racism itself or, as likely, the mistaken and unwarranted fear of racism where it doesn’t exist.

I’ll keep it real, for a moment, and confess that I’m not saying anything new on the subject. So much has been said about racism that it’s hardly possible, at this point, to deliver any large insights.

But I reached my breaking point a few days ago, upon hearing news of the editorial board of a college newspaper charging that bra manufacturers are racist. Why are they racist? Because “nude” is a common bra-color designation, and black women’s skin isn’t actually “nude.” Or something.

Anyway, interestingly, this recent ratcheting-up and battening-down of hysteria coincides with genuine and growing racist sentiment — but it has nothing to do with the black population.

In recent weeks, a number of Americans have convinced themselves that Islam is a race and a religion to be feared, and, more than that, annihilated. You might imagine that to a Jewish person like me, Islamophobia would be comforting — a measure of commiseration about the ongoing Mideast unrest. But in fact it bewilders me that unofficial American policy seems to be that an entire population must be either converted or killed.

Which is all to say that right now it’s safer and sounder to be black in America than to be Muslim anywhere. Perhaps that’s progress of sorts, but it feels like more of the same.

Mande Wilkes is a wife, mother, businesswoman, author, etc. residing on the South Carolina coast with her family. Read more of her columns.

Communists play cat and mouse with South African farmers

Hundreds of South Africa’s commercial farmers have now gone home after TAU SA’s yearly congress in Pretoria. In the north of the country they wait for the summer rain: their soil is prepared, the seeds are planted and the days grow hotter. Eyes look skyward for the first signs: they wait for the whip of the pre-storm wind, for that scent of moisture, for the quick darkening of the sky. Fifty three million South Africans depend on the country’s commercial farmers for their daily bread.

In his keynote Congress speech, TAU SA president Louis Meintjes covered many points – government propaganda on how “the whites” stole black land; farmworkers’ “rights” (but nothing about the rights of those who created the farms); how the country is run from Luthuli House, making the claim that SA is a democracy something of a farce. Then there’s the ubiquitous Freedom Charter, trotted out at every turn by the ANC, an outdated manifesto, written by white communists (notably Rusty Berstein), whose so-called principles are today only supported by countries like North Korea.

Then there’s the government’s 50/50 plan – the “sharing” of private farms with the workers which has elicited guffaws around the world and caused many potential investors to run for the hills. TAU SA says this latest caprice is a bridge too far. It is patently unacceptable, for many reasons but not least that it will cause hardship and hunger.

Then followed the president’s key question: where will it stop? Each demand’s acquiescence is followed by another demand. Despite reams being written about the empirical impracticality of the ANC’s farm policies, it is clear the government takes no notice. Willy nilly it surges ahead with plans and notions and white papers and green papers, each more ludicrous than the last. Communism’s DNA is well entrenched at Luthuli House, despite its spectacular failures in the twentieth century.

It should be therefore no surprise that the government proffered this policy during pre-1994 negotiations for the transfer of power in South Africa. It is a pity that many who negotiated with the ANC did not take cognizance of communism’s awful legacy.

Book

In his book How Communists Negotiate by American Admiral C. Turner Joy (MacMillan & Co, NY 1955), this Commander in Chief (UN Command) of Naval Forces in the Far East and American representative at the South Korean Armistice Conference at the end of the Korean War set out how the North Korean communists meticulously planned to get as much as they could without giving away anything to the other side. Virtually all of the processes he outlined regarding the negotiation process there were repeated by the ANC pre-1994.

His chapters include “Setting the stage”: Turner says the communists carefully consider the physical circumstances of the negotiating venue. (Remember the luxury game farms and the joint fishing trips of the Codesa protagonists. Then there were the well-dressed ANC big wigs in West Africa sporting English tweeds, briar pipes and a good British accent).

Chapter Two of Turner’s book – “The Delegation” – outlines how the very best intellectual minds and people of good appearance headed the communist teams at Korea. In pre-1994 SA, no rabble nor any toyi toyi-ing mobs were anywhere near the discussion venues. Chapter Three discusses the “Loaded Agenda” – “the Korean communists sought an agenda composed of conclusions favorable to their basic objectives, with some allowances for compromises if it suited them”, wrote Turner.

(It is rumoured that the Mozambican president Samora Machel told Nelson Mandela not to frighten SA’s whites because he would need them during the transition period so that the country wouldn’t disintegrate, as did Mozambique after independence. This practical approach to preserve the functional status quo during the early period after 1994 was sold as forgiveness and reconciliation on the ANC’s part, while in reality it was a calculated policy to preserve stability.)

Chapter Four – “Incidents” – refers to the communist policy of creating violent clashes and disturbances during the negotiation process in order to unnerve the other side who long for peace and want to hurry up the peace process to avoid further violence. (Nelson Mandela refused to renounce violence as a condition for his release. In fact after his release in 1990, violence increased exponentially until power was transferred in 1994.)

The Veto

The chapter on “The Veto” illustrates a Machiavellian method used to increase the chances of compromise from the other side. The stubborn recalcitrance of the North Korean side was designed to irritate the Americans into accepting some points in order to move ahead as they were tired of the delaying tactics.

Turner’s assessment of how the communists decide what is the truth and what is not is contained in the fascinating chapter “Truth and Consequence”. He says “the distortion of truth as practiced by the communists is a science”. (Remember Bishop Tutu’s assertion that there were “four kinds of truth” in his Truth and Reconciliation Commission summing up! Then we have the current “truth” about land theft, and a new “truth” about South Africa’s history, designed to engender a feeling of guilt among whites. This is entirely misplaced: without white settlement of Southern Africa, there would have been no present-day South Africa.

Whites found people who had no written language, who created no infrastructure and whose lives were beleaguered by battles with other tribes. They had no land titles and lived in primitive dwellings surrounded by sparse agriculture. Why the guilt among whites?)

Inches and Miles

The chapter most apt in relation to the TAU SA president’s speech is entitled “Inches and Miles”. Here Turner puts the case of “give an inch and they’ll take a mile“ so succinctly. He says:

“Communists regard any concession made by their opponents as a sign of weakness. Many Westerners entertain the notion that to accept some part of a communist negotiating proposal will encourage the communists to respond in kind.

“On the contrary such action is likely to induce an even more adamant attitude on their part. If Western negotiators agree to a communist proposal without insisting on an equal concession on another point, the communists conclude that their opponents are in a weak position and then they demand more.”

Thus the “fundamental techniques” to which Turner refers as part and parcel of communists’ negotiating processes are being used in South Africa 60 years after this Korean episode.

Anybody who cared to read a South African Communist Party directive on Reform and Revolution which was circulating in the mid-eighties would have seen that the doctrine was as sacred then as it was from the early days of communism. In para 13.2.3, it says “at the same time we must not mechanically dig in our heels against any future possibility to negotiate or compromise with other forces. We must remember that virtually all revolutionary struggles in the post-war period (Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique) reached their final climax at the negotiating table.”

The TAU SA president asks: Do we know what we are supporting? Where will it stop? My personal opinion is that it is irresponsible to support any policy unless you know where it will end and what will be the final goals. He asks the ANC government: what is your end goal and when will you stop?

Herein lies the rub. Give and give and more will be asked of you until there is nothing more to give. Feed the crocodile and it will turn around and devour you. The ANC government cannot be allowed to usurp the commercial farming sector. It is to no one’s advantage. Indeed, it is a catastrophe waiting in the wings.

South African whites, by definition, cannot be ‘racist’

This is a very amusing story that was published recently in South Africa. A local black comedian who calls himself TolA$$Mo (Mongezi Ngcobondwane) claimed that an Afro-American called him a “kaffir” and there is a court case on which you could read about here.

The usually anti-white columunist on the Daily Maverick, Sisonke Msimang, writes:

The wrinkle in the story is that the man Ngcobondwane allegedly shot his weapon at, and whom he claims called him kaffir – is black. And while it is theoretically plausible in an abstract sense, that a black person (even one from America where the South African term kaffir is not in use) might call another black person by a racial epithet, the reality is that the particular person in question seems unlikely to have done that. I happen to know French (although he is a relatively new acquaintance) so I may be biased – but I would be surprised if someone who was raised by civil rights activists would use a word like kaffir against another Black person.”

Ngcobondwane then goes on to suggest, “If one more white man calls me a kaffir, I’m going to moer him.”

This is a sentiment with which many black people in South Africa can identify. There is nothing quite like being called a kaffir. It takes the air out of your lungs, hits you in the solar plexus; stings your eyes and dries your mouth. You are at once ashamed and enraged – understanding that the word should have no power and yet feeling its force and weight in your pelvis and your knees and in the soles of your feet. Kaffir has the density of centuries; it is the color of blood and tastes like metal.

The argument elsewhere in the same column seems to be that the “race card” should not be played among blacks or “brothers” in American parlance. The race card should be reserved for whites only, i.e. you should only call whites racist, not your fellow blacks or “people of colour”. Although somewhere in this story lurks the somewhat politically incorrect fact that the American, James Albert French, might have been light-skinned, a kind of inverse reaction to the normal one whereby South African blacks kill their darker skinned “brothers” from other African countries, also calling them makwerekwere or “Kiwi’s” after the shoe-polish brand.

The other problem for cultural-Marxist race theory in SA is that whites and especially Afrikaners, are politically powerless and may therefore by definition not be racist, even if they use the word “kaffir”. Race being a social construct, or so the theory goes, “racism” is but the expression of power relations between a majority with political power and a minority without it. As we do not even rule a single municipality in South Africa and are both culturally and politically dominated by Afro-Saxon blacks, we cannot be racist, unlike Mr. French here who hails from the American Empire.

“Kaffir” is also an Arab word, originally, so one should think that it should be acceptable, not being of European or “eurocentric” origin. It means “heathen” and given the many belief systems proliferating today, including anti-racism which has all the hallmarks of a religion, like blasphemy, excommunication, etc., we are perhaps all “kaffirs” to someone somewhere. Or as the Koos Kombuis song goes in Afrikaans: “Ons is almal kaffers in ons harte.” Or maybe Koos Kombuis should be banned? Placed on the index, censored? Read my latest essay, Raiders of the lost Empire, if only because I also quote Karl Marx in there somewhere: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

S. African blacks attack and rob injured white at accident scene

A businessman from Krugersdorp witnessed the scene, akin to something from a horror movie.

The victim of a serious motorcycle accident, a 20-year old white man, was robbed and dragged by his broken arm by a black mob at the scene of the accident.

Quinton Wagner, whose father was shot dead in front of him earlier this year by black house robbers, is now fighting for his life in the Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg, according to the Johannesburg daily Beeld.

He was hit from behind by a pickup truck on his motorcycle in Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg.

About 20 black bystanders from a nearby minibus taxi rank fell upon Wagner, manhandled him and dragged hom five metres from the accident scene into the bushes.

Since being admitted to hospital on Friday, he has undergone three operations. Hy is unable to breathe by himself and is dependent upon a breathing machine. He also has blood in his lungs, his liver has been ruptured and six of his ribs broken, as well as his right arm and collar bone. Wagner’s pancreas has been damaged and he has injuries to his legs.

A businessman from Krugersdorp witnessed the scene, akin to something from a horror movie. He said the bleeding young man’s right arm was so badly broken that the bone protruded from this shirt. The black attackers nonetheless grabbed him by that arm and dragged him into the bushes.

He was notified by a client involved in the accident. Because he was not far from the scene of the accident he and a friend went there as soon as possible. But the blacks proceeded to rob them too.

“I could not believe my eyes,” he said. “We saw how the boy was dragged by his arms. When we got out of my pickup truck the robbers fell upon us too. The robbers tore the boy’s safety helmet from his head. He was lying on his rucksack. The robbers dragged him to and fro like a rag doll. They also fought among themselves to get hold of his shoes which they stole.”

The Good Samaritan said that the robbers held him when he tried to get to the victim. His wallet and his mobile phone were taken and his client was also robbed of his phone and laptop computer.

Police vehicles with black policemen inside drove past the scene without stopping and after a long time only one pickup van arrived, after the police were called.

“The CPF (Community Policing Forum, composed of volunteers, usually whites) cordoned off the road so that the emergency helicopter could land. When the helicopter tried to land, the robbers ran towards them to rob them too. The CPF kept them away while the two police officers went to sit to one side. They would not even take down statements.”

Solomon Sibiya, a police spokesman, could not be reached on Monday. He said no-one had informed him of the incident and he could not comment.

Black Management Forum very happy with ConCourt’s anti-white ruling

The Black Management Forum accuses businesses of ‘not respecting the rule of law’ by appointing white people to positions.

South Africa’s Black Management Forum has expressed its satisfaction with the Constitutional Court ruling that excluding whites from promotion is enshrined in the affirmative-action clauses of the country’s constitution. This came after an appeal by the Police Service against an earlier Appeal Court ruling that captain Renate Barnard should have been given promotion to superintendent, regardless of her race.

In response, the Black Management Forum has said in a statement that it “welcomes the Constitutional Court ruling in defence of Affirmative Action”.

The BMF “applauds the well thought and articulated ruling by the judges. This is essentially upholding the very law which is enshrined in our constitution. The BMF would like to remind all the institutions in our land that we will not find peace until workplaces reflect the national demographics of our country. Employment Equity Act is one of the transformation instruments which is meant to redress the imbalances of the past discriminatory era of apartheid which denied black people opportunities. We also note and condemn the general reluctance for transformation and unwillingness to appoint black people in senior and top management as reported by the Employment Equity Commission.”

The Black Management Forum accuses businesses of “not respecting the rule of law” by appointing white people to positions and it “will not rest until all the workplace in South Africa reflects our demographics”. As whites only constitute 9% of the population, that would mean that all institutions would have to impose racial quotas and fill positions with blacks, even where they are not qualified.

Diversity month means slogans against whites

A race row has erupted at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University after a project to mark 20 years of democracy in South Africa backfired.

The Port Elizabeth university’s “talking walls” project, aimed at encouraging staff and students to speak about democracy, yielded a range of offensive statements.

According to Herald Online, the white boards that served as the talking walls saw responses ranging from the silly – one student suggested free alcohol in the canteen – to the more serious “F**k whites” which fanned racial tension. Also upsetting to some was a statement that suggested fewer whites should be at the university.

The boards have been pulled off the walls and are currently lying in a passage. The offensive messages have been wiped off.

Management student Tiffany Francis, 21, said: “The past is in the past and we must work together to make the future better. They should have a disciplinary hearing to prevent it happening again”.

Marketing student Sanela Genu, 20, thought the students responsible should be expelled. “They brought the school name into disrepute.”

University spokeswoman Roslyn Baatjies said the university was saddened by the offensive comments, especially as it is presently celebrating Diversity Month.

“This behaviour is not in keeping with our core values. We would like to believe this is an isolated incident and does not reflect the feelings of the majority of staff and students.”

The comments had been written anonymously, so the university did not know who was responsible.

Source: timeslive.co.za

Blacks are confused and they require help: But what help?

by Johann Theron

Blacks themselves give a lot of clues as to what they want or need, especially when they think some politically correct answer is not required. Very few would venture to actually admit to wrong-doing such as the infamous Pallo Jordan of the South African revolutionary movement ANC (African National Congress), or as the American lawyer Michael Smith pointed out – black Americans would rather believe a cellmate than their own lawyer.

Lately a black South African twitter account tweeted that “they (blacks) do not want to be civilized” – something I would actually believe given their extremely limited and limiting continued tribal and communist education. Then quite surprisingly the South African Moeketsi Masola was published saying that he is both “ashamed to be black and a man”. Stories abound here in South Africa of “black diamonds” – a term denoting black people in senior corporate positions they were never qualified for – which (still) allow those white-run corporations to compete for lucrative government tenders. As long as they have a “scorecard” showing black management and ownership, they can still do business with an anti-white government.

The South African government itself is of course virtually 100% black except for a few important positions such as the Department of Trade and Industry Minister which manages the very influential state-owned enterprises of which there are thousands – with more to come. Then you also get the arrogant side where a “shortage” of money is simply downplayed by the possibility of selling “more bonds” to finance an unsustainable welfare state despite not purporting to be “welfare oriented”. South Africa proposes to be a constitutional state similar to America that actually functions like a socialist/Marxist regime behind the “black” curtain. Apparently 40% of parliamentarians are communist (of the old type) and I will not go into the percentage of councillors in municipalities that are illiterate. Municipal finances are in such disarry that something like 90% of South African municipalities get qualified audits.

Black people, especially in South Africa, agree that they cannot manage the country, but they continue nonetheless! They agree to be token appointments, but continue nonetheless. Recently Matome Letsoalo published an article with the title “African Leaders: Heroes or desperate house negroes?” The term house negro is of American origin (I believe) and he actually describes the President of South Africa (Jacob Zuma who incidentally has zero qualifications beyond primary or elementary school) as such a person or from that “horde”. That he asks how Obama can promote peace while causing war at the same time is perhaps a different discussion because it may have unpalatable answers such as to get rid of those same “hordes”.

That there is an inferiority complex in black people is assured – the question is how does one help these people? – not all of them though – because some are quite self-respecting and self-disciplined. But there are many others that cry for help. Since politics won’t help and neither will religion, the controlling elements in black people’s lives are tribalism and unionism. The interesting thing in South Africa is that unionism (something the anointed future SA President is well aware of) sits on the same side of the table as the government (as an alliance). In fact he appears to be intimately involved in the Marikana shooting where 34 miners died in a hail of police fire because he was most likely a black-diamond Lonmin shareholder.

The last “proper” vestige of influence on the crying masses therefore remains a single concept, i.e. tribal leadership. Unfortunately these “traditional leaders” are making things worse by claiming land they never possessed and monies they did not work for. The kind of land and funds that would have benefitted the individual crying black citizen immensely. But then that requires real (literate) black leadership heroes, maybe even somebody like Prince Buthelezi – not the Malema populist type.

Of English moral hysteria and student pranks

South Africa is apparently experiencing another tedious outburst of moral outrage about an innocuous case of “blackface” put on by two women students at the University of Pretoria for a 21st-birthday party.

I try to keep the mass media at a safe distance and therefore do not listen to radio, watch TV or buy any newspapers. The internet is a more clinical way of accessing information without background shrieks, unless it is YouTube. Yet, judging from responses on Twitter, there is some hullabaloo going on and the two students have now been “charged” by the university and will be subjected to a disciplinary hearing. They could face expulsion or some other form of punishment.

South Africa has slid so far down into an abyss of sadism, crime, murder and rape that it seems entirely risible that anyone should care about how white students make up their faces at a fancy-dress party. Yet, as one of the zealous anti-racists in Johannesburg, Gillian Schutte, once intoned in desperation: “Where is the outrage?”

Indeed. We need outrage to distract us from our abject failure as a society and even the increasing signs of a failed state in what used to be called the “Republic of South Africa”. Hardened and jaded by armed robberies, shootings in broad daylight, car hijackings, murder and torture of farmers, endemic corruption and the highest incidence of rape on the planet, the average South African – black or white – could hardly care about the latest student prank in Pretoria.

Yet the media and academic elite, in their slavish imitation of American political correctness, have to have their outrage and moral hysteria. There is something particularly British about moral hysteria which I suppose one could trace back to the time of Cromwell’s puritanical rule and which Fleet Street still has on tap whenever the United Kingdom has to rally public opinion behind another BP or Shell oil war somewhere.

It is certainly ironic that these days British moral hysteria is often projected towards Russia where once the rigours of communist zeal held sway. I was surprised to learn that anti-Semitism in the USSR carried the death penalty. As I do not know any Russian, I could not tell you which words merited a bullet in the head. Were it not for the fact that the death penalty had been abolished in 1994, one could well imagine how “racism” or politically incorrect utterances might soon become a capital offence in South Africa.

Thus South Africa gets its propensity for anti-racist outbursts from both Britain and the ex-USSR where many of the post-1994 leadership spent their formative years. Also, the Marxist-Leninism of the USSR has migrated to the USA in the form of so-called “cultural Marxism” which is the staple at most American universities, slavishly imitated by our local campuses. As Paul Craig Roberts put it recently in one of his sharply-worded commentaries on US-UK war-mongering:

If we are honest and have the strength to face reality, we will realize that the Soviet Union did not collapse. It simply moved, along with Mao and Pol Pot, to Washington and London.

In 1934 or so, shortly before the University of Pretoria completely abolished tuition in English in favour of Afrikaans, a Union Jack was burnt in front of the Old Arts Building by a young poet, WJP Erlank, who wrote under the pen name Eitemal. The English press was outraged, leading to his expulsion as a student but he instantly became an Afrikaner hero.

How the tables have been turned! It is certainly indicative of Afrikaner powerlessness that an English-speaking student, Thorne Godinho of the liberal DA’s youth movement DASO on the campus, was able to engineer the current outburst by publishing the photograph of the two Afrikaans girls dressed up as black servants on Facebook and get the university to punish them. If you want to know the meaning of “kowtow”, just watch today’s Afrikaans university administrators in action.

In more senses than one, Afrikaners find themselves completely at the mercy of latter-day zealots who are endlessly beating their quasi-religious precepts about race and racism into them. The slightest semantic or symbolic deviation is immediately punished and the guilty ones pilloried or subjected to a witch-hunt that will ruin their careers or “shame” them for years to come. It was the case during the so-called “Reitz 4” incident, as well as earlier this year during the photographing of a women’s residence initiation ceremony in Potchefstroom where for one split second and from a certain angle it could resemble a Nazi salute. Now the University of Pretoria is experiencing the same spate of orchestrated “outrage”.

Mr. Ponty Thuynsma, 76, in hospital. Photo: Lisa Hnatowicz, Beeld — Mr Ponty Thuynsma, 76, in hospital. Photo: Lisa Hnatowicz, Beeld

Over the past few days an elderly Afrikaner, Koos Jonker, was literally beaten to death by blacks near Ellisras. In a separate incident, Mr. Ponty Thuynsma was tortured with a hot iron and made to drink petrol in his home east of Pretoria. Thuynsma had to be admitted to the intensive care unit of the Wilgers hospital (see picture). However, these murderous, sadistic incidents pale into insignificance next to purely linguistic or symbolic transgressions of the dominant anti-racist theology committed by Afrikaans students.

In the USA, African Americans have been endowed with a special “minority” status akin to a sacerdotal class with special privileges protecting them against public criticism. As a special caste they also need to be treated with above-average respect. All of this dogma has been imported wholesale into South Africa, where blacks form a majority. Declaring the majority, who already has a monopoly on political power, in need of special protection and beyond criticism or occasional mocking quickly leads to a Soviet-style totalitarian society.

There is increasing censorship and after this latest “blackface” incident, some people think that the movies of comedian Leon Schuster should be banned as he often dons blackface and imitates black slang and speech patterns.

It is also beyond my comprehension how the South African “nation” as it has been defined, can be so criminal and morally depraved, yet at the same time given to an acute sensitivity or what we call in Afrikaans kleinserigheid, touchiness. Logically, the same rapist or murderer who finds torture acceptable conduct, would object to a white girl in “blackface” or someone using a term that is ethnically off-colour.

Of course, in the media and the universities there is an entire language and thought police force waiting to denounce anyone who deviates from their increasingly puritanical norms. By force of “outrage” and moral hysteria, they impose their contradictory values on us. Everyone who does not agree with them is vilified as a “Nazi”, “fascist”, “racist”, “white supremacist”, “sexist”, “homophobe” or other label within their impoverished catechism.

I almost wrote “secular catechism”. But there is nothing secular about it and its acolytes certainly do not subscribe to the values of the European Enlightenment. Tolerance and freedom of speech are not part of their belief system. It is a real religion with a fairly simple dogma and enough zealots to patrol the boundaries of our words and our actions. They do not countenance any form of heresy and at best will allow “sinners” to repent and submit to a programme of re-education.

Or “discipline”, that Leninist word for those deviating from the party line.

However, the strategic thrust of the current campaign around the Afrikaans universities is to oust the last remaining Afrikaners from those institutions so that they may be entirely controlled by English cultural Marxists. In its wisdom, the ANC government has decided that “South Africa needs more PhDs” and is throwing money at the problem. So apart from serving the “Red Church” as Albert Camus called it, one may also eject some hapless Afrikaner academic from his post amid rising incomes in the tertiary-education sector. Hence the witch-hunts against dissident students and lecturers at all the Afrikaans universities.

In the nineteenth century, anglicisation in South Africa was justified by British imperialism; now it is based on race and political correctness. Signs of “racism”, as defined, detract from the language and cultural rights of Afrikaners and even their access to tertiary education.

Until the final victory of Sovietised English over Afrikaans is trumpeted in South Africa, the semantic war is bound to intensify. We might as well all put on “war paint”; if that can still be said without causing offence to native Americans.

Little America at the tip of Africa

In this interview, two South African authors have a conversation about important issues affecting the country, the USA and society generally. They both grew up in and around Johannesburg and, thanks to the internet, discovered each other’s work a few years ago. Ilana Mercer lives in Washington State, in the north-western corner of America.

ILANA MERCER: There’s an elephant in the courtroom in which Oscar Pistorius is being tried for the murder of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. It is the unidirectional, black-on-black and black-on-white violent crime in South Africa. The fear of being butchered was likely behind the blade runner’s irrational, irresponsible actions. I had hoped that Pistorius would speak up. For all his privilege, Pistorius knows the rapacity and invincibility of the criminal class in his country. Like every other Afrikaner, he knew in his gut what infiltrating gangs would do to a legless Boer. The world is praising the proceedings in that court. However, “making sport of a caged animal that has confessed” is how a South African reader described this courtroom Colosseum. What do you think?

DAN ROODT: I largely agree with that. One of the columnists on our Praag.org site described the trial as a “canned hunt and a legal travesty.” Most people watching it probably do not know that only 8 percent of murder cases in South Africa result in a conviction, so killers have a 92 percent chance of literally getting away with murder! South Africa is both the murder and especially the rape capital of the world. Usually the statistics are massaged in such a way that only murder proper, called “first-degree murder” in the United States, is included in the absolute number of murders. But if one also counts other homicides with a lesser culpability, we are the world champions, even above India’s 43,000 homicides. But, of course, India has over 1 billion people, whereas we have just over 50 million. Even for first-degree murder, we have more of those per year (16,000) than the U.S. (14,000), which has six times our population.

Regarding the court procedures, Pistorius is spending a lot of money on his legal team, and the state is using an experienced Afrikaner prosecutor, Gerrie Nel. However, there has been large-scale affirmative action applied to the appointment of judges, so that many of them lack the knowledge of the law and the experience to do their job properly. In many cases, black offenders, especially, get off very lightly and in practice do not serve more than 10 years for first-degree murder.

The government is also applying pressure on lawyers to apply affirmative action in their own ranks as most of the top-level senior lawyers, or advocates, as we call them, are still white. They are preferred by the big-spending corporate clients in civil cases, especially. A lawyer friend of mine recently told me of one tedious corporate court case in Pretoria that has lasted 10 years and consumed $5 million in legal fees, also swallowing up her whole life. Ironically, even the president, Jacob Zuma – who has had more than 500 charges of corruption against him and was also accused of rape in December 2005 – used white Afrikaner lawyers to get him off, using their technical knowledge of the law and court procedures.

There is also rampant corruption in the criminal justice system, with policemen and petty court officials being bribed to make documents and evidence disappear, so the kind of televised court-room soap opera of the Pistorius trial is not at all representative of the vicissitudes of the average trial.

Unlike in the U.S., South Africa does not collect crime statistics broken down by race anymore, but we know that the vast majority of prison inmates serving time for violent crime are black. White offenders – which include white-collar crimes like fraud or insider trading – only constitute 1.8 percent of the prison population, while whites make up under 10 percent of the total population. A recent reliable survey showed that whites are disproportionately victims of house robberies, constituting about 50 percent of the victims, while the perpetrators are almost invariably black.

The image of South African blacks disseminated by the global media is of a population of kindhearted, forgiving people like Mandela, whereas the reality demonstrates something entirely different. There is something inexplicably sadistic about murders and assaults by black perpetrators on their white victims in South Africa, which often include lengthy and dehumanizing torture sessions, mutilation of bodies, sexual violence, and so on. Often the victims are children, including toddlers and babies. Every week we read about farm murders in the press where the victims are normally elderly white farmers, regularly ambushed on a Sunday morning when they return from church attendance.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

MERCER: The South African Constitution, naturally, sanctions the prosecution of individuals based on the things they say. Conversely, Americans are supposed to enjoy a constitutional right to speak freely. The freedom gap is, however, narrowing. The establishment – politicians, journalists, jurists, educators and academics; “conservatives” as much as liberals – trip over one another in a collectivist, concerted effort to ruin an “offender.” The latest individual to be crucified for committing America’s original sin – harboring impure racial thoughts – is Donald Sterling. You’ve written that, while “few people in the U.S. have had any direct experience of racism, they nevertheless discern racism in other people’s body language, in their use of euphemisms or in being patronized by others.” Explain how this “metaphysical racism” now works as an “engine of history.”

ROODT: Unfortunately, ever since the 1960s, South Africa has been influenced by America in a very bad way. Instead of looking to the U.S. for lessons in self-reliance, the right to self-defense, or how to finance start-up tech companies, we have simply imported your liberal, pathological political correctness. That includes the sensitivity around language and terms with a racial connotation. I cannot begin to tell you how many words there are in South Africa to describe people of various races including, of course, pejorative terms. I seem to recall that my generation was very sensitive to using some of those words, and there was a famous case in 1978 when the old government’s censors banned a satirical novel entitled “Magersfontein o Magersfontein!” for containing a piece of dialogue in which the word “kaffir” was used in an ironic way. This is our equivalent to what you call the “N-word” in the U.S. In print these days, most people here also refer to the “K-word,” as there is just such a taboo against using it. However, if you go to any school playground or university campus in South Africa, young whites are using it as a way of rebelling against the system. How long this will last, I do not know, because the government and mainstream, politically correct society are clamping down on it and even giving people suspended prison sentences for a first offense after being found guilty of using the “K-word.”

So in South Africa you can torture an elderly white lady and maybe get away with it, but you will be prosecuted for speech crime for using racial epithets. I would not be surprised if all telephone conversations will be monitored, NSA-style, at some point in the future to ensnare those who use so-called racist language.

When it comes to “metaphysical racism,” that is at a far more subtle level. Someone who first alerted me to this was the documentary filmmaker Craig Bodeker from Denver, Colorado, with his piece “A Conversation About Race.” Many people in the film say that “racism is everywhere,” surrounding us like sin or some invisible element. Also, in “A Conversation About Race,” I learned that some American blacks think that a compliment from a white could be a sign of racism. So either an insult or a compliment could be construed as racism.

In South Africa, some of the liberal commentators such as Steven Friedman who writes in the Johannesburg Business Day claim that blacks were damaged by apartheid and therefore cannot be expected to perform at the same level as whites. In the U.S., this claim is made about slavery, that the insidious effects of slavery are still present, which would explain the academic achievement gap, but also differences in wealth and income. Colonialism also comes into it, as far as other African countries are concerned. The fact that Africa has remained underdeveloped for so long is almost always blamed on colonialism, notwithstanding that it was colonialism that had introduced Africa to the wheel and to writing, not to forget science and technology!

Whereas about a decade ago, the British magazine The Economist had described Africa as “the hopeless continent,” it now sees Africa as a fast-growing continent, not very different from countries like China, Hong Kong or South Korea. Even Goldman Sachs thinks that Africa will soon be a developed continent competing on an even keel with Europe, North America or Asia.

The flipside of the new optimism about Africa, including South Africa, is that every failure or missed growth target is somehow backwardly rationalized in terms of racism, colonialism and apartheid. In short, “metaphysical racism.” So even when it comes to technology, the economy and education, there is always a cloud of racism somewhere that the developed world has to address by offering aid money or some form of expiatory confession from Western leaders.

I always wonder: If Africa is now standing on its own two feet and growing so fast, why do so many countries still need development aid? Why do South African blacks still need affirmative action, including racial quotas in sports?

ILANA MERCER: The dominant-party state that is South Africa is steeped not in an African creed but in an American one. One of your most astute observations has been that post-apartheid South Africa is very much a creature of the Anglosphere. In the U.S., centrally planned and enforced multiculturalism is twinned with open borders for Third World peoples. How has South Africa fallen in line?

DAN ROODT: Many people see South Africa as an experiment in multiculturalism and open borders. Almost robotically, we’ve adopted most of the American liberal precepts in a very naïve, knee-jerk fashion. Some people are even urging that we abolish borders completely, to allow any of the billion Africans north of our country to come and settle in South Africa, much like your government is doing vis-à-vis Central American dependents. However, our experience of the massive illegal immigration we have had since 1994 is that it increases intolerance, especially among the poor and the unemployed. Locals regularly kill foreigners, and we have had so-called xenophobic riots.

In some towns close to the border, the foreign population is about 80 percent. Foreigners have access to public health-care facilities, so many are “obstetrical tourists” who come here to have babies – “anchor babies,” as you call them in the U.S. Generally speaking, state hospitals are getting worse and worse, also as a result of being overburdened with foreign Africans.

Recently, there was a court decision that foreign children that have been orphaned or separated from their parents, for example in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, also qualify for free public education in South Africa. After Lawyers for Human Rights had sued for the privilege, the government did not oppose their petition to the court.

Open borders will lead to even more ethnic strife, and we may even import some of Africa’s civil wars as the belligerents pursue their combat in South Africa. In your country, it’s gang warfare.

MERCER: Under the Afrikaners, South Africa was a European-style nation-state – Christian and biracial, in the main. Under Mandela’s African National Congress, it has adopted multiculturalism, which subsumes an “American radicalism that aims at abolishing the nation-state and replacing it with a kind of global corporatism and welfarism,” to quote your work. South Africa is now an “Afro-Saxon” nation. Explain, please.

ROODT: Yes, I think those remarks of mine are borne out by what is happening in Europe right now. There is some kind of revival of the Western spirit going on in places like France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Austria and Hungary. It is something of a truism that Afrikaner nationalism in the 20th century was based on European-style ethnic nationalism. If you look at it more objectively and free of the moral hysteria and distorted accounts, apartheid or separate development was an attempt to impart European-style ethnic nationalism to South Africa’s African tribes. To some extent, it worked, and it still has an effect to this day. For example, there has been a resurgence of Zulu nationalism in South Africa, and to some extent the ANC under Jacob Zuma has become a vehicle for Zulu aspirations and advancement. With the difference that it is no longer limited to the old homeland of Kwazulu. The whole of South Africa has now become “one big Bantustan,” as the liberal commentator R.W. Johnson has characterized it.

But in other respects, South Africa has become a colony of the USA, culturally speaking. Blacks identify with African-American culture. You hear American rap music wafting from their cars, and they have adopted the same kind of victim’s discourse that you find in the USA. There is actually a Kenyan professor who teaches in the USA., as far as I know, Ali Mazrui, who coined the term, “Afro-Saxon” for the English-speaking blacks in Africa, the USA, the Caribbean, in Britain, and so on. In fact, they outnumber the original English-speaking population of England! The black elite in South Africa identifies with this global Afro-Saxon culture, and they see themselves as being an important part of it, using South Africa’s wealth and developed infrastructure to advance the Afro-Saxon cause.

Talking about the welfare state, one of the worst fears of the old apartheid theorists was that ultimately the productive, developed part of the economy would have to subsidize the unproductive, impoverished, undeveloped part, dragging both down into an equally distributed poverty. This is more or less what is happening in South Africa now as we have a welfare state for 50 million people, supported by only 2 million real taxpayers. The funny thing is that multiculturalism and affirmative action actually disguise this process completely, so that you can no longer really tell who the producers are and who the consumers of wealth are.

In the same way, knowledge and expertise also end up being distributed in such a way that you no longer know who really has it: Is it the person who does the job, or his secretary or assistant or deputy or whoever? The other day I heard that an ex-taxi driver was appointed to a top job in our central bank, but he is barely able to write an email and knows nothing about banking. Yet he has some outside white mentor or adviser who actually helps him do his job and is also his business associate. So everybody tries to exploit this made-in-America spoils system.

Unfortunately, the USA seems to be in imperial mode, and so it wants to export its multicultural model everywhere, including to Europe where there are still real nation-states in which people speak the same language, have a common history and identity and have not been transformed by immigration. You only have to come to South Africa to see the American model in its most extreme form, where race and political correctness dominate everything.

When it comes to issues of race and ethnicity, we have also imported the sensitivity around language and ideas that pertain in the USA. Once I actually quoted a black columnist complaining about the low scores in math recorded in black schools in Soweto. The next thing I was denounced as a racist. Even if you just try to defend your language and culture, or the right of free association, that is also seen as racist. Too much criticism of government corruption or affirmative action is likewise deemed racist.

Welcome to Little America at the tip of Africa.

Race matters for bariatric surgery

Non-Hispanic white patients who underwent a gastric bypass procedure lost slightly more weight over a three-year period than Hispanic or black patients, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the journal Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases.

Researchers examined the Kaiser Permanente electronic health records of more than 20,000 racially and ethnically diverse patients in Southern California who underwent bariatric surgery from 2004 through May 2013.

They found that, on average, at three years following gastric bypass surgery, non-Hispanic white patients lost 63 percent of their excess weight; Hispanic patients lost 59 percent; and black patients lost 56 percent.

With vertical sleeve gastrectomy patients, the researchers found no significant differences between racial or ethnic groups in the percentage of excess weight lost.

The study examined the two types of bariatric surgery and found that patients who underwent the now common gastric bypass procedure lost more weight over the same period than patients who underwent the more recently developed vertical sleeve gastrectomy procedure.

The study also found that overall, gastric bypass patients lost an average of 59 percent of excess weight (an average 81.5 pounds) and vertical sleeve gastrectomy patients lost an average of 46 percent (57.6 pounds) after three years of follow-up.

“Studies have shown that bariatric surgery is associated with sustainable weight loss for patients with extreme obesity, but there is very little research to show how these procedures affect persons of different races and ethnicities, especially in the long term,” said study lead author Karen J. Coleman, PhD, of the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research & Evaluation.

“To address the current gaps in the knowledge about bariatric surgery, we created a registry of patients who underwent surgery to monitor quality and safety outcomes and assist clinicians who are caring for these patients after their surgery.”