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THE COLLAPSE
OF SOUTH AFRICA.
Was Apartheid better? You judge.
A stunning article appeared
in the Daily Mail of October 30th. Written by Ross Benson, reporting
first-hand from Johannesburg, it lifts the lid on the near-collapse of South
Africa since white rule ended a few years ago.
And how may one measure that catastrophe? South Africa's regression towards
primeval barbarism, which Benson details, is quite neatly summarised at the
head of his article: a woman is raped every 28 seconds; qualified doctors
are leaving in droves while beggars and goats have set up home in the marble
foyers of derelict banks. South Africa today has become a nation on the edge
of self-destruction.
Law and order have to all intents and purposes broken down in South Africa.
Any sense of security no longer exists. Says Benson of the countries crime:
Farmers are butchered in their fields. The parks and beaches have become
killing fields. Car hi-jackings with mind-numbing violence are a daily
occurrence. The murder rate is running at 27,000 a year, or 74 a day.
Benson then repeats the horrifying statistics for rape, of which more will
be said. These figures, he comments, breed the kind of fear that has you
leaping at shadows, jumping red lights and climbing out of bed in the middle
of the night to check, yet again, that you have double-locked the doors.
For you to protect your home even halfway adequately, it now seems that you
need to pay an armed response security firm. But whatever you do is never
enough. One black businessman told Benson that he had lost count of the
numbers of his friends who had been mugged.
Everyone is in the firing line. No social gathering can take place without
horror stories being exchanged, but at this point we get some hint of the
censorship that hitherto has been mobilised to keep as much as possible of
the truth from the public gaze (presumably an increasingly difficult task in
the ever-worsening crisis engulfing the country). A white security man
commented on the criminal mayhem, “It's happening to your friends, your
brother, his wife, your sister, your mother, but, it isn't something you
read in the papers or hear about on the television news any more.”
Adds Benson: He carried a gun, but he wasn't fooling himself. He knew it
could happen to him. In Mandela's ˜Rainbow Nation" the dream is running
blood red.
Clearly, South Africa's new ANC (African National Congress) Government is
almost neurotically aware that the legitimacy of its rule is at stake here.
Decline of a city
Nowhere is the situation worse than in Johannesburg, where it is
exemplified in all its worst manifestations. Benson gives a graphic
description of how that unhappy city has declined. Here too, he comes
courageously close to modern-day heresy in giving the White Man his historic
due as the true creator of South Africa's original productive
infra-structure (a subject today largely taboo in a world sold on the
“politically correct” elevation of the non-European at the expense of the
European), and also focusing on the White Man's predicament now.
In a striking characterisation of the city, Benson writes:-
Built on the largest seam of gold ever discovered, this was once the richest
city in Africa, a gleaming steel-and-glass citadel rising out of the brown
ocean of the Veldt, a testament to the economic power and perhaps the innate
character of the white community that built it, but also an example of what
can be achieved by hard work and individual enterprise.
And what now? the skyscrapers are still there, he continues, but the people
who gave them life and prosperity have gone, driven out by hordes of
squatters, beggars and illegal traders who bought Mandela's promise of a
˜better life for all" and demanded instant delivery.
He continues:-
Barbecues made of old oil cans blaze in the marble foyers of what used to be
the headquarters of banks and airlines. There are goats tethered in
hallways. Corrugated iron huts have sprung up on the once manicured lawns.
This is not an environment in which any respectable business person, be they
black or white, can live or work - and most have fled.
Benson next proceeds to a grim and frightening account of what has been very
rapid urban and social decay in the centre of a city in which I once lived
and worked myself. Now, even big business is quitting a metropolis of which
it was once the reason for being there.
The country's flag carrier, South African Airlines, has taken refuge in the
distant outer suburbs. The big mining houses (which practically built the
town) and even the Stock Exchange has followed suit. It is evident they can
hardly remain in a city centre in which it is unsafe for their employees to
travel to and from work. Benson also reports that the Carlton Hotel has
closed and sold all its contents, and the Holiday Inn is a deserted
fortress, its 800 empty rooms protected by reinforced steel shutters. It is
as if the London Hilton, the Dorchester and our other luxury hotels were to
close down because order had totally collapsed, and the city had become
uninhabitable! All this is the tale of one of the world's major cities
crumbling into chaos and dereliction, perhaps one day in the not too distant
future to become as defunct as ancient Babylon.
It is now impossible even to walk in any degree of safety to the South
African Supreme Court building to get one's case heard. The alleyways
leading to it are prowled by muggers who, says Benson, are not open to
appeal. Although the court still goes through the motions of administering
the law, this has, comments Benson, helped ease the backlog of cases in a
country where, as other commentators have noted, “affirmative action" has
led to the colonisation of the bench by magistrates who are illiterate,
incompetent, corrupt and racially and politically biased, who routinely bail
murderers and rapists back into the community to re-offend. Cases are never
dealt with, crime explodes - no law, no order!
Fear at night
No wonder Central Johannesburg is now so much a place to avoid, especially
at night. As dusk falls, says Benson¦
The streets start filling with prostitutes and criminals pushing drugs, and
pills that turn a black skin white - before eventually killing you (if AIDS
hasn't claimed you first; up to 10 per cent of the population is carrying
the virus and three quarters of the entire health budget will soon be
spent on treating the incurable).
"You can hear the occasional sound of gunfire rolling down from Hillbrow, by
cruel coincidence Johannesburg's first integrated neighbourhood.
To many, including me (who once lived in that very high-rise district), this
does not seem so much of a coincidence.
Implicitly referring to the consequences of ˜affirmative action", Benson
describes how the police keep promising to move in and clean the place up;
they never do, and if they did it probably wouldn't make any difference: the
Minister in charge of so-called security recently admitted to parliament
that a policeman is three times more likely to commit a serious crime than
an average member of the public.
Summarising his observations of Johannesburg, Benson comments:
So much for the dream. This is the reality - and it is a shocking one, worse
than I had anticipated. I have seen cities abandoned in war. This is the
first city I have ever seen abandoned to the barbarians in time of peace.
So what of the luckless Whites, themselves abandoned amid this chaos to the
consequences of ˜multiracial democracy"? This, Benson makes clear, is not
only a tale of de facto displacement by conditions of social chaos which
white people find utterly intolerable; this in itself has caused mass white
migrations. In Johannesburg those who opt to remain in proximity to the city
have retreated to its northern outer suburbs. But there is a mass movement,
in effect recoiling on the old pioneer routes, back to Cape Province, the
region of South Africa in which Europeans first touched land. It is
estimated that in five years 80 per cent of the country's Whites will be
clustered towards the Cape.
Even in the Cape there is now a project to establish at least one urban
area, some miles into the interior outside Cape Town, which will in practice
be a fortified settlement. With property priced beyond what most Blacks, and
quite a few poor Whites, could possibly afford, it is, at the size of
Monaco, to be protected by a 33,000-volt fence and patrolled by armed
guards.
But in addition, fearful of lawlessness, the white population is also being
harassed and persecuted by the law. As Benson comments:
“The government has lost the battle of the streets but they have control of
parliament, and they have used their power to pass legislation aimed
specifically at one ethnic group.
Instead of apartheid, there is now ˜affirmative action", whereby Whites are
de jure displaced from their jobs and deprived of their incomes to make way
for Blacks, without regard for the latter's qualifications or abilities, but
purely on racial grounds in order to redress past imbalances.
The result? Air traffic controllers are now being appointed who cannot read
their instruments. According to Commissioner of Police George Fivaz, 30,000
of his officers are functionally illiterate. To supplement the facts
quoted by Benson, one may add the purging of the health services over two
years ago (as also reported at the time in the Daily Mail, by Peter
Younghusband, the paper's then South African correspondent) by the Minister
of Health Nkosazana Zuma, who replaced district surgeons and doctors with
Cuban recruits competent neither in the English language nor as medical
practitioners.
The
South African Defence Force, once the best
in Africa if not the World for its size, is now run down.
Working class whites thrown on
scrapheap
Working class Whites are now being dumped and paid a miserable dole to make
way for Africans. Benson quotes the example of a bus driver sacked after
17 years service. For blue-collar Whites, the economic trap-door has
opened beneath them and dropped them below the poverty line. Unemployed and
never likely to be employed, their children ragged and barefoot, dependent
on benefits of 150 a month each, which is often not paid (the social
services are being re-organised - and there's a sinister phrase! Some
families can no longer afford to feed themselves. These now rely on church
soup kitchens.
Apparently, whilst the violently racist, anti-white politician Patricia De
Lille says that Tony Blair has donated £20,000 to the home for sick children
for which she works, no-one says Benson, is digging in their pockets to help
poor Whites. They are off the end of Mandela's rainbow, without a pot of
gold in sight.
The Government in the new South Africa is intolerant of opposition.
According to white Democratic Party opposition leader Tony Leon, they want
everyone to be “on side". If you criticise them - and we do vigorously -
they call you neo-Nazi racists (a strange epithet considering that Leon is
Jewish). It seems that even Patricia De Lille - whose Pan-Africanist
Party's slogan is One settler [i.e. white person], one bullet - has been
battered by this accusation. The cause? She has been taking the ANC
Government and its Ministers to task for the stupendous corruption whereby
they have turned themselves and their most privileged supporters into a new
class of fat cats (all very typical of post-colonial Africa).
Free school lunches promised by Mandela fail to reach the children; family
allowances are not paid; council houses are so jerry-built they are
virtually uninhabitable. But when these failures come under criticism as
in the case of de Lille the response of the Government under the new
president Mbeki is to threaten her with expulsion from parliament for being
“racist”, and bring in legislation to outlaw criticism of a persons private
life which might impair their dignity. De Lille asks where the money for
these public projects went, and answers into someone's pocket.
There was corruption under South Africa's ancien regime, as there is any
country in the world under any government. But it was never, as it is today,
on a scale sufficient to cause the collapse of whole areas of public
administration.
In a nutshell, then, thanks to Ross Benson, we now have an overview of the
˜New South Africa" from which to take stock. What we see is a picture of
vicious and exploding crime, of chaos verging on anarchy, of corruption and
incompetence way beyond anything in the country's past, and of the racial
harassment and persecution of the white minority - the people who actually
built the country in the first place, and without whom there would have been
literally nothing for their successors to take over and bring to ruin.
It is not a picture which those with their heads screwed on the right way
did not predict, decades ago, as the likely outcome of majority rule -
though such people were then, and would still now be, vilified as
right-wing, racist reactionaries or worse. Such a fate has come upon Ross
Benson, who has been roundly denounced in sections of the South African
media, according to a second article by correspondent David Jones, also
writing from Johannesburg, published in the Mail two weeks after his own.
Backlash
The UK Daily Mail's own letters pages witnessed a similar backlash of
censorious intolerance in the week following the publication of Benson's
report. This response resembled a coordinated ˜write-in" against Benson by
aggrieved ANC supporters in Britain. This was in spite of Jones's
characterisation of his piece as a painfully accurate article about the
demise of post-apartheid South Africa. It is worth
pointing out that neither Benson nor Jones have any record of being
˜racists" or supporters of apartheid - something that ought to be
self-evident, to those in the know, by the fact that they have access to the
columns of a major national newspaper like the Daily Mail.
[As stated at the beginning, this article was published on October 30th.
The year was 1999. Why don't we hear more of these stories from the
mainstream media?? -Editor-]
Source: ELLIOT LAKE News & Views Blog
http://elliotlakenews.wordpress.com/2007/11/2...
For more information visit:
http://www.dienuwesuidafrika.com
The Scourge of the ANC: a history and comment on why the
ANC is failing South Africa especially Afrikanerdom.
Link to web-site- please cut and paste:
http://ancscourge.blogspot.com/
NOTE that although this was first published in
2008, the crime in SA is now far worse and next year South Africa hosts the
FIFA Soccer World Cup tournament. The violent criminals are already
planning their robbery strategies (big knives and guns with no respect for
life or limbs) so anyone thinking of going please heed the warnings on the
British and other government web-sites and make sure that you have adequate
medical and life insurance including repatriation of your body home again.
We are not joking. Check with your travel agent who would be sued for
not advising you correctly. |
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