A note on Trump granting refugee status to Afrikaner farmers:
There is the normal media churn about making this about Trump, that while he is deporting the proverbial “people of color” he is at the same time allowing white people in.
Well, once again we’re the missing the big picture, and that is this controversy is a public acknowledgment that the South Africa of Nelson Mandela is gone for good.
That South Africa was held as a shining example to the world. Of a country that could reconcile itself to a nasty part of its past and move jointly into a brighter future. All of this symbolized by a man, Mandela, who had spent decades in prison but was willing to be a figure of national unity.
Even the new South African rainbow flag presented that unity.
This was the idea that was sold at the End of History, and Mandela became a man of legend.
South Africa has made moral bank on this interpretation. Last year it brought charges of genocide against Israel in the ICC. South Africa claimed that its past in dealing with Apartheid gave it special moral standing. South Africa was greeted with applause by the usual suspects in the West.
With that standing and the economy it inherited, South Africa claimed to be a leader in the Global South and became a founding member of BRICS.
People in this country ate it up.
The cracks started to show soon after 1994. The African National Congress has held national power since 1994, and as with all dominant-party states corruption began to skyrocket. The economy started to stagnate, and the infrastructure began to crumble.
In January of this year Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law a policy of land expropriation without compensation. The terror war against the Afrikaner farmers began to grow in intensity with murders and the burning of homes.
We could play the usual game of “Mad Libs,” replacing the color of oppressor and victim, and wondering how that would play differently in the usual Establishment circles. We could also point to the very real prospect that South Africa is well on its way to following the same path as Zimbabwe of being a failed state.
This is in fact ethnic cleansing. The Afrikaners have lived in South Africa since the 17th Century. I wonder how many of them will still be there 20 years from now. It probably won’t be mass expulsions, but just enough pressure and violence that the Afrikaners will pick up and move out on their own.
The debate in this country is the usual racial angle, that for many of our supposed social “betters” there is something illegitimate about whites running from black oppression; there is even the dash of talk about settler-colonialism with CNN commentators saying that all Afrikaners should “move back to Germany.” There is the deeper, implied neo-Marxist angle supplied by the Episcopalian Church when it ended future refugee resettlement contracts with the federal government because whites can only be oppressors and never the victims in race wars.
Trump, with the simple action of admitting 59 refugees, has not only exposed all of this hypocrisy but has shone a bring light on the hellhole that South Africa is becoming.
Maybe if AfD gets power in Germany, Weidel could seek indictments in the ICC.