South Africa fades

Peter Hitchens has a great article on this in The American Conservative.

I have a South African friend (white, English-speaking) who says it's really bad. He almost dreads trips home, and worries about the safety of his elderly father.

Democracy as we know it was invented by the English, and still works best where English is spoken. (The record of the continent of Europe in the last century is not entirely satisfactory on this matter, though of course we have hopes for the future.) Language notwithstanding, South Africa seems not to have quite made the cut.

I would like to get one of those flamethrowers.

Sam Francis once advocated a campaign whereby white Americans create a pressure group to help settle South African whites here in the US. These are people with whom we share a similar history -- their ancestors went to the Cape instead of New York (i.e. New Amsterdam). They had their battles against the British Empire and hostile natives, and so did we. (By we, I am going by the general demographics of blog readers/posters, i.e. whites) Other groups obviously push for immigration of what they feel to be racial 'kin' -- I remember a few years back the Congressional Black Congress pushing for more Haitian immigration. So here is an opportunity for positive collective action by whites.

Let us not forget that Mrs. Taljaard is an active member of the DA. Considering that many activists in the Republican party are seriously putting forth the idea that a 39% tax rate (i.e. a return to what we had less than ten years ago) is socialism, it's possible that her view from the opposition benches is a little skewed.

Let us also not forget the enormous problems that the country faced and continues to face in terms of widespread poverty. The idea that South Africa was a first world country was largely an illusion sustained by the cheap and expendable labor supply that Apartheid produced. It was essentially a colonial economy. Now it has to transition to a modern one. These are not trivial things to accomplish.

As absolutely horrendous as Thabo Mbeki was on some issues (and if there's any justice, there's a special place in hell for him for his HIV/AIDS policies, and let's not even mention his Zimbabwe policy), one thing that he actually did right was to pursue fairly liberal trade and economic policies. And while there's still a great deal of work to do, the fact that there is an emergent black middle class (2.6 million of them) in South Africa does show that some progress has been made.

I wouldn't necessarily write off democracy in South Africa either. It's pretty natural for the ANC to have an immense reservoir of goodwill, considering both their leadership role in fighting Apartheid and the figure of Mandela himself. COPE itself shows that the natural instinct of dissidents within a party is to form their own party rather than settle scores behind closed doors in ways reminiscent of one-party nations.

The closest political analog of South Africa might be the PRI in Mexico, which had decades of rule and some big problems with corruption as well. Yet there we've seen that the political system can in fact open up and institutional inertia isn't enough to keep a single party in a relatively open country in power forever.

Would I be happier seeing the DA increase its influence? Perhaps even form a government? Sure. Ultimately, strong opposition parties are essential to good government (which is why I view the self-destruction of the Republicans as a real problem for the US). I still see South Africa as being the best hope on the continent for the establishment of real democracy and prosperity on the continent.

Anyone who thinks that SA is a basketcase "much like every other African country" doesn't know much about basket weaving.

Everyone knew this was going to happen. Some cultures are skilled and productive and some aren't and we all know which is which. I was in college in the 1970's during the anti-apartheid obsession. The obsessives never thought clearly about what was going to happen when their favorite ex-terrorists took over. I wonder what the 70s-era protestors are doing now.

Just one small comment from an actual South African: OUR banks didn't need to be rescued by the government, YOURS did. Who is the basketcase here?

Young South African journalist dies in a car crash. Her loss is a real loss to SA.

watch the video in this story ... listen to how she explains covering the atrocities in her country ... this young woman died last week in a car crash... even without the knowledge, her story helps me think American journalists got nothing to whine about .... http://tinyurl.com/cwauf8