Why COPE Failed in South Africa
There’s been some hand-wringing for a while ever since Jacob Zuma consolidated his position as next leader of the African National Congress. Zuma has a variety of unsavory characteristics, including serious charges of corruption and even rape, and poses some risk that South Africa will slide off its promising path of democracy and relative prosperity.
At the same time, though South African politics isn’t something I follow closely, I had a vague sense that it might in some ways be a good thing. Zuma’s ascension led to some of his rivals in the ANC leaving to form their own political party, the Congress of the People (COPE), which raised the prospect of giving South Africa a credible, black-led opposition party. That would, it seems to me, be a very healthy development since the ANC’s structural supermajority, no matter how well-deserved, presents a constant temptation to abuse of power and so forth. But when the elections results came in, COPE proved to be a huge bust. Eusebius McKaiser and Sasha Polakow-Suransky have an interesting article in The New Republic laying out some of the reasons why.
50 Responses to “Why COPE Failed in South Africa”
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May 1st, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Yes, Matt, but it was the existence of a credible black opposition party in the 2000 Zimbabwe election that Zimbabwe on its course to famine. To mobilize black opinion and reward his supporters, Mugabe started stealing the last white-owned farms, which were the most productive sector of the economy?
How long until a South African boss finds himself facing a tough re-election bid, so he calls out the street to wipe out the remaining productive white sector of the South African economy?
How different are South Africa and Zimbabwe, other than Zimbabwe had a 14-year headstart?
I guess the big difference is that South Africa has lots of mineral wealth that’s easy for the rulers to exploit, so they are less likely to sanction wholesale farmland grabs, since why go through all hard work of farming when you can just cash mineral rights checks from multinational mining corporations. But the murder of white farmers in South Africa has been going on retail for 15 years now.
May 1st, 2009 at 6:22 pm
The genuinely statesman-like Mandela worked out a deal with the white elites designed to not kill South Africa’s goose that lays the golden eggs: its productive white-built, white-run economy. Under Mandela, South Africa’s old white elite would cut Africa’s new ANC-affiliated black elite into a big slice of the action through affirmative action. This would come at the expense of more marginal whites, while the white elites would stay elite. And the black masses would get a cool new flag but not many goodies.
This division of the spoils has worked so far because of the ANC’s dominance at the polls and its cautious leadership under Mandela and Mbeki, who understand about not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The problem will come down the road when genuine conflicts emerge among black elites, which will tempt some black politicians to go down the populist road of whipping up resentment of rich (i.e., productive) whites. In Zimbabwe, it took 20 years before Mugabe was finally faced with enough internal black opposition that he turned on the white farmers as a scapegoat.
How much longer does South Africa have before it becomes Zimbabwe South?
May 1st, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Mr. Sailer,
You are aware that you are defending South African Apartheid, one of the most ideologically evil and antihuman regimes of the last half century? You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
May 1st, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Come now, Hector, you can do better than that! Where’s your reference to Hitler?
May 1st, 2009 at 8:35 pm
The problem isn’t so much Steve’s defense of apartheid per se, but rather the disingenuousness of pretending that the white economy’s strength was based in some sort of racial virtue of industry and hard work, rather than naked exploitation of a powerless underclass for 150 years, combined with wholesale expropriation of the nation’s natural resources at the barrel of a gun.
It’s fucking ridiculous to wither like a lily in the face of post-colonial violence while refusing to acknowledge the pervasive oppression and genocide inflicted upon the indigenous population ever since European settlement (read: violent theft) began.
Do you understand the concept of compounding returns? The white economy exists SOLELY due to the labor of generations of functional slaves.
May 1st, 2009 at 8:51 pm
I have to admit I find the analysis unsatisfying for two reasons:
(1) The primary concern of white South Africans is not affirmative action or taxes; it is crime. Any discussion of why whites voted they way they did has to talk about stances (and the extent to which they were credible) on this issue.
I don’t know what the concern of non-whites is regarding crime. Common sense would suggest that it’s just as serious an issue for most non-whites above the basic poverty line, and for plenty of those below the poverty line. Which raises the issue of what are the taboos and constraints that prevent COPE from simply promising all justice all the time?
(2) How does the voting system in South Africa affect the outcome. I forget the details but I seem to remember they have something like half the seats are locality-based and half are party list; but once that is established, are the decisions based on first past the post, runoff, lists like in Australia, or what? These sorts of mechanics make a vast difference as to how parties position themselves, but the article was written (at least to my eyes) as though the strategy and analysis were based on the way US voting works.
May 1st, 2009 at 8:58 pm
“one of the most ideologically evil and antihuman regimes of the last half century?”
Look, I dislike apartheid SA as much as anyone, but have a sense of proportion here. I notice the clever use of “half century” to avoid bringing in the Nazis, but we’re still talking about Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Pol Pot Cambodia, a long tawdry list of native Africa tyrants and a whole lot of Arab states all with substantially worse records as to how they treated their people.
Heck, yeah yeah we’re not supposed to say it, blah blah, but the simple fact is, Jimmy Carter was right — ignore the color bullshit and just look at the consequences of actions, and apartheid SA even comes out ahead of Israel.
May 1st, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I think there might be too much handwringing with this analysis. Its true that the ANC under Zuma wound up with slightly less than the same percentage of the vote that they last got under Mbeki, COPE notwithstanding. But the ANC posted a huge gain in KwaZuluNatal, a predominately Zulu province. Zuma happens to be Zulu and from KwaZuluNatal, and Zulus have a strong sense of ethnic identity and hadn’t before voted for the ANC in large numbers.
In other words, the success of the ANC in KwaZuluNatal masks a fair amount of slippage in their vote in the other eight provinces, particularly the ones with more literate populations. The Democratic Alliance made a large enough gain to be able to position itself as a credible opposition.
South Africa uses a fairly liberal party list proportional representation system that makes it hard for one party to dominate the political scene unless it is genuinely popular. The ANC has just been genuinely, broadly, popular (the analogy is the various landslide victories the Indian National Congress won in the first Indian elections). Its also almost ridiculously easy to get rid of a president who has lost political support.
As for the “Zimbabwe south” claim, check on Wikipedia or the CIA world fact book and start comparing the relative population, economy, and literacy of Zimbabwe and South Africa, or the ethnic complexity of the two countries. Or at least that the apartheid regime cut a deal with their opponents from a greater position of strength than the Ian Smith regime. Incidentaly, how to deal with Zimbabwe itself looks to be one issue where Zuma will perform better than his predecessor.
May 1st, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Sailer makes my skin crawl.
May 1st, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Sailer makes my skin crawl.
Indeed. Bigots who talk purty are still bigots.
May 1st, 2009 at 11:16 pm
MR HANDLY
I have noticed that whenever i meet a south african they never mention politics or the economy in South Africa.But they ALWAYS mention the crime problem.Is it worse than other African countries ? Worse than America ? And if so why?
I realise ,that like many Americans, i know too little about Africa in general and South Africa in paticular.But it would seem to me ,that they are doing pretty good for a country that has only recently become a democracy.
I am not trying to minimise their problems or their difficulties.But i do recall that when democracy came,many people predicted bloodshed and civil war.
i think that the media does portray Africa as ALL poor.I have heard that some countries like Botswana and Ghana are doing well.
I don’t beleive in being politically correct or not acknowledging Africa’s problems.But i have read too many German newspaper articles online ,which make America look like a hellhole.This makes me wonder how realisticly US newspapers portray Africa. I would not be surprised if many Africans did not recognise the Africa that they see in western newspapers.
THANK YOU MR HANDLY for your informative comment as well as you MR. ED . AND THANK YOU MR YGLESIAS for writeing about an often neglected subject.
There are not as many comments when there is this kind of subject matter.But the comments are more informative than when the story is about some republican saying something stupid .i get a laugh out of those stories as much as the next guy. But i learn nothing ,and i find the name calling in those stories comment section, tiresome.
MR YGLEIAS PLEASE CONTINUE TO WRITE ABOUT THESE KIND OF SUBJECTS. THANK YOU
May 1st, 2009 at 11:18 pm
“The primary concern of white South Africans is not affirmative action or taxes; it is crime.”
Right, but the South African government isn’t actively encouraging the raping and pillaging of whites, the way that Mugabe started doing during the 2000 election in Zimbabwe. The South African government tends to tolerate a high degree of rape and pillage by local criminals, but whether out of the conviction that whites have it coming to them for “naked exploitation of a powerless underclass for 150 years, combined with wholesale expropriation of the nation’s natural resources at the barrel of a gun,” or out of sheer organizational incompetence, I cannot say.
But clearly, whites are slowly being driven from the country, such as 2003 Nobel Literature laureate J.M. Coetzee, now safely in exile in Australia.
At some point, though, this trickle of ethnic cleansing could turn into a tidal wave.
The big question, then, is how long until enough leading elements within the South African power structure turn from apathy over violence against whites to actively encouraging it to help in power struggles among the black elite for votes and violent support from the black masses.
In neighboring Zimbabwe, it took 20 years. President Mugabe initially focused on putting down his rival Nkoma from another tribe, while letting the white farmers keep the economy running. It was only when Mugabe was challenged by a credible black opponent in the 2000 election that he turned racial populist and unleashed his thuggish supporters on the white farmers for “naked exploitation of a powerless underclass for 150 years, combined with wholesale expropriation of the nation’s natural resources at the barrel of a gun.”
Inevitably, Zimbabwe descended into famine and hyperinflation. But destroying his country helped keep Mugabe in power. So, the Mugabe Route inevitably remains a permanent temptation in South Africa whenever there is competitive politics.
May 1st, 2009 at 11:24 pm
By the way , when i was growing up in the 70’s Brazil ,India and China were considered 3rd world countries. Now they are major economic power houses .
Maybe not Brazil as much ,but wait a few years. Is there any reason why South Africa can not become like Brazil someday soon.If not, why? They seem to be full of minerals ,and gold is at an all time high .I am just curious.
May 1st, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Pete from baltimore –
India, China, and Brazil are still considered third world countries by just about everyone who uses that term. The reason that India and China are also seen as “major economic powerhouses” is because they are less poor than they used to be, and (most importantly) because they’re incredibly big.
In per capita terms, Brazil remains ahead of both of them (and way ahead of India).
May 2nd, 2009 at 12:09 am
MR. N
I would not have thought that Brazil was ahead of China or India. Thank you for the info.
I often wish the US newspapers spent more space on Brazil . The US media seem to think that Venezuela is the only country in South America.LULA from Brazil strikes me as much more interesting than Chavez.
May 2nd, 2009 at 12:44 am
“I have noticed that whenever i meet a south african they never mention politics or the economy in South Africa.But they ALWAYS mention the crime problem.Is it worse than other African countries ? Worse than America ? And if so why?”
You can get a hint from the murder statistics:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_murder_rate
with SA specifics here
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_South_Africa
To summarize, the murder rate for SA (per 100 000 population) was about 50 in 2000, (compared to around 6 for the US). This is definitely up there as one of the highest rates in the world. (Right now Iraq is at around 90, but that’s clearly an insane civil-war like situation. There are a small number of small South American countries with similar murder rates. In Africa, Sierra Leone was higher (may not still be), Angola was comparable, and Somalia and Liberia a little lower. Sierra Leone, Somalia and Liberia are, of course, basically failed states, just post vicious wars.
Murders are always the best sort of proxy for crime, because murders are tracked and reported more than other crimes, but pretty much every South African you speak to will have a story of their personal experience (not friend, not friend of a friend) of mugging, carjacking or burglary, with friends (not friends of friends) murdered or raped.
So yeah, it’s pretty bad, on a scale vastly higher than in the US.
As for the rest of Africa. Yeah, Botswana continues to do well, (though who knows what cultural weirdness might arise in the aftermath of so many AIDS deaths). And Ghana is doing OK. You’ll notice it’s always those two names that come up, never anyone else. There’s a reason for that.
As for post-apartheid SA. How depressing that is depends on what your expectations were. If you expected a replay of the Congo in the 60s, they’ve done great. If you hoped they’d be a shining light for the rest of Africa, well they’ve basically stood still. GDP growth tracks population growth, nothing more; population growth is far too high to remain viable, unemployment is rife (35 to 45% depending the exact definition and time span); basically it all looks like a disaster waiting to explode.
As for all the happy talk about Africa, spare me. I’ve heard plenty of it — the people at TED or POPTech telling us about African entrepreneurship, African dynamism, new ways of organizing, waves of democracy, blah blah. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe they’re right, but I look at the demographics, the low-level features, not this year’s hype (”cell phones and the internet will save South Africa”) and all I see is more famine, more disease, more war, for a long long time to come.
There’ll be plenty of new stories out of Africa in coming years, but they’ll be of the flavor “demand for biotech fuels prices food out of the reach of ordinary Africans” and “guerillas used Twitter to organize their coup of …”
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:11 am
Re: Heck, yeah yeah we’re not supposed to say it, blah blah, but the simple fact is, Jimmy Carter was right — ignore the color bullshit and just look at the consequences of actions, and apartheid SA even comes out ahead of Israel.
Maynard Handley,
You’ll note I said ‘ideologically evil’. Israel no doubt does bad things, as do, say, the United States and North Vietnam. But neither the post-1964 United States, nor Israel, nor North Vietnam was based on an ideology that explicitly denied the humanity of an entire race.
Israel treats the Palestinians pretty badly, but those crimes are not essential to the nature of the Jewish state. Racism was, however, as with Nazi Germany and the Confederacy, at the very core of South African Boer culture. Without racism, there’s not much of Boer culture left.
Pete from Baltimore,
It’s true that violent crime rates in much of the more rural, and less developed parts of Africa, are very low. Property crime, though, is hard to assess. In countries with severely underfunded and lackadaisical police systems, it’s often not worth people’s while to report thefts, so they may not get reported at all. I do believe, based on accounts of people I know who have lived in West Africa, that it’s quite a safe area. But the statistics should be interpreted with a grain of salt.
Steve Sailer,
As for Hitler, res ipsa loquitur.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:12 am
Re: GDP growth tracks population growth, nothing more; population growth is far too high to remain viable,
If I recall correctly, population actually declined in South Africa last year. South Africa has a fairly low birth rate, and its population is currently being decimated by the AIDS epidemic.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:38 am
Jacob Zuma is the Marion Barry of South Africa. But unlike in DC, there’s no federal government in SA to oversee Zuma and haul him off to jail when gets too far out of control.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:48 am
Israel vs. Rhodesia and South Africa
The ancient roiling of the world that kicked into high gear with the outward explosion of the European race after 1492 has been slowing down. Europeans succeeded in conquering North America and Australia overwhelmingly, but have been expelled from most other continents.
As the most educated members of the ruled races came to historical consciousness, typically in schools provided by their European overlords, they began to find subordination to another race to be an intolerable insult. That’s why political control of the world is now much more homogenous on the continental scale than a century ago, when Europeans ruled most countries on other continents
European settler enclaves on non-European continents—such as French Algeria, Rhodesia, and South Africa—have been ground down, in the first two cases utterly, and South Africa is likely just a matter of time. Russia has lost control of Central Asia. Latin America is only partly an exception: it has settled into an intermittent low-intensity twilight struggle among partly blended races—the descendants of the conquistadors who still rule most of that continent, and the Indians and blacks whose suffering is given voice by the likes of Hugo Chavez.
Today, most countries outside the New World are now ruled by elements relatively indigenous to their continent. A clear historical pattern has emerged: European settlers either take over an entire continent politically and demographically or lose power everywhere and find themselves expelled. There is, however, one famous exception to this rule: Israel.
The fact that Israel stands against such an epochal trend helps explain the inordinate excitement and loathing Israel arouses among its neighbors, just as decolonized Africa’s political elites found the continued existence of Rhodesia and white-ruled South Africa far more upsetting than the dismaying conditions in their own countries. Israel is a reminder of the European superiority to which these non-Europeans were once subjected themselves.
This resentment is basic human nature. To be part of a winning team is the desire of red-blooded young men everywhere. And conquest is the ultimate team sport. That some other nation could colonize your people is the ultimate, unpardonable insult. For how can one race sincerely apologize to another for being more competent?
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? (That’s why the neocon’s expectation that the American conquerors of Iraq would be greeted with dancing in the streets was so psychologically absurd.)
The problem with South African apartheid was not the idea of apartness, but the manifest dishonesty of its implementation. South African whites didn’t actually want to live far apart from blacks. Who else was going to serve them as cheap maids and farmworkers? They couldn’t possibly be their own hewers of wood and drawers of water, now could they?
Upon visiting South Africa in 1954, the hard-headed science fiction novelist Robert A. Heinlein noted acidly that the Afrikaners had replaced slavery with “a serfdom for the entire black race which leaves the black man no more free than he was more than a century ago without putting the Voortrekkers’ descendants to the inconvenience and expense of being personally responsible for the welfare of chattel slaves.”
South African whites may have enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world (when their abundance of servants and acres was counted), but their sprawling, well-maintained houses were built on sand.
Over time, the demographic balance shifted radically against the whites, as their fertility dropped and their control of epidemics lengthened black lifespans. Rather than, say, retreat to a defensible homeland in the Cape and achieve genuine apartness, they chose, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, to make a deal with the statesmanlike Nelson Mandela while the old man was still alive.
So far, their economic wager—that, with Communism discredited, the African National Congress wouldn’t do anything stupid to the economy—has stood up. South Africa has tremendous resources, so the white elite has been buying off the black elite with cushy jobs and shares in corporations. For less fortunate South Africans of all races, however, the transfer of power has meant epidemics of rape, robbery, and homicide.
In the long run, though, South Africa’s prospects are grim. South Africa will probably go the way of its northern neighbor, Zimbabwe, which preceded it into majority rule by 14 years. The final destruction of South Africa’s white minority will likely begin with a power struggle among black factions in which a South African version of Robert Mugabe strives to win re-election by paying off his supporters with white property.
In contrast, Israel’s position on the demographic curve is less fraught at the moment. With less territory than South Africa, Jews still outnumber Arabs by a comfortable margin within the pre-1967 borders (although Arabs have just about caught up within the post-1967 Greater Israel).
Although the Israeli Jewish total fertility rate (2.6 babies per woman) is quite high for a First World country, they are losing the War of the Cradle: Palestinian Israeli women average 4.6 babies, with similar rates in the Occupied Territories.
So, in the long run, how can Israel avoid the fates of South Africa and Rhodesia? How can it move from apartheid to genuine apartness?
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:51 am
I don’t see the Zimbabwe analogy. Zimbabwe’s government was, as is clear in retrospect if not always at the time, based on a single man. In South Africa, Mandela retired, and his successor Mbeki retired too. Would Zuma be able to become an autocrat? That doesn’t seem likely to me. It seems that at worst, the South African polity might evolve toward something like PRI-era Mexico, with corrupt single-party dominance without any single, autocratic, charismatic leader.
Of course, the “in retrospect if not always at the time” bit shows that many didn’t see the Zimbabwean disaster coming either, and thought that Mugabe was a reasonable and somewhat public-spirited leader as well. I’m not saying that I’m boundlessly optimistic about South Africa — just that I don’t see much potential for what’s happening in Zimbabwe to be repeated there.
May 2nd, 2009 at 3:04 am
Great job not engaging my arguments.
The fact that there are anti-colonialists who have done bad things doesn’t discredit me like your celebration of the “accomplishment” of the whites who employed slavery to extract resources and who built a Potemkin economy based on shining, Whites-only cities surrounded by townships tolerated only for their (necessary) ability to provide artifically cheap labor.
I doubt you’ve read any Coetzee. If you had, you wouldn’t so flippantly dismiss the themes of whether the whites in South Africa do indeed have crosses to bear. The fact that he moved to Australia is a facile observation.
You continue with the false equivalence of scattered farm killings with the system of genocide and (true!) ethnic cleansing put into place by generations of settler governments, starting with the extermination of the Herero et al., and continuing until 1994 with the sham Bantustans. Again, your deep concern for the wellbeing the descendents of land thieves in a country filled with millions living in dire poverty rings hollow.
I realize you’d love to strawman anyone who isn’t altogether very sympathetic to your claims about the glory of white accomplishment in Africa as supporters of Mugabe, but again, you’re just ignorant. Zuma (the original topic of the thread!) is no ally of Zuma, and the MDC is an African movement as well with anticolonial bona fides as strong as anyone else.
Who gives a shit if remnant whites lose their property. The “goose that laid the golden egg” isn’t housing the masses in the townships, providing ARVs to the millions with HIV, or jobs to the massive numbers of unemployed. Redistribution of ill-gotten white gains would produce a large net gain for the society as a whole.
May 2nd, 2009 at 3:04 am
My mistake: it should read “Zuma (the original topic of the thread!) is no ally of Mugabe, and the MDC is an African movement as well with anticolonial bona fides as strong as anyone else.”
May 2nd, 2009 at 3:53 am
Dan Cock asks about South Africa:
“Who gives a shit if remnant whites lose their property.”
How’s that working out in famine-ravaged Zimbabwe?
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:06 am
Let me ask you Dan, suppose we accept the hypothesis that a higher income generally correlates with higher economic productivity – one gets paid more, because one delivers a higher value-add than other types of people.
May ask, when then, in this new shining era of post-apartheid, do whites and white-run companies have higher incomes and higher educations and run the largest companies in SA?
Is it *still* structural factors and white racism? Even now, with all the affirmative action, they are still somehow expropriating rather than creating?
I honestly don’t get it. I’m looking for an honest engagement with the notion that it wouldn’t be terribly unproductive to the ANC to destroy the “white-owned” economy.
This can be independent of one’s view of whether they “deserve” it or not. Do you believe that once this righteous redistribution is enacted, and somehow does better than the historical, record of even magnanimous redistribution laws, that there are exactly equally productive members to replace those whites?
All I ever see when people like Sailer discuss South Africa is a general genuflection towards the ANC and post-apartheid. Feel free to speculate on Sailer’s motivations, or what not, I’m sure he’s used to it. But any potential liberal lions in the waiting should be tremendously disappointed at the generally weak arguments here. OK, I’ll grant that apartheid was bad; does this mean that the general political progress of SA hence is *good*? Why? Do you deny think its *completely* implausible that the path to Mugabe cannot follow from the present political situation? Why not? Is there some specific development that would need to occur before you agree that that’s the case?
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:23 am
Dan, I don’t think Sailer is arguing that an equivalent “ethnic” cleansing is occurring right at this moment. He is arguing that there is a huge potential for that to happen when the ANC will fracture due to inevitable political struggle.
But the level of *indigent* crime and general terror has risen immensely to fuel the Afrikaan diaspora. And it seems like they did everything “right” according to the West. They did not riot, they didn’t war, they didn’t secede. They handed over the democratic process peaceably, continued to work at integration, and even now there are still many who love their homeland and would rather not leave, until some incredibly gruesome crime is reported in the papers or happens to them. Whatever the cause, ANC rule has been a dismal failure – mining companies can no longer bank on reliable power services and new entrepreneurship is at an all time low, and you have to include aforementioned crime rate. Why? What do you think should change? Is it still white intransigence, and if not, when will this democracy transition to the the maturity of a multi-party ideological parliamentary state rather than monolithic one-party rule?
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:35 am
Pete from Baltimore,
While I have seen evidence that people tend to overestimate the likelihood of a crime happening to them, I’ve never seen much evidence to indicate that this fear is hyperbolic or exponential at reasonable levels of crime (I believe I have read murder rate was maximally 25% in the Dark Ages). I think you need to prove the affirmative case that the Afrikaaners are overreacting to the highest murder rate in the world.
Perhaps SA was never meant to be a nation after all. There’s a new report out on African genetic diversity and I’m struck that some of the most derived peoples, like the San and Khoikhoi and genetically distant descendants of the Dutch are all trying to forge a system that requires at least some level of shared culture.
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 am
“Steve Sailer,
As for Hitler, res ipsa loquitur.”
REALLY? THIS? This is what is allowed to pass for argument around here? Look here for an example of another fora where the exact same mendacious argument is used against Steve.
“Sailer,
As for the “sophistication” of your positive remarks about the Roma and the Sinti, well, they
rather remind me of those by that same failed painter when he admired the conducting by Gustav
Mahler of Wagner’s operas in Vienna, so cultured he was.”
If you think Steve is unnecessarily vitriolic or offensive, don’t you think it’s understandable how that would come to be, if every time he tried to open his mouth and make some sense those who disagree with him pen no statistic or argument other than cheap comparisons to Hitler?
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:59 am
Billare,
Stop kissing Sailer’s @$$ and let him make his own arguments. I want to know just how he justifies being a Nazi-Klansman-Afrikaner apologist.
I don’t think he’s vitriolic. Nothing wrong with a bit of vitriol. I dislike that he appears to be trying to be a latter-day Gobineau or Julius Streicher.
May 2nd, 2009 at 9:21 am
It isn’t the phrasing of Sailer’s arguments that’s the problem. It’s the arguments themselves.
May 2nd, 2009 at 9:42 am
how different are South Africa and Zimbabwe?
from Freedom House, the generally recognized authority on how democratic countries are (7 is authoritarian, 1 is a liberal democracy):
Zimbabwe: Political rights 7, Civil liberties 6
South Africa: Political rights 2,
Translation: Zimbabwe is one of the least free countries in Africa, South Africa is one of the most free
For those who say it’s a one-party state, there’s a huge difference between a state where only one party is popular to win (like Japan) and a state in which only one party is allowed to win because of massive vote rigging (Mexico in the PRI era). South Africa is the former.
South Africa is also one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, but you never hear that amid all the doom and gloom.
I don’t mean to dismiss the major problems they have, but it would take a lot to make South Africa literally as bad as Zimbabwe. I would just dismiss such talk as hyperbole if so many people didn’t seem to believe it.
May 2nd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Err, Steve, you realize that there were never more than 300,000 whites in Rhodesia, and that the vast majority of those had only come post 1900?
I mean, jeez, get your facts straight. The Afrikaaners have been there for hundreds of years, and there are a lot more of them.
Also, you’re ignoring the Coloureds, who basically speak Afrikaans before any other language.
Whites make up about 10% of the population, and Coloureds make up about 10%. And then, there are the Zulu, who ignoring Zuma, are almost entirely not present in the ANC. They hate the rest of the Bantu, and would rather ally with the Whites.
Which they did, effectively, by having their own liberation movement, that fought the ANC as much as it did the Afrikaaners.
Finally, apart from the fact that the percentages are much higher than Zimb and the absolute numbers much, much higher, you’re forgetting that the Afrikaaners are culturally distinct from a bunch of lazy English, Scotch and Welsh immigrants. They have a 400 hundred year old tradition of armed resistance. They beat the shit out of the British until the latter invented the concentration camp.
The reason, Sailer, that the Whites have nothing to worry about, which Mandela, Mbeki, and even Zuma understand, is that they are not liberals at all. If they were threatened, they’d retake the army, and they’d start slaughtering Blacks in the thousands. Hell, if you knew anything about the Boers, you’d know they’ve never even needed an army in the first place.
The Afrikaaners wiped out at least two major tribes that I can remember, are you really so naive as to think they’ll not do so again if they’re in danger? What, they’re scared of international condemnation? When the hell did that bother them? The only reason de Klerk gave up power was that he knew ethnic cleansing would be necessary. The deal was, we won’t commit a genocide if you leave us alone. That deal will not be broken.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Can we clear out some of the nonsense here?
– If some notion of genetic incompatibility is your vote in favour of the dissolution of an at-times-difficult but nonetheless very healthy 15 year-old democracy, then, uh, y’know, that’s kinda blatant racism under a vaguely intellectual guise.
This is not much better – the assumption that a country that moved from a moment of revolutionary social change straight into neoliberalism and economic incrementalism, and is now (under a strikingly imperfect new leader) probably going to have to renegotiate some kind of middle ground of poverty uplift without draining the middle/upper class to the point of accelerated flight is identical to a despotic neighbouring regime because they’re.. close to each other? both in Africa? What?
This is hallucinatory BS, not really worth addressing but here we go – whites are the minority in South Africa, and Afrikaaners are only one component of that demographic. They all exist peacefully in a democratic country, vote on election day, send their kids to racially mixed schools and pay their taxes. None of them are insane bloodthirsty racist savages about to turn on their black overlords en masse. At least this post contains an interesting – if no less offensive – reversal of the racial roles in the usual imagining of ethnic uprising.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:57 pm
You’re wrong. And if you’re right, in only in an utterly apathetic, almost nihilistic sense. Cellphones are helping rural farmers find out the standardized market rates for their produce, which isn’t going to solve poverty or famine – there’s no tech-y silver bullet, and the largest problems of any country are always going to be governmental and infrastructural in cause and solution – but improved living conditions aren’t something to dismiss as hype while waiting for an entire continent to change for the better. I’ve done a touch of work in this area, and doing something is almost always better than doing nothing.
May 2nd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
As for opening subject, COPE , I commented on the TNR article, but to repost a section:
Mbeki’s disastrous record on AIDS, his trickle-down economics, appeasement of Mugabe, almost anti-populist ‘aloofness’ and eventual removal from power by his own party left us a final picture of a politician looking just about as weak and ineffectual as possible (the end of W’s reign wasn’t dissimilar). Few should be surprised that a party formed from the disgruntled band of Mbeki loyalists failed to capture much support – holding their final campaign event in Sandton seems about as tone-deaf as you might expect.
May 2nd, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Re: How’s that working out in famine-ravaged Zimbabwe?
Don’t be dumb, Sailor. In case you didn’t notice, Zimbabwe is hardly the unique prototype of a country that socialized (and not very well) its farm sector. Cuba and Vietnam didn’t see mass famine when they socialized theirs. To take the nearest geographic example, Tanzania expropriated the big landowners (all of them- white, African, Arab and Indian) in the 1960s. They are a very poor country now, as they were then, but they never remotely suffered the hyperinflation, starvation, and generalized economic breakdown of present day Zimbabwe. Nor was there the kind of Zimbabwe-style racial warfare and crime. There was a bit of unpleasantness with the Arab Muslims on Zanzibar, but that happened before they united with the mainland.
Why do you assume that a socialist South Africa would look like Zimbabwe? isn’t it equally likely it could look like Tanzania?
Re: They all exist peacefully in a democratic country, vote on election day, send their kids to racially mixed schools and pay their taxes
God, not more of this Gospel According to Rodney King nonsense. Pace the arguments of the multiculturalists, not all cultures are full of happy, friendly egalitarian liberals. If I were a South African black man, I wouldn’t trust the Afrikaners more than I would trust a caged tiger.
May 2nd, 2009 at 3:52 pm
hey, I’ve lived in SA all my life, I’m not supposing any of this. My point wasn’t that everyone in SA is a friendly egalitarian liberal – there are still racist Afrikaans individuals living in democratic SA, of course, but the majority of them are just going about their daily business. Many are unhappy about crime, like the rest of the population. And this notion that black South Africans are hinging their existence on the appeasement of Afrikaners is imaginary. No more than a tiny, constantly shrinking fringe of Afrikaners dream of collective violent resistance, and they’re treated with the same seriousness afforded to an extremist US militia outpost.
May 2nd, 2009 at 3:53 pm
“Why do you assume that a socialist South Africa would look like Zimbabwe? isn’t it equally likely it could look like Tanzania?”
Well, that’s reassuring.
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Will asks:
“how different are South Africa and Zimbabwe?”
That’s exactly my point. They are lot more different in 2009 than they were in 1999, before the contested 2000 election persuaded Mugabe to win votes by stealing farms from the efficient white farmers, which led to famine and hyperinflation.
Elections didn’t make things better in Zimbabwe, they made things worse.
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Billaire – Did you read Sailer’s posts? He’s the one who calls it “ethnic cleansing” now. I can’t take your rebuttal seriously.
You’re also full of shit when you say the whites in SA did everything right. They held out for forty years, and grew more and more violent and repressive as those forty years went on. They were forced out by the combination of military defeat – they were no more able to repress the black majority than was Rhodesia – and near unanimous international condemnation. Go on Wikipedia sometime and look at the photos of “Whites Only” beaches from circa 1991 – fucking 1991!
It’s not at all the case that higher income comes with higher economic productivity – if we’re talking about labor here. Rather, the basic factor of production – capital – was expropriated for hundreds of years and continues to be held by those who took it by force and through slavery. 1994 didn’t change that. You can make arguments that allowing the whites to retain that capital is pragmatically better – it prevents bloodshed, it might lead to greater “growth” (which accrues largely only to them – but you can’t begin to argue that it’s just.
And, of course, Steve Sailer responds to my post about how it’s improper to strawman opponents of racism and anticolonialism as Mugabe supporters by merely trying to strawman me into being a Mugabe supporter.
You’re a joke, Steve.
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
If Mugabe didn’t exist, the Klansman right would have to invent him.
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:43 pm
The fundamental problem in South Africa is that the white minority still owns, I would guess, a sizable majority of all the wealth.
How would _you_ like to live in a country where outsiders from a different continent invaded and took all the land for themselves, and their heirs still enjoy most of that wealth? Finally, 15 years ago, people who are related to you seized power … and yet, here you still are living in a hut while white people are playing golf at Royal Johannesburg. Sure, some people who look like you have gotten rich since the takeover, but you sure haven’t.
Now, look a decade or two into the future and Jacob Zuma’s successor is running for re-election. Then the opposition party that Matt extols, COPE, document that the President and his extended family have stolen, say, 10% of the country’s wealth. So, to change the subject, the post-Zuma President replies, like Mugabe in 2000: “Who cares about chicken feed like that? The Real Crime is that white people still own half the country. It’s time for Direct Action!” And supporters of the President begin seizing for themselves white-owned farms, factories, mines, power plants, country clubs, etc.
But, then, it quickly turns out that politicians’ henchmen aren’t generally very good at managing factories, mines, power plants, country clubs, etc. So, the government prints more money to pay for stuff, expropriating the savers. Eventually, famine sets in.
By the way, this was argued over by Barack Obama Sr. in Kenya in 1965. Obama Sr. took the Mugabeist line, while his bosses, Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta, took the Mandelaist line against quickly expropriating the white and Asian geese that lay the golden eggs.
So, it doesn’t have to play out like in Zimbabwe, although holding democratic elections make it more like it will, as finally happened in Kenya in early 2008, when the Obama family’s Luo tribe started a small civil war to protest getting cheated once again in the elections by Kenyatta’s Kikuyu who have — amazingly enough! — wound up owning much of the stuff in Kenya that used to be owned by whites and Asians.
May 3rd, 2009 at 12:16 am
What happened in Zimbabwe and may well happen in South Africa shouldn’t be terribly surprising. It’s straight out of Aristotle 101 on the Fundamental Problem of Democracy: when the majority finally figures out it can vote itself the property of the minority, bad stuff tends to ensue.
So, if you are white person in South Africa, you have to weigh the odds that South Africa will go down the Zimbabwe path, and you’ll wind up homeless, beaten up, and your wife and daughters raped. What are the chances?
10%?
25%?
50%
Let’s say the odds are only 10% that South Africa will follow the single most similar country in the world, Zimbabwe. So, there’s only a 10% chance that you and your loved ones will suffer horrific harm from political developments. Well, 10% is a pretty low percentage … Yet, still, a 10% chance of Zimbabwe happening to you personally makes Perth sound awfully nice. And then you add in the chance that even without some South African politician going down the Mugabe path, the chance of, say, your wife or daughter being raped in the course of ordinary day-to-day crime is still pretty high in South Africa, a lot higher than it is in Perth.
So, whites are slowly but steadily bailing out of South Africa while they still have property that can be sold to finance their new lives elsewhere. It’s a slow motion ethnic cleansing — nothing surprising about it.
May 3rd, 2009 at 2:47 am
Crime’s a problem in South Africa. Purely statistically, it effects the majority black population (and especially the small, but emerging, black middle class) more than the whites. So casting it as ‘ethnic cleansing’ is pretty reprehensibly misrepresentative.
At this moment, with the democratically reelected ANC having fallen just short of the votes necessary to alter the constitution, with Jacob Zuma promising everything to everyone, from redistribution of wealth to business as usual, it’s hard to say exactly where the country is headed. But it’s a far, far cry from Zimbabwe, no matter how many times you insist they’re so alike. White flight is real, though less accelerated than it was immediately following the 1994 elections, but nobody is preparing to have their stuff seized just yet.
The ANC has a fine line to walk – to please it’s constituents (and actually do it’s job as elected officials), it will have to do more to combat poverty, more rapidly. But with the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament looming, it’s unlikely they’re about to become considerably less business-friendly very suddenly. (btw, just contemplate for a minute the notion of Zimbabwe hosting the World Cup, and then rethink how identical the two counties are.)
May 3rd, 2009 at 6:46 am
Mitch says:
“but nobody is preparing to have their stuff seized just yet.”
Few were preparing for that in Zimbabwe in 1999, either, a half decade further into majority rule than South Africa is today.
May 3rd, 2009 at 6:51 am
From Newsweek International, 2/14/09:
Fleeing From South Africa
Fourteen years after apartheid, why are the best and the brightest leaving Africa’s most successful state?
No one should be surprised to read that Zimbabwe has suffered massive emigration in recent years, especially among its white minority. But much less expected is the fact that next-door South Africa, the continent’s wealthiest and most developed country, is suffering a brain drain of its own (if on a smaller scale).
The South African government doesn’t keep reliable emigration statistics. But even as the global financial crisis has caused emigration from most other countries to slow, a number of recent independent studies show that mass departures from South Africa are ongoing and are sapping the nation of its skilled and best-educated young citizens. The most dramatic figures can be found among South African whites, who are leaving at a pace consistent with the advent of “widespread disease, mass natural disasters or large-scale civil conflict,” according to a report by the South African Institute on Race Relations. Some 800,000 out of a total white population of 4 million have left since 1995, by one count. But they’re hardly alone. …
The primary driver for emigration among all groups, but especially whites, who still retain the majority of South Africa’s wealth, is fear of crime. With more than 50 killings a day, South Africa has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world. The same goes for rape—ranking the country alongside conflict zones such as Sierra Leone, Colombia and Afghanistan. Future Fact polling indicates that more than 95 percent of those eager to leave South Africa rate violent crime as the single most important factor affecting their thinking. Lynette Chen, the ethnic-Chinese CEO of Nepad Business Group, is the only member of her family left in South Africa. Her parents departed in 2002 after being carjacked—twice. Her brother, also a victim of crime, followed suit shortly thereafter. “They’re always getting homesick,” she says. “But they won’t come back unless the crime is reduced.”
Another largely unnoticed problem is the growing number of attacks on South Africa’s white farmers. As in neighboring Zimbabwe, some of the attacks appear to be racially motivated. Others seem simply opportunistic, but the result is that white farmers’ numbers continue to decrease, leading to fears that despite the government’s good intentions, a Zimbabwe-style crisis—where the flight of skilled farmers led to an agricultural collapse—is possible here too.
Then there’s the problem of affirmative action, which many whites feel limits their opportunities for advancement and which keeps many émigrés from returning. “You can attract people home, but there are still the same concerns when they get here,” Chen says. “Crime and lack of job opportunities if you’re not the right color.”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/184783
May 3rd, 2009 at 8:27 am
Steve Sailer,
Don’t be absurd. I didn’t say that Tanzania was some sort of paradise, although I suspect Tanzanians, in spite of their very low per capita incomes, are probably happy not to have the nasty problems of crime and social alienation that plague South Africa. I was making the point that Tanzania, as poor as it is, never underwent the racial violence, hyperinflation, or famine that are currently happening in Zimbabwe. That in spite of the fact that land reform went much further in Tanzania than in Zimbabwe (i.e. they not only redistributed land but also partially collectivized it.)
So, again, I’m not sure why instead of comparing South Africa to Tanzania, you compare it to Zimbabwe. As I said, if Mugabe didn’t exist you people would have to invent him.
My challenge to you still stands, Sailor- if you have proof that racism is correct, then get it published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal of anthropology instead of writing dumb comments on a blog whose proprietor is too ditzy to correct you. Of course, then you might actually have to engage with the substance of other people’s arguments. Which you haven’t done, here….you just keep posting inane essays as if no one was responding to you at all.
May 5th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
[...] few days backed I linked to a short take from Sasha Polakow-Suransky about the failures of opposition politics in South [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
But clearly, whites are slowly being driven from the country, such as 2003 Nobel Literature laureate J.M. Coetzee, now safely in exile in Australia.
Classic Sailer: take two obscure, but verifiable facts (J.M. Coetzee is a Nobel laureate, and he immigrated to Australia) then use them to dress up some tendentious nonsense (whites are being “driven from the country”, and Coetzee is “in exile”), then trust that readers unfamiliar with the subject matter will grant his assertions an authority they don’t deserve.
Like 90% of Sailer’s written output, this claim is rubbish built on a foundation of racism.
May 5th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
The fundamental problem in South Africa is that the white minority still owns, I would guess, a sizable majority of all the wealth. How would _you_ like to live in a country where outsiders from a different continent invaded and took all the land for themselves, and their heirs still enjoy most of that wealth? Finally, 15 years ago, people who are related to you seized power … and yet, here you still are living in a hut while white people are playing golf at Royal Johannesburg. Sure, some people who look like you have gotten rich since the takeover, but you sure haven’t.
This belongs to the 10% of Sailer’s written output that isn’t rubbish. The yawning gulf in wealth between the affluent(who are not exclusively white these days) and the poor (who are, with negligible exceptions, black or mixed race) is a tremendous challenge for whoever governs South Africa. It’s a mystery to me, though, why Sailer concludes that this will inevitably lead to the Black majority expropriating the property of the wealthy while assaulting whites and raping their daughters. Oh wait, it’s not mysterious at all! It’s Steve Sailer we’re talking about here!