What is a Sensitive Young Man Meant to Make of the History of Apartheid?
Liberal Myths Part Four
This essay forms part of a series for my paid subscribers on the liberal myths that have shaped modern anarcho-tyranny:
My writing on anarcho-tyranny can be found here:
The film Invictus contains a scene in which Mandela, en route to taking office, passes by a white schoolboy rugby team training. A ‘racist’ Afrikaner rugby coach declares to his team that this is the day that South Africa goes to the dogs.
Whatever you may think of the attitude of apartheid apologists, whatever you may think of Mandela, it is undeniable that the ANC, the same ANC which Mandela believed would exist even in Heaven, has driven Africa’s wealthiest and most beautiful country into the ground.
In a twist most inconvenient, most embarrasing, most blasphemous to the global religion of rainbowism, the most reactionary of white South Africans have been proven correct.
Consider: the unemployment rate has increased by close to 50% under the rainbow regime, the murder rate is the second highest in the world (returning to levels last seen during the ANC’s own ‘People’s War’ during the final years of apartheid), and deaths in detention are much higher than during the days of ‘total onslaught’ and the fearsome security police. The arrest of 400 000 mostly young people for lockdown offences surely dispelled any remaining illusions of the ‘born free’ generation of South Africans.
In 2002, Afrobarometer polling showed that 60% of the country believed apartheid South Africa was better run. In 2016, similar polling revealed that 62% of all South Africans believed life had either got worse or stayed the same since the end of apartheid. These statistics are incredible given the religious nature of the ‘rainbow nation’ narrative and the messianic persona of Mandela.
I cannot find more recent polling, and I am sure the results would be even more embarassing for the regime and its global allies, as the fruits of ANC rule become more obvious: most evident in the ongoing and disastrous collapse of rail, electricity, and water supply.
This was not meant to happen.
South Africa was meant to show that progressive ideology could solve problems and govern diverse societies with competence and generosity. But now reality has called into question the entire modern political programme of the capable liberal state dissolving all the old superstitions of religion, marriage, tribalism, and nationalism. The miracle never arrived and the party is over.
And yet it remains too early to pronounce the death of rainbowism in South Africa or abroad, sickly as it is.
The ANC commands well over double the support of the opposition party. It remains bold enough to continue to push through the nationalisation of all healthcare; it has not repealed the affirmaive action which led to the collapse of the national power utility; and it plans to ration water for whites.
In the US, the Biden regime is accelerating the affirmative action regime, and adding sexual identities to protected and favoured classes, partnered by the regime;s corporate allies. The Vice Presidency and the Supreme Court are famously subject to diversity quotas.
The problem critics of modern ‘successor ideology’, or what I term ‘liberal terror’, face, is that the religious acceptance of rainbowism and the Mandela mythos will not die until the spell is utterly broken.
You would think that the savage South African riots of 2021 or the barbaric levels of crime would have done the trick, but for liberals, ideology reigns supreme. You can elucidate all the ways in which the ANC regime has waged war on the country, yet the myth that the apartheid regime was exterminating black South Africans on a World War II scale serves to undercut any facts, as well as the suggestion that ‘rainbowism’ is a monstrous deception, not only in South Africa but throughout the entire world.
Together with Martin Luther King (a truly odious character), Mandela (strong competition for MLK in personal viciousness) is a global symbol for a post-western order in which all European sins are purged by open borders, radical social policies, and a usurpation of the nation state by enlightened global bodies led by the likes of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Secretary-General of the World Health Organisation. People, particulaly media and academia, still believe in this stuff.
This is, of course, a problem because the persistence of the ‘good ANC gone bad’ myth, the myth of ‘moral giants’ who sadly succumbed to the temptations of corruption, demoralizes whole segments of independent-thinking people the world over, who may otherwise be emboldened to seek new beginnings and new political orders.
The myth serves to entrench policies which make life worse by diverting attention from the essential maliciousness of the regime. For it is rainbowism itself, the ANC itself, which is the cancer, not some fallen leaders who dropped the Mandela torch.
Happily, it is not necessary to convince the masses of the deceitfulness of the post-apartheid mythology. Generally, many people who avoid media know this already. Conversely, the midwit, media class, famously rationally impermeable to the proposition that only men have penises, can be ignored too.
No, the battle lies with sensitive, young independents (I myself am a sensitive, young man), who by no means want to embrace cheap bigotry or low-rent racism, but nonetheless know they need to live in a certain way of mental honesty and pragmatism in order to be happy.
Such young people simply need to be shown that it is possible to reject apartheid as wrong and wrong-headed without concomitantly believing it to be some kind of historic crime against humanity. For in the long litany of human brutality, apartheid was not even the worst crime of the apartheid era - that title would surely belong to the necklacing and lynching campaign of the ANC which claimed exponentially more black lives than the apartheid regime ever did.
No, when historians place apartheid in the context of centuries and millennia, in the shadow of British and German death camps, Soviet and Chinese genocides, the French Revoutionary Terror, South American human sacrifice, Shaka Zulu and Mzilikazi’s Southern African ethnic cleansing, Robert Mugabe’s gukurahundi, the Rwandan genocide, the brutality of the never-ending wars of Central Africa, the Middle East conflagration instigated by the US and Britain, not to mention Genghis Khan and the barbaric conquests of the likes of the pedophilic Mehmed II, the approximate 1000 deaths (probably less) at the hands of apartheid forces over close to four decades of the apartheid system will be marked as a moral wrong, but not as a world-historical atrocity.
Mere consideration of the simple facts that during apartheid black lifespans shot up, that black lawyers and doctors came into existence within a generation or two of having no written language, and that the South African state had to police borders to keep other Africans outside of their field of control, should put paid to the notion of a uniquely evil white nationalist state.
Nobody berates China daily for the tens of millions of deaths during their own social engineering project, the Great Leap Forward. Nobody berates Zulus daily for the deaths of over a million black South Africans at the hands of Shaka Zulu and his impis. Nobody berates the Americans for the deaths of a million Japanese civilians during World War II, many of those deaths occurring while the government was trying to surrender…
Quite frankly, it is ridiculous therefore to demand whites in general, and South African whites in particular, to live their lives in placatory guilt, peculiar only to them.
No, we are allowed to be on our own side.
Allow me then to elucidate some of the complexities of the apartheid story. I aim here not to praise apartheid, but to bury it…
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