Deconstructing the Boerehaat outburst

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by Dan Roodt

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We have a unique English population in South Africa. On the one hand, they are the most politically radical. On the other, some are partially Afrikanerised and bilingual. Just today I was listening to one of them speaking fluent Afrikaans on RadioSonderGrense, just about perfect, with a soupçon of an English accent. At least fifty percent of English-speakers in South Africa have a knowledge of Afrikaans, the highest figure for any anglophone population in the world. A much smaller percentage of them speak French in bilingual Canada and a much smaller proportion of Britons speak any of the other languages of the European Union to which they belong.

Somewhere in 2000 Régis Débray, the French essayist and philosopher and one-time chronicler of Ché Guevara visited South Africa. We immediately hit it off and he was absolutely fascinated by some of my theories on Africanism, the return to the origin, as well as a short introduction to Afrikaner thinking. I remember the local French Institute getting irritated as he was falling behind schedule as a result of our lengthy discussion.

One of the things he said I remember to this day: that no “Anglo-Saxon society” had ever succumbed to totalitarian ideas. Unlike Germany, Italy, Russia and much of Eastern Europe of course. He ascribed it to something that Orwell also wrote about: the common sense of the Englishman, his disdain for complex philosophical or ideological systems. In Orwell’s words:

Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound up with this.

However, I think I must write to Débray that he and Orwell were wrong, at least in some respects. The Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of the local English-speaking population divides into both a good-natured, polite, hospitable, outdoorsy type (like Afrikaners) and a more sinister, scheming, obsessive, greedy bunch oozing bad faith and hatred. I have experience of both kinds. Suffice it to say that the Mr. Hyde-style English person has caused us untold suffering; he or she is usually in the forefront of inciting hatreds of all kinds, advocating war or terrorism, social engineering on a vast scale, collective punishment and, last but not least, Boerehaat.

Ironically, while abjuring ethnicity, race and any form of patriotism, considered “fascist”, the leftist kind of Englishman reacts ethnically, viscerally to any form of “other” on the horizon. I have seen it many times, including over the past week with a motley collection of silly scribes and armchair activists lashing out at the Red October protest and campaign.

It bears repeating: the South African anti-racist is the biggest racist of them all! Their compulsive rejection of the (white) other is so fanatical, so obsessive, so pathological even that it borders on the insane. Not only do they hate Afrikaners, but also Southern Americans, Scots, French (the “Frogs”), Germans (the “Krauts”), the Dutch who are by definition “dumb”, Italians, Greeks, etc. While embracing political radicalism, Marxism (espcially the “vulgar” kind), egalitarian extremism, they still subscribe to nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon supremacism. Albert Brenner recently reminded us of Cecil John Rhodes’s famous statement:

I contend that we British are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence…

However, as an old Boer who participated in the first Anglo-Boer said: “I have seen the colour of the English flag and it is white.” The mythical victory of Wellington over Napoleon at Waterloo was largely won with German mercenaries. Hence the form of the ongoing low-intensity conflict between the English radical and the Afrikaner in this country: Besides placing bombs in public places or Wimpy restaurants, terrorism being the method of the coward, his main form of combat is in the propaganda department, a job which is also eminently suitable for women.

I could go into the vile history of the so-called “armed blacks” of the Anglo-Boer when the invading English army introduced interracial rape as a weapon of war into our pristine land, and you will get an understanding of English “warfare” which resembles the atrocities of a Charles Taylor or some Congolese warlord avenging himself on defenceless women and children. The point is that the English radical does the incitement and the “psy ops” but lets others do the fighting, or even the protesting.

A few months ago I observed this at close quarters outside the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. There were a few English radicals outside the court, speaking on cellphones, summoning their rented black crowd who duly arrived to toyi-toyi about “racism” in Afrikaans schools. A lone Afrikaner armed only with a camera, I confronted the black crowd and asked them why they weren’t singing “Dubula iBunu” (Shoot the Boer) because I was in attendance. But apparently that was not on the programme, to my great disappointment.

The Englishman and -woman, being cowards, would never confront us directly. They would always summon some or other rent-a-crowd or bused-in mob to protest or sometimes commit some horrible sadistic act, such as an intimidatory necklace murder. “Kill one, scare a thousand,” said Mao and of course the English radical has embraced this principle to the hilt.

Despite her surname, Gillian Schutte is as English and as radical as they come. Echoing the South African Communist Party, she has delivered the latest screaming denunciation of the Red October protest, aptly entitled Seeing Red. As confessions of Boerehaat go, it demonstrates a few things. The lack of culture and intellectualism that Orwell routinely ascribed to his countrymen, would be one of them. In fact, when the new, radical government took over in 1994, one of the first things that Kader Asmal, a miserable Indian and zombie warlord of the British Empire, did was to confiscate the classical-music instruments at Afrikaans schools. That vindictive, philistine act was surely not only his idea, but must have been decided by some English committee somewhere. No doubt the committee must have been consumed with envy and hatred at seeing our beautiful children singing in choirs and operettas, as naturally “musical as Italians or Germans” (see Orwell quote above) and playing their instruments with that quiet seriousness which is so characteristic of the Afrikaner child, as opposed to the ill-discipline, the boisterous and disrespectful, often drug-ridden anomie of the modern “English” child.

Many English bands build a career on about three guitar chords, as opposed to our famous pianists who perform Chopin or Beethoven the world over. The annual Unisa international piano competition is the highlight of the Afrikaner social calendar in Pretoria. However, English music, like English food, is loud and repetitive. Gillian Schutte does not have three chords. She only has one, strident, false note: “racism”. Karl Marx turned Hegel “on his head” in order to give us the class struggle, but even that simple idea is too complex for our local Rooinek Reds. (“Aanstap Rooies, die pad is lank en swaar…” goes the Afrikaans folk song, the existence of folk songs being another sign of our innate “fascism”.) Their natural inclination is to a kind of Spanish-Inquisition denunciation of the heretic. I think I have already pointed out the resemblance between the primitive and literal South African witch-hunt during which the offending man or usually woman is “sniffed out” by a sangoma and current attempts to identify and isolate dissidents or “racists” in order to publicly pillory or perhaps even physically harm them.

Gillian Schutte is the sangoma of the Johannesburg Left. According to her, the “Red October (campaign is).. becoming their own worst enemies as they buy into the construct of an imaginary genocide and declare a hate-filled discursive war against the entire black population”.

In essence, Schutte is calling for a black mob or impi to come and “sort out” the white, Afrikaner racists.

“But where is the outrage?” she laments. She claims that someone had called President Jacob Zuma (whose strongly Zulu identity most Afrikaners actually approve of, as being in keeping with their own ideas about acceding to modernity through one’s own culture and not a foreign one) a “Kaffer dog”. It is obvious that hordes of English “cyber warriors” in the form of agents provocateurs will try to frame Afrikaner dissidents by posting “racist” statements all over Facebook in the next few weeks, so that Schutte and her fellow racial cheerleaders may appeal to black racial identity which they keep in a wounded, rancorous state through endlessly harping on “apartheid”, “our dark past” and similar Gothic tales that are mostly fiction, interspersed with a few half-truths here and there.

To the “progressive English white”, blacks are but dogs to do his bidding, in taking the fight to the enemy: the patriotic Afrikaner who refuses to leave or disappear, or to wither away and die. At the end of the Anglo-Boer war, the British high command was flooded with letters from irate Natalians and Capetonians who did not want Britain to stop but to “cleanse the country for England” and proceed to a complete genocide of the Boer population, man, woman and child. In the concentration camps there was a concerted attempt to stamp out the Afrikaans language and identity. As E.B. Sargent wrote to Lord Milner in 1903:

We must appeal to England and the brothers and sisters of those who have fought for the Empire, asking them to come over to carry out that part of the work which their kinsmen were not able to complete. Our military operations have resulted in the greater part of the boys now remaining in the camps, and I am convinced that we have no better opportunity than now to make them all English-speaking next year … What we now require here are women, highly capable teachers with strong patriotism who would be willing to come hither and face the hardships of the camp life, in order to teach the children of the burghers our language and our ideals. Gradually these children should also be taught our great Imperial ideals.

Chris Louw overheard Alistair Sparks on an aeroplane, saying something similar, that Britain had made a singular mistake in not killing all Afrikaners when she had had the opportunity. Underlying the anti-racist discourse of the anglophone Left are the most archaic prejudices against the “European”, the non-English, as well as the Afrikaner – speaking his “guttural tongue” as it has been dubbed in so many trashy English novels written in this country.

In South Africa the colonial genocide of the nineteenth century meets the “progressive” genocides of the twentieth and they intermingle, eclectically, syncretistically. The British camp commander and rapist of Boer girls in their early teens meets Winnie Mandela with her box of matches and together they dance around the bonfire screaming their Rwandan chant from La Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines: “Kill the cockroaches!” Is it pure coincidence that Natal, source of all those genocidal letters, also has a “Valley of a Thousand Hills”? Cue in Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao’s Red Guards and you have the picture. I have always maintained that South Africa is a dumping ground for worn-out but dangerous ideologies from the rest of the world, such as communism or, in this case, American race ideology with its anti-white bias.

No-one in the petty-minded phalanx of the South African Left understands what the term “deconstruction” actually means, yet it has become one of those buzz-words circulating like a rumour or a piece of gossip. Let me not enlighten the benighted necklacists of Wits or UCT in their postcolonial trance.

Except, perhaps, for pointing out or performing one small piece of Abbau. Haha, it almost sounds like the Khoi loanword in Afrikaans and the name of Swedish pop group, “abba”.

Race, we are told by the leftist mob, is a social construct. Yet in their response to Afrikaner dissidence and protest in being led to the slaughterhouse – no longer are we lambs – the Left appeals very strongly to race and racial identity.

“Where is the outrage?” screams Gillian Schutte, meaning the outrage of blacks who should respond to her clarion call of race and a deep, biological identity. Jonathan Jansen, whom I call the clown of Bloemfontein, has published a collection of clichés called “Knowledge in the blood”. Yet, the Left, with its internationalist-Marxist, globalist, deculturated, we-are-all-the-same bombast, is actually appealing to the most basic of instincts: blood and racial rage.

Will the black hordes assemble for the witches’ sabbath of the white feminists? Are the Bantu that stupid?

That anyone should risk the future of South Africa in proving a point to a few Afrikaner protestors with red balloons is, of course, another indication of just how certifiably insane Ms. Hyde has become. Are we on our way to a Rwanda, a Katyn Wood, a Khmer Rouge Cambodia, a Maoist Cultural Revolution?

The sinister South African Left has always craved corpses in the streets, which it had after the Church Street bomb, as well as its ill-fated march on Bisho. The cold-blooded murder of the three AWB men in Bophutatswana by a black policeman is still relished as the crowning glory of its achievement.

To see a white man begging for his life before an armed black (or a mob), represents the ultimate English-leftist fantasy. Farm murders, as well as the shooting of Afrikaner children like Kayla Rawsthorne, Danielle Esterhuizen, Willemien Potgieter, Alyssa Botha and others by roaming young black “freedom fighters” sates, at least for a few moments, the bloodlust of the colonial “Reds” in this part of the world.

Afrikaners (and moderate whites generally) should keep cool heads, but also be aware that even the continued existence of Afrikaans government schools inspires an ethnic reaction which can become dangerous if left unchecked. We have already seen at Heidelberg, Fochville and other places how seemingly placid communities may be swept up through racial and ethnic rhetoric, disguised as “anti-racism”.

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‘Blaming apartheid, race does not wash anymore’

Matthews Phosa
Mathews Phosa

It is time for government to shape the country’s future decisively and stop blaming the past, former ANC treasurer-general Mathews Phosa said on Tuesday.

“We are… a government, and placing the blame on the past, apartheid, race, and other external factors does not wash anymore. It is time for solutions of which we are the architects and it is time to shape our future decisively,” Phosa said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation conference in Johannesburg.

“Let us begin by making sure that every rand of public money that is spent makes a tangible impact on development and upliftment of our people.”

Corruption and non-service delivery were serious concerns.

“If we fail to address the income gap and alleviate poverty, we will have other consequences. Ours will be a perpetually volatile society, open to flare-ups from time to time, and growing disenchantment among the voters with those they have voted into power.”

Phosa said many in the ruling African National Congress had faced charges of corruption and had brought the party into disrepute in “a devastating and shocking fashion.”

“It has never been ANC policy for anyone to steal public money. Anyone doing that satisfies his or her own greed at the expense of the nation, and to the lasting detriment of a party that commanded the respect of the entire globe.”

The corruption scourge would lead to the decline of the ANC and ultimately render its history “meaningless”.

“If we want to avoid being consigned to the dustbin of history, we must be demonstrably more decisive, more transparent and totally unforgiving in how we deal with those who steal public money, or abuse positions of trust,” said Phosa. – Sapa

Black mob threatens school over its Afrikaans language medium

Heidelberg_ANCA mob chanting that they will burn the headmaster of an old and prestigious high school east of Johannesburg yesterday marched on the school, led by local politicians from the South African Communist Party and the ANC.

One of the ANC-Communist apparatchiks who participated in yesterday’s march in Heidelberg, Recato Eberwein, had previously written on a blog:

I personally hope genocide happens. Then we get rid of amabhunu’s that life (sic) in cuckoo land. Kill a Boer, Kill a Farmer. Until Jesus comes we the ANC will rule

The ANC-Communist Party provincial government in Gauteng is currently on an offensive to stamp out Afrikaans in schools under its radical MEC, Ms. Barbara Creecy, a self-confessed Marxist revolutionary.

After an incident during which a black pupil at Volkskool Heidelberg had tried to kill a white classmate, the school suspended the pupil concerned, pending a disciplinary hearing. Due to the race of the suspended pupil, it was immediately denounced as racism by local ANC-Communist Party officials.

After a previous protest had been prohibited by court order, a march was held yesterday to protest against the suspension of the murderous pupil, as well as 10 others who had been investigated for drug possession and abuse. This too, was denounced as “racism”.

Mr. Johan Bester, the school governing body’s representative for safety and security, said the suspended pupils were suspected of taking drugs.

“We have a drug monitoring system and we regularly test pupils for drugs,” said Bester.

“If they test positive they are suspended and we put them on a programme to help them.”

Anglo-black genocide pact

A retired historian in Nigel, a nearby town, told praag.org: “What we are seeing are old rancours coming to the fore. During the Anglo-Boer War the British military in these parts had encouraged armed Bantu men to kill and rape the Boer women. Boer civilians were also put into concentration camps where they were starved to death or left without water.

Children's graves at the British concentration camp site in Heidelberg
Children’s graves at the British concentration camp site in Heidelberg Photo: Boerevryheid

“This particular high school was founded just after the war, in a desperate attempt to save the Afrikaans language from being extirpated by the British administration. The fact that the school is today highly successful, displined and one of the top-performing schools in the province, is just too much to bear for Mrs. Creecy and pro-British genocidaires who are still nursing the Afrikaner hatred from hundred years ago.”

The mob was demanding that the century-old patriotic name of the school be changed to that of a local communist, Robert Nkosi. Another member of the South African Communist Party, Archie Mokonane of the South African Communist Party (SACP) told the crowd that the school was racist because it taught in Afrikaans.

“English is the language of proletarian internationalism, therefore all other languages are racist. Those people in Europe who teach in Dutch or German or French are racists too!”

Sipho Nhlengethwa, a local ANC councillor, said they would campaign for the school to be named after Obed Nkosi, a terrorist from Ratanda, the black township in the area. “This is our public school now, we have conquered the Boers,” said Nhlengethwa.

Regional leaders from the ANC, SA Communist Party, Cosatu and the Young Communist League handed over a memorandum of demands.

They want the school’s civilian governing body to be dissolved and replaced with a revolutionary communist council of “education workers”.

‘We will necklace them, we will burn them’

Young Red Guards chanting “we will necklace them, we will burn them”, referring to the Afrikaner pupils at Heidelberg Volkskool, disrupted and brought to a halt all education in the black township of Ratanda. School children were forced to participate in the protest, with both primary and high schools being deserted for the rest of the day. Bystanders put the number of marchers at 8 000. Teachers had told children that there would be no classes on Monday as “everybody had to march against the Afrikaner cockroaches”.

Volkskool was also accused of being racist because there were white players in the rugby team, with some members of the mob claiming that governmental race quotas for rugby only allowed one or two white players per team. “We want no whites in the team, it hurts our eyes to see whites,” said one.

A spokesman for the school blamed the inflamed racial tensions in the town on the provincial government’s failure to build an extra English-language high school, as promised in 1998. Cornelius Human, a member of the school’s governing body responsible for its legal affairs, said:

“What we found ourselves in was just a situation with wild allegations, with no substance – and we’re expected to act on them. It’s exactly the same situation that we have now.”

In hundred years, not much has changed in Heidelberg. The British concentration camp has gone, leaving a children’s graveyard like so many others in South Africa, but the hatred of Afrikaner children has stayed.

On different kinds of Untruth

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by Albert Brenner

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Man is not affected by events but by the view he takes of them. Epictetus

It is simply not a winning recipe anymore to use Reason as a tool to counter the irrationality inherent in modern discourses on race. It is as if the methods of the natural sciences – and positivism in the social sciences – have become all but redundant.

For example, the use of statistical analysis to prove that black-on-white crime is vastly more prevalent than white-on-black crime has proven to be ineffective when it comes to calling for even-handedness in academic debates, good faith in politics and legal justice for white individuals and their communities. Similarly, (most) white liberals and their black disciples have no problem acknowledging the scientific validity of IQ test scores when it suits their purposes. Yet when it does not, they deny its validity. This is completely irrational, for the litmus test of rationality demands that one cannot hold A and non-A simultaneously.

Even the utilisation of precise scientific measurements leading to empirically-valid facts are denied by (most) liberals. For example, the average male body has ten times more testosterone than the average female body. Testosterone plays a huge role in behaviour, as any expert in physiology and human behaviour would readily attest to. Meaning that it is simply false to believe that gender is a social construct, because the amount of testosterone in the human body hugely impacts average gender – ergo, role – behaviour.

The above-mentioned examples, and numerous others, proves that traditional forms of truth-validation do not hold sway anymore in the irrational universe of modern discourses on race. Meaning that we are, literally, back in the days of Galileo and the Inquisition… where even 100% proof of heliocentricity could not negate the dogma underpinning geocentricity.

It is therefore imperative that conservatives devise new forms of critique – hence, a new methodology – in order to regain their foothold in the narrative on/of race in the academic and public spheres.

In order to do so, it is necessary to isolate and examine the core rationale, the thesis, holding the (still dominant) liberal race-narrative together. Once this has been done, one only needs to define its antithesis and, if present, exploit the synthesis.

The two most salient characteristics of the liberal race narrative are individual agency and emotionality. The former flows (mostly) from the aestheticism of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. The latter obviously flows from Freud.

Both the above-mentioned are, generally, present in academic discourses in the form of interpretivist theory. This theory is, in very basic terms, underpinned by epistemological assumptions that hold that the “truth” is in man. This is obviously the dialectical opposite (the antithesis) of the classic modernist view that the “truth” is out there somewhere. In short; man creates knowledge, s/he does not discover it… in the Cartesian sense.

These two theoretical perspectives were the main combatants in the so-called Paradigm Wars, as initiated by Thomas Kuhn – in lieu of his relativization of (a single) Truth. It suffices to say that a compromise, a synthesis, has been found after the fog of battle has cleared, namely, sociocultural theory. This theory, albeit a synthesis, is inherently antithetical (to the liberal race narrative) because it emphasises collective agency. Meaning that conservative thinkers would be well-advised to use it as a truth-validating method/ology to counter the emphasis on individual agency, as espoused by liberals. In short; sociocultural theory has the potential to become a marvellous instrument of/for exposing “untruths” in the irrational universe of liberal discourses on race.

To the trickier one, emotionality: what is the antithesis of emotionality? As mentioned in the introductory paragraphs of this column, cold hard scientific facts are unable to function as untruths in the wacky irrational universe inhabited by (most) white liberals. Could indifference be the antithesis of emotionality? This seems to be happening in the public sphere… where the normal white conservative citizenry is becoming increasingly immune to the incessant screams of “Racist, Hater, and Nazi baby-seal clubber!” by bleeding-heart white liberals.

It is as if indifference has become a potent weapon in the fight against the emotion-laden zealotry of the white liberal establishment in the public sphere. But now the question obviously is; how does one colloquialize indifference into solid academic theory with which to counter the still dominant left-wing narrative on race-related issues?

I can only think of one school of (Western) philosophy that was passionate about indifference (pun intended): Stoicism. Maybe therefore a re-evaluation of Stoicism could assist in developing the necessary theoretical foundations from which to utilise indifference as weapon – alongside sociocultual theory – with which to expose untruths in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Stoicism was, after all, the moral backbone of the old British Empire… which, as we know, was very successful. So why not try a winning recipe…?

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Jonathan Jansen backtracks on anti-Afrikaans statement

Jonathan Jansen
Jonathan Jansen

A careful argument on language in education has been distorted to create a media hype, Free State University rector Jonathan Jansen said on Wednesday.

“It still amazes me how a careful argument about language inclusivity can be seriously distorted for maximum media hype,” Jansen said on his twitter account in reply to a report about a speech in September.

Afrikaans newspapers Beeld and the Die Volksblad published front page articles on Jansen’s opinion that exclusive white Afrikaans schools and universities held a danger for race relations in South Africa.

Jansen’s comments were made while delivering the Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture of the English Academy of South Africa on September 18.

In his speech, Jansen said English and not Afrikaans could be the “taal van versoening” — language of reconciliation — for South Africa.

He said English could also be the one major solution for the crisis in education.

“Instruct every teacher and every child in English from the first day of school rather than add the burden of poor instruction in the mother-tongue in the foundation years to the trauma of transition to English later on.”

Jansen said for many parents English was already the language of choice in schools.

The reason for this was that indigenous languages were poorly taught.

He said learning in a mother tongue was no guarantee of improved learning gains in school.

The Kovsie rector said English could be the foundation for a common language. He said he understood that the symbolism of supporting indigenous languages had a political value beyond his pragmatic reasoning.

Language differences were of themselves not contentious, but the mobilisation of languages for political purposes constituted the problem.

For this reason Afrikaans-dominant white schools and universities represented a serious threat to race relations in South Africa, he said.

“You simply cannot prepare young people for dealing with the scars of our violent past without creating optimal opportunities in the educational environment for living and learning together.”

Jansen said English had levelled the playing fields in the historically Afrikaans universities for common engagement between students.

The Kovsie rector confirmed his opinion on English as a reconciliation language in a tweet on Wednesday.

“I also believe that there is no way in which young people across divisions can heal past rifts without a common language; that is English,” Jansen’s tweet read. – Sapa

Cape Town has twice the murder rate of Johannesburg

Cape Town, danger lurks here...
Cape Town, danger lurks here…

According to an analysis of the latest crime stats by the Istitute for Security Studies, the murder rate in Cape Town is almost twice as high as that of Johannesburg.

Lizette Lancaster, a researcher at the Institute, writes: “Between April 2011 and March 2012, police recorded more murders in Cape Town than in Johannesburg and Pretoria combined. This means that, taking population into account, Cape Town residents are 1,8 times more likely to be murdered than Johannesburg residents. Yet this information is potentially misleading because the likelihood of being a crime victim depends in large part on race, gender, age, economic profile and where in a city a person lives.”

For example, almost two-thirds of the Cape Town murders took place in just ten of the 60 police station precincts in the city, according to an analysis of crime hotspots by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). For years, the Coloured area of Mitchells Plain has experienced the highest violence and property crime rates in the country.

Black areas in Cape Town show ‘abnormally high murder rates’

Although surpassed by Coloured (mixed-race) areas regarding general violent crime, black townships in Cape Town showed the highest murder rates. According to Lizette Lancaster, “Nyanga, Khayelitsha, Gugulethu and Harare remain the most murderous in the peninsula, according to an analysis that takes population size into account. These areas have experienced abnormally high murder rates for more than a decade.”

Similarly, a countrywide analysis of police precinct statistics suggests that income levels matter. Residents in low-income areas are far more likely to be murdered than their middle- and high-income counterparts. Half of South Africa’s murders occurred in only 13% of police precincts (or in 143 out of 1 127).

The focus tends to fall on South Africa’s national murder rate, which is almost five times higher than the global average of 6,9 murders per 100 000 people. However, about 13% of police precincts in South Africa had lower murder rates than this, including affluent areas such as Brooklyn (Pretoria), Garsfontein (Pretoria), Camps Bay, Claremont, Rondebosch (Cape Town), Edenvale and Linden (Gauteng). Over 10% of South African policing precincts – more than 115 stations – experienced no murders, while three in four murders occurred in just a quarter of the country’s police precincts. Suburbs like Sandton, Parkview (Johannesburg), Durban North, Table View and Woodstock (Cape Town) had a murder rate of just under 10 per 100 000 people.

Although murder is often used as the main indicator to support arguments that South Africa is a violent country, it makes up only 2,5% of all violent crime. While there were 16 259 murders in 2012/13, over 600 000 other violent crimes were also reported to the police, including attempted murder, rape, robbery and assault.

Most murder victims are young black men

A vast majority of the murders that take place daily do not make the news. They happen in areas where crime and violence are the norm, and where residents already feel marginalised and forgotten. The majority of murders are neither premeditated nor committed as part of a crime, but occur when an argument leads to physical assault. Research shows that most victims are killed by acquaintances, friends or family members during disputes fuelled by alcohol or drug abuse.

Victimisation surveys, police docket surveys and mortuary surveillance studies reveal that most South African murder victims are young black men. These studies also reveal that most murdered women are killed by their intimate partners, and that men are six times more likely to be killed than women. However, violence affects all South Africans, and the resultant trauma has lasting physical, emotional and often financial consequences.

Read Lizette Lancaster’s entire report here.

17 EU ministers condemn ‘racism’ against black Italian minister

Cécile Kyenge with the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister, Joelle Milquet, to her right
Cécile Kyenge with the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister, Joelle Milquet, to her right

Ministers from 17 EU member states on Monday (23 September) gathered in Rome to condemn the racism directed towards Italy’s integration minister Cecile Kyenge.

Ministers from 17 member states gathered in Rome to condemn racism.

The ministers called for a new pact to stamp out racism across Europe, which they see as on the rise.

“What has happened to the Italian minister is unacceptable but we’re talking about a widespread phenomenon,” Belgium’s deputy prime minster, Joelle Milquet, told reporters in Rome.

They signed a “Declaration of Rome,” which calls upon the EU to put together a plan for 2014-2020 on diversity and the fight against racism.

“Intolerance and discrimination, in whatever form, is reprehensible. We cannot ignore it and we cannot do nothing about it,” states the declaration.

The ministers want the European Commission to draft a report on racism before the European Parliament elections next May.

It notes that all member states should finalise the transposition of anti-discrimination legislation and put in place “judicial instruments” to help weed out attacks.

The declaration also condemns political movements with racist and xenophobic positions and notes that the economic crisis has reinforced populism and racism.

Speaking to reporters after the declaration, Kyenge thanked her counterparts for their support.

Kyenge, an eye doctor born in the Congo, has faced racial slurs and jeers in her first five months office from far right Italian politicians and others. She has also faced death threats.

Right-wing Northern League senator Roberto Calderoli compared her features to that of orangutan. Italian Northern League MEP Mario Borghezio, who is a member of the civil liberties committee, described the Italian government as a ‘bongo bongo’ administration because of Kyenge.

In early September, members of the far-right Forza Nuova movement smeared blood on mannequins, which they placed outside municipal buildings in Rome. The act was in protest of Kyenge’s proposal to extend citizenship to Italian-born children of immigrants.

“I have never said Italy is racist, every country needs to start building awareness of immigration and Italy has simply arrived very late,” Kyenge said following the mannequin incident.

In August, a member of separatist group Veneto State, threatened to kill Kyenge on his Facebook page.

In another incident over the summer, Italian Councillor Dolores Valandro, was given a 13-month suspended sentence, a €13,000 fine, and a three-year ban from holding public office after she suggested Kyenge should be raped. – euobserver.com

Anti-racists are the new racists

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by Dan Roodt

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South Africa’s multiracial and multicultural society is exploding into a never-ending Kulturkampf or American-style culture war. Anti-racists are the new racists, spreading intolerance and even violence ahead of them with a megaphone, figuratively speaking. During the court appearance of a wine farmer, Mr Johnny Burger, the crowd in the Cape had been swept up into a lynch mob threatening to kill him on the spot. Police had to use pepper spray and a stun grenade to disperse them. Shades of the Ku Klux Klan? Except here the Klansmen are anti-racists.

Anti-racist intolerance is growing in leaps and bounds. In another recent incident, it led to the unfortunate resignation from Pretoria University of one of our praag columnists after Dr Piet Croucamp from the University of Johannesburg had accused her of hate speech. As I have commented elsewhere in an Afrikaans column:

“The media group Naspers and a small group of academics acting in bad faith and attacking others in the name of race, mostly for personal reasons, represent a danger to freedom of speech in South Africa.”

This afternoon I got an email from a friend saying that Mr Burger’s case reminded him of the notorius “Black Circuit” of the early nineteenth century. At the time a 1000 Cape farmers had to appear before a roving court to answer to trumped-up charges of murder, rape and assault. In the end, no-one was convicted and it was found that colonial English missionaries had colluded with local Khoi-San tribesmen to falsely accuse farmers of heinous crimes.

Contrary to our law, Mr Burger, accused of assaulting a Coloured child, was presumed guilty until his innocence could be proven. Two days ago, the Cape Times newspaper wrote about the case of Flippie Engelbrecht, the child concerned: “Those who brought the case to court charged that after the assault Engelbrecht had lost his sight, had epileptic fits, and because of this had rolled into a fire and suffered terrible burns, losing his hands.” In yesterday’s Cape Times, headlined Questions surround Flippie’s assault, “new evidence” came to light in the form of medical records showing that Flippie Engelbrecht had reported a “swelling on the side of his face”, which may have been a tumour, causing his epileptic fits and other medical problems. The same medical records contradict some of the dates advanced by the victim. However, in the meantime the wine farmer had committed suicide after his life and his business had been ruined by hysterical anti-racists pursuing him in the media, both traditional and social, led by the radical, Afrikaner-hating ex-lawyer (who was struck off the record as an attorney after dubious business deals and bankruptcy), Carina Papenfus.

So here we have two incidences of whites being subjected to histrionic public campaigns by so-called “liberal” anti-racists whose objectives have more in common with the Spanish Inquisition than with advancing the precepts of liberalism. Freedom of speech and even academic freedom in South Africa have been casualties of these campaigns, not to mention the two white victims, one committing suicide and another resigning her post and leaving the country, presumably for fear of being further persecuted.

Our universities are no longer places of learning but over-politicised shrines to political correctness and obtuse hatreds that are seemingly ignited by throwing a switch.

Volumes have been written on the cultural, linguistic, racial, anthropological, ethnic, ideological and religious divisions of South African society and I do not wish to dwell on the obvious. What concerns me more, is the apparent descent of people with nominal university qualifications into this kind of racial street fighting. They wield race and the word “racist” like a Cape Flats gangster brandishes his knife. Not so long ago, twelve schools had to be closed in that area as a result of gang activity and Mrs Helen Zille, the premier of the Western Cape, was calling for the army to be brought in to stabilise Manenberg.

Yet, ostensibly, we have more to fear from the pseudo-intellectual gangsters than from the drug-dealing, turf-warring criminals of the Cape Flats. Their influence on public discourse is far more insidious and destructive of the last vestiges of civilisation that remain in South Africa. They are intolerant zealots such as are to be found throughout history, wherever religious wars or ethnic conflicts have ignited and blazed.

Except for the Sunday paper Rapport, no-one seems to take Papenfus seriously. She waged a slanderous email and Twitter campaign against the hapless winemaker, apparently threatening and cajoling his customers into ceasing to order from him, with the intention of ruining his business and his life. Ms. Papenfus is a kind of cyber thug that replicates the intimidation tactics of petty gangsters in the public sphere. After all, as any mafioso or racketeer knows, a small business may be ruined by hitting one or two of its weak spots. Although she must have studied at one time for a degree or diploma, she has no intellectual pretensions. Her creed is simple: harass the whites. And being white and Afrikaans herself, but an ANC member, it is a case of être plus royaliste que le roi.

Papenfus is dangerous, but easily understood. The other two zealots who pounced upon the soft-spoken Pretoria woman philosopher, occupy positions of institutional power. Croucamp is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg in political science and frequently appears on talk shows, both on radio and on television, wearing his trademark blue bandana. Schutte writes a column in the Mail & Guardian newspaper which is also avidly read by the “tenured radicals” at South Africa’s more than twenty universities.

Schutte was due to debate Croucamp’s victim on the topic: “‘Do white people have an obligation to withdraw from the public sphere?’ But as she stated in a subsequent column: “I am obviously not going to validate Louise Mabille’s hate speech by actually debating with her. Rather I will end by saying that she has presented a shining example of how whites should not participate in the public arena.  It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it.”

From Rhodes University, we have already had an opinion by Dr Samantha Vice that all whites, i.e. everyone of European descent, should take some form of vow to remain silent in public. So white guilt leads to the ultimate form of self-censorship, public silence.

Elsewhere, Ms Gillian Schutte describes herself, somewhat pretentiously, as a “feminist-neopagan-post-structuralist-deconstructionist-socialist” and she apparently has a Master’s degree in creative writing from the University of the Witwatersrand.

The one thing we can already deduce is that the mob outside the Cape courtroom who wanted to lynch Mr Burger at least believed in some form of dialogue. They were screaming, hurling abuse and gesticulating. With police intervention and protection, one could still call it communication.

Croucamp and Schutte want to reduce us to silence, however. Theirs is the monologue of totalitarianism, of censorship, of “There is only one truth and it is mine”. They pontificate in the name of power, the corrupt power that is ruling, nay, pillaging, South Africa.

It is therefore ironic that Schutte should describe herself as a “post-structuralist-deconstructionist”. Does she even know what she is referring to? The very basis of any “deconstruction” is the existence of more than one meaning, even the uncertainty, indetermination and radical plurality of meanings. Just over ten years ago a small group of us Afrikaner thinkers had a private seminar with Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales on the boulevard de Raspail in Paris. I remember Derrida as a modest, soft-spoken, amiable figure who reminisced about his single visit to South Africa. He liked Potchefstroom and even told me that “Heidegger would have felt at home there”. Derrida was full of gentle irony, self-doubt and respect for others, even the Other, as he so often termed it in his more political writings.

Schutte, by contrast, is a third-world ideologue, possessed by a terrible certainty. She has more in common with Robert Mugabe or Idi Amin than Jacques Derrida. Like so many others strutting about our campuses today, she has no real culture but the fad of the moment. The more politically correct such fads are, the better. Her meretricious pseudo-intellectualism has all the charm of Winnie Mandela’s expensive sunglasses and jewellery, being the brash expression of a corrupt and power-hungry soul. Ideas are but slogans, brands, to market yourself to another kind of mob to the one that wanted to lynch the Cape winemaker.

I have often thought that South Africa today has much in common with Nero’s Rome. Our country has become murderous, corrupt and decadent. Innocence has died. Approximately a thousand children are raped every day, including babies, and nobody says a word. Or if they broach the subject, they are immediately reduced to silence, given the ritual knife for disembowelling themselves. Schutte’s smug satisfaction (“It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it”) may be deconstructed to reveal two things: Schadenfreude and a paradoxical expectation of honour in others.

There is no English word for Schadenfreude, hence the German loanword that is universally used. However, the Afrikaans (and Dutch) term leedvermaak expresses the same thing, with a few more connotations (“signifieds” for post-structuralists) thrown in. The other day I tweeted in Afrikaans, something to the effect that leedvermaak is the apotheosis of journalism in South Africa. Vermaak also means entertainment, hence the misery of others, their travails amid hysterical accusations, calumny and vilification provide entertainment. Anti-racist Blitzkrieg, either on the vineyards of the Cape or on the campus of Pretoria University, therefore feeds the sensationalist mainstream media machine, sated on the blood of murder victims.

Celebrity "businessman" Kenny Kunene
Celebrity “businessman” Kenny Kunene

Due to the surfeit of murders in South Africa, people are becoming bored with news of another killing, no matter how ruthless and macabre. Celebrity murder, such as the Oscar Pistorius case, is still news, but not even serial killings elicit much attention. In a society as utterly cruel and corrupt as ours, we are in desperate need of frivolity, such as the camp antics of that incorrigible clown in drag, Pieter-Dirk Uys, or Kenny Kunene’s parties where guests eat sushi off the bodies of bikini-clad ladies.

South Africa is profoundly amoral. It lacks a moral or ethical code to define right and wrong. Someone like Baudrillard would say that this “lack”, in a psychoanalytical sense, creates a need for a kind of pseudo-ethics, a moral simulacrum.

This is where anti-racism comes in. Anti-racism is the simulacrum of our lost moral code. It is no coincidence that the objectionable sentence in Louise Mabille’s column contained references to both Calvinism and baby rape, the former marking the overtly Christian morality of the old South Africa and the latter epitomising the radical “freedom from all scruples” that characterises the new South Africa.

In this respect, Gillian Schutte, despite her evidently defective grasp of some basic philosophical and literary concepts, understands the “new amorality” well. In one of her “feminist” videos, a rape victim explains that the “cure” for the shame attached to having been raped, is to join the so-called “slutwalk”, ardently recommended by Ms. Schutte. By self-identifying as a slut, a woman is freed from the fear of rape and “forced sex” as it is euphemistically called. Miracle cures are to be found everywhere in South Africa, peddled by immigrant Nigerian pastors and indigenous witchdoctors alike. Not to forget the infamous “virgin cleansing myth” by which one may be cured of HIV-Aids by raping a virgin, including an infant, and which Louise Mabille alluded to in her column.

Gillian Schutte is also a champion of the word “cunt” which, according to her, should become part of our everyday discourse. As she puts it,

“When women finally reclaim and speak this word, its full potential will be released and women will repossess their collective cunt-power and rise up against misogyny and patriarchy with the absolute intent of ending it.”

Amid the universal amorality and Neronic decadence of South Africa, Schutte is clutching at ethical straws, more precisely: pubic hairs. Instead of simply affirming and enjoying the slutwalk, she opts for the simulacrum of the good, which has now turned out to be the “collective cunt-power” of women.

But there is no “good” anymore. South Africa is really living according to the famous maxim from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” As I intimated the other day, SA really stands for “Sadists’ Apocalypse”. Eighteenth-century French literature, specifically the writings of the Marquis de Sade, is all that we have to remotely begin to understand our baby rapists and farm murderers.

Apart from Gillian Schutte’s “cunt-power”, the other pseudo-morality that people desperately cling to is anti-racism. In our sadistic universe where nothing is wrong, some people imagine that racism is the one remaining sin. You may kill, rape, bribe, lie and steal, more or less with impunity, but uttering the word “Bantu” will earn you the opprobrium of polite society, that society which is now reappropriating the magical power of four-letter words.

The simulacrum of sin is transgression of anti-racist etiquette. That alone awakens some form of long-lost moral response which is delivered with predictable ecclesiastical ritual: denunciation, excommunication, prohibition, censorship. From the TV studio did Schutte, the high priestess of atavistic cunt-power and pagan ritual, deliver her sermon against what Orwell called thoughtcrime: “racist” thoughts and suspicions, including the mere mention of “baby rape”, which is a proven and documented phenomenon in this country.

Did Johnny Burger, the Cape winemaker, commit suicide to save his honour? In a country where “trial by media” and populist passions have come to influence courts and the judicial system, Burger probably correctly surmised that he would not receive a fair trial. His suicide reminds me of the death of the patrician Latin author Petronius who, having got wind of Nero’s henchmen being sent to kill him, preferred taking his own life while drinking wine and having musicians perform for him.

Thanks to Carina Papenfus’s hate campaign, no-one will ever drink Burger’s wine again.

Similarly to Burger, Louise Mabille fell upon her own sword and resigned. Understandably, there is despair and pessimism among the remaining class of thinking people in South Africa. We are outnumbered and outscreamed by those who are playing for the gallery.

However, notwithstanding samurai customs, there are other ways of saving one’s honour. On these shores, we have the example of the bittereinder, of someone fighting to the very, bitter end, against all odds.

Are we ready for that thankless struggle, knowing full well that we shall face calumny all the way? If reason be dead, can thought or the mind still withstand the mob, baying for our blood?

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Open the boom… ‘What? Baboon?’ So black cops arrest her

Kenya-Haunted_Baboon
Boom… Baboon, it all sounds the same anyway.

She said “open the boom” but the security guard heard her say “you baboon”, reports the Pretoria News. Next thing she was arrested, driven in the back of a police van to the Sunnyside police station and locked up for the next five hours in a communal cell with about eight black men.

Now Deborah Lynn Greaves of Centurion has won R50 000 from the police.

Greaves, 50, of Centurion instituted a R300 000 damages claim against the minister of police following her ordeal.

Her nightmare started when she was due to attend a training course at a conference facility in Sunnyside.

She tried to park inside a basement parking garage but was told by the security guard that parking was reserved and she should park in the street.

Greaves said she had previously parked inside, even though she did not have an access card.

That day, she parked in the street but when she returned the next day, she again tried to park inside.

Again she was denied entry, but this time, she said, the security guard was aggressive and screamed at her. He wanted her to park outside.

She phoned a colleague to arrange parking inside the parking garage for her, as she felt her car was unsafe outside. The colleague handed her his access card so she could drive into the basement.

But when she left that afternoon, the security guard refused to open the boom for her to exit. Greaves said she told him to “open the boom” and that “the way in which you do things is stupid”.

He apparently mistook what she told him as “you are a baboon” and that he was “stupid”.

Nevertheless, he opened the boom and she drove off.

She returned the following day and while attending training she was called by the course co-ordinator. He told her the police were waiting for her outside.

She was told by two policemen that she was under arrest.

Greaves was threatened that if she did not get into the police van, she would be cuffed.

The police drove her at high speed to the police station.

She said she was terrified and was being thrown around in the back of the van.

At the police station she was told that she was being held for crimen injuria.

She had to spend five terrifying hours in a cell with men, under conditions she described as filthy. Her lawyer had her freed on a warning at about five that afternoon.

Greaves said she was so traumatised that she had to receive counselling from a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The police initially denied all the allegations made by Greaves in papers before the Pretoria High Court.

Her lawyer, Konrad Rontgen, was ready to proceed on Monday, but just before the case was called the police indicated they would settle the matter by paying Greaves R50 000.

Greaves said she was happy it was over, but she was disappointed with the settlement amount.

“This does not compensate me for the humiliation, fear and embarrassment I had to endure. I still get nightmares and I become extremely fearful when I see a security boom.

“This was totally unnecessary and now the taxpayer has to pay for the wrongs of the police. All I wanted to do was to park.”

The charge levelled against her was that of crimen injuria, but the prosecutor refused to entertain this and dismissed the case. – Pretoria News

Liberals and their IQ cake

gollum

by Albert Brenner

Everybody knows it is not very intelligent to want your cake and eat it. Yet, this is exactly what many liberals do when it concerns discourses surrounding the validity and applicability of IQ tests/scores. That the aforementioned is still a very sensitive issue needs no further elaboration.

Unfortunately ill fortune still awaits any serious writer when s/he addresses the IQ question in a frank manner, except when it comes to criminalizing the conservative (heterosexual) Pale Male, of course.

In a recent article in the science section of the left-wing Huffington Post newspaper, “evidence” was provided to prove that “racists” have low IQ scores.

According to the study`s lead author, Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at Brock University in Ontario, “People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice…”

His sentiments were echoed by Dr. Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist, “ Reality is complicated and messy… Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies.”

Now, seeing that one of the gods of the left, Karl Marx, imposed a “simpler solution” called dialectical-materialism on (the) “complicated and messy” Reality – by, basically, reducing everything to the monopoly of the means of production – it surely must cut both ways.

Meaning that both conservatives and liberals are, ultimately, equally prone to simpler solutions, ergo, being equal in the capacity to be people of low intelligence. Nosek readily admits to this logic; stating that less intelligent types might be attracted to liberal “simplifying ideologies“ as well as conservative ones.

It therefore suffices to say that this research only proved that the opposite of its hypothesis is also true. Rather “scientific”, wouldn’t you say? But that, obviously, did not dissuade the Huffington Post to boldly title this article Intelligence Study Links Low I.Q. To Prejudice, Racism, Conservatism.

Their prejudice (low IQ?) is even more evident in the opening paragraph of said article, “Are racists dumb? Do conservatives tend to be less intelligent than liberals? A provocative new study from Brock University in Ontario suggests the answer to both questions may be a qualified yes”.

Another example; in a recent article titled IQ tests: women score higher than men, in the left-wing British newspaper The Telegraph, it was boldly stated that women are more intelligent than men.The article quoted a certain Helena Jamieson… who said: “I think women probably always knew deep down that they were the more intelligent ones – but as the gentler sex we were quiet about it and let men continue to believe they ruled the world.”

Now just imagine if a man had said, “I think men probably knew deep down that they were the more intelligent ones…“ Can you just imagine the furious outcry that would have caused, especially on the part of feminists?

As is glaringly evident in the above examples, liberals have absolutely no qualms in recognizing the scientific legitimacy/validity of IQ tests when it comes to nailing conservative Pale Males. Yet, when it comes to acknowledging the very same instrument as a scientifically legitimate tool to, for example, measure the difference in average IQ scores between blacks and whites, all hell breaks loose!

Be that as it may; the left certainly has a Gollum-like approach to IQ. A warped approach akin to acknowledging that a thermometer can measure warm temperatures, but when it gets cold, it suddenly does not “function” anymore.

The above irrationality is perfectly illustrated by the liberal columnist John Wiener of The Nation magazine. He wrote an article in lieu of the dismissal of Dr Jason Richwine from the Heritage Foundation. Wiener basically accused Richwine of “racism”. In his article, Why Did Harvard Give a PhD for a Discredited Approach to Race and IQ?, Wiener wrote: “Both ‘race’ and ‘intelligence’ are culturally constructed notions, not biological or genetic facts. None of this is hard to understand.”

Yet in his conclusion, he wrote the following: “The last word in this story goes to a study published in 2012 in the journal Psychological Science. ‘In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874),’ the researchers wrote, ‘we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood.'”

It really does seem that liberals want their IQ cake and eat it. It is a pity they do not allow conservative (heterosexual) Pale Males the same Gollum-like leeway. On the contrary; if the latter just mentions the words “race” and “IQ” then they will most certainly be crucified … like Dr Thilo Sarrazin, Prof James Watson, Dr Jason Richwine, et cetera.

The fact that any scientific inquiry into the differences between the races is a political landmine field guarded by the left, has its origins in a deliberate lie told by one of its doyens, Margaret Mead.

As the conservative columnist Christopher F. Chabris notes; “Before World War II, for example, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, presumably basing herself on her observations of non-Western cultures, wrote: ‘We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.’ Later, Mead admitted that what forced this conclusion was not the data she had collected but the political goals she espoused: ‘We knew how politically loaded discussions of inborn differences could become. . . . (I]t seemed clear to us that [their] further study . . . would have to wait upon less troubled times.'”

Well, these “troubled times” are still upon us. Difference has not disappeared. On the contrary, it has got progressively worse.

But then, what else could be expected from those who want their cake and eat it?

Why don’t you have black friends?

Tanner Colby
Tanner Colby

by Tanner Colby

“So, how many black friends do you have now?”

It’s a question I get asked a lot, ever since I set out five years ago to find out why I, your typical middle-class white person, had no black friends at all.

I do have black friends now, actually. Several. But I rarely offer that information when asked, because to ask white people how many black friends they have is to pose the wrong question.

Recently, a Reuters poll came out showing that 40% of white Americans have zero nonwhite friends, and only 20% of white Americans have five or more nonwhite friends. People seemed shocked that the numbers were so bad.

Personally, I was surprised that they were so good. America remains a deeply segregated and divided country. Even accounting for institutional and socioeconomic barriers, in the places we have the opportunity to integrate—the high school cafeteria, for instance—we largely don’t.

The Reuters survey itself is misleading, lumping all minorities together under the vague heading of “nonwhite.” Depending on what part of the country you live in (e.g, anywhere but Minnesota or Wyoming), it’s not uncommon to have Asian or Hispanic friends.

But the social divide between whites and those groups is more a function of the slow-rolling, generational process of immigrant assimilation. That is a wholly different phenomenon from the social divide between whites and blacks, which is the product of 400 years of slavery and segregation. That’s the social divide we should worry about, and if the poll had focused on that, the numbers would surely have been much worse.

The reason why “How many black friends do you have?” is such a terrible question is because it shows how we typically talk when we talk about race. Even when we try to talk about race in a constructive way, we usually make black people the object of the sentence, rarely the subject.

Black friends are the things to be acquired to prove one is not racist. The way the question is asked accords black people no agency, nor does it reveal anything about the real character of the white person being queried.

What you really want to know is not “How many black friends do I have?” but rather, “Have I become the type of individual that a black person might choose to be friends with?” That’s a real question. Poll a couple thousand white people with that and you might start to get some interesting answers, or at least some confused and befuddled looks.

White people are products of their own whitewashed, sanitized environment. Black people have been systematically excluded from white neighborhoods. Black stories rarely surface in popular culture. The history of race in high school textbooks has been boiled down to a handful of bedtime stories about Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks. Try to tap into the average white person’s feelings on race and you won’t necessarily find feelings of hate and antipathy. You just won’t find much of anything, no fully formed or well-considered thoughts about race of any kind. There’s nothing really there. Even white people who want black friends don’t know where to start.

America’s lack of integration wouldn’t be such a big deal except for the fact that relationships and social networks are vital to economic advancement.

Even when programs like school busing and affirmative action give black people access to white spaces, when those people go to climb the social ladder there’s nothing there for them to grab onto, because there’s very little reciprocal effort coming from the other direction. It’s high effort and low reward.

The result is that black people end up with integration fatigue. Many black writers responded to the Reuters poll with essays on why they didn’t want white friends, and didn’t need them. White friends weren’t worth the bother.

This is their prerogative, but ultimately, it’s to society’s disadvantage because white people control the access to, well, just about everything. If you don’t have white friends, you might have a decent job and a comfortable life, but all the doors of opportunity in this country are not open to you. “I may do well in a desegregated society,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “but I can never know what my total capacity is until I live in an integrated society.”

Interracial friendships, social bonds across the color line, are a key factor in putting the sins of America’s past behind us. But it’s not something that’s accomplished by white people knowing lots of black people. It helps if white people know how to be better white people. – CNN.COM

Tanner Colby is the author of Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America.

Australia to combat ‘online racism’

Dr. Tim Soutphommasane
Dr. Tim Soutphommasane

Australia’s new race discrimination commissioner starts in the job today and he’s got his sights firmly set on tackling the modern face of racial prejudice.

Dr Tim Soutphommasane is a 30-year-old first generation Australian, whose parents fled Laos in the mid-1970s, he grew up in south west Sydney.

He’ll now spearhead the nation’s response to racism and discrimination and he’s keen to craft strategies to help eliminate casual bigotry and cyber racism.

Presenter:Emily Bourke

Speaker:Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Australia’s new Race Discrimination Commissioner

EMILY BOURKE: Australia’s new race discrimination chief says racism is still far too common.

TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: About 20 per cent of Australians report that they have experienced race hate talk, so racial slurs or verbal abuse. Eleven per cent report that they have been excluded from the workplace or social activities on the basis of their skin colour or ethnicity.

EMILY BOURKE: As a migrant himself, Tim Soutphommasane, has experienced racism in Australia first-hand.

TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well I’m a first generation Australian of Chinese and Lao heritage. It’s a mouthful when I say that to people. But I think it sums up my cultural identity. I have experienced racial slurs. It can be very confronting. It’s very unpleasant, but most of all it’s about a denial of respect and equality.

EMILY BOURKE: Dr Soutphommasane says the modern face of racism is increasingly casual.

TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: For instance, you might have someone making light of an issue or cracking a joke and when someone complains there, the response is perhaps along the lines of well, come on, just have a bit of a laugh, don’t take yourself too seriously. And I think that attitude belittles the experience of racial prejudice and discrimination.

It’s not just about hurt feelings, or about mere offence. Part of the cultural shift that needs to take place on casual racism is to recognise that racism is as much about impact as it is about intention.

EMILY BOURKE: But he adds racism among young Australians has followed the same trend as schoolyard bullying – it’s moved online.

TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Cyber racism among younger Australians is a serious emerging problem. There’s no question that if we do not tackle this issue, we may be creating further challenges of social cohesion and we may be cultivating a sense of indifference to racial abuse when it happens online.

EMILY BOURKE: In his new role, Dr Soutphommasane says he wants to start a new conversation about racism and how to stop it.

TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: What it’s going to require is change at the everyday level in civil society, in your workplaces, in your schools and indeed in your backyards, at those barbecues, when someone says something that’s off-colour.

Perhaps in the past we’ve been happy to let that slide and not create a bit of a fuss. But if we’re prepared to take a stand and prepared to persuade someone to see racism from the perspective of another person, then perhaps we have an opportunity here to achieve a generational shift in our thinking. – ABC

In defence of pale males

Another pale male: Argentine model and presenter Mario Guerci
Another pale male: Argentine model and presenter Mario Guerci

by TAU Bulletin

The state of the nation is no more ludicrously evident than Gauteng premier Nomvula Mokonyane’s recent “warning” that “pale males” would return to government in Gauteng if SA’s opposition Democratic Alliance party wins next year’s provincial election.

“It can’t happen, it will not happen” she declared. “Reversals in transformation are unacceptable, and the Gauteng public must be spared the “white gevaar”  (danger).

Where in the world are efficiency, skills, creativity and diligence seen as a danger? Only in South Africa, where so-called liberation credentials, party membership and loyalty trump the need to maintain the first world country and its infrastructure which was handed to the ANC on a plate after the 1994 election.

Ms. Mokonyane’s racial invective and resentment has been received with a muted tolerance. Despite the non-racial assurances in the Founding Provisions of South Africa’s constitution, the governing party’s racial diatribes against, mostly, whites continue apace. Indeed, they seem to have increased. The State President’s YouTube clip where he urges his supporters to “kill the boers” and that his cabinet would “kill with a machine gun” is still running, without any apparent move by YouTube to take it out of circulation. (Yet a YouTube clip made by two white South Africans saying they refuse to apologize for being who they are was taken off within a few days of its appearance on the internet.)

South Africa has two parallel universes – the ANC’s self-delusion and the reality. The fact that the country has dramatically slipped down the world’s various achievement indexes over the past nineteen years has either escaped Ms. Mokonyane’s notice, or she is disingenuous in the extreme. Does the rather corpulent Ms. Mokonyane not realize that 90% of the food she and her countrymen consume is produced by pale males? That virtually everything she takes for granted in this country was created by pale males?

From where did the railways, roads, commercial farms, schools, hospitals, potable water and electricity transmission emanate?  The very language she uses in a legislature which is not part of her cultural heritage is a language of the pale male. The news print that distributes her humbug is not of her culture either. But she is selective in her vitriol.  When this lady shops, she hurries to the pale males’ luxury shopping centers:  she was recently seen at up market Hyde Park “posing proudly with her R10 000 LK Bennet shoes and matching handbag”. (Tony Leon, Business Day 30.7.13).  Pale males are excoriated but they are good enough to produce and supply the luxuries which she and her fellow anti-white friends cannot live without.

There is no empirical evidence to show that without the intervention of others in Africa (including pale males), Ms. Mokonyane’s culture would have evolved any further than that of those “lost” tribes one finds in the Amazon and Papua New Guinea.  She should be grateful that that particular ship sailed around the Cape of Good Hope many years ago and that it decided to stop for victuals. Non-pale male groups who could have manned that ship may not have been so conciliatory to the locals, then and now.

Who created the Sasols, the Iscors, the Eskoms and the country’s nuclear capacity? Who rid the country of the tste tste fly and malaria? Who developed Africa’s premier agricultural and veterinary service, used by the whole continent? Who produces maize and other grain surpluses year after year on the continent that cannot feed itself?

And, conversely, who is busy destroying what used to be the African continent’s pin-up country?

Certainly not pale males. Ms. Mokonyane and her compatriots should look in the mirror. But if one’s modus vivendi  is self delusion, then blame is the name of the game. The world has taken note of the Africa of today. It is not a pretty picture. Zimbabwe went from the continent’s bread basket to a basket case. Few if any of the continent’s governments can feed their people. Corruption, nepotism, inefficiency and venality are the order of the day. South Africa is no exception.  Who is to blame for Liberia’s status as an African cesspool, or for Ethiopia’s failed state ranking? Colonialism? Apartheid? Pale males? Neither of these countries was subjected to colonialism or apartheid. They are travesties because the people who live there are who they are.

South Africa today could certainly do with some pale males to put things right. But this is not the ANC’s priority: a deep racial inferiority complex trumps practicality.

The facts

Pale males around the world are denounced by the non-achievers with relentless regularity. Whites in the United States complain about this as well.  We quote Fred Reed from the US’s Nationalist Times:

“I am weary of the endless denunciation of ‘white privilege’; the calls to abolish all tests in which whites excel, and the need to make universities and police forces and advanced placement classes ‘look like American demographics’.  It might be well to note the utter dependence of the US on white men who have contributed virtually everything that keeps the affirmative action classes from living in mud huts.”

Reed continues with examples of this contribution: “Euclidean geometry, parabolic geometry, hyperbolic geometry and projective geometry.  Physical chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. Air conditioning. Number theory.  Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture.  Information theory.  Entropy. Enthalpy. Almost every symphony ever written. Pierre August Renoir. The diatonic scale. The mathematics behind the twelfth root of two and all that. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single sideband radio. All other radio. Dentistry. The internal combustion engine. Turbojets, turbofans, Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit.

“The computer, computational fluid dynamics. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Homer. Glass. Rubber. Nylon. Roads. Buildings.  Acetyl-cholinesterase inhibitors. Silicone. The automobile. Bug spray. Public cryptography.”

“Like it or not white men can do these things, have done them, and continue to do them. The evidence shows that all groups receiving affirmative action have not done them, and cannot do them, which is why they need affirmative action.

“The pattern of white men doing difficult things continues. Consider the founders of companies in information technologies. Not quite all white, but all men. Anyone who watched the landing of Curiosity on Mars will have noticed that Mission Control consisted overwhelmingly of white men. If I were rude, I would say to those who criticize: invent your own things.”

Reed cites South Africa as an example of a tragedy in the making. “A constantly dwindling number of whites are at the mercy of a predatory welfare class and it’s possible they can’t and won’t carry the rest of the population. If things get worse for them, they will simply flee the country.”

Whether this scenario plays itself out in South Africa is up to the whites. But Ms. Mokonyane mustn’t take too much for granted. Her dislike of pale males borders on the obsessive, to the point where common sense and practical considerations for the benefit of all South Africans are cast aside in an all-consuming and embittered realization that her ANC cannot feed its people, cannot govern, and are no better than what the world has seen emanate from the rest of the continent over the past fifty years. She knows this, the ANC knows this, and the world knows it. Keeping out the pale males won’t improve the ANC. This racial animosity is inimical not only to whites but, eventually, to the future of all South Africans.
The pale male acrimony is however selective. Ex president Nelson Mandela was not interned in an ANC-run hospital. The new ANC elite have quietly bought houses in so-called white areas. They send their children to white schools. They want the pale male’s education system. (Every university in South Africa is a white creation). What is the yardstick against which anything of worth in South Africa is judged if not against a pale male-created yardstick? Are the elite’s suits bought from Nigeria or Italy? Is there such a thing as a Ghanian IPod? Do they fly Air Kenya or British Airways? Do they go to Mali for their holidays or to Paris?

A South African business journalist refers to “the African No” – “a jumbled melee of endless meetings, unreturned phone calls and ignored e-mails”. Compare this approach with the white world. The United States for example accounts for 4,5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s GDP. When people flee their terrible countries they try for Europe, Australia and other pale male bastions. They don’t want to emigrate to Zambia or the Sudan.
A cursory trawl through South Africa’s productive sector sees pale males as police divers, as rescue helicopter pilots, as paramedics, as the donors to charities, as the bedrock of the taxpayer base, as the underpinners of the medical profession, the service industry, the banking and the mining sector. The country is divided into the producers and the consumers, and we know on which side of the divide the pale male sits.

Virtually all of the productive farms that were handed over to ANC supporters under the government’s land redistribution policy failed:  a pithy example of pale male producers and ANC-created destruction.

It is a pity that more media space is not given to a frank analysis of who are the drivers of the South African economy, instead of to those who talk about nationalization, about transformation, about white racism and so-called privilege. South Africans might get a clearer picture of who is really important in the grand scheme of things, as opposed to those who can talk the leg off an iron pot, hold press conferences,  fly all over the world first class, endlessly discuss turnaround strategies and blame everyone but themselves for their shortcomings.  Within ten years, South Africa’s social spending (including huge government employee wage bills) will exceed government revenue. Employee compensation as a share of government income went from 31,7% in 2008 to 44,3% in 2012. South Africa’s pale males are a finite group – even they cannot hope to foot the bill for this parasite profligacy forever.

Maybe then South Africa will value its pale males, but it may be too late.

(Extract from Nationalist Times courtesy of Impact magazine)

Who’s killing whom? Speak up, Bill O’Reilly!

mercer_ilanaby Ilana Mercer

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Beggars can’t be choosers. Those who’ve never hesitated to tell the truth about the hue of hatred in America are elated. Someone more powerful has stepped up to help do the work so few will do.

In 2010, Bill O’Reilly became the first member of mainstream media to briefly broach a taboo topic: the color of crime in the US. In his July 13th “Talking Points” memo, the famous talker alluded to rates at which blacks commit violent crime proportionate to their numbers in society.

Then as now, Mr. O’Reilly came straight out andsaidthis:

“African-Americans make up 13 percent of the population, but according to the Justice Department, they comprise 39 percent of violent crime convictions. Thirty-six percent of all murders in America are committed by African-Americans, and 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks.”

The Bureau of Justice’s statisticians confirm the long-standing trends to which Mr. O’Reilly alluded. The report,“Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008, “states: “Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders,” and were eight times more likely to murder than whites.

Everyone is, however, tripping over one another to show-off their admiration for Bill O’Reilly. That’s premature.

So elatedare the truth-tellersthat some have even missed that Bill and the blond brigade of Fox News—in the person of Kirsten Powers and others—are beating on breast about “intraracial” crime-patterns only. Or black-on-black crime. In so doing, these comfort-zone commentators deflect from the white-hot issue of black-on-white violence. You see, blacks are also more likely to murder whites than the reverse. This likelihood is a trend which O’Reilly and the gang are submerging by emphasizing only the “intraracial” nature of most murders.

They are in “good” company. The Bureau of Justice Statistics does the same—and worse: It often inflates white violent crime by conflating whites with Hispanics.

Into the Cannibal's Pot

Thus while 84 percent of white victims were killed by whites, and 93 percent of black victims were killed by blacks; a hell of a lot of whites are killed by blacks, while few blacks are offed by whites.

As regards“stranger homicide,”blacks murder whites four times more often than whites murder blacks. Put differently, black-on-white murders constituted 20 percent of the known sample of “stranger homicides.” White-on-black murders constituted 5 percent of the same sample. (Given the direction of the aggression, one wonders whether some in the white cohort were not engaged in self-defense.)

When, then, will Bill O’Reilly and the simple-minded Ms. Powers pipe-up about interracial violent—”the ugliest form of racism in America,” in Pat Buchanan’s always-candid assessment?”

After researching the FBI numbers for ‘Suicide of a Superpower,'”Mr. Buchanan concluded: “An analysis of ‘single offender victimization figures’ from the FBI for 2007 finds blacks committed 433,934 crimes against whites, eight times the 55,685 whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black on white – with 14,000 assaults on white women by African Americans in 2007. … Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse.”

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” this writer went back to the 2005 Bureau of Justice’s Statistics of “Homicide trends in the U.S.” Despite blacks comprising a mere 12.3 percent of the population, to whites’ 75.1 percent, in 2005, there were 10,285 black murderers to 8,350 white murderers. The crime of rape is most certainly anything but “intraracial.” As the BJS’s 2005 “Criminal Victimization Statistical Tables” reveal, blacks, at 12.3 percent of the population, were responsible for 36 percent of the 111,490 incidents in which whites were raped. And blacks committed 100 percent of the 36,620 incidents in which blacks were raped.

The legendary miscegenation of the much-maligned white male: could that too be a myth? Not one black woman or man—0.0 percent—was ravished by a Caucasian.

These unidirectional victimization patterns endure behind bars, seconds Human Rights Watch. “White inmates are disproportionately targeted for abuse.” A report titled “No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons” found that, “Inter-racial sexual abuse is common only to the extent that it involves white non-Hispanic prisoners being abused by African Americans or Hispanics.” “A form of revenge for white dominance of blacks in outside society” is how Human Rights Watch dignified the sexual subjugation of white by black inmates.

To counter evidence of the color of crime, America’s own self-styled anti-racism activists will typically claim that whites make up most of the population and are therefore natural targets for crimes. The probability of a black encountering a white is simply many times the reverse, their argument goes. However, interracial encounter rates do not account for the sheer hatred manifested in the appalling attacks on vulnerable white Americans. Interracial encounter rates fail to explain away what was done to the white American couple from Knoxville, Tenn., in 2007. Or to the four whites from Wichita, Kans., who were slain by blacks in 2000.

It is the “deep and dark reality buried in the hearts of the individuals who butchered twenty-one-year-old Channon Christian and twenty-three-year-old Hugh Christopher Newsom in Knoxville,” to which “American jurists and journalists, politicians and pundits are oblivious, for the most.” Or so I contended in“Into the Cannibal’s Pot.”

“Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused ‘by the tearing,’ or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash.”

White trash.

Similarly, probabilities belie the stalking and savaging, in 2008, of a Columbia University student at the hands of Robert Williams; he black, she white. Her nineteen-hour ordeal ended with Williams setting the twenty-three-year-old student on fire. It began with Williams raping the girl orally, vaginally, and anally, pouring bleach in her eyes, boiling water on her body, slicing her face and slitting her eyelids with a carving knife.

The telltales of racial hatred were seared into the mangled white bodies of these victims andmany more like them. This the swirl of statistics conceals.

In the context of black-on-black violence, the self-celebrating media—Mr. O’Reilly and the parade of T & A that goes for commentary on cable—are currently breathing fire over the black family’s demise. To get my attention, they’ll have to get as fired-up about the white-hot hatred behind black-on-white menace and murder.

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©2013 By ILANA MERCER

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