Weekend Links and Commentary #4
Sweden makes a right turn, digging trenches in South Africa, Chileans reject SA-style progressivism, life after empire in Africa, new Kenyan president rejects CNN sexual politics.
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Summary:
The Swedes have opted to oust their left-wing female Prime Minister, placing in power a coalition of which the major party is the Sweden Democrats, a party admittedly founded by Nazi sympathizers. Why is that? And what does this bode for the upcoming Italian elections?
After the right-wing rule of Pinochet, Chileans have veered to the left. Yet recently, continuing with trends around the world, they chose to reject overwhelmingly a new South African-style progressive constitution that would have replaced the constitution of Pinochet.
As I have pointed out, South Africa represents the future of the diverse, progressive world. Ernst van Zyl, the Conscious Caracal from Afriforum, with whom I spoke last year here, has written a brilliant piece for IM-1776, in which he draws lessons for the world from his experience as an Afrikaner trying to make life work surrounded by decay and failure. In short, somewhere, at some point, you have to take a stand and dig a trench.
In the wake of so much complaining and resentment expressed by Africans as the Queen was celebrated in her passing, I turn to a classic piece by the legendary doctor and writer, Theodore Dalrymple, on his own personal experiences of the end of empire and colonialism in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Finally, a fun and based interview from the new Kenyan president as he responds to the perennial question posed to Kenyan leaders by the likes of the insufferable Christiane Amanpour from CNN. Yes, LGBTQIA2S* rights, again.
(I promise - it won’t be as long as you think. Keep reading.)
Most Swedes See No Reason to Tolerate Increasing Crime to Keep Up Liberal Niceties
The Swedish Prime Minister has resigned, in favour of a new centre-right coalition that includes for the first time the Sweden Democrats.
The party could no longer be ignored by its moderate partners if they wanted to stay alive themselves. The Sweden Democrats, despite being the biggest party in the new coalition, will not supply the nation’s new Prime Minister, to placate its partners.
But if Sweden has opted to place such a coalition in power, it is obvious there is an important shift underway in liberal democracies.
To understand why, I would point you to this shocking Twitter thread on rising immigration and crime levels in that country.
You are not meant to see the connection between these two things, but of course there is.
Some highlights:
Random street violence:
People comment how awful and horrifying it is the far right is capitalizing on this.
But the solution is simple.
If you make looking after your own people a ‘far-right’ policy, do not be shocked when people turn to the far-right.
The Italian election is coming up in a week. The ‘Brothers of Italy’ led by Giorgia Meloni, is currently measuring double the support of any other party.
Something is shifting.
It need not have come to this, but European countries decided to declare war on their own people. The people will inevitably look to fight back.
Chile says emphatic no to proposed new constitution in referendum
From Al Jazeera:
Chile has voted resoundingly to reject a proposed new constitution that President Gabriel Boric argued would have ushered in a new progressive era, in a result that far exceeded the expectations of the conservative opposition.
The new constitution would have had a greater focus on social rights, the environment, and gender equality than the existing charter, which was adopted during the rule of military dictator Augusto Pinochet. It emerged from an agreement between legislators and protesters to end violent rallies against inequality in 2019 in which dozens of people were killed.
The central issue seems to have been the affirmative action embedded in the new document, along with bizarre rights for ‘neurodiversity’, a massive expansion of state welfare as a human right, and a permanently fixed state duty to fight ‘climate change’.
Of course, abortion rights were there too, as well as rights to sexual ‘pleasure’!
What is interesting is that the vast majority wanted a new constitution, yet when they saw the proposed new one, they overwhelmingly rejected it.
So much of what passes for freedom and democracy carries very little interest for the majority of people, who, to be perfectly honest, would most likely choose an authoritarian leader to get things done if they had the choice.
In South Africa, the constitution is constantly lauded as progressive and a shining light for democracy. But nobody ever got to vote for it. The entire structure of the state was entrenched by party bosses under guidance from global institutions.
And, as it turns out, the constitutional order of centralist government and social liberalism has been disastrous in terms of combating poverty, unemployment, and crime, which is what the vast majority of everyday citizens care about the most, and not the issues trumpeted by the laptop and media class.
Less than half of eligible voters turned out in the most recent election. And a significant portion turned out to vote for a party against whom they regularly protest, often by damaging public property. It makes you wonder why expanding the vote is such a moral imperative for so many people, as opposed to the flourishing of those same people.
Because of this crumbling of society, South Africans are now having to build trenches…
To live dangerously on the margins of human expansion like a leopard in the Western Cape mountains is better than growing fat and living safely in a concrete zoo
I have written before on South Africa as a forerunner of western crumbling, a kind of experiment to see how much crime and chaos everyday citizens can live with, in return for the comfort of being liberal and having ‘courageous conversations’ about race.
But more importantly, Ernst van Zyl has now written about what to do next, about the social and spiritual implications of these times and how to survive them.
Perhaps you move, but somewhere you will need to build. Why not in the land of your fathers?
The brilliant essay speaks for itself. An excerpt:
Over the past several decades South Africans have mainly chosen to emigrate to Western, Anglosphere countries. These emigrants concluded that the time has come to move, and that movement closer to the cultural and political power centers of the Western-dominated global order was their best bet. As Russell Lamberti put it: “[w]e now live in a world of people on the run.”
But the problem with constantly moving to higher ground to escape the rising tide is that you eventually run out of higher ground. If you recently emigrated, or semigrated to what you deem a more defendable position, you now have a duty to take root and hold your ground there. The harsh reality is that, at some point, you will have to make a stand. If not you, it will be your children. And isn’t there something abhorrent about “outsourcing” the responsibility of solving the biggest problems and challenges of your time to future generations?
Our mindset should be to fight for what we want to preserve in our towns, neighborhoods and communities. In its prime or in its decline, the crushing boots of advancing empires or the shockwaves of their collapse will always find you, as my Afrikaner ancestors have learned repeatedly throughout our volatile history. No wonder, then, that Southern Africa is also the home of AfriForum, one of the most developed proverbial trench-digging operations in the world.
The largest civil rights organization in the southern hemisphere, AfriForum unites 300,000 paying members behind a common cause. We have established over 150 neighborhood watches and many farm watches. We’ve developed emergency support services and we have more than 155 AfriForum branches across the country, which do everything from cleaning up neighborhoods to planting community vegetable gardens and trees and repairing potholes. AfriForum also has its own publishing company, film and documentary production company, and theatre. The broader Solidarity Movement, of which AfriForum is a part, established its own private institution of higher learning, Akademia, and built a world-class technical college campus, Sol-Tech.
He concludes:
The benefit of living in good times is that you have ample opportunities to live a comfortable life. The advantage of living in hard times is that you have plenty of opportunities to live a great life. As my father once observed: “There is a hefty price to pay to live in one of the greatest places on earth.” The older I get, and the more volatile the West becomes, the truer that sentiment rings. Freedom is only truly possible on the frontier, and a frontier is more often than not to be found on the periphery of empires or on the edges of powerful civilizations. So I’ve thrown my lot in with the trench diggers of Southern Africa. To live dangerously on the margins of human expansion like a leopard in the Western Cape mountains is better than growing fat and living safely in a concrete zoo.
Meanwhile, the ANC is pushing ahead with a takeover of the entire health sector. There will be no private care under this new regime. I cannot think of anything similar being enforced around the world. Forerunners, indeed.
South Africans of goodwill will necessarily become the pioneers of state-proofing.
Read the whole piece.
After Empire
After the Queen’s recent death, the response was mixed in Africa.
Postcolonial royalty such as former Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta (son of Jomo), made statements such as this:
“Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was a towering icon of selfless service to humanity and a key figurehead of not only the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations where Kenya is a distinguished member but the entire world.”
Meanwhile, many on social media and leaders on the left released vindictive statements, focusing on the colonial legacy of Britain in Africa.
I, for one, think dwelling upon resentment and hatred, especially toward an old lady who was a figurehead, is fairly pathetic, and betrays an attitude that when motivating governance, leads to incompetence and scapegoating.
(One obsession the South African intelligentsia have is with the Cullinan diamond, presented to the British King by the old Boer Transvaal government. As the Afrikaans news site, Maroela Media, has pointed out, this grievance is unhistorical. The diamond was the property of the mine-owner, before South Africa even existed. It was bought by the Transvaal government using Boer War compensation money from the British, and then given to King Edward VII.)
At the same time, I am not naïve enough to believe that British rule in Africa represented some kind of unblemished glory. I have been to the old Boer concentration camps where women and children died.
Mentally, I often find myself coming back to this famous essay, After Empire, by Theodore Dalrymple, the doctor-writer-journalist, on his experiences in Rhodesia, and the mixed legacy of colonialism as well as the disaster that was the rule of the likes of Mugabe.
Dalrymple worked in Rhodesia as soon as he qualified as a doctor.
I went to Rhodesia because I wanted to see the last true outpost of colonialism in Africa, the final gasp of the British Empire that had done so much to shape the modern world. True, it had now rebelled against the mother country and was a pariah state: but it was still recognizably British in all but name. As Sir Roy Welensky, the prime minister of the short-lived and ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, once described himself, he was “half-Polish, half-Jewish, one hundred percent British.”
What he found is a society you would never imagine existed considering the howling about liberation and colonial sins.
By the time I arrived, it had no friends, only enemies. Even South Africa, the regional colossus, with which Rhodesia shared a long border and which might have been expected to be sympathetic, was highly ambivalent toward it: for South Africa sought to ingratiate itself with other nations by being less than wholehearted in its economic cooperation with the government of Ian Smith.
I expected to find on my arrival, therefore, a country in crisis and decay. Instead, I found a country that was, to all appearances, thriving: its roads were well maintained, its transport system functioning, its towns and cities clean and manifesting a municipal pride long gone from England. There were no electricity cuts or shortages of basic food commodities. The large hospital in which I was to work, while stark and somewhat lacking in comforts, was extremely clean and ran with exemplary efficiency. The staff, mostly black except for its most senior members, had a vibrant esprit de corps, and the hospital, as I discovered, had a reputation for miles around for the best of medical care. The rural poor would make immense and touching efforts to reach it: they arrived covered in the dust of their long journeys. The African nationalist leader and foe of the government, Joshua Nkomo, was a patient there and trusted the care implicitly: for medical ethics transcended all political antagonisms.
He does recall, however, with some unease the vast gulf between the life of space and beauty he lived, and the world of those who served in the white households.
The real luxuries were space and beauty—and the time to enjoy them. With three other junior doctors, I rented a large and elegant colonial house, old by the standards of a country settled by whites only 80 years previously, set in beautiful grounds tended by a garden “boy” called Moses (the “boy” in garden boy or houseboy implied no youth: once, in East Africa, I was served by a houseboy who was 94, who had lived in the same family for 70 years, and would have seen the suggestion of retirement as insulting). Surrounding the house was a red flagstone veranda, where breakfast was served on linen in the cool of the morning, the soft light of the sunrise spreading through the foliage of the flame and jacaranda trees; even the harsh cry of the go-away bird seemed grateful on the ear. It was the only time in my life when I have arisen from bed without a tinge of regret.
We worked hard: I have never worked harder, and I can still conjure up the heavy feeling in my head, as if it were full of lead-shot and could snap off my neck under its own weight, brought about by weekends on duty, when from Friday morning to Monday evening I would get not more than three hours’ sleep. The luxury of our life was this: that, our work once done, we never had to perform a single chore for ourselves. The rest of our time, in our most beautiful surroundings, was given over to friendship, sport, study, hunting—whatever we wished.
Of course, our leisure rested upon a pyramid of startling inequality and social difference. The staff who freed us of life’s little inconveniences lived an existence that was opaque to us, though they had quarters only a few yards from where we lived. Their hopes, wishes, fears, and aspirations were not ours; their beliefs, tastes, and customs were alien to us.
Our very distance, socially and psychologically, made our relations with them unproblematical and easy. We studiously avoided that tone of spoiled and bored querulousness for which colonials were infamous. We never resorted to that supposed staple of colonial conversation, the servant problem, but were properly grateful. Like most of the people I met in Rhodesia, we tried to treat our staff well, providing extra help for them for the frequent emergencies of African life—for example illness among relatives. In return, they treated us with genuine solicitude. We assuaged our conscience by telling ourselves—what was no doubt true—that they would be worse off without our employ, but we couldn’t help feeling uneasy about the vast gulf between us and our fellow human beings.
The warmth he shared with the servants was contrasted with the tricky relationship he had with his African medical colleagues. Many were sympathetic to the nationalist movements of Nkomo and Mugabe, which were funded by the Soviets and the Chinese. Two of his colleagues would enter the new government after 1980. Both of whom would assist in the fleecing of the country.
Whilst black and white doctors were paid the same, Dalrymple notes the living standards were not the same, and what lay behind this gulf explains ‘the disasters that befell the newly independent countries.’
It is worth reading his explanation of this in detail.
The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire—and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows.
These obligations also explain the fact, often disdainfully remarked upon by former colonials, that when Africans moved into the beautiful and well-appointed villas of their former colonial masters, the houses swiftly degenerated into a species of superior, more spacious slum. Just as African doctors were perfectly equal to their medical tasks, technically speaking, so the degeneration of colonial villas had nothing to do with the intellectual inability of Africans to maintain them. Rather, the fortunate inheritor of such a villa was soon overwhelmed by relatives and others who had a social claim upon him. They brought even their goats with them; and one goat can undo in an afternoon what it has taken decades to establish.
It is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper reaches by whites, could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not long do so when manned by Africans who were supposed to follow the same rules and procedures. The same is true, of course, for every other administrative activity, public or private. The thick network of social obligations explains why, while it would have been out of the question to bribe most Rhodesian bureaucrats, yet in only a few years it would have been out of the question not to try to bribe most Zimbabwean ones, whose relatives would have condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages their official opportunities might provide. Thus do the very same tasks in the very same offices carried out by people of different cultural and social backgrounds result in very different outcomes.
Viewed in this light, African nationalism was a struggle as much for power and privilege as it was for freedom, though it co-opted the language of freedom for obvious political advantage. In the matter of freedom, even Rhodesia—certainly no haven of free speech—was superior to its successor state, Zimbabwe. I still have in my library the oppositionist pamphlets and Marxist analyses of the vexed land question in Rhodesia that I bought there when Ian Smith was premier. Such thoroughgoing criticism of the rule of Mr. Mugabe would be inconceivable—or else fraught with much greater dangers than opposition authors experienced under Ian Smith. And indeed, in all but one or two African states, the accession to independence brought no advance in intellectual freedom but rather, in many cases, a tyranny incomparably worse than the preceding colonial regimes.
He points out something which almost everybody who visits Africa notices. The ‘unsuitedness’ of most people to living in a large industrialized democracy creates a real warmth and charm you do not encounter in the first world, which has the requisite impersonality to make complex bureaucracy work.
Of course, the solidarity and inescapable social obligations that corrupted public and private administration in Africa also gave a unique charm and humanity to life there and served to protect people from the worst consequences of the misfortunes that buffeted them. There were always relatives whose unquestioned duty it was to help and protect them if they could, so that no one had to face the world entirely alone. Africans tend to find our lack of such obligations puzzling and unfeeling—and they are not entirely wrong.
How does this co-exist with all the carnage and violence which would beset newly independent Africa? Dalrymple does not believe it is a case of a people getting the leaders they deserve. Nobody deserves an Idi Amin or a Robert Mugabe. His theory carries great interest and insight:
In fact, it was the imposition of the European model of the nation-state upon Africa, for which it was peculiarly unsuited, that caused so many disasters. With no loyalty to the nation, but only to the tribe or family, those who control the state can see it only as an object and instrument of exploitation. Gaining political power is the only way ambitious people see to achieving the immeasurably higher standard of living that the colonialists dangled in front of their faces for so long. Given the natural wickedness of human beings, the lengths to which they are prepared to go to achieve power—along with their followers, who expect to share in the spoils—are limitless. The winner-take-all aspect of Africa’s political life is what makes it more than usually vicious.
Thus Dalrymple reaches a counter-intuitive conclusion.
Colonialism was wrong not because of its intentions. By the end of it, most of it was benign. But what was left behind was so unsuited to conditions on the ground, that the project lay wide open for the worst people to tyrannize and rape their countrymen.
I am not sure I agree with him about the inevitability of this. The ideological winds of change which ended colonial rule absolutely did not have to lead to the empowering of so many psychopaths and communists. There surely was another way.
‘For now, Christiane Amanpour, let us focus on the real issues that affect the Kenyan people’
Finally, a bit of based fun.
William Ruto dismisses the sexual obsessions of CNN:
This harks back to Kenyatta brushing off Obama to his face when the US President, of apparent Kenyan ancestry, made a very rare visit to the country.
Who are the global revolutionaries? Whose embassies foment social upheaval around the globe? I don’t think it is China or Russia.
Immigration is essential in order to dilute cultural heritage and diluting culture is needed for the imposition of a communist and/or totalitarian state. This is why past communist regimes worked so hard at getting rid of religion and culture... The state had to encompass all of that and that meant destroying what was already there.