The Boers need their own state

What is happening in South Africa is simultaneously milder and far worse than genocide. It is racial-communist anarcho-tyranny. That is why the Boers need their own state.

(Flagge Oranias: Vectorebus, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

Since the left has saturated the public sphere with their sanctimonious phrases, the bad habit of adopting this language out of convenience has taken hold. So, when talking about the plight of South African Boers, a plight for which the Western countries are indeed partly responsible, as they dismantled the white republic, people speaks of genocide.

What is happening in South Africa is not a genocide, even though the grotesque scale of everyday violence might have the effect of driving the Boers out of their country.

What is happening in South Africa is simultaneously milder and far worse than genocide. It is not as if the government under Cyril Ramaphosa is systematically murdering or planning to murder the white population. This restraint may be due to the fact that Nelson Mandela’s successors are incapable of systematically planing or doing anything. Nevertheless, a genocide in the way Western observers usually understand this term, is not taking place in South Africa. Over the past decade, an average of about 50–100 out of every hundred thousand white farmers have been murdered each year. For comparison, in Germany during the same period, the general murder rate was less than one per hundred thousand.

It is difficult to find an appropriate term for whatever is happening in South Africa. I have called it racial-communist anarcho-tyranny; Carl Benjamin has tried the term stochastic terrorism. Perhaps someone will come up with something better. On one hand, there are the Economic Freedom Fighters, a black party with round about 10 percent support, openly calling for mass murder. This allows the ruling ANC, the African National Congress, Mandela’s old party, to present itself as the moderates, even as it expropriates white farmers without compensation.

The expropriations, however, are only the tip of the iceberg. The country has a multitude of racial laws targeting whites. Most of them are economic laws. The country openly practices something called Black Economic Empowerment. This is a points system where a company earns more points the more black employees it has and the higher the proportion of black ownership. For many business dealings, especially those involving the government, a certain number of points is required. In practice, this means a white person needs a black business partner who, in the best case, does nothing except being black to meet the quota but still he needs to be paid. The ANC uses this system to place its cronies in positions and sinecures at the expense of whites. It is understandable that under these circumstances, more and more Boers are leaving the country where their ancestors have lived for a longer time than the current Bantu majority. As a result, racial-communist anarcho-tyranny does indeed lead to violent ethnic displacement.

If a conventional genocide were taking place in South Africa, it would be relatively easy to address. Think whatever you will of the United Nations, but you could bring the issue before the Security Council, impose sanctions, send blue helmets, and, if all else fails, overthrow the government with a so-called humanitarian intervention. Unfortunately, it is not that simple.

Currently, a very telling defense of the South African government is making the rounds: After Donald Trump put the issue on the international agenda, the usual suspects are now fact-checking the claim that a genocide of whites is taking place there. Of course, they say, there is no genocide; South Africa simply has high crime rates, and besides, one must understand that whites are so much wealthier than blacks. Inadvertently, these people hit the nail on the head. South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. These murder rates are at least as much due to the incompetence of the black government as to its malice. The economic strangulation of whites stems from the government’s corruption. And that does indeed have something to do with wealth distribution, only the wealth wasn’t distributed by Santa Claus.

Whites in South Africa are many times more productive than blacks. As a result, they act on South Africa’s political system like foreign aid or an oil discovery in other Third World countries. They function as an external source of wealth. As long as a country generates its own wealth, however well or poorly, the status of elites depends on their role in the country’s economic activities. But when great wealth comes from outside, you become rich by appropriating this unearned wealth. Wealth that a country does not generate itself makes the fight for its distribution the main focus of politics. Total corruption is the only possible outcome.

For Palladium, Lawrence Thomas has described how South African politics since the end of apartheid has become a struggle for such sinecures. However, he places too much emphasis on the ANC having been influenced in the past by communism from the Eastern Bloc. The bigger problem lies in the current incentive structures. For a black government in South Africa, there is nothing more lucrative than plundering the whites. Thomas calls for the overthrow of the ANC. But any black government would become like the ANC.

There are essentially two options. A return to white rule is unacceptable to blacks for reasons of pride, even if they would be materially better off under it. The other solution is a Boer state.