political correctness

NATO is the root cause of EU migrant crisis

The scale of the migrant crisis Europe is facing today cannot be understated. It is truly unprecedented. What is habitually understated, however — and in fact almost completely ignored by mainstream media — are the real roots of the crisis, says Danielle Ryan.

The debate around migration into the EU is happening nearly entirely without reference to the causes of the recent influx of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. The elephant in the room is NATO and nobody really wants to talk about it.

Hundreds of articles, laden down with numbers and proposals and predictions fail to make any direct link between cause and effect. News anchors sit seemingly baffled, mouths agape, at the apocalyptic-like pictures they are seeing land on their desks, and yet few are willing to draw the appropriate conclusions. But it is such a basic and logical connection that it’s hard to believe it is not being made very loudly and very persistently.

Maybe it’s just that these journalists are so conditioned to framing U.S. and NATO policy in a positive light that the links don’t even really occur to them. Or maybe they’re simply embarrassed and trying to shift focus from their long-recorded support for various military interventions in these countries.

Either way, the result is that the story is framed in such a way that it makes the timing of the crisis sound almost random. We’re witnessing a conversation about how to ‘deal’ with boats full of Libyans making their way across the Mediterranean — as if Libya was a country that had just self-imploded yesterday, and for no discernible reason.

A fierce debate is raging over ‘what to do’ about these migrants — and in a way that’s understandable because that is the more immediate problem — but the debate we really need to be having is about the policies, NATO’s policies, which were the catalyst.

Even if Europe unites in formulating a ‘solution’ to the problem, it will be nothing more than a bandaid fix because it will only deal with symptom. After all, what’s the point in covering your open wound with a bandaid when the guy who cut you is still wielding a knife in the same room? It doesn’t take a genius to work out how that story ends.

Whenever the cause is grudgingly mentioned by the media, it is mentioned briefly and abstractly where the author or anchor might refer to “conflict” or make mention of how violence has “reignited” in these countries in recent years and months.

The editors at the New York Times in particular, are big fans of loading all the blame squarely onto Europe’s shoulders. Here a Times piece argues that the migrant crisis “puts Europe’s policy missteps into focus”. Another piece, from the editorial board, lectures Europe on how to handle the situation.

In April, NATO head Jens Stoltenberg called for a “comprehensive response” to the crisis and promised that NATO would help to stabilize the situation. The alliance’s role in “stabilizing” Afghanistan was part of its broader approach to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, he said.

That is rich coming from the head of a ‘security’ and ‘defensive’ alliance which for years has pursued a policy of offensive destabilization in the very regions which people are fleeing from in their hundreds of thousands. But Stoltenberg’s comments and NATO’s actions are easily decoded by the employment of some basic common sense.

The NATO modus operandi is clear. The pattern, repeated over and over, involves the complete destabilization of a region, to be swiftly followed up with another NATO-led ‘solution’ to the problem. When you couple that with the use of spokespeople who are unashamed to feign ignorance and lie blatantly (Jen Psaki, Marie Harf etc.), and a compliant media that will regurgitate the line without question, this is what you get.

The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya was authorized by the United Nations on “humanitarian” grounds and resulted in the deaths of between 50,000 and 100,000 people and the displacement of 2 million. Very humanitarian.

Similarly, after the U.S.-led campaign to destabilize Syria in an effort to topple Bashar al-Assad, facilitating (and even supporting) the rise of ISIS in the region, a staggering 10 million have been displaced (according to Amnesty International) and European countries are left to help pick up the pieces. Germany, for example, has pledged to resettle 30,000 Syrian refugees. Sweden, a non-NATO nation, has taken in similar numbers.

It should be made clear however, that the numbers European countries have taken or pledged to take pale in comparison to the numbers being hosted in other Middle Eastern countries. Lebanon, for example, is hosting 1.1 million Syrian refugees. Jordan is hosting more than 600,000. Iraq hosts nearly a quarter of a million. Turkey hosts 1.6 million.

There is one country that’s getting off scot-free in all of this — at least on the Syrian front. That country is the United States. The U.S. has taken in less than 900 Syrian refugees after four years of war. American officials have cited “national security” in their explanations for not yet taking more, although they have said they would like to see the number increase.

Maybe this has something to do with it?
Debate not allowed

There is a second media crime flying under the radar here and it is this: In European countries where the massive influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa have caused serious societal divisions, where migrants have failed to assimilate (for a variety of reasons, including both government policies and often radical religious beliefs), Western media will allow no one to talk about it honestly — and woe betide the person who tries.

Take Sweden, where the disease of political correctness is at an even more advanced stage than it is in the rest of Europe. There, any attempt to debate the coherence of a ‘doors wide open’ immigration policy is branded as “racist”. A further irony in the Swedish context, is that the country is facing a housing crisis and has nowhere to put most of the people they are pledging to resettle. There’s some real forward-thinking, common sense policy for you.

This is a dangerous combination for Europe: An unsustainable influx of migrants, foreign policy which ensures its continuation, a docile media, and an epidemic of political correctness which has infected the entire continent.

Media 101 on the migrant crisis: Talk a lot about migrants, don’t mention why they fled and then call anyone who has a problem with it a “racist” — success! Oh, and you get an added bonus if you can somehow link it all to ‘Russian aggression’, Vladimir Putin and NATO as a ‘defensive’ alliance.

Some European countries are taking a more hardline approach and are getting slammed for it. Hungary, for example, is looking at building a barrier wall along its border with Serbia, similar to barriers along the Greek-Turkish and Bulgarian-Turkish borders. Again, this has sparked accusations of xenophobia and racism from media and political quarters.

But that’s part of the game, isn’t it? If NATO’s war supporters can focus the debate around the idea that anyone who wants to address or critically assess immigration policy is “racist” then we won’t have to talk about why the migrants are here in the first place or why they are facing such dire circumstances at home.

Russia Today’s Oksana Boyko tried recently, to broach this topic with Peter Sutherland, the UN’s special representative on international migration and development, but she got nowhere. She argued that the debate around migration into the EU can’t really be had without addressing the essence and heart of the problem, but found that NATO policy is apparently a topic not up for discussion.

Debating Europe’s migrant crisis without acknowledging the context in which it has been created it useless. It would be like asking Americans to debate police brutality without talking about race. The two are inescapably interlinked and any ‘solutions’ that come from an incomplete debate will ultimately fail.

For now though, it seems Europe will continue to debate this humanitarian crisis in terms of ‘what to do’ without addressing the ‘how to stop’ and we’ll keep running around in a vicious circle.

An easier solution, of course, would be for NATO to put an end to its campaign of destabilization in the Middle East and North Africa, but that would require the acceptance and acknowledgement of some very hard truths.

Danielle is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC. Special interests: American politics and foreign policy, US-Russia relations and media bias. Her blog can be found at journalitico.com.

Jerry Seinfeld ‘doesn’t go near US colleges because they’re too PC’

College kids are too politically correct for Jerry Seinfeld.

The comedian spoke to ESPN Radio host Colin Cowherd for an episode of “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” to promote the latest season of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” and the two talked about political correctness and comedy. Cowherd commented how comedians like Chris Rock and Larry the Cable Guy won’t perform at college campuses for this very reason.

“I hear that all the time,” Seinfeld said. “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.’ I’ll give you an example: My daughter’s 14. My wife says to her, ‘Well, you know, in the next couple years, I think maybe you’re going to want to be hanging around the city more on the weekends, so you can see boys.’ You know what my daughter says? She says, ‘That’s sexist.’ They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ ‘That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice.’ They don’t know what the f–k they’re talking about.”

The 61-year-old star said this hurts comedy, and commended Louis C.K., who recently landed in hot water over his “Saturday Night Live” monologue about child molestation, for not worrying and just doing his thing.

You can listen to a clip from the interview:

Cultural Marxists persecute 3-year olds for ‘racism’ in Britain

Some years ago, the British Daily Mail reported that “toddlers should be taught about racism and singled out for criticism if they have racist attitudes, a Government-funded advisory group said”.

It told nursery teachers, playgroup leaders and childminders to record and report every racist incident involving children as young as three.

These could include saying ‘Yuk’ about unfamiliar food.

Even babies should not be ignored in the hunt for racism because they can ‘recognise different people in their lives’, a new guide for nurseries and child care centres said.

The instructions for staff in charge of pre-school children in day care have been produced by the National Children’s Bureau, which receives £12million a year, mostly through taxpayer-funded organisations.

The NCB, which describes itself as ‘an umbrella body for the children’s sector’, has long used its resources to campaign on controversial issues, for example in favour of a legal ban on smacking by parents.

It also runs the Sex Education Forum, a campaign for more sex education in schools.

The new 366-page guide, Young Children and Racial Justice, warned that ‘racist incidents among children in early years settings-tend to be around name-calling-casual thoughtless comments, and peer group relationships’.

It said such incidents could include children using words like ‘blackie’, ‘Pakis’, ‘those people’ or ‘they smell’.

Children might also ‘react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying “yuk”.’

Nursery staff are told: ‘No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist intent, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action.’

If children ‘reveal negative attitudes the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes’.

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many racist incidents as possible to local councils.

‘Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution,’ it said. ‘In fact, the opposite is the case.’

The guidance said that anyone who disagrees is racist themselves.

It also suggests cultivating the home languages of new immigrants – despite Government anxiety to promote the learning of English.

It said: ‘English is now viewed as the major language of the world but this is not because it has any innate linguistic advantages – it is because English is the language of power in a world dominated by English-speaking peoples.’

Critics of the race programme for pre-school children labelled it ‘totalitarian’.

Author and researcher on family life Patricia Morgan said: ‘Stepping in to stop severe bullying is one thing, but this is interference in the lives of children. It smacks of totalitarianism.

‘It is regulation of private speech and thought. They intend nursery staff to step into children’s playground squabbles and then report them to the local council as race incidents. Who would ever have thought that the anti-racism crusade would go so far?’

Ten-year old criminally charged for ‘racist speechcrime’

A boy of ten has already been taken to court for calling a mixed race 11-year-old ‘Paki’ and ‘Bin Laden’ in a school playground argument.

The pair subsequently made up and became friends again, yet the Crown Prosecution Service decided to go ahead because the victim’s mother made a complaint.

The ten- year- old eventually appeared at Salford Youth Court in 2006 where he denied a racially motivated offence under the Public Order Act of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause another person harm or distress.

But District Judge Jonathan Finestein ordered the authorities to review their decision to prosecute.

He said of the defendant: ‘I shouldn’t think he understands Bin Laden or Al Qaeda. I’m not condoning what he supposedly said but there must be other ways of dealing with this apart from criminal prosecution.’

Prosecutors later decided not to pursue the case.

The 3 codes of political correctness

South Africa has arguably become the most politically correct country in the world where even the most innocuous statement may invoke hysterical denunciations, complaints to the South African Human Rights Commission or terminate an academic career.

For example, saying that “women do not run as fast as men” could land you in hot water as a sexist, mysogynist and patriarchal denialist.

However, amid the plethora of politically correct utterances that confront us daily, I have made a minor discovery, with the help of old-fashioned literary theory, applied by people like Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco to both classical realism and popular novels by Ian Fleming.

Almost any PC statement invariably contains three codes:

I’m so clever (with its corollary, you are mentally retarded).
That’s racist.
I laugh at you.

Number 1 (the IQ code) stems from an amazing explosion of self-conscious genius in South Africa. I suppose if you obtain two distinctions in matric, one for Mathematical Literacy and one for English Third Additional Language it is only natural that you could take yourself for Einstein. I call it “South African IQ narcissism”.

Code 2 (some call it the race card) is of course a kind of nuclear weapon in the arsenal of PC semantic war and is liberally employed. Although most people do not know what the integral of x is, they are au fait with the finer subtleties of Afrocentrism as taught at American universities. So if you disagree with the statement, “Europe stole its culture and technology from Africa”, someone will cast the first “j’accuse”, after which a whole mob will join in.

Code 3 is the class code. Yes, apart from race, there is still class. It is the clincher, employed by the speaker after he has posited his unassailable intellectual and moral superiority. It also has some connection with the British class system which many South Africans emulate and secretly hanker after. So appealing to old-fashioned logic will expose you to sneering snobbery and ridicule: “I am descended from Peers whereas you are a real low-life miscreant, a single-passport holder born in Klerksdorp. I spit on your velskoens.”

Do yourself a favour and read all the newspaper columns, blogs and tweets. You will spot at least one or two of the PC codes, if not all three in one go!

Just don’t take yourself for a genius, or you might lapse into PC discourse yourself.

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.

Why I hate South Africa, part 1

by Dan Roodt

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South Africa is a land of great natural beauty. Its unique flora and fauna attract tourists from all over the world. Due to geological accident, we also have buried beneath our soil and rock the biggest or second biggest mineral bonanza of all time, including 80% of the world’s platinum. Since 1886 when gold was discovered, various fortunes have been made in mining those mineral deposits.

The weather, at least where I live in the north of Johannesburg, is more than ideal; it is perfect. We have three hundred days of sunshine per year or thereabouts and it is never too hot or too cold. Visitors from the northern hemisphere mistake our winters for summer as midday temperatures go above twenty Centigrade.

When the Voortrekkers, our nineteenth-century pioneers crossed the Drakensberg in their ox-wagons and arrived in the Transvaal, they stumbled upon a pristine land of sunshine, savannah and plentiful game, a true paradise.

South Africa could have been utopia, if it had not been for her people. Even using such a possessive pronoun in the feminine gender implies some kind of connection between the land and its inhabitants, if not patriotism. Now, patriotism and a sense of belonging would be the last thing the average interloper strutting and stomping about this fair land could be suspected of. Rather, he or she regards this bountiful place as the forty thieves did the cave of Ali Baba, simply a source of loot!

The turning point in South African history came in the nineteenth century when the gold rush drew like a magnet a horde of crazed would-be capitalists and criminals to these shores. For a few decades during the twentieth century we had managed to staunch the mayhem, the cold, unscrupulous greed venting itself upon us. Alas, for a variety of reasons – not least the utter cowardice and stupidity of the former Afrikaner leadership – that time of growth and hope for the future is long past. All that we may look forward to is more decadent dissolution, more crime and venality that will rage unabatedly. It is as if the land itself has been wounded, stung and, like a predator sensing its own demise, lashes out at every living being within the arc of its claws and fangs.

The floodgates of hell have been opened, in the name of “democracy”, that exalted term. It has become, in our context, comical, ironic and even absurd. It reminds me of the GDR, the German “Democratic” Republic which was equally lacking in real democracy. But let me not insult that erstwhile “farmers’ and workers’ state”, the GDR, by comparing contemporary South Africa to it. At least in the GDR there were still some principles held by a few people, communists at that, whereas South Africa has descended to the level of delinquent insouciance in which values or principles only exist to be mocked or sneered at.

Normally I would write these words in our noble local language, Afrikaans, which washed up on the shores of the Cape from Northern Europe. A spoken language, a patois of Dutch and Low German, we have lovingly preserved and standardised it to become one of the world’s great cultural languages. Yet, in recent times and under the influence of the ambient nihilism of South Africa, many of our people have discarded this age-old tongue, full of mysterious words and expressions that formed that “bridge between Europe and Africa” that NP van Wyk Louw, perhaps our greatest poet, spoke of.

South Africa has become a dump in every sense of the word. And I say that not only because garbage or litter is literally strewn all over, but because its inhabitants have no real sense of value. Money is proverbially “easy”, obtained through corruption or simple robbery and theft. So like all parvenus the “South Africans” do not know what it means to save, invest or work for money. However, in a more fundamental sense, things of great value – cultural, historical, linguistic, architectural, artistic – are simply thrown away, dumped. Some of our greatest buildings, monuments to a past of taste and a strong national identity, have been demolished without so much as a second thought.

Afrikaans too, has been dumped, with everything else, including by many Afrikaners who have become caught up in the general decay, the loss of societal moorings that have come to characterise this entity which we still mistakenly call a “republic”. To say that I feel alienated from South Africa represents an understatement. However, I feel almost equally alienated from my fellow Afrikaners, these new, obsequious, treacherous and venal people who are but a pale shadow of their patriotic and pioneering forebears. Apart from a tiny minority of proud and civilised Afrikaners who still honour their culture, language and traditions, the rest have become almost mimic men in the sense given to that term by V.S. Naipaul, a second-hand, quasi-British people and as rootless as the illegal African immigrants that wander over our borders on a daily basis.

Perhaps predictably, the Afrikaner has become ashamed of himself. Taunted and vilified by the invective and propaganda of his enemies, he has lacked the courage and the intelligence to respond in any meaningful way. The abjectness of the Afrikaner’s spiritual surrender is painful to behold. That is why this text would be simply lost on the vast majority of Afrikaners, milling about in their confusion, self-doubt and self-hatred. The glib clichés of their journalists and pundits, imitating American-liberal or politically correct discourse, are quite beyond any form of serious discussion or reflection. Like Captain Ahab confronting Moby Dick, I have to face up to this monstrous entity with the bland geographical name, South Africa, casting this message appositely to sea like a message in a bottle that might be read somewhere on the other side of the globe, or not read at all.

Apparently the first Roodt came to South Africa in the early 1700s, so despite what Afrocentric blacks proclaim to the contrary, that “Africa belongs to the Africans”, I may consider myself to some extent naturalised. I hold no other passport. Yet I am also very aware of the murderous xenophobia at the heart of contemporary South Africa which holds that both the white man and the foreign African are unwanted, “foreign”, fit only to be expelled or to be killed.

Like any sensible person of European descent has to admit, South Africa hates us. We are despised for many reasons, some more atavistic and preposterous than others, but in no other country has pure, unadulterated ethnic hatred been so mythologised and so obfuscated by largely spurious interpretations of history as here. Lest I be accused of lapsing into the commonplace black-white rhetoric representing analysis or thinking in South Africa, I am accutely aware that much of what passes for racial feeling in South Africa has always been stirred up from outside or been a handy way for the oligarchy currently looting us to justify its domination and ludicrously discriminatory policies, however much they may be clothed in US-style, politically correct jargon.

Sooner or later, one has to confront the salient fact: South Africa, or the gathering mob on the way to another necklace killing, that symbol of “liberation”, hates me. In turn, and increasingly so, I have come to hate South Africa. With a passion.

I may still love boerewors and biltong, and soaking up the winter sun through my window, but I have only contempt for this failed-state-in-the-making, this pseudo-democracy, this Little England, Little America and everything little, belittling and petty that one may imagine.

South Africa has no reason for existing. It is not the name of a country, but of a pathology. It possesses no identity to speak of. It is just a big parasite preying on the labours of the few who are still, against all odds, pursuing a normal existence under the Southern Cross.

I think I could write a book about why I hate South Africa. However, immediately I have to concede that writing books in South Africa is generally a waste of time. The few people who are still able to read, after umpteen educational experiments, the advent of cellphones and the ambient degeneracy, do not constitute a market for books. There is no literary society. Like everything else in South Africa, the book industry is controlled by a few colonial souls who make money out of importing British books. What is known as the local book, especially the so-called non-fiction book, is merely the endless repetition of baseless clichés and idées reçues. Otherwise there are various talking heads from radio and TV who somehow think that they should also bestow upon themselves the imprimatur of “author” by having their usual vacuous sayings coagulated into print.

The notion of “debate” and especially a debate by means of an argument that might span two or three hundred pages of a book, is so foreign to South Africa that it would make me even more of an outsider than I already am if I had to attempt anything like it. It would appear to be some foreign activity, like playing pétanque on a rugby field.

It remains therefore for me to sum up the very good and multifarious reasons why I hate South Africa.

(To be continued)

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The twisted motives behind political correctness

by Brandon Smith

As I have confessed in the past, in my early years I found myself active in the Democratic Party and the general liberal methodology. I had no understanding of the concept of the false left/right paradigm. I had no inkling of the dangers of globalism and central banking. I had no concept of decentralization or non-participation. I had never even heard of libertarianism. I knew only that George W. Bush was a criminal (and I was right), but the problem went far deeper than the GOP. I was astoundingly ignorant of the bigger picture.

However, what I did have going for me was an almost violent sense of nonconformity. I hated collectivists, yet I found myself surrounded by them while working within the leftist culture. It was the insanity of self-proclaimed “liberals” that taught me the true nature of the facade of politics. When I realized that the Democrats were essentially the same corrupt entity as the neoconservatives, everything in my life changed.

One aspect of liberalism with which I am now very familiar is political correctness. I didn’t understand it at the time, not until I stepped outside the cultism of it and looked in from a wiser place. It always bothered me, but I couldn’t quite grasp why until later. Then, it hit me like a revelation. Political correctness was not a political ideology. No, it was a religion, a full-fledged spiritual con, a New Age ghetto of frothing mishmash that is sociological voodoo. And the leftists were eating it up like steak night at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

These people were rationally retarded. Every idea they proposed they merely parroted from books and articles they had read. They were like malfunctioning automatons trapped in a cycle of discontented social criticism. Their desperation to invent meaning in the midst of their irrelevant lives made me feel ill. If they could not find a legitimate cause to champion, they would create one out of thin air and defend it relentlessly, regardless of how shallow it truly was.

When I outline my analysis of economic destabilization within the United States or I write about the rise of the police state, I am driven by a fundamental sense of concrete concern. There are indeed real problems in the world, swirling in a storm of obvious factual conflicts. But the warriors of the PC culture don’t see any of it. Rather, they fantasize about injustices that don’t exist, trespasses that are ultimately fictional. They imagine themselves champions of some greater purpose that, in the end, doesn’t matter.

Recently, I read a news story about a “transgendered teen” in Maine. When the boy was in the fifth grade, he decided to dress as a girl and demanded to use the girl’s bathroom at his public school, despite having the biological apparatus of a male. This story was international news, folks! Why? I can’t say, except that the mainstream media have made a point to focus on “gender optional” issues as if they represent some kind of civil rights uprising.

The issue perfectly illustrates the disturbing nature of politically correct culture.

Teachers at the school did not deny the student the use of restroom facilities. In fact, they allowed him to use the teacher’s bathrooms to avoid any confusion. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court, on the other hand, had other ideas. It ruled that the school’s refusal to allow the boy to use the girl’s facilities constituted a violation of the State’s anti-discrimination law. The ruling has been heralded as a massive victory for the politically correct narrative.

Now, let me make one thing clear: I could not care less about this boy’s sexual orientation (if he even has one). I do think the very idea that a fifth-grader at about the age of 10 is sexually conscious enough to develop a sense of gender dissuasion is absurd. Children who haven’t even experienced puberty yet, proclaiming they are transgendered? Utter nonsense. I find it far more likely that the student’s PC-obsessed parents influenced him to come to such a decision despite his naivety.

Is it not rather mentally backward for any person to base his public persona solely on his carnal compulsions? Do I dance around on the sidewalk bellowing to strangers how much I love the curves of women? Do I require a sociopolitical legal apparatus to vindicate my existence? Do I feel the need to shame gay people into publicly embracing my straight man’s libido? No, I do not.

The PC culture demands that we, as individuals, openly accept the sexual orientations of anyone and everyone; otherwise, we are labeled prejudiced monsters. It is not enough that we object in a logical manner. No, we must fall to our knees and thank the stars for the very existence of gender chameleons.

In the end, the psychological gender position of any particular person does not overrule his biological features. A child with a penis is a boy. Period. He will never be a girl. Ever. Not without surgical aid. And even then, he will never have the ability to give birth, which is the very hallmark of femininity. (Sorry, feminists, but that’s how it goes.) A boy, no matter his mental orientation, does not belong in a girl’s lavatory. The privacy rights of the girls outweigh the gender confusion of the boy. If I were a girl (why not play some gender games since everyone else is), I would beat the living hell out of any boy gallivanting in a dress in a bathroom I was using and make sure he never dared come back. And, by extension, if I were a rather mischievous boy with an aptitude as a peeping tom, why not dress up in a tutu in the hopes of getting a glimpse of the forbidden while being legally protected by the State?

The warped conflicts that arise, though, are not the creation of the child in question. A fifth-grader has no concept of gender rights or political correctness. This issue was a creation of the PC cult and its acolytes. These people don’t actually care about the children they involve in their legal dramas. They exploit them, with every intent to abandon them once they have chiseled their agenda into the gray matter of every American.

What truly motivates these people? Why do they do what they do? I think my experience with leftists makes me a well-positioned observer of the psychology of the culture. Here are the hidden thought processes I have witnessed while dealing directly with the PC army.

PC Elitism

One of the unfortunate side effects of religion is that proponents often use it as a means to feel superior to others. I have seen it in Christianity as much as I have seen it in any other belief system. It is the primary reason why I refuse to subscribe to organized and establishment-sanctioned spiritualism. Religion should be a personal experience first and foremost, not an easy way to fit in with the collective. Communing with others who share one’s beliefs should be secondary. Hypocritically, politically correct adherents often criticize Christians for their collectivist elitism while suffering from the same problem themselves.

PC culture allows participants to pretend as though they have some greater understanding of the world, an elevated knowledge of life that makes them superior to the uninitiated. It is important to understand that when a person pursues the methodology of zealotry, he doesn’t do it to make the world a better place; he does it to feel better about his place in the world.

The politically correct are so violent in the assertion of their ideals because they crave the subjugation of the mainstream and a recognition of their “rightness.” They don’t want people to “accept” their beliefs as tolerable. They want people to adore their beliefs as supreme. They want every man, woman and child to reinforce their ideals without question.

The malfunction of this philosophy is that zealots are never finished. They must always find new ways to feel superior to others. So they continuously engineer new taboos and new sins, no matter how ridiculous, so that they can forever look down upon the laymen. Because of this, there will never be an end to PC law. It will go on forever, labeling numerous social interactions and stances as “aberrant” — never satiated and never satisfied.

PC Futurism

The young are always searching for ways to feel wiser than the old. This is just the natural way of things, at least in America. Now, I know from ample experience that age does not necessarily denote intelligence. I’ve met plenty of idiotic people who had decades of time to learn from their mistakes but didn’t. But the young, many of whom lack time and struggle, have a terrible tendency to either pretend that they have “seen it all.” Or they pretend that the very atmosphere of the day somehow gives them a greater insight than generations past. The reality is that most of them know very little of import. This attitude comes from a philosophy called “futurism” (popular with the Nazis and the Soviets), which holds that all the beliefs and discoveries of the past mean nothing compared to the beliefs and discoveries of the present. This ideology is alluring to the young, because it gives them a way to feel intellectually dominant over older and more “ignorant” people who are “behind the times.”

Political correctness is basically an appendage of futurism. By labelling elders as social bigots and products of a barbaric era who don’t understand the “lingo” of the PC elite, liberalism draws in and collectivizes the fledgling left. Younger generations are given a cultural avenue toward high priesthood, a right of passage usually reserved for the aged. They get to skip ahead past all the trials and tribulations of life and announce their deep awareness of the so-called greater good.

The values of forefathers past become archaic scrawlings of racist and prejudiced cavemen who could never appreciate the “brilliance” of today’s academia. The inherent freedoms of natural law that have existed since time began are nothing more than obstacles to them, standing in the way of a new and better world where they have somehow outsmarted human instinct and centuries of history.

PC Collectivism

The very foundation of political correctness is solidified in a desire for the perpetual reinforcement of one’s worldview. PC people need every other person around them to sing the praises of their pure virtues. If I happen to disagree with the idea of gender bending, for instance, as some kind of socially persecuted subculture that needs overt government protection, then I am, of course, labelled a hateful Neanderthal. If I stand in opposition to the concept of victim group status in general, in which the state demands that designated “minorities” be given special treatment regardless of the status of the individual, then I become a racist political fossil ignorant of the bigger picture. You see, if you disagree with PC culture in any way (even if that way is rational), you cannot win. To refute political correctness is to refute the god of the New Age; and to refute their god, even with concrete logic, is blasphemy.

This kind of blind faith in political correctness lends itself entirely to collectivism. The average person begins to think that without a viable appreciation of the philosophy, he may be left out or cast aside. Most people do not know how to function without the approval of others. Therefore, even if a father happens to have a healthy skepticism over the idea of a make-up wearing fifth-grade boy waltzing into his daughter’s school bathroom, he is likely to keep his mouth shut, because to speak out would be a risk to his position within the group, or the community.

PC Control

The prevalence of PC philosophy is not subtle. I have always found it interesting that political correctness seems to consistently support the demands of the state. Our system smothers children with it in public school, our workplaces are rife with the propaganda for fear of lawsuits and colleges are veritable breeding grounds for the PC oligarchy. Politically correct culture goes out of its way to constantly test others to make sure they are also true believers.

The truth is some discrimination is healthy, and some discord is needed for a society to remain balanced. As long as we don’t allow our disagreements to end in the physical harm of others, then those disagreements are our natural-born right. If you are a racist (this goes for non-whites as well), that’s fine. Just don’t act out your racism in a violent way around me, or I will have to put you down permanently. If you have a distaste of homosexuality (or asexuality, as seems popular nowadays), then whatever, I don’t care. You shouldn’t have to have organizations like GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) in your face attempting to force you to put on a smile for gaydom, coordinate man-on-man heavy-petting protests in your favorite restaurant (Chick-fil-A) while you’re trying to eat a damn sandwich, push boys into the girl’s bathroom, or trying to shut down your favorite TV shows because the stars happen to share your views (“Duck Dynasty”).

Now, PC proponents will argue that the very existence of bigotry does harm to society as a whole, and it must be educated out of individuals. Frankly, I see that kind of utopian fascism as a far greater threat to society as a whole than bigotry ever will be.

Look at where we are today because of the PC nightmare! We have a Nation on the verge of industrial and economic collapse, partly because companies are forced by law or persuaded by government subsidies to hire people with victim group status, even if they are unqualified, while ignoring highly qualified people who just happen to have lighter skin. We have children not even old enough to discover their own inherent character being clinically diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” by a psychiatric community of quacks, which conjured most PC terminology out of thin air. We have boys who are told that they are stunted for acting out their natural male impulses and girls who are told that true femininity is weakness and that they should act more masculine. We have a mainstream culture that coddles and infantilizes young adults, young girls who think promiscuity is the key to womanhood and that motherhood is disgusting (which I find rather ironic), and young men who have no testicular fortitude and no clue how to take charge of their own lives.

The American family unit has been completely destroyed. We have women who are ashamed to set aside careers to raise children because feminism frowns upon “breeders” who bring down the whole gender. We have men who abandon their children and refuse to take responsibility. And we have a weak-minded population addicted to collective affirmation and unwilling to think outside the box for fear of being shunned and shamed. Honestly, I can’t see a single redeeming quality to political correctness other than the fact that those people who espouse it do so loudly and obnoxiously, making it easier for me to identify and avoid them or to take special note of them as an obvious zombie threat in an America swiftly declining into mundane oblivion.

Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

‘SA’ is for Sadists’ Apocalypse

by Dan Roodt

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In a recent article in the Sunday Independent, Gillian Schutte mistakenly blames so-called “white conservative narratives” for the appalling sexual violence that is sweeping South Africa at present. As rape is notoriously underreported, most estimates put the number of such crimes at more than a million per year or approximately three thousand per day.

The macabre forms of dehumanising torture during farm murders provide another clue to the societal breakdown that is occurring in our country. Even calling it “our country” might be a malapropism in that Afrikaners like myself are no longer considered full citizens in an Afro-Saxon state that is slouching towards some incarnation of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or, better still, Charles Taylor’s Liberia. This week, Taylor’s conviction as a war criminal was confirmed by an international court, the first head of state to be jailed for such crimes committed in Sierra Leone while he was in office.

South Africa has become a sadists’ apocalypse. No amount of “reframing”, circumlocution or leftist pseudo-intellectualism can disguise it any longer. Nor can the seemingly desperate massaging of the crime statistics. In the age of social media, people communicate their horror and despair at being captives in this, our “paradise of cruelty”. Policing our language as in the cowardly attack upon Louise Mabille is a poor substitute for the lack of policing elsewhere.

As the twentieth century has shown, utopias are always dangerous, be they fascist or communist. Every utopia has turned into its mirror image, a dystopia replete with genocide. South Africa’s pursuit of a racial biopolitics known as “transformation”, as well as extreme forms of cultural relativism, have unleashed hitherto unknown social consequences. In the domain of sexual violence at least, the country has earned the dubious title of “rape capital of the world” and it regularly tops international murder tables too.

Understanding the causes of this immense violence, unknown in peacetime, represents a rare analytical challenge. None of the usual explanations actually fit. The same people denouncing “colonialism” are the most accomplished colonialists in their slavish subordination to US or British racial discourse and political correctness.

However, neither Britain nor America has absorbed any significant African cultural influence so it is of no use applying the sociology of New York or London to an outbreak of sadistic violence in Limpopo province. It is risible to see ostensibly educated people constantly blaming either “apartheid” or “poverty” for the horrors and cruelties afflicting this society.

The retreat of Afrikaner power in South Africa has been coterminous with the resurgence of African belief systems, including witchcraft and ritual murders. In the early nineties South Africa experienced hundreds of killings associated with witchcraft and occult beliefs, leading to the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders. We still do not understand the role that occult beliefs played during the revolution, especially in establishing hegemonic black politics and racial nationalism. The necklace, that symbol of revolution, is pregnant with ethnographic and cultural meaning. There is also evidence that young “comrades” intimidated traditional healers to extract money from clients and that the accusation of being a witch was used to eliminate political opponents.

Mrs. Winnie Madikizala-Mandela, that international heroine and former wife of Nelson Mandela, subscribed to the Maoist doctrine – ‘kill one, scare a thousand’ – that support is gained through terror and horror. She notoriously stated in 1986:

…with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.

A necklace killing whereby a tyre is placed around the victim's neck, filled with petrol and then set alight — A necklace killing whereby a tyre is placed around the victim’s neck, filled with petrol and then set alight

Child and even baby rape is another ghastly phenomenon indicating that South Africa has navigated to a new, alien moral code. Stating that white men sometimes do it in some other country too, hardly mitigates the particular horror that it has assumed here.

The British Guardian ran an article on 12 March 2009 entitled, “Raped and killed for being a lesbian: South Africa ignores ‘corrective’ attacks“. The Guardian’s website contains an accompanying video interview with lesbian rape victims, as well as young black men who are outspoken in their support of “corrective rape”. One of them says:

Me, I have no time to rape them, but if there are some of the other guys who want to teach them the way, they must rape them, they must rock them.

But perhaps white conservatives are a bigger problem: they might go to church or caution their children against drugs and sexual promiscuity, which would undermine the libertine morals that so many have advocated for so long in South Africa. In Hillbrow, as recounted to me by a former policeman, young white female drug addicts are employed as prostitutes by Nigerian gangsters. When they are no longer useful to their pimps, they simply get injected with heroine and pushed off highrise buildings in what gets officially recorded by the police as “suicides”. In South Africa, the crime reality show is so much better than the fiction.

The country’s academics are all but ignoring the scourge of rape, including infant rape, judging from the paucity of published articles in the field. To some extent they have acculturated to the witch-hunting culture in persecuting dissidents in their own ranks. Otherwise they engage in repetitive denunciations of “patriarchy” as if there were still a father left somewhere that has not been killed.

South Africa’s “transformed” universities have been turned into the “armed brothels” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn spoke about when he said:

Rousseau is the grandfather of the concentration camps and also of those armed brothels that we continue to call universities. We have with us on one hand the Old Left, a finished product of L’éducation sentimentale, with its bent for social engineering and its tendency to identify its own plans and policies with the volonté générale; on the other the New Left which has taken up the slogan Retournons à la nature! exemplified in the rabble of unwashed, unkempt, debauched, unbridled ignoble savages who look to the Third World of the underdeveloped for inspiration. Its heroes are Chairman Mao with his Little Red Book, Ché Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Holden Roberto, the Harlem criminals and the pistol-packing priests.*

That is why leftist university intellectuals find any form of criticism of traditional African culture to be inherently “racist” and eschew references to practices such as ukuthwala (the kidnapping and forced marriage of young maidens). Recent legislation has placed about 18 million black South Africans under so-called customary law in which such practices are legal.

Everybody in South Africa, whether white or black, fears a witch-hunt in some or other form. Especially the kind of witch-hunt whereby you are called a “racist”, lose your tenured university job and spend the rest of your life in ignominy. Therefore white academics are completely silent on ukuthwala or the so-called “virgin cleansing myth” if the professors do not actually deny in writing that such phenomena exist!

Here and there information filters through the iron curtain of political correctness. The only academic article worth reading on the “virgin cleansing myth” is that by Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala which appeared in The African Journal of AIDS Research in 2002 under the title, “On The Virgin Cleansing Myth: Gendered Bodies, AIDS and Ethnomedicine“. It provides a fascinating glimpse into the psycho-sexual paradigm in which, as she puts it, “virgin cleansing is believed to have both a therapeutic and a prophylactic effect” (against HIV-AIDS). Raping a child or a disabled person is therefore seen as a form of AIDS prevention or cure.

But even the virgin cleansing myth obliquely alluded to by Dr. Mabille in her critique of insipid Western feminism does not go far enough in explaining South Africa’s journey upriver into the heart of darkness. We really lack the concepts to understand the enormity of what we are faced with.

Much of what passes for analysis of sex and culture in South Africa consists of rehashed hippie or New Left thinking from 1960s America. Get liberated, man, is more or less the gist of it. Call it Marcuse on Durban Poison. Repression or any form of “holding back” is invariably seen as “bad”. But sometimes repression might be desirable, even imperative. Freud was old-fashioned enough to advocate a balance between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.

The old Afrikaner government, while encouraging African ethnic identities, saw fit to suppress witchcraft and ritual murder by making it a criminal offence. Prior to becoming the first president of a united South African republic, Charles Robberts Swart introduced the Suppression of Witchcraft Act 3 of 1957. To the principled cultural relativist, the act – which is still on the statute books – is an affront and he would probably agree with the Marquis de Sade that “morality is just geography misapplied”, meaning that a crime in one culture is a harmless pastime in another.

One could even argue that the very structure of the South African political system is tending towards sado-masochism. Last Sunday the new CEO of the liberal Institute of Race Relations, Dr Frans Cronjé, argued in Rapport that whites should assume a far more submissive role in South Africa, lest they expose themselves to some form of collective revenge during a Second Revolution. According to Cronjé, such a revolution will be

…a violent, racist and destructive transition from a reconciling democratic state to a hostile, black nationalist state… After the Second Revolution, white South Africans will lose their homes, their jobs and their businesses.

Apart from exhortations to submissiveness, white guilt and even “vows of silence” à la Samantha Vice of Rhodes University, South Africa’s academic sycophants contribute little to our grasp of contemporary violence. In this respect, French literature is more instructive. Sade’s amoral theory of nature, of course. But also his notion of the sovereignty of sexual instincts that should not be tamed by any man-made law or religious scruple.

The Marquis de Sade had a disciple in the surrealist author Georges Bataille who espoused a theory of “transgression”. He took an interest in violence, punishment and eroticism. Bataille also collected photographs of Chinese executions which included horrific torture.

South Africa’s army of sadists regularly commit acts that shock a weaker Eurocentric sensibility. At the same time they are creating a world without limits, revelling in a new-found innocence that to them must represent the perfect freedom, the sovereignty of Sade’s libertine who pursues excess in celebration of pristine nature, a nature that punishes the weak and rewards the strong. To impose one’s will on a woman is also a gift of nature to all men. As Sade writes in Philosophy in the Bedroom:

If then it becomes incontestable that we have received from Nature the right indiscriminately to express our wishes to all women, it likewise becomes incontestable that we have the right to compel their submission, not exclusively, for I should then be contradicting myself, but temporarily. It cannot be denied that we have the right to decree laws that compel woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her; violence itself being one of that right’s effects, we can employ it lawfully. Indeed! has Nature not proven that we have that right, by bestowing upon us the strength to bend women to our will?**

Human rights or even a puritanical code such as feminism is not incompatible with sadism. As Bataille would argue, morality is needed for transgression to take place.

Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem “Daddy” that “Every woman adores a Fascist”. She was wrong. Every woman adores a sadist. Especially if she happens to be a feminist.

* Erik van Kuehnelt-Leddihn. “The Western Dilemma: Calvin or Rousseau?” in Modern Age, Winter 1971, p. 55.

** The Marquis de Sade. The complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and other writings, transl. RIchard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1965, p. 319.

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