Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from post-Apartheid South Africa is a polemical work anchored in history, reality, fact, and the political philosophy of classical liberalism. It is a manifesto against mass society, arguing against raw, ripe, democracy, here (in the US), there (in South Africa), and everywhere. Into the Cannibal’s Pot follows Russell Kirk’s contention that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order. It is a reminder that, however imperfect, civilized societies are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes. The tyranny of political correctness, so unique to the West plays a role in their near-collapse. Advanced societies don’t just die; they either wither from within, or, like South Africa, are finished off by other western societies. Ilana Mercer delivers a compelling book; it is required reading for thinking people who care about the destiny of western civilization.

Dedicated to my Afrikaner brothers betrayed, and to my African sisters, Nomasomi Khala and Annie Dlahmini, whose lives touched mine.

This is a book about ideas and ideology. When losing an intellectual argument, there are despicable people who point an accusing finger and shout racism. In our dark times where mob rule and collectivist ideas resonate with so many, this appalling strategy can be very effective.

To those who support colorblind civil discourse, rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom, the golden rule (do unto others as you wish them to do unto you), liberty, freedom of expression and religion and private property rights…regardless of skin color or ethnic background (black, red, white, yellow, brown, green or violet), we extend the hand of friendship.

To those who support all forms of thuggery—including totalitarianism, collectivism, fascism, extremist fundamentalism, unequal treatment under law, income redistribution, nanny state government programs and the soft bigotry of low expectations—your skin color and ethnicity are irrelevant…and your ideas belong in the dustbin of history.

It is no surprise that a manifesto against majoritarianism would not find favor with the mission of most American publishers. Opposition to mass society was once an accepted (indeed, unremarkable) theme in the richly layered works of iconic conservatives such as Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham. Today, by contrast, such opposition is considered as damning as it is impolitic.

And don’t even think of writing a less-than hagiographical account of Nelson Mandela. Time magazine’s Richard Stengel has serialized his tributes to Saint Mandela. (Stengel has completed two. Perhaps a third is planned?) But an opposing voice to the media paean for the democratic South Africa and its deity, written by a dissenting South African exile—this cannot be countenanced.

“What menaces democratic society in this age is not a simple collapse of order,” forewarned Alexis de Tocqueville, “but a tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit and condition.” In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, this sameness of mind and spirit manifests in a convergence of opinion—even in the neatly bifurcated America.

Thus, while almost every other postcolonial insurgency in Africa has been scrutinized, rival views of post-apartheid South Africa are unwelcome. Despite the country’s body count since “freedom,” the foundations of what was a joint Anglo-American undertaking are not to be faulted or questioned.

The loss of 300,000 innocents murdered since democracy dawned is therefore regularly diminished. People slide into extenuation: “We have our problems, but we now have, I’m proud to say, a working, wonderful democracy in South Africa.” These words were uttered by the roaming Justice Richard Goldstone, who—unlike this writer’s father—attached himself to the anti-apartheid cause only once it became fashionable, safe and professionally expedient.

In itself, the tale of the publication of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa bears telling. For while this polemic respects no political totems or taboos, it is faithful to facts. These facts cried out to be chronicled. They should not have had a struggle to find their way into print.

Yet struggle they did.

“Ilana, if you’d only give me something like Corinne Hofmann’s Back from Africa, publishers would pounce,” promised one literary agent. Hofmann’s salacious account of her time as the sexual plaything of a virile African tribal chief was described by The Times Literary Supplement as “a dated tale of exotic desire and disillusionment.”

As the PC pecking order stands, Into the Cannibal’s Pot might also have been pounced upon had its author been more like economist Dambisa Moyo of the trendy Dead Aid. That popular book consists of derivative deductions which had been reached decades ago by Peter Thomas Bauer, the doyen of development economics. (To give Ms. Moyo her dues, Dead Aid is dedicated to the late Lord Bauer.)

The following is an assessment from a well-known academic publisher whose stock does not exactly fly off the shelves:

I’ve long been aware of Mercer’s writing. Though I rarely agree with her, she’s quite a presence on the right side of the blogosphere. This is an extremely well-written and provocative work. I was riveted as I read it. …The problem here is that the market for a book with such a clear political bias is that much smaller. So I just don’t think we could take it on.

“There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea,” said Dr. Johnson. This is my position with respect to political parties stateside and in South Africa. How can a book that discounts the venerated vote and disavows all political parties have a political bias? Into the Cannibal’s Pot is manifestly against politics! A partiality for small government and big society—in other words, for civilization—is not a “political bias.” No, the prejudice was that of the petitioned publisher; his was a prejudice against an unorthodox perspective that comports with the classical liberal philosophy, and with reality.

Another publisher made the following excuse:

We recently had the chance to review your manuscript. Like everything you do, it is well-written and worthy of publication. However, we do not believe we can successfully market it.

This particular editor added that the imprint would be concentrating instead on the timeless topic of the Olympic Games in China. Obviously that is a far more inspiring subject than this writer’s “unhealthy” preoccupation with the methodical ethnic cleansing of the Afrikaner farmer.

Other respondents lavished praise on a “closely argued stylish effort” (for which, of course, they did not care to make an effort).

To go by the Left’s postmodern strictures, truth is not immutable but subject to a process of discovery. As a practical matter, then, how is a synthesis of the South-African situation to emerge if the antithesis is disallowed?

Let us not discount the publishing world’s ongoing drive for the bottom line and the lowest common denominator. (The publisher who refused to bear Christian Witness, citing the prospects of poor profits, is an example.) This uncompromising dedication does not lend itself to contrarian material, not even when the facts are pressing (and almost too horrible for words). After all, a complicit publishing establishment can shirk responsibility and seek comfort in the fact that the marketplace for books no longer adjudicates the product’s worth. Actually, nowadays this marketplace does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the millions of subjective preferences consumers demand and publishers deliver. Mackenzie Phillips’ squalid story of incest and insanity outsells Ludwig von Mises’ pearls of wisdom. For some this cultural foot-and-mouth will be faith-inspiring, for others deeply distressing.

When South Africa was governed by a racist white minority, it was scorned by the West and treated as Saddam Hussein was, with boycotts and sanctions. Now that a racist, black-majority government controls the country; that it is as violent as Iraq, Liberia, or the Congo and rapidly becoming another Islamist-friendly, failed African state, it is the toast of the West.

Indeed, world leaders and the liberal lickspittle media seldom speak of the embarrassment that is the democratic South Africa—the crumbling infrastructure of this once First World country, and the out-of-control crime—down to an ongoing mini-genocide. Rocker Bono certainly isn’t moved to tears over the seemingly systematic extermination of the Afrikaner farmers of South Africa. The cultural cognoscenti in the US are equally silent about the New South Africa’s unparalleled, radical, race-based wealth-distribution policies.

As Into The Cannibal’s Pot demonstrates, South Africa’s democratically elected African leaders are as committed as their political predecessors, apartheid-era Afrikaners, to restructuring society around race. With one distinction: more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.^[*] Consequently, the much-maligned Western stronghold established in South Africa under Boer—and before that British—rule is rapidly reverting to type. Gone is the European strongman who suppressed the seething African kraal. What has arisen instead is best captured by Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz: “The horror, the horror.” Dubbed the “Rainbow Nation,” for its multiculturalism, South Africa is now, more than before, a “Rambo Nation.”

Americans, who take for granted their domestic tranquility, can’t afford to finesse the fate of the dying Christian civilization at the tip of Africa. Into The Cannibal’s Pot compels them to stare into “The Heart of Darkness” that is the New South Africa, and by so doing, offers a cautionary tale: in their unqualified paeans to the will of the majority everywhere, Americans must understand that traditionally Western legal institutions, however flawed, are preferable to institutions riven by tribal feuds, fetishes, and factional loyalties.

^[*] See Chapter 1, Crime, the Beloved Country

Universal suffrage is not to be conflated with freedom.

As the democratic South Africa (and Iraq) amply demonstrates, political rights don’t secure the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; ink-stained fingers don’t inoculate against blood stains. Extant societal structures that safeguard life and property can always be improved upon. But once these bulwarks against mob rule and mayhem disintegrate, they are seldom restored. A civilized society, ultimately, is one in which the individual can go about the business of life unmolested. If he can’t do that simple thing, of what value is the vote?

Post-apartheid South Africa serves as a reminder that such societies, however imperfect, are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes; the new South Africa reminds us that, for better or for worse, societies are built slowly from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by people, not by political decree. Sadly, the facts as this writer tells them indicate that, while the Old South Africa could only have improved; the New South Africa can but decline.

So why is this book so very crucial at this juncture? Simply this: Although grisly horror stories have percolated into the popular press, the emetic facts about the New South Africa have never before been told. They must be! Into the Cannibal’s Pot fills this knowledge gap. This book, moreover, is crucial in curbing the naïve enthusiasm among American elites, and those they’ve gulled, for radical, imposed, top-down transformations of relatively stable, if imperfect, societies, including their own. As the example of South Africa demonstrates, a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure.

In the U.S., a slower, more incremental transformation is under way. It began with a state-orchestrated, historically unparalleled, mass importation of inassimilable ethnic groups into a country whose creed is that it has no creed any longer. American institutions no longer assimilate immigrants.

Rather, they acculturate them to militant identity politics aimed at doing away with merit. Dissolving the American people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, will likely erode American institutions further, and may well replicate on American soil the terrifying conflicts that mar the Third World. Ever the source of deafening demagoguery about the virtues of democracy, American leaders might wish to consider that, “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule.”¹

Still, American leaders refused to rest until South Africa became a democracy. And before that Zimbabwe. And after that Iraq. (They were not alone. I trace that chain of culpability in Chapter Seven, “The Anglo-American-Australian Axis of Evil.”) The consequences in each case have been catastrophic. While all people want safety and sustenance for themselves, not everyone is prepared to allow those whom they dislike to peacefully pursue the same. This maxim applies both to Mesopotamia and to Azania (the term once used for South Africa by the governing African National Congress). The time is historically ripe to challenge some of the central tenets of liberal democratic ideology through the prism of another democratic disaster: post-Apartheid South Africa.

If the sanctity of life is the highest value in a civilized society, then the New South Africa has little to recommend it. Societies are only as good as the individuals of whom they are comprised; individuals only as good as their actions. Democratic South Africa is now preponderantly overrun by elements, both within and without government, which make a safe and thriving civil society impossible to sustain. The salient feature of mass politics in the New South Africa is a government unable to control itself and unwilling to control a sinecured criminal class. As a consequence, sundered is the individual’s right to live unmolested.

Our unhappy trek through the wreck of the New South Africa begins with the facts, nothing but the facts. The realities of crime-riddled democratic South Africa are relayed in Chapter One: “Crime, the Beloved Country.” The title parodies Alan Paton’s poignant tale titled Cry, the Beloved Country. The story of the life of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo was to apartheid South Africa what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to antebellum America.

1 Donald L. Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa?: Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Berkeley: California,1991), p. 99.

Victims of crime in South Africa garner some sympathy, but it is sympathy on a sliding scale. Thus, worldwide, the press extended liberal pieties to liberal Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer. She had survived an attack in her Johannesburg home. The Prince of Wales bewailed the murder of another prominent liberal, Anglo-Zulu War historian David Rattray. He was killed by six armed Zulus. When the nephew of South Africa’s finest novelist (no; it’s not J. M. Coetzee), the liberal André Brink, was shot and killed in front of his wife and daughter, The Economist took note:

‘First he thought it was a mouse, then a rat—and then the rat shot him in the face.’ That is how André Brink, one of South Africa’s most famous novelists, described the recent killing of his nephew Adri, at home at 3am in the morning.²

Former First Lady Marike de Klerk, brutally stabbed in her Cape Town apartment, received a fair amount of international attention too. Not so the Afrikaner farmers who are being culled like springbok in a hunting safari. This brings us to the mini-genocide underway in the democratic South Africa, chronicled in Chapter Two, “The Kulaks of South Africa Vs. The Xhosa Nostra.”

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is largely composed of the Xhosa Bantu tribe. The Xhosa are also well-represented among the Africans armed with automatic weapons, who roam the countryside killing Afrikaner farmers. These rural folk—who, by law, must battle their ubiquitous assailants with only a shotgun, a handgun and a legally limited number of rounds at their disposal³—are convinced that the assaults are state-sanctioned, the ANC’s idea of an early eviction notice; “land reform,” if you will. The evidence suggests that they may have a point, hence the title pitting the “Kulaks” against the “Xhosa Nostra.”

But before we recount how upward of 3,000 members of this once 40,000-strong community—almost ten percent—have hitherto been exterminated, we explain who the Boers are and provide a brief, action-packed, history of Boer, Briton and Bantu. Americans will want to hear this! Decades of emasculation—legal and cultural—have created a hunger among American men, especially, for heroic, historic narrative. The story of the South African settlers, circa 1652, is every bit as epic as that of the American settlers. Despite their comparable foibles and frailties, the last haven’t been blackened by historians as much as the first.

It is commonly argued, in defiance of emerging facts to the contrary,⁴ that crime is an equal opportunity offender in South Africa: whites, blacks and browns are all in it together. What is incontrovertible, however, is that, where economic opportunities are concerned, the minority that dare not speak its name is on the wane. White males, strictly speaking, are not supposed to comprise more than ten percent of the payroll in a South African company. As during apartheid, a class of people is being dispossessed because of their pallor.

Chapter Three, “Dispossession is Nine-Tenths of the Law,”explores this legal attack on property known as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). BEE is yet another unique feature of the South African democracy, whereby racist labor laws have made for what Robert Guest, Africa editor of The Economist, has charitably termed “The world’s most extreme affirmative action program.”⁵ The upshot of such a coercive transfer of private wealth from those who create it to those who consume it is that societal institutions—state and civil—are being hollowed out like husks. South Africa’s gutted institutions serve as a harbinger of things to come in the U.S., where affirmative action is still dismissed as a “minor irritant,”⁶ but ought not to be.

South Africa is a microcosm of what America could become, unless it returns to the principles that made it great. If American institutions continue to subordinate their raison d’être to politically dictated egalitarianism, reclaiming them from the deforming clutches of affirmative action will become harder and harder. Sadly, it is probably already too late for South Africa, where the majority opposes a meritocracy. Americans, however, must once again embrace merit and individualism. Be it in the U.S. or in South Africa, preferential treatment, enforced by legal fiat and rooted in the characteristics of a group (race) rather than the value of the individual, flouts justice in every respect.

The West has grown accustomed to Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s refined former president. Having spent most of his adult life abroad in exile, Mbeki has the mannerisms of an English gent, not a man of the people. But the baton has been passed from the pukka proper Mbeki to the populist polygamist Jacob Zuma, whose favorite jingle is called “Bring Me My Machine Gun.” (It only has two lines; the second beseeches, rather politely, “Please bring me my machine gun.”⁷) In a country in which crimes are seldom prosecuted, the newly-installed President Zuma has the dubious distinction of having stood trial on 783 charges of corruption, racketeering, tax evasion, and rape.⁸

Against Mbeki’s reserved style, there is Zuma’s unbuttoned conduct, dancing half naked in tribal dress. In one of his Noble-Savage moments, after forcing sex on an HIV-positive acquaintance, Zuma promised, disarmingly, that he took a shower as a prophylactic against AIDS. It has been suggested that Zuma has done for South Africa’s international image what Borat Sagdiyev has done for Kazakhstan.⁹ With one distinction: Borat is a fictitious character, the product of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedic genius; Zuma is “for real.”

Since Zuma’s ascension, wealth transfer in South Africa is expected to accelerate considerably and to resemble ever more closely the unabashed confiscation and dispossession brought about by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. “Mandela, Mbeki, And Mugabe Sitting In A Baobab Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” or Chapter Four, analyzes the significance of the unqualified support Zuma’s predecessors, Mandela and Mbeki, have lent the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe over the decades. “If you want to see the future of South Africa, it might not be a bad idea to look at the present in Zimbabwe.”¹⁰

The Old South Africa had been governed by Puritans. But as Christianity receded in influence after the 1994 transition, the void left has been filled by Islam. The unintended consequences of bringing the Old South Africa to its political knees, to the detriment of American interests, are covered in Chapter Six, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither?”

America, a humane society, ought to take pity on the persecuted descendants of another Protestant patriarchy. However,even if American immigration policy welcomed white South Africans, which it doesn’t, Afrikaners would find it hard to leave. The Boers (and British) built the place. Like Heidi away from the Alps, Afrikaners tend to wilt when separated from their homeland. Not for nothing have the Afrikaners been dubbed “The White Tribe of Africa.”¹¹ They are as African as black South Africans. What is to be done, then, in light of the fact that Afrikaner farmers, in particular, are being killed off at alarmingly high rates? While it remains for the secessionists to “give territorial content”¹² to their aspirations, secession is one of the escape routes suggested in the conclusion, “Saving South Africans S.O.S.”

Into the Cannibal’s Pot is topped and tailed with hard evidence that allows conclusions vis-à-vis the aggregate characteristics of South African society. Although not necessarily politically correct, such conclusions are perfectly proper. With this in mind, a word about the titular tease. Cannibalism, attests Leonard Thompson, author of The Oxford History of South Africa, was widespread during the upheaval associated with rise of the Zulu Kingdom in the 1820s.¹³ These days, in northeastern Congo, two prominent militias, the Lendu and the Hema, delight in demonstrating to UN observers their culinary creativity with human hearts and livers.¹⁴ While cannibalism—motivated by aggression, ancestral reverence, or survival—has seldom been an athema in Africa, Into the Cannibal’s Pot is meant as a metaphor, and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery:

In America, religion is relatively nonmystical. Religious teachers here are predominantly good, healthy materialists. They follow common sense. … The majority of religious people in this country do not accept on faith the idea of jumping into a cannibal’s pot and giving away their last shirt to the backward people of the world. Many religious leaders preach this today, because of their own leftist politics; it’s not inherent in being religious.¹⁵ [Emphasis added]

Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a Cameroonian thinker, and a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.”¹⁶ Why? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans. These, and other causes—and excuses—are examined in Chapter Five, “The Root-Causes Racket.”

Based on the evidence presented in this book, both Ms. Rand and Mr. Etounga-Manguella would have agreed that South Africans had been tossed into the metaphorical cannibal’s pot. Washington and Westminster insisted that the country pass into the hands of a voracious majority. Unwise South African leaders acquiesced. Federalism was discounted. Minority rights for the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu were dismissed. Ironically, America’s founding fathers had attempted to forestall raw democracy by devising a republic. Yet under the wing of the American eagle a dispensation was negotiated in this writer’s former homeland, the consequence of which is the raw, ripe rule of the mob and its dominant, anointed party.

Since Into the Cannibal’s Pot stands for peaceful, progressive, and sustainable change, it will resonate with those who saw the folly of imposing majority rule on Iraq. Democratizing Mesopotamia has resulted in horrifying material destruction and lasting moral damage. Democratizing Azania has, similarly, made it abundantly clear that the franchise is not to be equated with freedom and that political rights do not safeguards natural rights. The cause and the consequence of the almost over-night, top-down transformation of South Africa is a society where might makes right.

In the interstices of this polemic, the reader will find my story and the story of those I love and had to leave behind. Above all, this tome is a labor of love to my homelands, old and new.

16 Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York, 2000), p. 74.

Ilana Mercer has been lauded by iconic author and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz as “dangerous … intelligent, informed, independent, courageous.” Historian, and New York Times bestseller-list author, Thomas Woods has called her “one of the few writers on earth whose talents I truly envy, adding that, in his opinion, “She should be a household name.” Joseph Farah (CEO of WND.com) has described her as “standing out like a beacon in a vast sea of punditry. She’s always hard to pigeonhole. She’s always witty and incisive.” Paul Gottfried (historian and author of such books as Conservatism in America) wrote: “Ilana takes on indelicate cultural, social, and political issues and challenges her opponents to rethink their positions.” The outspoken libertarian broadcaster Ron Smith of Maryland’s WBAL Radio has called her “a refreshingly original writer on the issues of our time.”

As the only writer to have defended NFL quarterback Michael Vick on the basis of libertarian (propertarian) principles—or so said Fox News TV commentator Sean Hannity—she was invited, in 2007, to debate the matter with Mr. Hannity, after which he commented:

Having read your columns throughout the years, I think I know you a little bit—I know you come from a very intellectual point of view, an intellectually honest point of view—you have given the most articulate argument I’ve heard on the other side of this [animal rights issue], one that is consistent with many of the views you have.

Ms. Mercer was born in South Africa—her father, Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson, was a leading anti-apartheid activist eventually forced to leave the country—and spent her formative years in Israel. In the 1980s she returned to South Africa, where she married, had a daughter, and after completing her degrees, including a double major in psychology and Hebrew, worked as an AIDS counselor. In 1995, she and her family immigrated to British Columbia, Canada, before moving with her husband to America’s Pacific Northwest, which she calls home. Ms. Mercer left South Africa with the proceeds from the sale of her apartment stashed in the soles of her shoes. Had she been apprehended smuggling her property out of that country, she’d have been jailed together with her husband; they both stood taller on that trip. Ms. Mercer, who happens to know what living without freedom is like, has seen first hand the same oppression sneak-up on unsuspecting Americans. (For instance, the South-African model of detention-without-trial is slowly becoming a fixture of the American legal landscape.)

Her book Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash with a Corrupt Culture (2003) was hailed by the late Aaron Russo (former libertarian presidential candidate) as the work of “a true warrior—a modern-day Joan of Arc—in the fight for freedom.” A Fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, and the Jeffersonian think-tank Free New York, Inc., she has appeared as a guest on scores of broadcast talk programs: including those of Sirius Satellite Radio’s Mike Church; of the late, legendary talk-show host George Putnam; and of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In addition to appearing on RT, the global Russian television news network, she was among the participants in the 2003 Public Network television series America At War, debating the media’s dereliction of duty during the invasion of Iraq.

Ms. Mercer is—and has been for the last decade—a featured columnist for WND.com (which, according to Web monitoring site Quantcast, had one million daily visitors as of September 2009). Other publications where her articles, essays, columns, editorials, book and film reviews have appeared are The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The Orange County Register, Insight On the News (an affiliate of The Washington Times), London’s Jewish Chronicle and Quarterly Review, The Ottawa Citizen, The Calgary Herald (for which she penned a regular weekly column),the two Canadian national newspapers, the Financial Post and the Globe and Mail, The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Free Life: a Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, and the Foundation for Economic Education’s Ideas on Liberty.

Ms. Mercer’s work has been cited by The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Time’s European edition, among other prominent publications. She maintains a popular blog, where she comments on the issues of the day. In her role as proprietor of the libertarian Barely A Blog (BAB), she has attracted such contributors as Tibor Machan (Cato Institute adjunct scholar), George Reisman (emeritus economics professor at California’s Pepperdine University), and the aforementioned Thomas Szasz.

ILANA Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer and theorist based in the US. Her acclaimed, weekly column, begun in Canada, has been going strong since 1999. (Articles Archive.) Ilana is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June 29, 2016), the first libertarian book of Trump, and of the seminal Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011).

Ilana’s weekly column appears in The Unz Review, WND.COM, for which she has penned WND’s exclusive “Return to Reason” feature (now called “The Paleolibertarian”) since 2001, Townhall.com, American Greatness, Britain’s Ludwig von Mises Centre For Property and Freedom, London’s Quarterly Review, founded in 1809, and CNSNews.com.

She has also contributed to the Mises Institute’s Wire, as well as to its Power & Market Blog; to the Ron Paul Institute, the Abbeville Institute, The American Thinker, The Daily Caller, The Liberty Conservative, The Heartland Institute, The Hudson Institute, to Intellectual Takeout and to Chronicles, a magazine of American culture.

Under the handle “The Paleolibertarian Column” or “Paläolibertären Kolumne,” in the German, Ilana’s weekly column was featured respectively on Russia Today and in Junge Freiheit, a German weekly of excellence, for some years. Likewise did the column run on Taki’s Magazine. Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank).

Since the late 1990s, Ilana has written for The Financial Post, The Globe and Mail (Canada’s National Newspapers), The Vancouver Sun, The Report Newsmagazine, London’s Jewish Chronicle and Quarterly Review, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The New Individualist and the Foundation for Economic Education. Her work has appeared in The Ottawa Citizen, The Orange County Register, The Colorado Gazette, and in other Freedom Communications, Inc. newspapers across the United States, including The Valley Morning Star, The East Valley Tribune, Jacksonville Daily News, Washington County News, Holmes County Register.

Ilana’s work has also been published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Free Life: a Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, the Foundation for Economic Education’s Ideas on Liberty and in Insight On the News (a former affiliate of The Washington Times), for which she has penned essays in symposia debating intellectual property.

Ilana has written weekly columns for the conservative Calgary Herald, Vancouver’s North Shore News. As was she an analyst and commentator for Free-Market News Network, founded by the late Harry Browne, one-time libertarian presidential candidate.

Ilana’s commentary has been mentioned in the European edition of Time (see “Trading Places” by Peter Gumbel, appeared in the print edition of March 28, 2005), cited in the Boston Globe (“The Downside of Diversity” by Michael Jonas, August 5, 2007); the New York Times’ Economix blog (“Are Federal Workers Overpaid?” by Prof. Nancy Folbre, October 13, 2009), and featured on web sites such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute, LewRockwell.com, The Hudson Institute, The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Laissez Faire City Times, Rational Review, Antiwar.com, Frontpage Magazine, and Jewcy.com, an acclaimed “online ideas-and-culture magazine.”

Ilana, who supported Ron Paul for president in 2008 and 2012, was asked by the Paul campaign for a written endorsement. Here it is:

“Ron Paul stands alone among the presidential contenders for a solvent, sovereign America—he has the will to stop the squandering of men and matériel in Iraq and the intellectual wherewithal to salvage an ailing currency, fortify forsaken borders, and restore individual liberties.”

John Derbyshire, formerly of National Review Online, called Ilana’s case for the Texas Republican “Pauline Gospel at its best”:

“The most persuasive Paul booster remains the ravishing, brilliant, and eloquent Ilana Mercer. I don’t say you’ll agree with her, only that this is the Pauline Gospel at its best. If you won’t buy it from Ilana, you won’t buy it from anyone.”

Ilana is the founder, editor, and creative force behind IlanaMercer.com. This aesthetically pleasing thematic website, on which ilana’s essays are archived conveniently, reflects her vision, transformed into pixels. She is also the proprietor of the weblog Barely a Blog (BAB), to which prominent thinkers such as Tibor Machan (RIP), George Reisman, and the late Thomas Szasz have contributed. (Mercer contributed a dust-jacket blurb to Professor Szasz’s book, Coercion As Cure.)

Ilana has been a guest recently (May 1, 2021) on Michelle Malkin’s “Sovereign Nation,” on Newsmax TV (“it’s systemic anti-whiteness”), ABC Radio (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and on radio stations across America. These include “Talk Back,” the nationally syndicated show of the late, legendary George Putnam, The Mike Church Show (aka the “King Dude”) on the Sirius Patriot Channel, and Sean Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio show, on which she appeared, regrettably, to defend NFL quarterback Michael Vick (honest thinkers admit to mistakes). About Ilana’s work, Mr. Hannity said this:

Having read your columns throughout the years, I think I know you a little bit—I know you come from a very intellectual point of view, an intellectually honest point of view—you have given the most articulate argument I’ve heard [‘In Defense of Michael Vick’‘] on the other side of this, one that is consistent with many of the views you have. (August 17, 2007)

As has Ilana appeared on Russia Today (RT), most recently to mine the legacy of Mandela, and on the Public Network’s television series, “America at War” (#434), where, in 2003, she debated the media’s dereliction of duty during the invasion of Iraq. Her analysis of Martha Stewart’s legal travails, “Convicted for Fearing Conviction,” was voted among the best Mises.org articles of 2004. In the same year, she received the “Ron Paul Liberty in Media Awards (LIMA)” for the essay “Wartime Socialism.”

Ilana was born in South Africa, which her father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, decided to leave pursuant to harassment by the South African security police on account of his anti-apartheid preaching and activism. (Ilana herself, on return, decades later, fought petty apartheid tirelessly.) The family departed in the 1960s for Israel, where Ilana spent her formative years. She returned to South-Africa in the 1980s, married and had a daughter. The family emigrated to Canada in 1995, and then went on to settle in the US.

Described as an engaging, iconoclastic polemicist by National Post editorial writer Lorne Gunter, Ilana typically marshals powerful analytical argumentation in support of her case. “All I can tell you is that you can’t win an argument with this woman. I’ve tried and failed,” said Victor Niederhoffer, Ph.D., in May of 2012. Dr. Niederhoffer is a noted stock-market investor, a former business partner to George Soros, and founder of the New York City Junto liberty forum.

In a review titled “The Passion of Principles,” the Objectivist magazine The Free Radical called Ilana’s first book, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With a Corrupt Culture, “a perfect mix of reason and rhetoric.” (Here are part 2 & part 3 of the review.) The late great Ron Smith of WBAL Radio, Maryland, had described her as “a refreshingly original writer on the issues of our time.” Others have praised Ilana as a particularly strong stylist, with “no less powerful an intellectual punch as Ayn Rand, only wickedly funny.” (Citations are here and here).

Ilana’s latest book is The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June 29, 2016). It was the first serious analysis of the Trump phenom, and certainly the first libertarian book of Trump. Released in June of 2011, her second book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from post-Apartheid South Africa. Into the Cannibal’s Pot is a polemical work anchored in history, reality, fact, and the political philosophy of classical liberalism. It is a manifesto against mass society, arguing against raw, ripe democracy, here (in the US), there (in South Africa), and everywhere. “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” follows Russell Kirk’s contention that “true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order.” It is intended as a reminder that, however imperfect, civilized societies are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes. The tyranny of political correctness, so unique to the West—plays a role in their near-collapse. Advanced societies don’t just die; they either wither from within, or, like South Africa, are finished off by other western societies.

All is not grim. Ilana does pause to turn the arrows in her epistolary quiver away from the state—the Thing the inimical Sir Humphrey Applebee of the British satire “Yes, Prime Minister” called a disorganized criminal organization. She covers popular culture, mainstream media, Hollywood, and pseudo-science. From sex to music, it’s all here, minus the unpalatable pabulum served by the mummified media.

When she is not expatiating upon the issues of the day, Ilana enjoys running outdoors. She has been a long-distance, recreational runner since the mid 1990s. Parrots are another passion—in particular, the plight of psittacines in captivity and in the wild. Ilana supports parrot rescues in the community. So too is the cause of the near-extinct Cape Parrot (Poicephalus robustus) close to her heart. Ilana is owned by an adorable hookbill called Oscar-Wood (Poicephalus fuscicollis).

Then there is Music. Chamber music and Bach—any Bach—are her first loves, but she finds the hard core, intricate and masterful brilliance of progressive rock outfits like Symphony X, Dream Theater, Magnitude Nine, and Kamelot (sic) as alluring, to say nothing of neoclassical wizards such as Sean Mercer and Tony MacAlpine.

For a fun quiz conducted with Ilana read “The Third Degree à la Germany: Answering To Junge Freiheit” (November 11, 2016).

ILANA ON THE ISSUES

(Click to expand – click again to close)

To the publisher of this volume to whom added appreciation is due.

To Thomas Szasz, Thomas DiLorenzo and Erik Rush—firm friends all.

To my proof-reader and copy-editor R. J.Stove: The manuscript was polished for publication by the epistolary Wizard of Oz.

To James Ostrowski and Nebojsa Malic for useful comments.

To researcher Rhona Karbusicky, who provided unstinting assistance.

To a nineteen-year-old homeschooled, consummate professional named Aaron Sleadd.

To my dear daughter, who helped me through a punishing publication process.

To my sweet mother, Ann-Wendy Cumes, and my beloved father, Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson, for their backing.

And to my husband, Sean Russell Mercer, who kept me going.

~ Ilana Mercer

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority…from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. —Lord Acton^[*]

If a young South African were to ask me whether to stay or leave, my advice would be to go. —Breyten Breytenbach^[†]

The Williams family is emigrating—leaving South Africa for good. The family will be departing for the UK without their twelve-year-old daughter. Emily Williams was killed at seven in the morning on her way to school, a victim of an armed robbery underway at the home of a classmate who was being fetched by Emily and her mother. Many of the family’s friends are following Roger Williams’ lead. An executive director and chief financial officer at AECI, a South African chemicals group, Mr. Williams believes “everybody should have the right to go about their business and go to school without worrying that you’re going to become a victim of crime.”¹

René Burger is the little sister of Schalk Burger, a young rising star in South African rugby. Twenty-year-old René, a medical student, was headed for classes at the Tygerberg hospital in Cape Town when she was abducted from the well-patrolled hospital grounds by three men. They drove her to a remote location and gang-raped her at knife-point.

Young Noah Cohen emerged from soccer practice in time to watch his father die. Sheldon Cohen had been sitting in his car outside a Johannesburg sports stadium waiting for Noah when he was shot by “three young men.”²

An elderly Jew is murdered on his way to synagogue in Johannesburg on Saturday morning, shot for refusing to hand over the “valuables” in his tallit bag, the pouch in which an observant Jew carries his prayer shawl.³

A family friend writes: “Crime is out of control down here—you hear of truly horrific stuff all the time. Johannesburg is particularly bad. I recently sold my house and moved into a security village where all the houses are accessible only through one entrance. There are guards who phone you if someone you know wants to get in to see you. Insane!”

This is a snapshot of life in suburban South Africa circa 2008, fourteen years since freedom. Ordinarily, case studies do not a rule make, but you’d be hard pressed to find a family in democratic South Africa whose members have not been brutalized. The travails of this writer’s extended family are fairly typical. They tell of the lives of good people ruined by rubbish: A sister’s partner suffering permanent neurological damage after being brutally assaulted by five Africans; a brother burglarized and beaten in his suburban fortress at two in the morning by an African gang (his wife and infant son were miraculously spared); a father whose neighbor was shot point-blank in front of his little girls as he exited his car to open the garage gates; a spouse, two of whose colleagues were murdered (one shot by African taxi drivers in broad daylight, left to bleed to death on the pavement near his girlfriend’s place), and whose cousin and uncle were hijacked, aunt raped and beaten within an inch of her life. Sean Mercer, Ph.D., found out recently that a fondly remembered professor at his alma mater had been beaten to death with an umbrella by an angry African student.⁴ A Cambridge graduate, Brian D. Hahn was a prodigious applied mathematician at the University of Cape Town.⁵ He is no longer, but his webpage is still online. Hahn, it states, was born in November 1946 in Cape Town, born again in August of 1966, and died in February of 2005. His colleagues tell of a humble man who practiced his profession and faith faithfully. Rest in Peace.

“The circle narrows,” mourns Afrikaner poet and former anti-apartheid activist, Breyten Breytenbach in an essay for Harper’s Magazine:

The grandmother of a close friend—she’s as old as [Mandela]—pleads with her robbers not to be sexually violated, she even claims to be infected with a communicable disease; the nephew of a fellow writer is shot in the face, killed in his own house by a night intruder whom he mistook for a rat; the son of my eldest brother is stabbed in a parking lot outside a restaurant, the blade pierces a lung, the police never turn up, he is saved because his companion calls her boyfriend all the way in Australia by cell phone and he could summon a nurse he happens to know in Johannesburg. (The woman is on a first visit to the country; she leaves the next day and swears never to return.)⁶

This writer and her immediate family, presciently, left South Africa in 1995, shortly after the white minority ceded power to a black majority. A year prior, we had voted in South Africa’s first democratic election. In 1990, I’d been on the Grand Parade in Cape Town, among a crowd of thousands, to witness Nelson Mandela’s release after twenty-seven years in prison (it was a riot, literally). In previous decades my father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, had been a well-known anti-apartheid activist. With him I attended the inauguration of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and met and took afternoon tea with the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall.

When we departed, South Africa was still a country with a space program (on which my husband Sean Mercer worked), gleaming skyscrapers, and department stores that rivaled Macy’s. The Central Business District in Johannesburg bustled. Crime was controlled, or at least confined. When mobs stoned cars en route to the D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town (geographical names across the country have since been changed to expunge Afrikaner history), a tough and competent police force sprung into action. An equally impressive Western system of Roman-Dutch law, and a relatively independent judiciary, dished out just deserts in response to the ubiquitous “muti-murders” (African ritual killing, including human sacrifice in Venda⁷), and to“necklacing” (the more contemporary African custom of placing a diesel-doused tire around a putative offender’s neck and igniting it). Or to the rape of babies. To borrow from Gen. Sir Charles Napier: Before 1994, when African men raped infants because they considered the “practice” a traditional salve for AIDS, South African policemen followed through with their custom: they tied a rope around the rapist’s neck and hung him. “Afrikaner rule,” the noted liberal historian Hermann Giliomee has observed, “was characterized by an obsession with imposing restrictions through proper legislation and with due process in executing these laws … The 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.”⁸

It goes without saying that a condemnation of the New South Africa is not an affirmation of the Old. More crucially, realism is not racism. The undeniable reality is that, a decade since this abrupt transfer of power, the rule of the demos has turned a once-prosperous, if politically problematic, place into a lawless ramshackle. The BBC World’s John Simpson recently—and reluctantly—disclosed that South Africa jostles with Iraq and Colombia⁹ for the title of most violent country in the world. So violent is the “free” South Africa that, for a period, the freewheeling ANC government imposed an official blackout on national crime statistics. It now releases them once yearly.

The surfeit of crime statistics, say those who chronicle crime, can be misleading because “crime definitions vary from one country to the next.” This is an argument that the African National Congress’ grotesquely mistitled Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula often seizes upon, to conceal the blood-soaked facts of violent crime in his country. Following its chief’s example, the South African Police Service (SAPS) has developed an agile facility with misleading statistical comparisons. To diminish crime under its jurisdiction, the SAPS is fond of drawing skewed comparisons between low-crime spots in South Africa and high-crime spots in otherwise low-crime countries.

Juxtaposing the incidence of murder in low-crime Pretoria and high-crime Washington, D.C (29.1 per 100,000 inhabitants¹⁰) is an example of the practice. The same sources like to point to the incidence of rape in Canada: evidently one of the highest per capita in the world, having surpassed both the U.S. and Zimbabwe.¹¹ But the only way First World Canada—with its 1.77 murders per 100,000 population¹²—can lay claim to this dubious distinction is by legally redefining rape. The cause of this is the baleful influence of feminist Catharine Mackinnon on American and Canadian jurisprudence. The consequence of it is that a woman can seek and find in the law a legal remedy to the regret or rage experienced following an impromptu romp between the sheets.

The redefining of rape in American and Canadian law is the product of the collaboration between advocacy groups and feminist stakeholders, and has been exposed by John Fekete in Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising. Undergirding this sub-science are statistically promiscuous surveys such as Statistics Canada’s 1993 “Violence Against Women” survey, and its American equivalent. As Professor Fekete has demonstrated, this voodoo consists of single-sex surveys with no input from men; is fraught with problems of unrepresentative sampling, lack of corroboration, a reliance on anecdotes, and a use of over-inclusive survey questions. Suffice it to say that, contra North America, in South Africa, where a rape occurs every twenty-six seconds,¹³ the crime of rape is unlikely to mean mere sexual harassment or sexual disappointment. Very many South African young men consider rape a form of recreation, their rapacity even finding expression in the vocabulary: gang rape is jocularly referred to as “jackrolling.”¹⁴ Ironically, the provincial chauvinism of the cloistered gender feminists of the West has helped trivialize the plight of their African sisters.

Ultimately, murder in all its horrible finality cannot be statistically finessed. This is why, in proportion to population size, it is the best gauge of the precariousness or safety of life in a given society. The U.S. Bureau of Justice concurs: “Homicide is a fairly reliable barometer of all violent crime.”¹⁵

Let us, then, survey homicide statistics for South Africa. They are easy to understand, if hard to digest.

Between April 2004 and March 2005, 18,793 people were murdered in South Africa (population 43 million). In comparison, the “high-crime” United States (population 299,398,000¹⁶ ) suffered 16,740 murders. Put differently, South Africa has sixty homicides per 100,000 people; the US approximately six.¹⁷ The European Union (population 728 million) has approximately 1.59 homicides per 100,000 per year.¹⁸ On average, in South Africa, sixty-five people are murdered every day, three times that number are raped; and 300 are violently attacked and robbed daily.¹⁹

These official figures, say other researches, are more serendipity than science.

According to Robert McCafferty of the United Christian Action, Interpol had pegged South Africa’s murder rate at “114.8 murders per 100,000 inhabitants,”²⁰ roughly double those released by the South African Police Service (SAPS). In 1995 and 1996, Interpol counted 54,298 annual homicides to the SAPS’s 26,883. While slightly more optimistic, the South African Medical Research Council (MRC) corroborated the trend Interpol uncovered. It reported approximately a third more murders in South Africa than the official police statistics reveal,”²¹ tallying an average of eighty-nine daily deaths, or 32,000 a year. A discrepancy of over 10,000 murders is, shall we say, more than a margin of error.

McCafferty, whose data is a distillation of information from criminology journals, the SAPS, Crime Information Analysis Centre (CIAC), Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Interpol websites, and “the major newspapers on crime statistics and related issues,” concluded that “what sets South Africa’s crime apart from basically every other country on earth is the incredibly high levels of violent crime”—murder, attempted murder, serious and common assaults, rape, and all categories of robbery: that is, robbery with aggravating circumstances, armed robbery, and car hijacking.

During his term of office, former president Thabo Mbeki wielded the “racist” ad hominem deftly. Mbeki ignored the BBC’s otherwise incontinent exhilaration about everything else South African, choosing instead to frame as racism the network’s newfound realism vis-à-vis crime.²² Mbeki countered a BBC crime exposé by asserting that “nobody can show that the overwhelming majority of the 40-50 million South Africans think that crime is out of control. Nobody can, because it’s not true.”²³ It so happens that South Africans are fed up (“gatvol” in Afrikaans) with crime, as is evident from the petitions, protests and vigils staged across the brutalized country. Asked about their feelings of safety compared to 1994, a majority (seventy percent) of South Africans surveyed by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in 2001 answered that South Africa was “not safer than it was before 1994.”²⁴ Even if Mbeki had been able to get most South Africans to concede that crime was insignificant, that would not settle the matter. Unfortunately for Mr. Mbeki, truth is not adjudicated by majority vote.

To most Western observers, the new dispensation in this writer’s old home engenders unconditional praise the world over. For them, not knowing whether you’ll survive the day is but a spot of bother. Conservative columnists are as prone as anyone else to be nonchalant about the present situation. One of them described South Africa as “the greatest triumph of chatter over machine-gun clatter. It’s not perfect, and crime is at an all-time high in South African cities, but at least the massacres are a thing of the past and life goes on much better than before.” If by “massacres” our correspondent meant Sharpeville, where in 1960, panic-stricken policemen of the apartheid regime shot dead sixty-nine black demonstrators, why, in democratic South Africa that’s the daily carnage quota.

Few realize that during the decades of the apartheid regime a few hundred Africans in total perished as a direct and indirect consequence of police brutality. A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the death toll in “free” South Africa, where hundreds of Africans, white and black, perish weekly. Nor did apartheid’s casualties come close to the ANC’s during “the armed struggle.” Freedom’s forebears “necklaced” 400 non-combatants, and murdered hundreds more—Zulu opposition, state informers and witnesses, rural headmen, urban councilors, “and others perceived to be collaborators of the system or enemies of the ANC.”²⁵ “Between 1976 and 1994,” writes Giliomee, “state agents deliberately killed between two hundred and three hundred people active in the struggle against the state.”²⁶ It takes the free agents of democratic Azania only five days to deliberately kill as many of their fellow citizens.

Still fewer realize that during the decades of the repressive—and reprehensible—apartheid regime, which ended officially in 1994, crime rates in South Africa were overall much lower; in whites-only areas they were not dissimilar to those in other Western countries. McCafferty, whose brief it was to compare “the number of murders in the ‘Old South Africa’ (under apartheid) … to the ‘New South Africa’ (post 1994),”²⁷ counted 309,583 murders over the forty-four years spanning 1950 to 1993. In the first eight years of the “new democratic dispensation,” 193,649 people were murdered. In other words, under apartheid, on average, 7,036 people were murdered each year, a small number compared to the carnage under the ANCniks: 24,206 annually. The latter is the South Africa Police Service’s low-ball estimation, which both Interpol and the South African Medical Research Council have disputed.

The ANC government now claims that matters have improved and that it is winning the war on violent crime. The Democratic Alliance disputes this. The tiny, tokenistic, opposition to the “all-powerful black majority party” puts the ostensible drop in crime down to the fact that fifty-one percent of victims no longer bothers to report crime, given that corruption is rife, arrests rare, and prosecutions and convictions still rarer.²⁸ Recent findings suggest that the SAPS’s optimistic, homicide statistics are not to be believed. As reported by The Economist, the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation has confirmed the existence of a “pervasive pattern of (police) manipulation of statistic.” By an amazing coincidence, the reported decline in violent crime and the government’s 2004 announcement of its intention to cut such crime have dovetailed.

Doctored or diminished, the SAPS’s statistics spanning 2006 to 2007 reveal that 19,202²⁹ South African lives were lost (population 43,786,115³⁰ ) compared to the United States’ 16,574³¹ (population 303,824,646³²). A yearly average of 19,202 murders (under democracy) still constitutes almost three times as many as 7,036 annual murders (under apartheid). Clearly, the era of apartheid remains a Golden Age with respect to the sanctity of life, for blacks and whites alike.

McCafferty’s numbers notwithstanding, such an unsettling claim is usually met with this brittle argument: Murders are not more numerous under majority rule, but merely more evenly spread. Let us celebrate, for democracy has desegregated crime! In his searing 1986 critique of apartheid, Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black And White, Joseph Lelyveld (a former New York Times editor) surmised: “Apartheid [ensured] that the victims of most black violence [were] black and the victims of most white violence white.”³³ At the time, Lelyveld avoided further damaging deductions, such as that apartheid separated the high-crime from the low-crime communities. The Group Areas Act of 1950, the basic statute that had guaranteed absolute residential segregation under apartheid,³⁴ served to confine crime to the black townships. Ditto influx control laws: “Africans who had not established a claim to be in urban areas were given only seventy-two hours in towns and cities to find work and were compelled to register at a government labor bureau for this purpose.”³⁵ Let us not beat about the bush; violent crime in the New South Africa is predominantly black on black and black on white. Since the demise of apartheid, it has both increased and spread from slum to suburb. However, even assuming that violent crime has not increased but is only more “equitably” distributed, why is that good or even tolerable? Does parity in the probability of being victimized constitute progress? Does the fact that whites are now as likely as—data³⁶ suggest more likely than—blacks to be slain herald a more just dispensation? An answer in the affirmative evinces a quest for vengeance, not fairness.

While it is true that “there is nothing new about hideous, sadistic, violent crime in SA,”³⁷ the Afrikaner National Party, for all its faults, kept the lid on the cauldron of depravity now bubbling over. At the time, Lelyveld, and left-liberals like him, inveighed against the heavily armed “plainclothes white security cops who cruise[d] around the major black townships in big Fords and Datsuns.”³⁸ But, among the many demonstrators forever punching the air, most distinguished between “ordinary (good) police and riot (bad) police.” Or so wrote the late Fredrik van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the former anti-apartheid opposition, the Progressive Federal Party (PFP). In The Last White Parliament, Slabbert attests that “Without exception, [blacks wanted] ordinary police to remain in the townships and help with [much needed] crime prevention.”³⁹

Dubbed the father of apartheid, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd was certainly “[k]eenly interested in urban security.” To that end, “township streets were purposely wide so police could control movement easily.”⁴⁰ Indubitably, law and order in the townships of Old South Africa was less a function of the Boer’s brotherly love for the Bantu than of his orderly habits. But it was subject to investigation by a relatively independent judiciary; reports tabled often finding against the police. For example, Justice Kannemeyer’s report (which was debated in parliament) of the response to the riots that erupted in 1985 was, to quote the headline in the Johannesburg-based Star,at the time, a “‘devastating indictment’ of police.”⁴¹ The only “devastating indictment” of Jacob Zuma’s police force issued these days emanates from outside the government and well beyond its vengeful reach. (Try as I did, I was unable to get white policemen and women—old hands working deep in the guts of the reconstructed SAPS—to talk about the “workplace”: they were afraid.) The ANC’s response to a police force shot through with corruption has been the dissolution of the crack, anti-corruption unit known as the “Scorpions.”⁴²

The Afrikaner’s quaint and quintessentially Western practices are etched vividly in journalist Keith Richburg’s Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. Just before Afrikaners “surrendered without defeat,”⁴³ Richburg, Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post from 1991 to 1994, journeyed to South Africa from the killing fields to the north, on assignment. In the course of his duties, he filed a report from the scene of a tribally motivated killing near Johannesburg. Zulu and Xhosa were embroiled in pre-elections strife. Twelve people had been gunned down. A small massacre by African standards—at least, so thought Richburg, who has described Africa as a continent where everywhere black bodies are stacked up like firewood. Imagine his astonishment when “the police, mostly officious-looking white officers with ruddy complexions—came and did what you might expect police to do in any Midwestern American city where a crime has occurred. They cordoned off the area with police tape. They marked the spots on the ground where the victims had fallen.”⁴⁴ Topping this CSI-worthy protocol was a statement to the press “promising a ‘full investigation.’” This civilized routine Richburg characterized as utterly misplaced on a continent where nobody counts the bodies; and where chasing down and charging a man with murder is like “handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”⁴⁵

The Old South Africa was the odd man out in Africa. Maligned by Joseph Lelyveld, the Afrikaner’s presence in high-crime localities was why a semblance of law and order was maintained and common criminals pursued and prosecuted to the benefit of all.

Little wonder then that “pollsters note a small but growing number of blacks experiencing ‘apartheid nostalgia.’ ‘It’s not that they want to return to apartheid, but in retrospect it was a time when things worked better,’” says Robert Mattes, co-director of the Afrobarometer poll.⁴⁶ That’s an understatement. Certainly back then soccer moms and dads were never shaken down during a match—a common occurrence these days. Back then The Christian Science Monitor’s South African correspondent did not compose his dispatches from behind “ten-foot walls, electric fencing, burglar bars,” and within reach of “at least one panic button wired directly to an armed-response team.”⁴⁷ Back then shopkeepers were not compelled to cower behind iron bars, as they do now. Gun battles were unheard of on the streets of South Africa’s major metropolises, some of which have come to resemble Mogadishu, pavements strewn with garbage, skyscrapers overrun by squatters, and landmarks vandalized beyond recognition. To wit, the Impala Stampede, a “giant bronze statue that used to adorn the entrance to Anglo American’s offices, was torn down and destroyed by the rampaging gangs.”⁴⁸

In the New South Africa, rising prices at the pump corresponded to a rising body count, as petrol attendants are targeted for crude.⁴⁹ An attendant trend did not accompany the steep gas prices during the 1987 oil embargo against South Africa. This writer would safely fill the tank and travel to Hillbrow to lunch with her late grandfather. Hillbrow was then a hip, cosmopolitan, Johannesburg suburb. Today it is South Africa’s Harlem, before gentrification. Equally uneventful for this writer was the walk to work from the Eloff street bus terminal in Johannesburg’s city center, where the magnificent five-star Carlton Hotel was open for business. It closed in 1997; the safety of the guests could no longer be guaranteed. The green glass Garden Court Hotel and the Great Synagogue have suffered the same fate.⁵⁰ Fearing for its safety, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, once “the tenth largest in the world,”⁵¹ joined the exodus from the Johannesburg Central Business District (CBD) to the suburb of Sandton.

Defiantly and heroically, a consortium called “Business Against Crime” (BAC) has undertaken to beat back the dirt and decay that had blanketed Johannesburg’s CBD. These intrepid entrepreneurs aim to restore the “mothballed” monuments, reopen boarded-up buildings, and replace brothels and shebeens with legitimate businesses. These are not guys with guns: The BAC’s frontal assault on crime relies on a system of closed-circuit TV cameras! The Economist has proclaimed this “public-private partnership” a success. At the same time, the magazine has conceded that conviction rates in South Africa still hover at a “dismal” eight percent and have only just begun to inch upward.⁵²

Optimism aside, it is hard to see how the prospects of being caught on camera would deter a hardcore criminal for long since he has a ninety percent chance of getting away with murder. Considering that the country now has one of the world’s highest murder rates and lowest conviction rates, a South Africa thug can safely pursue his vocation without fearing the consequences, confirms criminologist Neels Moolman.”⁵³ Since freedom, the SAPS, a reconstructed, racially “representative” force, has relaxed the pursuit of criminals. Besides, the democratic South Africa’s criminal class is unlikely to flee before the regiments of an ill-trained, illiterate and corrupt outfit. If anything, evidence abounds of cooperation between criminals and cops, starting at the top. Jackie Selebi, the SAPS’s national police commissioner is a bent and brutal man who’s been linked to the mob⁵⁴ (and was eventually dismissed by President Zuma).

The swirl of statistics tends to conceal the casualties of crime. One such casualty is Baby Tshepang. “Tshepang” means “have hope.” If Tshepang has hope it is against all odds, for she was raped and sodomized, in 2001, when nine months old. The culprit was a twenty-three-year-old man—Tshepang’s sixteen-year-old mother’s former lover. Rape of infants in South Africa has reached “epidemic proportions,” writes Linda M. Richler in the Child Abuse Review, and “occurs with unacceptably high frequency.”⁵⁵ Roughly ten percent of all rapes in the country—52,425 a year⁵⁶—are committed against children under three years of age. In the span of the two months following Baby Tshepang’s rape, another five children under twelve months of age were raped. In two of the cases, media reports suggested the child’s caregivers might have accepted money for making the child available to the perpetrator.⁵⁷

Sexperts and sociologists have a habit of sanitizing savagery with odd-ball pseudoscientific assertions: “To penetrate the vagina of a small child,” writes Richler ponderously, “the perpetrator must first create a common channel between the vagina and anal canal by forced insertion of an implement.”⁵⁸ In the gaping wound that was Baby Tshepang before she was sewn back together, Richler has detected a technique where there was only brute, libidinal force. She offers no forensic evidence for her claim. Richler’s less iffy inference has it that this nauseating crime wave may well be rooted in the “virgin cleansing myth”—the idea that sex with a virgin cures HIV/AIDS and offers protection against acquiring the virus. (Seen in the context of the late Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msiming’s espousal of beetroot, garlic and lemon as antidotes for AIDS,⁵⁹ this makes perfect sense.) Oddly enough, when epidemiologists speak of mapping the spread of the epidemic in a country in which one in five adults is infected,⁶⁰ they are somehow parted from their critical faculties, rarely mentioning epidemic sexual violence as a vector of transmission.

Thankfully, for the victims, political correctness doesn’t plague the private, entrepreneurial sector. “The connection between violent crime and AIDS in South Africa was underscored by ‘rape insurance’ policies launched in November 1999,” write Dave Kopel and Drs. Paul Gallant and Joanne Eisen of the Independence Institute. LifeSense, a medical benefits organization underwritten by Lloyds of London, has been offering a “Rape Care” package to rape victims which “provides a top-up policy should the rape survivor become HIV-positive as a result of rape. Dr. Angus Rowe, a spokesperson from LifeSense, stated that ‘in an environment where rape is so pervasive we need to extend protections to rape survivors in the families.’ Rape Care policy holders will have access to counseling and medical treatment, ‘an anti-retroviral starter pack, the home delivery of the full 28-day anti-retroviral treatment, and HIV testing for one year.’”⁶¹ Had the private sector not similarly—and speedily—moved to palliate the South African people’s desperate need for protection against criminals, who knows how many more would be ravished or killed? There are now 400,000 “guardian angels” in private security toiling to make up for the state’s failure to protect its citizens.⁶²

One doesn’t have to be an HIV/AIDS counselor to conclude that endemic sexual violence increases the spread of the disease. It so happens that this writer was such a counselor at the Cape Town chapter of ATIC, the AIDS Training, Information and Counseling Centre. The African women I counseled there were educated and well turned out, yet they giggled like girls when prophylactics were mentioned. African patriarchs disdain protection, they told me, coyly cupping their mouths and laughing—at me. They were, however, deadly serious. For these women, insisting on your, “like, reproductive freedoms”—uttered in staccato, tart tones, indigenous to North America—meant risking the wrath of quick-fisted husbands. At the time, the counseling model used at ATIC was developed for gay American men. Based on my experience with these urban, urbane women, I recommended—and was commended for—changing the laughable, gay-centric guidelines. If sophisticated African women were afraid to suggest sheaths to their men, all the more so their rural, uneducated sisters.

One tenet of the gay-centric counseling model applies to Africa in spades: the reality of rutting, rampant sex. When the puritanical apartheid government “finally stirred into action, launching AIDS education and prevention programs, it met considerable resistance,”⁶³ attests historian Martin Meredith. Anti-apartheid activists accused the government of wanting to prevent Africans from having promiscuous sex so as to retard population growth and “check the advance of African liberation.” AIDS, they joked, stood for “Afrikaner Invention to Deprive us of Sex.”⁶⁴ Although Mbeki persisted in the belief that AIDS is a conspiracy—Big Pharma having replaced the Afrikaner as culprit—there isn’t a corner in post-apartheid South Africa that has not been missionized by AIDS educators. Still, infection rates remain, for the most, unaffected. Rocker Bono, the warbling modern father of foreign aid, has praised Africans for being a “rare and spirited people.” Sadly, if the spirit didn’t move them in so many wild ways, rates of infection in Southern Africa might not have reached twenty to 33.7 percent of the adult population. Africans are having unprotected sex irrespective of the mortal dangers of AIDS, a phenomenon which Austrian economists might explain with reference to time preference rates. In this case, time preference rates signify the degree to which different people will discount the future in favor of immediate gratification. Time orientation, agrees Lawrence E. Harrison, an associate at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, is a central value in progressive as opposed to static cultures.⁶⁵ Educational efforts aside, the number of people infected in Southern Africa bespeaks a high time preference: the habit of consistently risking the future for fleeting fun. Put it this way: The Catholic Church’s consecration of condoms will likely have the same overall effect on African AIDS infection rates as its condemnation of sex outside marriage.

Let us not forget these child victims. Certainly Breyten Breytenbach does not. Breytenbach, the exiled Afrikaner poet “who served seven years in South African prisons for his anti-apartheid activities,”⁶⁶ invokes for our remembrance South Africa’s children at large, and Meisi Majola’s two-year-old boy in particular. The tot was snatched from his home and his genitals mutilated. “To be used as muti…a potency potion.” Little Courtney Ellerbeck’s broken body mirrors the unremitting violence inflicted on the most innocent members of South African society. The child hobbles about cheerfully with the aid of calipers with lockable knee joints, metal hips, and a walker. She is the country’s youngest crime victim. Courtney was born a paraplegic after being shot in utero by a hijacker.⁶⁷

Because the ANC disregards the importance of private property and public order and the remedial value of punitive justice, innocent victims of crime often defend themselves in their own homes on pain of imprisonment. The Amendments to the Criminal Procedure Act demand that, in the course of adjudicating cases of “private defense,” the right to life (the aggressor’s) and the right to property (the non-aggressor’s) be properly balanced. “Before you can act in self-defense,” remonstrates Anton du Plessis of the Institute for Security Studies, “the attack against you should have commenced, or at least be imminent. For example, if the thief pulls out a firearm and aims in your direction, [only] then you would be justified in using lethal force to protect your life.”⁶⁸ In a country where, as columnist Barry Ronge noted, husbands and children are routinely forced to watch while mothers are raped, victims must now “calibrate the extent of the menace” before defending loved ones. Why, even for giving chase, victims may now be prosecuted as aggressors.

Between a rock and a hard place, to use that cliché of in-betweenness, is where Jaco Swart found himself when confronted at two o’clock in the morning with two intruders in his homestead. The twenty-six-year-old Swart hails from Delareyville, a small farming community in South Africa’s northwest. This town is named for General Koos de la Rey, hero of the Boer War. Young Swart is a hero too. But for choosing to defend home and hearth in the New South Africa, he was arrested and charged with murder and attempted murder. Swart had dispatched the one assailant and injured the other with a licensed firearm. Not only can self-defense be an offense in the new constitutional democracy, but it may be considered racist when practiced by whites. COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, under whose auspices, presumably, home invaders fall, accused Swart of racism.⁶⁹

The sixteen-year-old son of Len Parkin of Pretoria was awoken at three in the morning by two armed men, and instructed to lead them to where his parents slept. The boy complied. The criminals shot his father. Despite his injuries, Len Parkin seized his handgun and managed to hasten the descent into hell of the one assailant. An opprobrious police inspector, one Paul Ramaloko, said: “Because Parkin is in hospital, he hasn’t been arrested. The public prosecutor will now decide whether the victim was using his firearm in self-defense or not.”⁷⁰

An elderly couple—he seventy-seven, she seventy-three—may spend the rest of their days in jail for attempted murder. The plucky pair had overpowered an intruder who had grabbed their pistol and was poised to pounce.⁷¹ Not far from where these heroes reside live my in-laws. I used to rest easier knowing that if a thug entered their Western Cape home, my elderly mother in-law could easily dispatch him with her six-round .32 Special. It was comforting to know that in the unlikely event of her requiring further firepower, my father-in-law could weigh in with his .38 Special. But with the advent of the Firearm Control Act of 2000 (FCA)—whose constitutionality is currently being challenged—the Safety and Security Minister unveiled “an arsenal” of stricter gun-control laws, decreeing that “gun-toting cowboys”⁷² such as my elderly mother and father in-law would no longer be tolerated, and “non-threatening” home invaders would no longer face on-the-spot justice. Should my in-laws awaken to find a malefactor beating down the door, they shall have to hold their fire and attempt to ascertain his manifestly acquisitive—and almost certainly murderous—motives.

Lucky are the outlaws in the New South Africa. Less lucky are the in-laws.Their licenses, “granted under the old Arms and Ammunition Act,” were supposed to be valid for life and mandatory renewal unconstitutional.”⁷³ Now, they, and each of South Africa’s three million legal gun owners, have been required, under the FCA, to re-apply for permits. If she wishes to keep her handgun, my mother-in-law will have to trundle to the only licensed gun seller in the region and, for a fat fee, acquire registration forms and a booklet, which she must study and prepare to be examined on. Once she passes the exam, she will head to the police station, where again, she will be fleeced and forced to fill in more forms that’ll be sent to the capital. There, an ANC official will decide whether she truly needs a handgun for “self-defense.” This process can take years. Kopel, Gallant and Eisen predicted that Mbeki’s FCA would outlaw ninety percent of lawfully owned firearms currently in civilian hands.⁷⁴ Preliminary reports appear to substantiate their estimate with respect to new applicants as well.⁷⁵

In a country where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered, or all of the above, the reasons the revamped SAPS gives for denying an application are: a “lack of motivation,” “your husband can protect you,” “the police will protect you,” “you are too young.”⁷⁶ Talk about an “eff-off” attitude! The applicant must also prepare for a house call from their protectors for the purpose of inspecting the safety deposit box. Since my seventy nine-year-old infirm mother-in-law has forfeited the pleasure of this procedure—my father-in-law will soldier on—she must surrender her handgun to the police. In this way it can be sold by the notoriously corrupt officers of the law to other industrious trade union workers. For giving up her gun, she will get no official receipt or acknowledgment. If the thing is used in a crime, she’s liable. Ditto if she tampers with the mechanism to render it unusable.

As would increasingly be the case, there are those who dismiss as “right-wing scaremongering” any claim that the right to self-defense is seriously circumscribed in a country that needs it more than any other. A case in point is Professor Anthony Minnaar of the Department of Security Risk Management at the University of South Africa (UNISA), my alma mater. Placing “the perpetrator” in irons following a “shooting” in said “perpetrator’s” home, and irrespective of the circumstances, is standard—and proper—police practice,^[*] maintains Minnaar. In case you wonder, “the perpetrator” in Minnaar’s nomenclature is the proper term for a victorious victim of an assault. Besides, admonishes Minnaar, charges are, for the most, dropped. Or if the charges are imposed, they are commuted to a lesser charge such as culpable homicide with a self-defense plea. Beleaguered South Africans, however, need fewer Minnaars and more laws that exempt them from any criminal or civil liability if they are forced to use deadly force in self-defense.

Worlds away from South Africa, Americans have also been subjected to a state-orchestrated volcanic change in their society, the consequence of the unchecked flow of millions of Third World illegal immigrants into the country. As Heather Mac Donald, scholar at the Manhattan Institute, has documented in detail, the sturdy American castle is being catapulted by criminal aliens, although not yet sufficiently so as to make Americans fret over the erosion of the Castle Doctrine. However, as a number of landmark cases would suggest,“Make My Day Laws”⁷⁷—a favored American sobriquet for Castle Laws inspired by the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry character—will become more important commensurate with rapidly changing demographics and the attendant spike in crime.⁷⁸

A man’s home is not mere property—it is his castle. In defending his home, an individual is defending a safe haven for his most cherished belongings: his person and his beloved. Someone eager to violate another’s inner sanctum will be more than willing to violate the occupant. This applies in spades to South Africa, where life is snuffed out for a cell phone or for the simple pleasure of it, and where home invasions are on the yearly rise, and frequently culminate in torture, rape and murder.⁷⁹ Confronted with a home invader, there’s precious little a homeowner can do to divine the intentions of the intruder. This is the distinctively American subtext of the Castle Doctrine, which is unevenly applied across the U.S., despite the fact that the Second Amendment to the American Constitution affirms a natural right to self-defense (recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Heller vs. The District of Columbia).

Not that you’d know it, but South Africans have a right to live free of all forms of violence, “public” or “private” in origin.⁸⁰ Section 12 of their progressive Constitution protects the “Freedom and Security of the Person.” Clearly “progressive” doesn’t necessarily spell progress: Nowhere does this wordy but worthless document state whether South Africans may actually defend this most precious right. A right that can’t be defended is a right in name only—implicit in the right to life is the right to self-defense. The South African Constitution is descriptive, not prescriptive—full of pitch-perfect verbal obesities that provide little by way of legal recourse for the likes of Messrs Parkin, Swart and all the other good guys with guns.

Whites have been told to accept their lot. Or “[to] continue to whinge until blue in the face,” as Charles Nqakula counseled those who carp about crime.¹²⁰ Securing subjects in their lives and property has not been a priority for the ANC. South African historian Rodney Warwick believes that the state’s stout indifference does not exist in a void. Ditto the steady, anti-white venom the ANC cobra-head keeps spitting. “The de facto situation is that whites are under criminal siege explicitly because of their ‘race,’” he writes in the Cape Argus. “The black criminal collective consciousness understands whites are now ‘historical fair game.’”¹²¹ Warwick sees the physical vulnerability of white South Africans as flowing from a confluence of historical antecedents that have placed them in a uniquely precarious position. “The white minority,” he writes, “surrendered [its] political dominance for non-racial constitutional safeguards.”¹²² By foreswearing control over the state apparatus, whites ceded mastery over their destiny, vesting their existential survival in a political dispensation: a liberal democracy. In a needlessly optimistic assumption, whites imagined blacks too would be bound by the same political abstractions, and would relinquish race in favor of a constitutional design as an organizing principle in the society they now controlled. Having surrendered without defeat,¹²³ for a tepid peace, Europeans are, moreover, particularly and uniquely vulnerable within this political dispensation because of their history on the continent. Remedial historical revisionism notwithstanding, South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not exactly the product of the people currently dismantling it. Instead, it was the creation of British and Dutch colonists and their descendants. For what they’ve achieved and acquired—and for the sins of apartheid—they are the objects of envy and racial enmity.

A chronicler of Africa, the observations of African-American journalist Keith Richburg agree with Warwick’s. Richburg believes that on the Dark Continent, tribal allegiance trumps political persuasion and envy carries the day. He cites the fate of the Tutsi—an alien, Nilotic African people, who formed a minority in Rwanda and Burundi—among the Hutu who are a Bantu people. The Hutu have always resented the tall, imposing Tutsis, who had dominated them on-and-off since the fifteenth century, and whose facial features the lovely supermodel Iman instantiates. When Hutus picked up machetes to slash to bits nearly a million of their Tutsi neighbors in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, they were, on a deeper level, contends Richburg, “slashing at their own perceived ugliness, as if destroying this thing of beauty, this thing they could never really attain, removing it from the earth forever.”¹²⁴ Are shades of this impulse alive in the savagery inflicted on the European “settlers” of South Africa (and Zimbabwe and the Congo before them)? Who can say for sure? This much I do know: Empowering majorities in Africa has helped, not hindered, the propensity of hostile masses to exact revenge on helpless minorities.