‘Cannibal’s Pot’ is a warning to America

 

“We must end the terribly racist apartheid system in South Africa,” they said.

“We must institute a democratic government based on the will of the majority of South Africans,” they said.

“Let us institute boycotts, international condemnation, and UN sanctions against the Afrikaner racist rulers of South Africa,” they said.

Of course the “they” I’m talking about is the international liberal intellectual community (in their eyes, “liberal” and “intellectual” are synonymous, anyway). Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s they hammered away at the White minority government of South Africa, which had produced an economy that was functioning well and a standard of living that was, even for black South Africans, the highest on the continent. All that mattered not to these limousine liberals; blacks did not have the vote in South Africa, and under “apartheid” (‘separateness” in the Afrikaans language of the Afrikaners) they were subjected to various restrictions and “thou shalt nots,” under laws passed by the country’s parliament (not imposed by some megalomaniacal dictator, as in most sub-Saharan African states), and that was enough to stiffen the spines of these radical liberals in their resolve that apartheid, and White rule, must go.

The Afrikaners, by the way, are White descendants of Dutch, French and German immigrants who first began coming to what was later South Africa in 1652. They extended their frontier north and east gradually, as we extended ours westward, during the 18th and 19th centuries, battling the native tribes for land and, later, the British Army, in the Boer War of 1899-1902. The Boers, as they were called in those days, lost that war, but ultimately gained control of the country, out-voting the other, mostly British, English-speaking Whites whom they out-numbered by about 60% to 40%.

In her stunning portrait of the process that brought down the Afrikaners, and what followed it, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Ilana Mercer sounds a clarion wake-up call that we should heed — or face a future in which we may well wish we HAD paid attention.

Mercer is a White South African herself — Jewish, born and raised there, and resident until 1995, when she and her family reluctantly left the country the year after the last Afrikaner government handed over power to the African National Congress, a crypto-Marxist organization that had fought apartheid for years. Mercer’s father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, was a prominent opponent of apartheid for years, then lived long enough to be appalled at what his country had become after the black majority’s political arm, the ANC, took it over.

Ilana Mercer paints with broad but clever strokes on a sweeping canvas in telling the story of how the ANC, which owes much to Europeans Marx, Engels and Lenin for its philosophy, and very little to African tribal tradition, took over South Africa. The country was admittedly not too democratic, but was nevertheless prosperous and functioned well, under the Afrikaners. The ANC has deliberately driven it into the ditch.

From attacks by black guerrillas on White-owned farmers, mostly Afrikaner, which have killed at least 3,000 people since the ANC took over in 1994; to changes in laws which force White businessmen to take on black partners, but do not require the same of black businessmen; to the attempts to suppress the Africaans language in public institutions; to the infrastructure and government operations which have broken down miserably since 1994, to soaring murder and other crime rates and the tanking economy, Mercer lays about her mercilessly with facts and well-placed humorous touches.

A few samples:

She refers to the Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis in World War II, as “reductio ad inferno of affirmative action for Aryans — a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish advantage.” In this way she compares the Jews, over-achievers who wound up disproportionately represented at the top of the German economic pyramid, with the Afrikaners, who have far out-achieved the black Africans, on average, and probably would have anyway, even without the advantage of apartheid.

Mercer relates how Western intellectuals in the 1980s “… thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of radical Marxists. Anyone suggesting such folly to the wise (British prime minister) Margaret Thatcher risked taking a handbagging. The Iron Lady (Thatcher)  ventured that grooming the ANC as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to ‘living in cloud-cuckoo land.’ ”

Unfortunately, the intellectuals’ judgments were clouded — mainly by ideology that ignored the likely result of “majority rule” — and since 1994 the cuckoos have been in charge, as Mercer relates to her readers, sparing no punches and not hesitating to call a spade, a spade.

As the book moves forward Mercer turns to the current situation of the U.S., where the majority of Americans are White, but are seeing their majority dwindle; where the president is a mixed-race man officially labeled “black”; where political correctness and affirmative action rear their trouble-making heads at every turn; and where to be “black” is to be, in the eyes of many, officially “cool.”

Mercer goes on: “The coolness of being black and the considerable leverage the identity affords those who cultivate it is why celebrities like Obama, Halle Berry, and Alicia Keys have chosen to identify with the fathers who abandoned them, over the (devoted, liberal, White) mothers who reared them.

“Berry, Keys and Obama have embraced this politicized racial identity. To do so is smart because, in America, black is indeed ‘beautiful’ (interior quotes Old Corporal’s, not Mercer’s). “Yet in an America that has placed Obama in the Oval Office, the prevalence of alleged deep-seated racism is still inferred, post haste and post hoc, from the fact that African Americans lag behind Anglo-America in academic achievements and socio-economic status.”

Mercer warns that, given the current trends in America, this could lead to a day when the wishes of a simple majority (of non-Whites, by that time) could be used by the government to simply override those of the former White majority, just as it now does in South Africa. White opponents of apartheid in South Africa had envisioned a multi-racial government under “democracy” there; instead they got one where the wishes of Whites and other non-black South Africans are simply run over and trampled into the dust by the ANC-dominated government.

Mercer gives numerous examples of how Western intellectuals over the past several decades have sucked up to and idolized Nelson Mandela, the former Communist who ran the ANC for many years. She refers to him sneeringly at one point as “St. Mandela.” And she points out how the Western media, once apartheid was dismantled and the White minority effectivel disenfranchised, have pretty much just ignored South Africa and the “cannibal’s pot” it has become.

There were a couple of recent events, though, that brought the world press panting back to South Africa like a pack of faithful dogs. One was the 90-something-years-old Mandela’s recent illness in the hospital, which was monitored as closely as if he had been the Pope, or the world’s reigning rock star (Mandela apparently has now recovered). The other was the recent charge of murder filed against South African Olympic sprint runner Oscar Pistorius, accused of killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Mandela, obviously, is black. Pistorius is a White Afrikaner. Obeisance and reverence from the world press for the one; harping on how the White African has fallen for the other. Is anyone surprised?

I highly recommend Mercer’s remarkable book. It is published by Stairway Press, and is available on www.amazon.com .