Zimbabwe 2.0 (South Africa)

[David]

[HAL]

I can't recommend any offhand.

[Mugwump]

^ the racial representation idea makes no sense at all, except it is South Africa - where race is clearly the fault line that is going to lead to murder and disaster for millions of people when success was possible. We don’t have to generalize the principle here. It was a unique case.

My Iraq reference was a throwaway line, reflecting the fact that Iraq’s democracy, dominated by Shias, has served to inflame the Sunni population. It too needed very strong stabilizers. But the two cases are different in almost every other respect. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy said.....

[Mugwump]

^ David, I think you may have edited your post to pose a question since I first replied to it.

In response to the question you posed, the idea of a kind of international protectorate in SA seems to me justified as a special case, because the international “community” did so much to dismantle the old South Africa. In a sense, it forced regime change on the country, when it would have been better (for all communities in South Africa) to force development goals on the existing regime, which (unlike the present regime) was competent to deliver them. Unlike the US, which at least tried to repair Iraq, the international community did nothing to support South Africa, despite having engendered the parlous state and casual brutality in which it now languishes.

As to your second question, it’s highly debatable that South Africa’s crime problem stems from lack of money. That seems to be your answer to all social ills, but I dispute it. South Africa, for all its many unpleasant features and poverty, had a low crime rate until the 1980s. What happened at that point was the breakdown of civil authority, prompted by internal and external pressures, and a soaring rate of violent crime as a result - 20,000 murders a year, in 2017. It’s always an interesting question whether people would rather live under moderate oppression with civil security, on the one hand, or in freedom and fear on the other. You might, again, ask the Iraqis about that.

In any event, the key point here is that the international community, rightly offended by the racist ideology of South Africa, forced change upon it, and then looked the other way once the bleeding began. South Africa is a missed opportunity to create a beacon for Africa because, perhaps, the biens-pensants don’t actually care as much as they pretend to.

In response to your question regarding the practicality of my suggestions, I’d argue that while the old order stayed in place, such a structure might have been negotiable, had enough unsentimental people who really cared been around to negotiate it and manage it within an uncompromising civil authority. It might not have worked, of course - Africa has a way of smashing its future - but it was a better historic bet than the rainbow happy-clappy wager.

Riffing on the interesting exchange between P4S and ptid in the Trump thread, South Africa might have grown its way out of trouble if it had kept enough of what worked. Instead, it is on the zero-sum path to Zaire.

[David]

[Mugwump]

If I have said it to you numerous times, it is probably because I have sensed, on each occasion, that you are advocating that spending more public money on something will solve it. I thought that was what you were proposing above but if not, then apologies.

Some policy choices are about prioritizing resources, but not all. Too often we have to allocate money to alleviate the consequences of bad behaviour because we don’t have a theory about what causes it. Or we know what causes it, but we simply do nothing to prevent it, except spend money to alleviate the consequences. Many policy choices are about which institutions you empower, how you staff them, what you choose to license or interdict, etc. perhaps that causes money to flow from a to b, but that’s really a technical issue rather than a policy issue.

On the topic, my point is that some more accountable version of the existing SA regime should have been maintained in place, as it was the only way that South Africa was likely to maintain a potent economy which could organically deliver development goals, while protecting its minorities. That would not have required a great deal of money, but it would have required a lot of protracted, hard-headed resistance to the idealism of Western activists and ANC hopefuls. It would probably have strained the patience of the black population beyond endurance, but the desire of some people to wreck their own country with wrong-headed policies does not necessarily need to be indulged. Mandela, I think, knew this - but apres lui, la deluge.

Given that they did not try to develop a constitutional structure for SA which protected the white and Asian minorities, because that would have meant accepting some unromantic compromises, the least our activists could now do is to exercise the same energy in protesting against the persecution of white people for the color of their skin. Alas, most seem content to sip their lattes and utter platitudes about the propensity for shit to happen on the karma bus.

You can always tell how much someone really cares when no one is looking.

[David]

I think I understand now that most of the disagreement here comes from entirely different premises. If one buys into the “white genocide” narrative or something in that ballpark – and, indeed, it’s right there in the thread title, in a reference to a neighbouring country in which whites have been specifically and rigorously targeted institutionally – then I would understand that a major issue here is the lack of constitutional protection of white South Africans. That’s quite a different matter than a country that is simply dysfunctional, crime-ridden and poverty-racked in a general sense, which is how I understand South Africa to be (and in which case the specific plight of whites or constitutional protection of minorities is at most a side issue). Whether whites are being specifically targeted right now seems to be a hugely contested point, and I’m not sure what to believe – and that includes some who seem a little too eager to tell us that race is completely incidental in farm attacks (and of course, one takes the panic-mongering of Breitbart types with a grain of salt). So it would be good to get some credible information here.

[stui magpie]

^

From what I've read, the truth (as usual) seems to be somewhere in the middle.

There are factions within the SA Parliament calling for white farmers to be dispossessed of their land without compensation. That's an easily verifiable fact.

The SA Government is saying publicly that they have no plans to do this and are saying the right things about needing to maintain food production, even though they are planning legislation to enable them top do exactly that.

Farmers are being attacked. The isolation makes them easy targets, the motivation seems to range from racism to just wanting money and stuff. There's little reliable data on what percentage of the farmers attacked are black or white. The vast majority of the farmers are white, yes, but the majority of their workers are black, and data doesn't distinguish between farm owners and farm workers.

It's a notable fact that since the end of Apartheid more then 20 years ago, the only people in the country who's lives have been improved are the black politicians and their cronies. Everyone else, including the majority black population, is pretty much worse off.

[David]

^ I think that's pretty much spot on except for the last sentence. The Conversation article I linked earlier in the thread suggests that things have actually improved substantially for much of the South African population in the last 20 years. Things are (very) bad, no doubt, but it seems they may have been much worse before.

[stui magpie]

Dunno about that.

[Pies4shaw]

[stui magpie]

[Pa Marmo]

[Mugwump]

^ David, there are two issues, separate but linked, which your thread helpfully clarifies : the dispossession and murder/maiming of white farmers, plus the systematic discrimination against white people (via black economic empowerment laws), on the one hand ; and on the other, the destructive effects of civil disorder, political corruption and technical incompetence, which lead to general impoverishment.

In 1990, the RoE was 2.5 Rand to the USD. Today, despite being freed of sanctions, it is a damning 15:1. In the last 25 years, the average growth rate has been just slightly over 2% : lousy for an emerging economy with a rich resource and industrial base resiling after sanctions. Unemployment has gone from 15% to 25% in that period. Crime has exploded. The inability of the new government to deliver sharply rising living standards underpins the zero-sum scrabble that is sucking SA into a classically African pit.

I saw the effects of so-called “black economic empowerment” in the multinational business in which I worked. The business in South Africa by 1988 was a meritocratic, technically-strong outfit. It had an active professional and leadership development programme for black South Africans which was making slow but steady progress. By 2002, it was a nepotistic shell run at the top by people with political connections. These lorded it over people who actually knew what they were doing. The results were beyond predictable.

South Africa may astonish me by becoming a stable, strong and growing economy which offers all of its people a secure standard of life. But any dispassionate observer would say that it is most unlikely, given the trajectory.

Those who agitated for the present disaster will no doubt sleep the sleep of the just, wrapped warmly in their unexamined consciences, never in their cosy lives having imagined the cry of Cromwell : “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”.

[Skids]

Farmlands.

Do you really know the history (watch the first 10 minutes) of South Africa? I don't think many do.

I just found this while googling about the 50 protesters at Lauren Southerns (I'd never heard of her) talks in Perth.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCla6APLHX6W3FeNLc8PYuvg