By Eugene Girin
05/23/2012
The Census Bureau’s announcement that a majority of births in the U.S. last year were non-white makes Ilana Mercer’s latest book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa more relevant to Americans than ever.
Not surprisingly, no mainstream publisher would have anything to do with this a stunning indictment of the state of affairs in Bantu-ruled South Africa, even though most praised the book as "well-written", "riveting", and "worthy of publication". After all, the South Africa ruled by Afrikaners (“Boers”) was the international bogeyman of the Left — and the politically-correct Right.
When in 1994, the communist terrorist Nelson Mandela and his white-hating ANC party took over and began dismantling one of the most successful countries in the world, the new South Africa, effectively ruled by Mandela’s Xhosa tribe, became the darling of the Western commentariat. Mandela, like Martin Luther King, became a secular saint to politically-correct Westerners and any criticism of either Mandela or post-1994 South Africa is either ignored or drowned in politically-correct indignation. The bombings and brutal murders (like the infamous “necklacings” where Blacks opposed to the ANC would have a tire thrown around their necks and set on fire) are conveniently disregarded by the "Madiba’s" Western sycophants.
Ilana Mercer opens the book with a harrowing chronicle of the out-of-control violence visited by the new rulers of South Africa upon its rapidly dwindling white minority:
As Mercer writes, there’s almost no white family in South Africa whose members have not fallen victim to the post-1994 reign of terror.
White farmers bear the brunt, in a murderous campaign that can only be described as genocide. Out of the approximately 40,000 white farmers at the time of the end of Boer rule, more than 3,000 (almost ten percent) have been murdered. (Blogger Sarah Maid of Albion estimates 3176 as of April 30, 2012.)The murder rate for white South African farmers is 313 per 100,000, making farming the most dangerous occupation in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. By comparison, the murder rate for residents of Detroit is 34 per 100,000, and it’s also rising.
The characteristic modus operandi of the killers is to rape wives, regardless of age, in front of their husbands and then bludgeon, stab, hack, or beat both to death.
Mercer recounts a typical story: white farmer Beatrice Freitas and her husband Jose were Portuguese immigrants from the island of Madeira who came to South Africa forty years earlier. They built a thriving nursery, known throughout the region, near the border with Mozambique. After Afrikaner rule ended, their homestead fell victim to a roaming gang of Xhosa. The assailants first tied up Beatrice and her disabled husband. They then dragged Beatrice, in her mid-sixties at the time, to the laundry room, where they gang raped, beat, and burned her with an iron. She sustained third-degree burns over twenty-five percent of her body as a result. And, also typical, no one was arrested.
During the second attack, Beatrice’s husband was shot multiple times and died. Local white farmers caught the murderers and turned them over to the police — but they were allowed to "escape" from custody.
But even if the case had made it to trial, there would be little chance of the culprits being punished — the conviction rate in ANC-ruled South Africa is eight percent, as opposed to roughly 75 percent in the US.
This is the absolute opposite of the situation under Boer rule. Mercer reports a present-day white farmer remembers that when three Africans murdered a farming couple decades ago, they were promptly arrested, tried, and hanged. And for many years, no one dared to attack farmers in that locality.
The reason for this farmer’s reminiscence: in 2010 his own wife was shot to death by African laborers. The bereaved husband has little expectation of justice for his wife.
Ilana Mercer is highly critical of apartheid. Her father, Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson, was a devoted opponent of Afrikaner rule. But she acknowledges that under the Afrikaners, South Africa was stable, prosperous, and safe.
Under apartheid, the economy achieved a continuous growth rate and attracted thousands of Black immigrants from other African countries. The country’s Black population rose from 8.6 million in 1946 to 28.3 million in 1991. During the much maligned Afrikaner regime, the life expectancy for South African Blacks skyrocketed from thirty-eight to sixty-one years. (Under Black rule, it has plunged again by a whole nine years). Just twelve years after the start of Afrikaner rule in 1948, the rate of literacy among the Xhosa (the majority tribe in South Africa) was already higher than that of any other African Blacks and even surpassed that of India. The Black school population grew by a whopping 250 percent during the first decades of apartheid. Furthermore, the Boer government engaged in a campaign of income redistribution from whites to Blacks. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the Black share of personal income doubled. By the end of Boer rule, South African Blacks received more in government revenue than they paid in taxes.
Pre-Mandela South Africa also boasted a highly functional rule of (Roman-Dutch) law. As even anti-apartheid Afrikaner historian Hermann Giliomee acknowledged:
"The [apartheid] government did not attempt to cover up deaths in detention, despite a torrent of unfavorable publicity. Although political opponents were at the mercy of their interrogators in prison, both the policeman and the prisoner knew that neither was outside the law".
Keith Richburg, the Black American Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post in 1991-1994 described the efficient, professional, and unbiased work of the Boer policemen who responded to the scene of a Bantu-Zulu tribal battle — comparing it to the lack of law and order in other African countries where solving a murder was like "handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500". Present day outrages like the mass rape of infants and ritual killing, which are based on tribal beliefs, were simply not allowed to happen in Afrikaner-ruled South Africa.
A particularly interesting part of Ilana Mercer’s book is devoted to the largely unknown fact that the majority Xhosa tribe (which includes both Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki) are themselves relative newcomers to South Africa. The Xhosa came from the lands to the north and engaged in a campaign of genocide and displacement against the San (known in the West as Bushmen) and the Hottentot people. In Botswana, a country adjacent to South Africa, the Bantu majority has banned the Bushmen from claiming their ancestral lands. "Where’s the international uproar"? asks Mercer.
Another issue the author addresses: the ANC government’s unrelenting campaign of land expropriation against Afrikaners. A typical tactic is for a group of ANC-supported Blacks to form an illusory "tribe" and push for a Boer farmer’s land to be given to them. The money that this "tribe" attempts to use in order to buy the land comes wholly from the taxpayer, given to them by the sympathetic government.
Needless to say, these "tribes" have no title deeds or other documents to prove their claim. But in present day South Africa, such inconvenient legalities are brushed aside. After all, what rule of law can exist in a country ruled by a party of racially-motivated terrorists whose unofficial anthem is the song "Kill the Boer" and whose current president’s favorite song is "Give me my machine gun".
Ilana Mercer’s book is indispensable to those who want to know the truth about post-apartheid South Africa — and is a warning for Americans. The author convincingly shows that even a highly successful, economically vibrant country like pre-Mandela South Africa can be dismantled in a matter of years and turned into a chaotic, blood-drenched wasteland.
The warning signs are already obvious here.
Eugene Girin immigrated legally from the Republic of Moldova in 1994 at the age of 10. He has been published by VDARE.COM, Front Page Magazine, Alternative Right and Chronicles Magazine.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.