There is a bullshit line coming out of the supporters of the former apartheid regime in South Africa, mostly the Afrikaners (Afrikaners are 60% of South African Whites, and English speaking South Africans are 40%) that South Africa was some sort of an agricultural wonderland under apartheid. After all, they exported crops!
Big deal, Guatemala exported crops from 1954-1970, and it had a poverty rate of 90%. Who cares how much food you are shipping out of the damned country if you can’t even feed your own people?
Of course, this is typical capitalist thinking. When we socialists look at the agricultural sector, we want to see if it is producing enough food to feed the people. If not, if we need to import food. If we are producing food for export, should we instead by cultivating food for our own people. Capitalists care only about agricultural production, and whether or not it is making any money.
Capitalists only care about feeding the people of the nation insofar as the people have the cash to buy their typically overpriced food. If you ain’t got the cash, you can starve. Capitalists never place any weight in making sure that everyone in the country gets enough food to eat, because, really, that’s a money-loser. So the only way populations typically get thoroughly fed is through socialist programs.
Capitalists, of course, care nothing about any of this. They don’t even care about importing food. They’ll import the entire nation’s food supply as long as they can make money off of it.
Capitalist Latin America has long exported almost all of its agricultural produce (think bananas in Latin America) while importing almost all of its food (mostly overpriced canned food from the US). This arrangement is particularly acute in the Caribbean.
This is great for US capitalists. They make a bundle importing the bananas or whatever, and then they turned around and sell Jamaicans overpriced Beefaroni in the can. The average Jamaican ends up spending almost all their spare change for overpriced US canned food, while they could eat homegrown food much cheaper. The Caribbean elites don’t care, as they make money exporting bananas, etc, and then again importing the Raviolis from the US.
No country is ever going to develop that way. But Latin American elites have never tried to develop their countries. They only care about increasing their own wealth, to the detriment of their countrymen. Those two sentences explain the whole history of Latin America since independence. You don’t need to know much more than that.
Hence, it was with a grain of salt that I read White nationalist / Afrikaner and sadly enough, increasingly, the MSN’s version of the South African wonderland. I wondered how were the Blacks faring under this apartheid utopia?
Turns out that in 1973, the malnutrition rate among South Africans was 25% (Patrick 1973). I doubt if it got any better in the next 20 years. Why would it? And presently? The present rate of malnutrition in South Africa is 30% (IUNS 2005). So one can argue that the transition from White to Black rule has possibly increased malnutrition from 25-30%, while the population exploded. That’s lamentable, but it’s hardly the picture portrayed by the anti-ANC liars.
South Africa has many problems with its food supply. First of all, it is arid, and only 13% of the land is really arable in any real way. Beyond that, climate change, which 100% of White nationalists support to the hilt, is starting to cause some serious problems in South African ag. So the White nationalists are cheering on the very environmental catastrophe that is ruining their beloved Afrikaner farmers in South Africa.
The corn crop is declining, in part due to climate change, but also due to depletion of the soil. Soil depletion is complicated, but in part it was caused by Africans having their land taken from them while they were herded onto disastrously overcrowded homelands with marginal soil that become progressively eroded with the decades. South Africans have tried to switch to sorghum, but there have been some problems making the transition.
It is true that the South African White farmers are currently victims of some horrible violence. But much of the crops produced by these farmers go out of the country as exports. In a nation with 30% malnutrition in its young, what’s the point of that?
Paradoxically, in addition to malnutrition, South Africans now deal with overnutrition. ~41% of South Africans are now overweight, including many Blacks – 1/3 of men and 1/2 of women (Sibbel 2004).
The ANC regime, to their credit, is trying to formulate a program to distribute nutrient-fortified bread to all South Africans in order to combat widespread nutritional deficiencies. Of course only a socialist government would ever do such a thing, and no White apartheid regime would have ever done anything like this.
When Tea Party kooks scream about socialism, this is the sort of thing they are protesting: South Africa is trying to make sure it’s children get the calories and nutrition that they need, since capitalism has proven incapable of doing so. Isn’t socialism terrible?
Next time someone breathlessly tells you about how South Africa was the breadbasket of Africa and a food exporter under apartheid but now imports food and is running the risk of major famine under Black rule, take it with a grain of salt.
References
- International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS). September 2005. Malnutrition Task Force Bulletin.Patrick, Doreen. October 18, 1973. Malnutrition: Fact or Fiction.
Sibbel, Greg. 2004. South Africa Malnutrition – The Changes of Urbanization. Kuemper Catholic High School, Iowa.
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“It is true that the South African White farmers are currently victims of some horrible violence.”
According to Dr. Gregory H. Stanton of “Genocide Watch”, South African whites are in the 5th of the 8 stages of genocide. For some reason people scream genocide when it is against people of color but when it is against whites it is glossed over. There was genocide against whites in Haiti, yet nobody seems to want to talk about that.
Genocide against whites in Haiti? I guess if you’d be saying the same thing if blacks owned a bunch of white slaves and the whites had an uprising and killed the people enslaving them. I guess you’d call that genocide right?
Not all the whites in Haiti owned slaves, yet they were all killed. In fact there were blacks who owned slaves in Haiti and in the South pre-civil war.
http://www.therightperspective.org/2009/06/28/whites-sleeping-on-the-edge-of-vesuvius/#comments
A French officer who escaped described the carnage:
“The murder of the whites in detail began at Port-au-Prince in the first days of January [1805], but on the 17th and 18th of March they were finished off en masse. All, without exception, have been massacred, down to the very women and children. . . . A young mulatto named Fifi Pariset ranged the town like a madman searching the houses to kill the little children. Many of the men and women were hewn down by sappers, who hacked off their arms and smashed in their chests. Some were poniarded, others mutilated, others ’passed on the bayonet,’ others disemboweled with knives or sabers, still others stuck like pigs. At the beginning a great number were drowned. The same general massacre has taken place all over the colony, and as I write you these lines I believe there are not twenty whites still alive-and these not for long.”
With this final slaughter, French San Domingo vanished from history and the black nation of Haiti arrived.
Well living under slavery and seeing your sisters, mothers and daughters get raped and sold away like cattle might force you to do extreme things. It’s a shame that your sympathies lie with the oppressor more than the oppressed just because they share your skin color. Even I sympathize with white farmers that get killed in S. Africa. You don’t have to reflexively take the side of your race in all situations.
I cannot support the genocide of the Whites in Haiti. It occurred a full 10 years after the slaves had been freed. Many of the Whites were frightened and wanted to leave, but the Blacks reassured them that everything was ok, and that the Whites were safe. Then they killed them. At the time of the genocide, there were no Black slaves, and the Blacks had been free for 10 years. It was inexcusable.
I hardly agree that S. African Whites are experiencing a genocide. The 40,000 White farmers? Now you may have a better case there. There is no way that the S. African Whites as a group are being genocided. Are they being killed at a higher rate than the local Blacks? Dubious.
I’ve never heard anyone say that South Africa was an agricultural wonderland under apartheid. The only beef regarding agriculture that I’ve recently heard is that 90% of the once functioning farms that have been turned over to blacks under land reform are now producing nothing, creating fear that the country’s already serious issue with malnutrition will become utterly catastrophic if land reform continues to proceed as planned.
Considering its obvious holes that are available for the biased to seize upon, anyone who makes the “apartheid provided bountiful nutrition” argument is either a moron or completely desperate. I certainly wouldn’t rule out either, especially the latter when we consider the 30,000 whites who have been murdered since apartheid fell and your benevolent, peace loving socialist ANC (“kill the farmer, kill the Boer”) came into power.
When a certain ethnic group has clearly been pegged for cleansing by their neighbors in conjunction with the entire white-hating liberal community and its media bitches, it’s only natural that the soon to be cleansed will start pleading their case, trying to convince everyone that they have a vital role to play in humanity. Why not support that plea? All they’re saying is, “hey, you might not like us, but golly, we do have something to offer the world besides the alleged dissemination of chaos and despair that you insist on harping upon.”
As porous as the nutrition argument is, a group saying that they can provide farming to the world is a pretty good argument. Being in the late stages of genocide usually brings about those kooky nationalistic sentiments that you so heartily despise, apparently gathering no clue that nationalism so often arises as an effect in a cause and effect scheme. Cause = killing an ethnicity, effect = the murdered ethnicity trying to woo an unsympathetic brotherhood of man into sparing their lives.
It would also help their cause to point out that in this climate of desperately bad nutrition, the population of South Africa expanded from 5 million in 1900 to 50 million today. With all of its immigration, “freedom,” and sustenance providing “amber waves of grain,” can even America claim that sort of proportional growth?
http://www.meattradenewsdaily.co.uk/news/290310/south_africa____farmers_see_red_over_land_reform_.aspx
Despite my Afrikaner ancestry, I only halfheartedly claim any dog in their fight to stay in South Africa. South Africa looks to me like a perfect example of how ridiculous it is when two completely different cultures try to inhabit the same space. Of course, no one can say that because if they did some people might get the idea that forced multiculturalism is every bit as illogical and dysfunctional in reality as it looks on paper.
I fully support some sort of resolution that would grant all white South Africans asylum in the EU, Australia, the US, and New Zealand. They’re obviously not wanted in South Africa while representing a well-educated labor force that would be an asset to any country. Of course, some old people and others would need to stay behind, but a serious hands-off order in exchange for ridding themselves of the vast majority of the king of the white devils might even work. I’ve never heard of the compassionate, fair-minded ANC issuing an edict to leave white people alone. If they did, I have no doubt that it would seriously alter the lives of whites.
One problem with this plan, besides the aforementioned recognition of multicult failure (then everybody will want to homogenize!), is that once all the Boers are gone, who are the Africans going to blame for their problems? Well, the Boers I suppose, likely for centuries to come. Of course they might point the finger at the sizable and prosperous Jewish community in South Africa. There’s also the large community of Brits who have managed to conveniently escape world-wide blame for the disaster. Will entertainment whores like Bono still use their fame as a platform to work the masses into an anti-white frenzy? I doubt it. While we’re at it, why not blame the Catholic church for running the Huguenots out of France and starting the Afrikaner diaspora? Better yet, let’s just blame religion…blahblahblah…
I think this whole discussion on whether or not Africa was more prosperous and healthy under white rule is absolutely irrelevant.
If any non-white group were to rule my people, I wouldn’t care if our standard of living soared. I wouldn’t care how much our rulers developed our nations.
Regardless of how useful my conquerors were, I and my people would and should do whatever it takes to expel them. We may not be as prosperous or well fed, but we’ll govern ourselves and be free.
Therefore, while Africa may be poorer now than it was under white rule, they at least rule themselves. By expelling the Europeans, Africans ensured that regardless of what happens from now, Africa will remain African.
No group should be deprived of self-determination. Same goes for whites in western nations.
I agree with most of this comment. People need to be free. Blacks need to be free. It’s better to live in a free Black state, whatever its problems, then to live under White rule. This is a basic principle. The notion that Whites must rule over Blacks, even paternalistically, is very White Supremacist and ought to be rejected by all decent people.
Africans have a right to be free. If they fuck up their new freedom, well, so be it. It’s better to be free.
Wow, for someone trying to defend the African blacks, you sure have A LOT of hate towards them. Before you spout off about anything regarding South Africa, did you know that most of South Africa has now been invaded by Nigerians? And we all know how much you LOVE Nigerians:
http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/bad-place-to-visit-wouldnt-want-to-live-there/
Don’t have any hate towards African Blacks. However, I do hate you, woman. And Nigerians. You and Nigerians. Now into the big black boiling pot you go, both of you.
Also, from reading a few of your posts, it has now become 100% crystal clear that you suffer from some sort of mental illness. I feel sorry for you. Your life must be terrible and I can’t imagine that you have anyone in your life who cares whether you’re alive or dead. You need serious counselling.
Ok woman, you’re banned. Now go hop on your broom and fly right off this blog.
Often the white nationalists will bring up Zimbabwe, and the fact, that supposedly it was an agricultural wonderland before Mugabe, and then afterward a starving hell-hole.