Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Monday, 9 November 2009
South African Farmer shot without warning
The following is from a report on South Africa's News 24Warwick Antony Dorning, 55, of the farm Adamshurst near Howick’s Mpophomeni area, was shot and killed in his home at about 20:00 on Saturday. His wife, Dawn, was not injured.
Dorning recently took early retirement from his post as Chief of Staff in the Office of the Premier.
Peter Miller, former Finance MEC and a long-time associate and family friend, said two armed men entered the house through a bedroom door onto the verandah that was open for the dog.
Dawn Dorning was in the room and screamed when the two burst in. Dorning, who was in the kitchen getting a bedtime snack, ran to the bedroom where he was shot in the head as he entered, “stone dead, in cold blood, without warning,” said Miller.
The men threatened Dawn and demanded money before moving into the house where they also threatened Dorning’s mother, 85-year-old Noo, who lives in a wing of the main house.
Continue reading here
Hat tip: Dina, Johann, Doberman and Alan
I luv SA
Sunday, 8 November 2009
The Flexibility of the Word
There are certain words which mean different things to different people, and others the meanings of which can be, and are, adapted to suit the purpose and agenda of those speaking them. Love for instance is a word that can mean many things. Through the ages scholars and poets have pondered on the meaning of love, the forms which it can take, and whether it means something different to a man than it does to a woman.It is only really in the twentieth century that the word love, or at least one form of love began to be given an entirely different meaning. For the first time ever there became circumstances where it has become possible for the act of love to be called hatred. In fact, it has not only become possible for certain forms of love to be called hate, but they now routinely are called hatred.
To love one's country, to love one's people and to love one's culture is now to risk allegations of hatred, unless your form of love willingly contemplates and indeed welcomes the surrender and eventual destruction of that which you most cherish.
It is as if by merely wishing to preserve and protect your own kind, you must necessarily also seek to harm and destroy others, and yet it even goes beyond that, were I to declare the wish that every race, culture and people should be preserved, protected and cherished, I would still, in the eyes of many be guilty of hatred were I to then include my own race, culture and people among those to be preserved, protected and cherished like the others.
To claim one's own culture is of equal value and equally worth saving as any other, is now seen as a cruel act of aggression against those with whom you you claim equality.
It was not always like this. To our forefathers, patriotism and the love of one's own race and people were once viewed as being among the highest and most noble forms of love. They are, now to many viewed as the most despised forms of prejudice and bigotry.
Love of ones country, ones culture and ones people is only accepted as anything other than hatred if all three are viewed by the lover as being fluid, inclusive and ultimately disposable.
You and I might might question how it is possible to love what one would willingly, gleefully even, not only see destroyed but actively conspire at its destruction, but, as ever, it is not you or I who determine these things. To those who do make such definitions, it matters not that we hate no one, it is what and who we love which renders us guilty of a hate crime.
Within this parallel universe into which we have somehow tripped, love can be a form of hate, hate a kind of love, and in this respect, both, of course, are racism.
If you thought Love had many meanings, that little word racism has infinitely more.
Who can forget the full bodied black lady in Craig Bodeker's excellent film “A Conversation About Race” who, when challenged to explain what she meant when she insisted she saw racism "around her every day" stated that it revealed itself when white people were “too nice” to her. Hence apparently racists can be simultaneously nasty, and too nice, or, at least, that's what they can be if you are desperate to find them.
In a recent article in the Chicago Sun Times an African American writer called John W Fountain details his objections to being addressed as “Bud”, which, as I understand it is the American equivalent of the Anglo/Australian term “Mate”. To Mr Fountain, oblivious apparently to the fact that in vast swaths of blue collar America just about every male is known as “Bud”, the term is a post-racial form of “boy” used by racist white Americans who can not bring themselves to address a black man as “Sir”. Mr. Fountain's article goes some way to proving that, as many have long suspected that the real meaning of “racism” can be just about anything that an over sensitive black man wants it to be.
It is also possible to be racist in respect of areas where actual race does not even enter into the equation. For instance as we have seen very recently conservationist have been accused of racism for merely seeking to protect a native species from an alien one. Even efforts to control a troublesome pest can be met with similar charges if, as I explained in a recent posting, that pest is not a native one.
Calls for the use of proper language have resulted in cries of racism as have intelligence tests which too many minorities fail to pass.
A sexual preference can be racist, if one only attracted to members of ones own race, at least that is what many young girls are told.
Serious discussion of immigration has been all but taboo in British politics for years, as the subject is infused with potential racism, and anyone expressing anything other than pompom waving delight at the arrival of the annual half million new residents, is instantly tarred with the dreaded “R” word.
Racism is failure to promote some one from an ethnic minority irrespective of merit or lack of same
Racism is mentioning the fact that ethnic minorities commit a disproportionate number of crimes without insisting that crimes, such as gang rape, honour killings and shooting someone because they disrespect you, are the fault of social deprivation and racist white society.
As we have seen in the last week from the outcry following the release of a couple of YouTube videos in which someone with a camera did nothing more than walk through a couple of London boroughs filming what they saw, racism can be no more than revealing the truth.
Of course, ultimately that is the main point isn't it?!
We exist in a world where love can be hate, hate can be love, and racism means anything the establishment disapproves of.
Some may say the world has gone mad, but I resist that assessment, although it may not be entirely sane the new language is viciously calculating, brutally cynical and single of purpose.
Saturday, 7 November 2009
A lone voice?
One man, at least, speaks the truth, click the image, or click here, to play the video at Live Leak_______________
Hat Tip: dabex
Something to Think About
By the Green Arrow Most of these invaders, are (by nature of the journey they have to make across the wastelands of Western Europe to get to the only safe place in the world - Our Country) young men.
Now most of you will already know this but I will say it anyhow. Young men in Afghanistan learn to shoot an AK47 at a very early age, in fact they can shoot before they are even big enough to beat their donkeys and their women.
Now a bit about the "British Army" - sorry Army - The Establishment dropped the British years ago. The Army consisted of 112,900 regular soldiers (including 3,380 Gurkhas) up to October 2009. Of course that number is dropping every day thanks to the illegal war in Afghanistan and many of those soldiers are not all front line troops but support and specialist units.
Now we have to consider the structure of our Army. We will not go up to Division, Corp or Army level but stay with the Battalions and Regiments.
We currently have 18 Infantry Regiments and each Regiment is made up of between 1 and 5 battalions so are of various sizes.
Now coincidentally, the average size of a British Battalion is about 600 men, so as you can see, we are allowing into Our Country, roughly 3 or 4 Regiments of trained, possibly enemy soldiers every year.
Of course to assist in training these invaders before they leave Afghanistan, we send Our Boys out to be targets for them to train on before their real mission - the takeover of the United Kingdom from within.
I will not go on about the numbers of Pakistani British born young men who fly to visit their "Homeland" every year and who receive weapon training before returning to the UK, where they also wait for the balloon to go up.
Just something for you all to think about.
Note: Add to the above the thousands of Somalis, Algerians and other North Africans who enter this country each year, 90% of whom are Muslims, as are the Iraqis, Iranians and other Middle Eastern people, arriving in equally significant numbers, and then remember that the same thing is happening across Europe.
One Knoxville Horror Killer Sentenced To Death—But The Time-Bomb Is Ticking
Lemaricus DavidsonA really horrific anti white hate crime was the 2007 murder of a young white couple called Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian, for which the five black accused are currently being tried separately. the following article by Nicholas Stix of V-Dare addresses the outcome of the latest of these trials, and the only one so far to have resulted in a death sentence, despite strenuous efforts on the part of the judge to protect the defendant, from receiving the ultimate penalty.
One Knoxville Horror Perp Sentenced To Death—But The Time-Bomb Is Ticking
In the second Knoxville Horror murder trial, only one penalty could spell justice for the victims of Lemaricus Davidson, the man who with an indeterminate number of accomplices carjacked, kidnapped, gang-raped, beat, sexually tortured and murdered Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23: Death.
And death was indeed the sentence finally meted out to Davidson on Friday afternoon, by seven male and five female jurors.
Two days earlier, the jury had convicted Davidson on 35 out of 38 state felony charges.
The trial was a defeat for Knox County Criminal Court Judge Richard H. Baumgartner, who had again sought to subvert justice and save Davidson from the executioner’s needle, as he had earlier saved Davidson’s convicted accomplice and half-brother, Letalvis Cobbins.
In Cobbins’ August trial, Judge Baumgartner had abused the jury selection process, in order to rig the sentencing options. Although the victims were both white, and the assailants had committed the atrocity in a jurisdiction that is 88 percent white and only 8.8 percent black, Baumgartner went to 27.5 percent black Davidson County, to fetch a majority-black jury, which he bused in to Knox County. That jury convicted Cobbins of 33 out of 38 felony charges, but sentenced him only to “life without parole”.
In Gomer Pyle’s immortal words, “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”
But in Davidson’s trial, Judge Baumgartner was confounded by the defendant himself, who insisted on being tried before a Knox County jury. (Davidson's defense attorneys wouldn't say why.)Hence, only one juror was black.
Continue reading at V-Dare
Friday, 6 November 2009
The United Kingdom and Multiculturalism: Some Lessons from Eastern Europe
Abstract: Multiculturalism is based on what amounts to an article of faith, namely that race is a social and political construct; that nation states and the races that created them can be readily transformed in order to achieve certain ideological goals chief of which is the creation of a multicultural society. In this article, based on his knowledge of the former Soviet Union and other Eastern European states, the author examines the attempt to impose racial and ethnic solidarity on large and racially and culturally differentiated populations. The main conclusions are, firstly, that multiculturalism does not work and, secondly, that the Soviet experiment’s attempt to solve the nationalities question has lessons which we in the West cannot ignore.
Key words: Beria, Commission for Racial Equality, Commission on Integration and Cohesion, Dostoevsky, free speech, Lenin, Mao, multiculturalism, nationalities, political correctness, race, Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Union, Stalin, Tito, Yugoslavia.
© Frank Ellis 2006
A man who will not use his freedom to defend his freedom does not deserve his freedom, Reverend Carl McIntire (1906-2002)
Introduction
As a scholar who has devoted a great deal of time to the study of World War Two and especially the war on the Eastern front, the celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of that war’s ending were of the greatest academic and personal interest: academically because more, hitherto classified, material has been placed in the public domain; personally because these anniversaries, and others like them, remind me of what my country has been through and how my nation and people have been made and tempered by history’s trials. Exhausted and impoverished in May 1945, Britain was nevertheless triumphant and could look back on a job well done. Sixty years later Britain is a far more prosperous country yet faces an acute threat to national survival which our politicians, openly, at least, refuse to admit. Painful questions assail us. Why does a nation, which has been racially homogenous for hundreds of years, permit itself to be invaded and overwhelmed by legal and illegal immigration? And why has this collapse of morale and spirit happened so quickly? How can it be that our nation, so resolute and successful in defending our island home from invasion in 1940, which then resisted the Soviet threat, fails to see, or refuses to see, the current danger? What is the nature of this dreadful malaise of mind and spirit that makes a people surrender when all their past history bears witness to their defiance in adversity? That 2005 also marked the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar, the great defining battle which did so much to secure our freedoms and prosperity, and which should have been a celebration characterised by due solemnity, reverence and pride in our naval history but was corrupted by considerations of political correctness, makes my point.
The aetiology and interaction of these themes – the loss of civil courage, organised lying on the part of our political class, the conspicuous cowardice and hypocrisy which undermine our universities – have a long and complicated history. Many of the problems which beset a liberal democracy were recognised by Plato and are as germane today as when they were first explicated by him in The Republic (c.385-380 BC) and The Laws (c.350-340 BC). Plato’s solution to the chaotic danger inherent in democracy is to ensure that the state is ruled by philosopher kings, with the impossible mandate for mortal men, however talented, to arrest all change. Plato, like Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, attached exceptional importance to the institution of censorship, believing that only constant control over all intellectual endeavours, especially the arts, would prevent the state from collapsing into anarchy. It never seems to occur to Plato and some of his harsher imitators that the measures needed to protect their political enterprises might suggest that any such enterprise itself is deeply and irredeemably flawed.
Indeed, if required to summarise my opposition to multiculturalism, the latest assault on our freedoms, I think I would be hard put to characterise it as anything other than “deeply and irredeemably flawed”. As with Plato’s blueprint for a stable utopia ruled by a caste of philosopher kings, so multiculturalism cannot under any circumstances dispense with censorship. In fact, Plato provides an important insight into why education at all levels in the UK has become a high priority for the ideologues of multiculturalism. In Book 7 of The Laws, Plato in a section headed “The Dangers of Innovation in Education”, warns of the evil of change:
If you control the way children play, and the same children always play the same games under the same rules and in the same conditions, and get pleasure from the same toys, you’ll find that the conventions of adult life too are left in peace without alteration. But in fact games are always being changed and constantly modified and new ones invented, and the younger generation never enthuses over the same thing for two days running. They have no permanent agreed standard of what is becoming or unbecoming either in deportment or their possessions in general; they worship anyone who is always introducing some novelty or doing something unconventional to shapes and colours and all that sort of thing.
Now, if Plato overstates the dangers of change, and fails to recognise the impossibility of arresting change, he certainly recognises the dangers of intellectual and moral relativism when he sees them. What applies to toys and ‘the conventions of adult life’ is true of language. Change the way, or rather compel children to change the way they (and adults for that matter), use language and you can cause havoc to ‘the conventions of adult life’.
Unlike Plato’s fictional republic, however, multicultural zealots have managed to implement their ideas, translating and modifying the various programmes of Lenin, Anton Makarenko, Nadezhda Krupskaia, Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. Moreover, availing themselves of the techniques of mind terror deployed by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, they have achieved dominance in key areas of Western societies – public sector bureaucracies, the print and broadcast media, immigration, the police and all levels of the education system - that is utterly bewildering. There is no doubt that agencies which are committed to multiculturalism, universities for example, do harbour those who dissent from multicultural orthodoxy but such is the pressure to conform that dissenters express their misgivings only to a trusted few or keep their own counsel. The consequences of this are that people say one thing in public and another in private. In their working lives and their interaction with colleagues they resemble actors in a socialist-realist play. Real and meaningful communication concerning multiculturalism does not take place. Sloganeering is all that is acceptable (“diversity is our strength”). The would-be, or actual dissenter, experiences a deep sense of intellectual isolation and would immediately recognise the state of mind of a Soviet citizen described by Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward: ‘If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person’s mind begins to roam irretrievably. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians’.1 It is this state of mind, natural in a totalitarian state, but hardly desirable in what purports to be a liberal democracy, that compels me to conclude that the cult of multiculturalism is based on the same anti-intellectual and anti-rational infrastructure as totalitarian communism.
The Soviet Experiment
Russia’s descent into the madness and the slavery of Bolshevism which began in 1917 has a long pre-history. The seeds were probably sown with the growth of literacy and the unique role that Russian writers took upon themselves in the nineteenth century, but the most significant development – I would say – is the transformation of some of the ideas of Western utopian socialism into something much more sinister. Socialism with its global aspirations and promise of a global empire of communism embodied in the ideological construct of the international proletariat – “Workers of the world unite” – was implacably hostile to any form of national or racial identity. Well before Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they understood that Russian national identity, the ancient Russian folk culture, Russia’s vast, impenetrable, rural hinterland, and for the Bolsheviks, its equally impenetrable rural culture, and, of course, Russia’s ancient church, were obstacles blocking the road to communist control. And so they set about to destroy them or to weaken them to the extent that they were rendered inert or suited for purely decorative purposes. In our own time and place, following its moral and intellectual collapse the Church of England fulfils a similar role. The demands of the Russian radicals in the 1860s and 1870s, their hatred for their own people and their contempt for Russia’s history and culture anticipate to an extraordinary degree the left-wing radicalism which attacked our country in the 1960s and 1970s, the period known collectively as “the 60s”.
Two novels, The Devils (1871-1872) and August 1914 (1971&1989), by Fedor Dostoevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn respectively are brilliantly perceptive works regarding our own time.2 Writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century when radical ideas were subverting Russian society, Dostoevsky penetrated the revolutionary mind and predicted the rise of the twentieth-century’s totalitarian movements with terrifying accuracy. Solzhenitsyn who experienced the Lenin-Stalin experiment on his own flesh argues that such by the start of World War One was the moral and intellectual damage done to Russia, especially to a critical mass of those charged with her stewardship, that nothing less than a miracle would save Russia from the dreadful Soviet century.
Both Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn examine the radicals’ hatred and contempt for Russia. Dostoevsky’s devils, the revolutionaries, want to enslave her – they call it liberation – by imposing socialist rule on Russia and eventually the world. Their method is revolution, murder and the total destruction of the old order. What strikes the contemporary reader as so prophetic is the fact that Dostoevsky identified the cultural treachery and cowardice of the professional and intellectual classes who colluded with the radicals out of fear or out of self-interest well before Julien Benda wrote Trahison des Clercs (1927). Here, from the mouth of one of Russia’s haters, is a vision of the future socialist anthill:
Every member of the society spies on the others, and he is obliged to inform against them. Everyone belongs to all the others, and all belong to everyone. All are slaves and equal in slavery. In extreme cases slander and murder, but, above all, equality. To begin with, the level of education, science, and accomplishment is lowered. A high level of scientific thought and accomplishment is open only to men of the highest abilities! Men of the highest ability have always seized the power and become autocrats. Such men cannot help being autocrats and they have always done more harm than good; they are either banished or executed. A Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes gouged out, a Shakespeare will be stoned - there you have Shigaylov’s doctrine! Slaves must be equal: without despotism there has never been any freedom or equality, but in a herd there is bound to be equality...3
and:
We don’t want education [...] The thing we want is obedience. [...] The moment a man falls in love or has a family he gets a desire for private property. We will destroy that desire; we’ll resort to drunkenness, slander, denunciations; we’ll resort to un-heard of depravity; we’ll smother every genius in infancy. We shall reduce everything to one common denominator. Full equality […] 4
And in what is a horrifyingly accurate portrayal of our own time:
[...] the teacher who laughs with their children at their God and at their cradle is ours already. The barrister who defends an educated murderer by pleading that, being more mentally developed than his victims, he could not help murdering them for money, is already one of us. Schoolboys who kill a peasant for the sake of a thrill are ours. The juries who acquit all criminals without distinction are ours. A public prosecutor, who trembles in court, because he is not sufficiently progressive, is ours, ours. Administrators, authors - oh there are lots and lots of us, and they don’t know it.5
Dostoevsky obviously grasped the nature of what we now refer to as the Stockholm syndrome. And surely the following describes the corrupt ethos of our television and entertainments industry:
But one or two generations of vice are absolutely essential now. Monstrous, disgusting vice which turns man into an abject, cowardly, cruel and selfish wretch – that’s what we want! And, on top of it, a “little fresh blood” to make them get used to it.6
Whereas Dostoevsky offers us brilliant prophesy, Solzhenitsyn tries to make some sense of the flow of history, the red wheel that crushed Russia. His discrete narratives try to break down the complex miscellany of historical incidents. There are many reasons, according to Solzhenitsyn, why Russia eventually succumbs to the Bolsheviks: the Russian military high command is complacent and incompetent and has failed to keep abreast of the technological and tactical changes in modern war; Stolypin, the one statesman, who, Solzhenitsyn believes, could have saved Russia, is assassinated; the growth of revolutionary ideologies of the left; the concomitant loss of will on the part of the ruling class; and its failure to understand the nature of Marxist subversion and so deal with it. Exhausted and demoralised by a succession of military defeats, Russian in 1917 was only too vulnerable to the Bolshevik seizure of power. However, as in Britain, France and Germany, the national Russian response to the outbreak of World War One is a devastating ideological defeat for the Marxist and later the Soviet-Leninist myth of the solidarity of the international working class. Lenin and other Bolsheviks were confident that the workers of the belligerent nations would not kill each other. Drums, flag and national pride proved to be far stronger than the abstractions of Marx and Lenin. As one of Solzhenitsyn’s more professional officers puts it in August 1914: ‘The only sentiment the masculine heart can fittingly cherish is love of country’.7 Unfortunately, the consequences of this ideological defeat proved to be profound and far-reaching. It convinced the post-World-War-One generation of leftists – Marcuse and Gramsci - that in order to implement their programme in the West, they had to gain control of what one might loosely term as culture. Today, the results of this intellectual and cultural subversion are ubiquitous and pernicious.
Love of Mother Russia, as understood and advocated by Solzhenitsyn, has nothing in common with “workers of the world unite”. Nor indeed is Solzhenitsyn’s interpretation of patriotic duty consistent with the teachings of Tolstoy, which are relentlessly attacked in August 1914. The essence of Solzhenitsyn’s complaint is that Tolstoy is irresponsible to encourage pacifism. I suspect that Solzhenitsyn had Tolstoy in mind when, interviewed on the BBC’s Panorama programme in 1976, he lambasted Bertrand Russell for his shameful advocacy of “better red than dead” in the face of the Soviet threat to the West.8 When Russia is under attack it is the duty of her sons to defend her not to abandon her. Moreover, when Stolypin responded to terrorist attacks carried out by the revolutionaries with the death penalty, Tolstoy, preaching his bizarre and idiosyncratic cult of “rational love”, condemned the hangings. In effect, he claimed that the terrorist acts of middle class revolutionaries and the response of the authorities were no different; that Stolypin, the defender of law and order, and a terrorist bomber, were one and the same thing. Tolstoy, the wealthy and internationally famous author, clearly anticipates the response of many twentieth-first century celebrities and politicians to contemporary problems. They use their fame as actors, pop stars or radio and television show hosts to promote causes, multiculturalism being chief among them, which are demonstrably harmful to the rest of us, while they remain largely insulated from the joys of “diversity”. They do this, I suspect, not necessarily because they believe that having their neighbourhood – or rather our neighbourhoods - swamped by illegal immigrants is inherently a good thing, but because the music industry with its global reach and global profits requires that its artists and rock bands keep on message.
The Nationalities Question
By the mid 1980s when Gorbachev launched perestroika and encouraged a policy of openness (glasnost’), the Soviet Union consisted of fifteen republics organised on the principle of ‘socialist federalism’ (Article 70, Soviet Constitution, 1977).9 In addition to the 15 constituent republics there were autonomous republics, such as, for example, Chechno-Ingush and Karelia, which were part of the Russian Federation. The constitution also recognised various autonomous districts and regions. Despite the relentless propaganda of fraternal solidarity, many of these republics harboured grievances with regard to Moscow. Some of them pre-dated the Soviet period (Chechnia, for example); others arose from Soviet policies in the 1920s.
Between 1923 and 1927 the State Political Directorate, a precursor of the NKVD, was engaged in a major campaign to suppress opposition to Soviet rule and Sovietization in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. These were not minor police raids but major operations involving the deployment of regular troops, heavy artillery and planes. Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Lavrenty Beria, the latter eventually became the head of the secret police, played the lead role in the Sovietization of Georgia. Measures taken by Stalin and Beria with regard to national minorities during World War Two were savage, with long-lasting consequences. Between November 1943 and May 1944 the NKVD, with the use of American lend-lease Studebakers, organised and carried out the mass deportation of Chechens, Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans because they were suspected of having collaborated with the Germans. After 1945, the Red Army replaced the Wehrmacht as the occupying and imperial power in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria. The Soviet occupation zone in East Germany became the German Democratic Republic in 1949. Yugoslavia must be reckoned a failure for Stalin. Tito resisted all attempts by Stalin to bring Yugoslavia within the Soviet fold. The result was a permanent and bitter split between the two states.
Moscow’s struggle to impose its will on Georgia and Central Asia in the 1920s taught those conducting such operations a very important lesson. In a report analysing Soviet operations against rebels in Turkestan and Ukraine, an official in the State Political Directorate, concluded that ‘military repression is effective only when it is followed by an intensive process of Sovietization in the core of the country’.10 Sovietization is the key concept here. It meant the elimination of all opposition, especially those who articulated a strong sense of national identity and their replacement with people who had so thoroughly internalised the Soviet worldview that they could be relied upon - though always watched very carefully by their minders - to do Moscow’s bidding. Not only did Sovietization mean the physical extermination of so-called “class enemies”, but it also involved a total assault on all manifestations of national culture, history and traditions. The common denominator in all three is language. The Soviet commissars fully understood the need to suppress the teaching and use of native languages in favour of Russian.
While Moscow appeared to make concessions to the Soviet republics – Article 72 of the Soviet Constitution (1977) guaranteed the right of secession from the union – the reality was that the party mechanism bound the republics to Moscow and any attempt to secede would be met with tanks. That Moscow exercised such control bears witness to the fact that within the republics there existed, even among the so-called loyalists, fissiparous tendencies. These were not necessarily all based on outright hostility to Moscow but on the realities of having to deal with practical problems that required the exercise of local judgement and local solutions. However, as far as Moscow was concerned, even an assertion of initiative based on purely pragmatic considerations contained within it the seeds of an assertion of political independence. Moscow’s position is consistent with the ideological worldview of Marxism-Leninism. All power is ideological. All acts stemming from the exercise of power are by definition ideological. To pretend otherwise is counter-revolutionary and such behaviour must be purged. And, indeed, the history of Moscow’s relations with the Soviet republics is one of relative stability punctuated by purges of Republican Party cadres, who started to assert a republican, nationalist identity rather than an all-union, Soviet one. For example, during Stalin’s Great Terror one of the accusations frequently levelled at the leadership of the republican parties was ‘bourgeois nationalism’. In our own time, if you object to England’s being devoured by the United States of Europe, Europhiles will dismiss you as a “little Englander”.
In Ukraine today many regard the collectivization of agriculture and the Stalin-made famine as deliberate genocide which was intended to destroy the roots of Ukrainian nationalism forever. The invading Germans were well aware of the massive resentment in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic states towards Soviet power, especially the bitter legacy of collectivization. One reason why so many Red Army units surrendered en masse to the Wehrmacht in the summers of 1941 and 1942 was because these soldiers and officers were totally disaffected from the Soviet state. Had the Germans not been so blinded by theories of racial superiority and played the liberator-from-communism card more effectively and much sooner, it is a good bet that the Soviet Union would have lost the war. It is often assumed that the war in Europe ended in 1945, yet the Red Army and NKVD units fought a major counter-insurgency campaign in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic states against nationalist groups that only petered out in the mid 1950s. And the message from the Poles who rose up against their Nazi oppressors in August 1944 only to endure the imposition of Soviet tyranny is the same. As long as a hard core of patriots survive, then the nation can survive and can be reborn. All is not lost.
This is surely the lesson that we must take from the fate of the Soviet empire in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. No matter how harsh the Sovietization of these countries after the Nazi defeat that spirit of independence endured the post-1945 purges and the suppression engendered by the Brezhnev doctrine. In June 1953 workers in East Berlin rebelled, Hungary following suit on a much bigger scale in October 1956. In 1968 reformers in Czechoslovakia tried to abolish censorship and in August of that year the reform programme was crushed. The Poles ever ready to assert their independence rioted in Gdańsk in 1970. By 1980 Solidarity emerged as a serious threat to communist party rule in Poland. Despite Gorbachev’s best intentions, glasnost’ facilitated the break up of the Soviet Union by focusing so clearly on the sins of the past. The nationalities question returned with a vengeance. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, justifiably aggrieved by the consequences of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact (1939), now sought to rectify this fifty-year old injustice. One of the decisive moves occurred in Hungary where in September 1989 it opened its borders with Austria. East Germans were now able to get to West Germany. On 9th November 1989 the hated wall – what Honecker’s regime called the “anti-fascist protection barrier” – was breached. Then followed the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. In Bulgaria, Zhivkov was ousted and in Romania, Ceauşescu’s mafia turned against him and he died in a hail of machine-gun fire. So what went wrong? To quote Martin Malia:
His [Gorbachev] whole policy had been based on the mistaken belief that the East Europeans would eagerly respond to a genuine reformed socialism if it were offered to them, and that there were many lesser Gorbachevs out there to do just that. He woefully underestimated the people’s loathing of Communism and the power of national sentiment in the External Empire, just as he underestimated these same forces within the Internal Empire.11
Gorbachev’s own words on the nationalities question support Malia’s assessment. In Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987), Gorbachev tells his readers that the multinational status of the Soviet Union strengthens the union, that it is not a source of ‘weakness or disintegration’.12 Despite all the historical evidence, and not a word about the savagery of Stalin and Beria towards national minorities before and during World War Two, Gorbachev insists that:
If the nationality question had not been solved in principle, the Soviet Union would never have had the social, cultural, economic and defence potential as it has now. Our state would not have survived if the republics had not formed a community based on brotherhood and cooperation, respect and mutual assistance.13
Here and elsewhere in his discussion of the nationalities question Gorbachev preaches the standard Soviet position. Lenin, he tells us, laid the foundations for ‘a harmonious multiethnic state’.14 His final plea for the continuing advocacy of ‘Soviet patriotism’, even as the whole Soviet edifice was about to collapse, bears witness to the intellectually debilitating consequences of censorship and the fact that like so many Soviet leaders he was largely insulated from what was going on beyond the walls of the Kremlin. Gorbachev reminds us of the multicultural zealots in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the European Union, who insist, regardless of any empirical evidence to the contrary, that “diversity is our strength”. The nationalities question mounted then a double threat to the survival of the Soviet Union. Internally, the constituent republics, sensing that history was moving their way, asserted themselves. Externally, the states, which had been tied to the Soviet Union since 1945, exploited the lack of will to impose the Brezhnev doctrine, and broke free.
An appendix to the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the fate of Yugoslavia is profoundly instructive for the attempt to impose an alien multiculturalism on discrete groups of people. Josip Broz Tito died in 1980. The ensuing ten years saw the republics asserting their various identities which then erupted into genocidal violence in the 1990s. Yugoslavia offers a special warning for the rainbow warriors. Alija Izetbegovic, the Croatian Muslim, who became president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, rejected the Yugoslav version of a multiethnic state. In his Islamic Declaration, written in 1970, his vision of what Islam means is uncompromisingly clear:
There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic religion and non-Islamic social and political institutions. And by claiming to order its own world itself, Islam obviously excludes the right or possibility of action on the part of any foreign ideology on that terrain. There is therefore no lay principle.15
Now we were assured that Tito, like Lenin, had solved the nationalities question; that, in many ways, Yugoslavia was a model, multiethnic state. As with Moscow’s internal and external empire, the fiction of Yugoslavia was held together by force, and in the case of Yugoslavia, was ended by force. National and ethnic (racial) differences can be suppressed but not indefinitely and when they eventually do reassert themselves violence is not necessarily inevitable, just highly likely. Iraq reaffirms this lesson. In a brief article published in The Daily Telegraph it was reported that Sunnis were learning Shia customs and modes of behaviour so as to be able to pass themselves off as Shia Muslims. They do this in order to fool the death squads. The need for such deception in order to survive reveals the inherent weaknesses of multicultural societies. The two journalists who wrote this article observed:
Just two years ago the suggestion that relations between the two sects in the country [Sunnis and Shia] could ever reach such a nadir was ridiculed by Iraqis, who would describe how for generations Shia and Sunni Muslims had intermarried, lived on the same streets and worked beside each other.16
Multiethnic societies can only be held together by a strong centralised state and a leader who is prepared to use force to subdue the competing rivalries (racial, cultural or religious) in order to secure stability. Once the power apparatus has been removed, those rivalries will assert themselves. In other words “the brotherhood of man” scenario so beloved of multicultural extremists is a façade. Moreover, people on both or many sides of any racial, cultural or religious divide, will themselves act as if this is the case when there is no chance of any change but as soon as an opportunity arises to assert their own racial, ethnic or religious identity at the expense of rivals, regardless of how long they have apparently been living together in harmony, then they will do so.
Some Lessons for the United Kingdom
Since 1991 a number of explanations have been advanced to explain the reasons for what in historical terms was the sudden and dramatic collapse of the internal and external Soviet empires: imperial overstretch; the failure of an economy based on the common ownership of the means of production; the personal role of the late Pope John-Paul; the determined leadership of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan; and the relentless erosion of belief in the system among those charged with making it work. It seems to me that all these explanations do tell us something about the end. But one factor, censorship, is especially important in trying to understand the end and why it came so suddenly. The reason, I believe, that censorship deserves to be taken so seriously as a major, and possibly decisive, factor in the Soviet collapse is that censorship affects all the other factors.
Gorbachev believed that his policy of glasnost’ would gain him the support of the intellectuals. To a certain extent it did, both at home and abroad. However, the moment the censorship regime was eased (being finally and formally abolished on 1st August 1990); it brought masses of damaging revelations into the public domain for the first time. Indeed, so damaging were many of these revelations that the effect was not restorative of Soviet fortunes, as Gorbachev hoped, but catastrophic for his hopes of saving the Soviet Union. Timing did not help either. The period 1989-1991 marked a whole series of 50th anniversaries associated with the beginning of the Second World War. The Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact was a permanent source of bitterness between Poland, the Baltic states and the Soviet Union. Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia regarded their annexation as act of aggression, which it was. The logic of Polish objections was clear. The pact laid the basis for the Red Army to invade Poland which it duly did on 17th September 1939. Six months later the NKVD murdered just under 22,000 Polish military and civilian personnel at Katyn and other sites. It was only as late as 1991 that Gorbachev finally acknowledged that the Poles were not murdered by the Germans but by Beria’s NKVD. How anything like normal relations could ever be possible between Poland and the Soviet Union while this festering grievance remained unsolved is inconceivable. In 1991 the Soviet regime’s defenders had to endure savage and prolonged criticism of the way Stalin had handled the war. There were revelations about the Terror Famine and the Great Terror. And so the revelations kept coming, like a high-speed glacier. I would go so far to say that without the institution of censorship the Soviet Union would never have endured as long as it did. And here is a lesson for those who are opposed to multiculturalism. Trevor Phillips, Bhikhu Parekh and the vice-chancellors of British universities are terrified of free speech. Free speech makes it possible to gather together to exchange ideas, to highlight the failures of the grand experiment. This is the context for the legal and administrative assault on the British National Party (BNP) and similar patriotic parties and any number of non-affiliated individual dissenters throughout the European Union.17
In the years following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power tens of millions of people were slaughtered. Genocide and mass terror gave way to selective terror and harsh administrative measures against dissenters. I have argued before that we may be experiencing this process in reverse. No, I am not implying that the government plans to build concentration camps for those who attack multiculturalism but the relentless erosion of our liberties, especially the attacks on free speech, coming from within the United Kingdom and the European Union, means that problems that can only be addressed by openly and honestly confronting them are not being addressed. On so many issues – the future direction of the European Union, the numbers of illegal immigrants in the United Kingdom, race and the dire consequences of multiculturalism – we are the victims of organised and systematic lying. In the former Soviet Union they could at least get the truth from Western radio stations. To whom shall we turn for the truth? The Home Office? The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE)? Or perhaps David Cameron? No, we are on our own.
To read Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to study the Soviet nightmare from the perspective of someone who is living through the soft totalitarianism of multiculturalism and political correctness is to understand far more clearly the nature of the people and their institutions that seek to destroy us. And it is our destruction that they most certainly do seek. Organisations such as the CRE talk of “integration” and “cohesion”, as does Ruth Kelly’s latest creation, the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, but to the extent that the CRE wants to compel the white indigenous majority population to accept policies that most of us instinctively reject as wrong, consider to be possibly insane and immoral, and certainly against the best interests of our ancient land, and then seeks to terrorise any articulated opposition, the CRE’s goals become clear. It seeks nothing other than the transformation of the UK into a multiracial society in which, on present trends, whites will become a minority in their land. “Integration”, “cohesion” and “diversity” are the mendacious and ugly euphemisms of those who are actively working towards the racial and cultural dispossession of whites. The aim is to eliminate the English by destroying (“deconstructing”) any awareness among a critical mass of them that they, the English, are a great and proud people and one that has been disproportionately and highly successful across the entire spectrum of human endeavour. The CRE should properly be referred to as the Commission for the Racial Elimination of the English People (CREEP).
Why is it that the major political parties in Western states, many of which identify themselves as “conservative”, collude in the racial and cultural dispossession of their own states and people? In 1968, Enoch Powell warned us about the dangers of mass immigration. Forty years on Powell has been completely vindicated (as has the former, Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford) yet today no conservative politician, whatever his private opinions and the globally conspicuous and gruesome failures of multiculturalism, would dare to articulate such sentiments. In May 2001, during the general election campaign John Townend muttered briefly about the fears of his East Yorkshire constituents and then quickly capitulated when Hague publicly denounced him. The loss of patriotic spirit in a party which if it stands for anything must stand for love of home and hearth has been especially sudden and dramatic. It is also baffling.
Russia and the Soviet Union have travelled this path before us. Russians were quite willing to exterminate other Russians in pursuit of the internationalist goals of Soviet communism. Trotsky, one of the architects of the Red Terror, was supremely indifferent to the fate of Russia’s Jews. Stalin and Beria crushed fellow Georgians when necessary. Without a substantial minority of Quislings in the Soviet republics they, too, would not have endured as long as they did. The growing secularization of Western societies and the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks may also be related. When a nation denies God, its past, its culture, its heroes and its many folkways, patriotism cannot long survive. As the Germans closed in on Stalingrad, even Stalin saw the need to awaken and to unleash Russian patriotism. Stalin realised that Russian soldiers would die for Mother Russia, for Rodina (Motherland), but not for the hated collective farm. The internationalism of the Soviet Union and the pan-Europeanism of the European Union occupy, temporarily, the void created by the rejection of any divine authority, or the status of the nation. The ideology of class war and the would-be builders of a super corporate state assert a claim to something higher, to something altogether more worthy than narrow, selfish, national interest.18 That otherwise large numbers of quite intelligent people are especially susceptible to these sorts of universalistic appeals is obvious from the way so many Western intellectuals were seduced by the promises of communism. Even though it is a secular perversion, building paradise functions as a powerful substitute for the loss of any divine significance, giving meaning to the otherwise empty lives of the builders. Man’s Search for Meaning, the English translation of Viktor Frankl’s Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager (1946), an account of his time in a Nazi concentration camp, goes a long way to understanding the almost millenarian fervour with which people embraced Soviet communism and, currently, embrace multiculturalism and its dictionary of bitter and noisome lies. It also helps to explain the genocidal intolerance towards enemies on the part of Soviet communism and the repressive measures which have been introduced by the European Union to criminalise any opposition to multiculturalism.
In The Devils, one of the revolutionaries realises that accusations of being insufficiently liberal are an effective way to secure the obedience of his followers. Terrified of such an accusation, his ovine adherents will believe anything they are told and engage in, or support, any abominable act or deviant behaviour, in order to enhance their standing within revolutionary circles. Having proved (debased) themselves as dedicated to the cause, they reward themselves by making savage attacks on the bourgeois society they have left behind. Multiculturalism also bestows small pleasures on its followers which are not to be ignored. There is nothing more intoxicating for a sizeable chunk of the British middle classes than to be able to demonstrate their commitment to multiculturalism by denouncing any rational opposition thereof as racist. These supporters of multiculturalism also demonstrate a magnificent spirit of self-denial. Truly, no greater devotion to the brotherhood of man and the love of his neighbours has a practising diversophile than that he, selflessly and nobly foregoing the many and undisputed blessings of “diversity”, so that others can enjoy exclusive rights thereto, drags himself and his family away from London to suffer the cruel indignities and eternal torments of rural exile among the fox-hunting savages and bestial racists who inhabit the benighted wastelands of Hay-on-Wye, New Radnor and the Somerset levels. Is this white flight from the city and the dishonesty on the part of those who engage in it just a manifestation of the heroic hypocrisy of which the white middle classes in this country are capable, or does it hint at something more worrying? Is it another example of the loss of moral and cultural confidence?
Two new factors enter the calculus in the twenty-first century: mass immigration (legal or illegal); and the presence of a large, disaffected and growing Islamic minority. The logic imposed upon us by this Islamic presence must be apprehended. We can pretend that it is not a long-term problem; that it is just a question of a “few extremists” and confine ourselves to reacting when there is an explicit threat of violence. This will not work since it is essentially a defensive posture both in policing and in security terms, and as an intellectual and cultural response to clear, present and future danger. Do we really believe that if we keep our heads down the menace of multiculturalism in any of its variants will simply go away? It will not. I meet lots of people who, even now after the Islamic terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 and 7th July 2005, seem to think that immigrants, hostile to this country and its institutions - but who nevertheless enjoy its prosperity - can and will be assimilated. All we, the indigenous population, have to do, apparently, is to make a few concessions and all will be well. This is called appeasement and it does not work. From where does the pressure emanate for these people to assimilate? Indeed, why should they when they are incessantly told that they bring some wonderful, enriching gift called “diversity” for which we, the indigenous population, should be grateful?
The worst of Enoch Powell’s vision has, I believe, still to fall upon us. I have no doubt that at some stage the leaders (self-appointed or otherwise) of what the BBC likes to call the “Muslim community” will demand the creation of an independent, Islamic state on the territory of the United Kingdom. The prelude to these demands would be a long and well organised terrorist campaign, or the threat thereof, designed to weaken our will. If any British government permitted this to happen or if we do nothing to stem the tide of hostile immigration, we face the real possibility of a return to the religious wars of our distant past. What would Alija Izetbegovic’s Islamic Declaration or some variation thereof mean for Britain? Eventually, the government, any government, will have to confront the problem of illegal immigrants. How many illegal immigrants there are in this country is not clear, a million, possibly two million. Any responsible government would order that all illegal immigrants be rounded up and deported. This would make a huge difference to the pressure on housing and water in the South East of England. Unfortunately, governments have consistently failed to behave responsibly and honestly. There exists a real temptation for government to declare an amnesty for all illegal immigrants, with an assurance – about as valuable as the ones Hitler gave to Chamberlain and Stalin - that new laws would be enacted and enforced to stop more illegal immigrants entering the country. This is simply a variation on the theme of amnesty. It would be a catastrophe for our country. The British seem to think that because they have enjoyed exceptionally long periods of stability and prosperity that they always will. No country, no state on earth has a God-given right to remain stable, prosperous and most important of all, free. Our constitution and polity confer no permanent immunity from civil unrest, or in the future, large scale racial unrest. It is folly and arrogance on the part of the British to believe otherwise. It may well be that the British are so benumbed by multicultural agitprop that they just do not care and that a majority will acquiesce to the relentless destruction of Britain by a combination of Quisling politicians and immigrants.
Conclusion
The Soviet empire and its end show that harsh measures taken against dissenters cannot work indefinitely and that they provoke resistance, sometimes violence. I have already noted the dreadful example of Yugoslavia. If free speech can be progressively weakened by governments, then why not other liberties long taken for granted? Just how far will any British government in the future be prepared to go, in order to destroy well organised and lawful resistance? I repeat: we cannot take ancient and hard-won liberties for granted. The brave men and women who resisted the Soviet state also teach us that we must find the moral and civil courage to stand up and be counted. If Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Irina Ratushinskaia, and Vladimir Bukovsky, and all the many others I have not mentioned, could find it in themselves to challenge the powerful Soviet state with its arsenal of concentration camps, psychiatric hospitals, and secret police, then what do we in England have to fear? Solzhenitsyn understood the power of truth more clearly than most, realising that communism could not endure forever: ‘And I sat there’, he wrote in the Gulag Archipelago, ‘and I thought: if the first tiny droplet of truth has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth? And they will burst forth. It has to happen’.19 Well, we need to make it happen.
Notes
1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (1968), trans, Nicholas Bethell and David Burg, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p.492.
2 Andrei Platonov, Evgenii Zamiatin, Vasilii Grossman, Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bulgakov are all profoundly instructive regarding the methods of Soviet organised lying which are so relevant for our own time.
3 Fedor Dostoevsky, The Devils, Trans, David Magarshack, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1982, p.418.
4 Fedor Dostoevsky, The Devils, p.419.
5 Fedor Dostoevsky, The Devils, p.421.
6 Fedor Dostoevsky, The Devils, pp.421-422.
7 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 The Red Wheel 1: A Narrative in Discrete Periods of Time, trans., H. T. Willets, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990, p.100.
8 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the Western World, The Bodley Head and BBC, London, 1976, p.20.
9 They were: Armenia; Azerbaijan; Belorussia; Estonia; Georgia; Kazakhstan; Kirgizia; Latvia; Lithuania; Moldavia; Russian Federation; Tadzhikistan; Turkmenistan; Ukraine; Uzbekistan.
10 Stéphane Courtois et al, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans., Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer., Harvard University Press, London, 1999, p.140.
11 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, The Free Press, New York, 1994, p.463.
12 Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Collins, London, 1987, p.118. In a study of the nationalities question Valerii Chalidze noted that: ‘if the policy of glasnost’ continues, then national problems, including the demands of separatists, will be a painful test of that policy’. See Valerii Chalidze, Natsional’nye problemy i Perestroika (Nationality Problems and Perestroika), Chalidze Publications, Vermont, USA, 1988, p.8.
13 Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Collins, London, 1987, p.118.
14 Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Collins, London, 1987, p.119.
15 Mervyn Hiskett, ‘Islam and Bosnia’, The Salisbury Review, volume 11, Number 4, June, 1993, p.5.
16 Ahmad Ali & Oliver Poole, ‘Sunnis learn Shia customs to bluff Baghdad death squads’, The Daily Telegraph, 9th October 2006, p.14.
17 Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code declared a whole range of behaviour to be “counter-revolutionary” and liable to punishment. Very large numbers of those who were arrested and sentenced during the Great Terror were charged under Paragraph 10 of Article 58 which covers “propaganda and agitation”. Paragraph 10 specifically criminalises any expression of religious and nationalist sentiment aimed at the “masses”.
18 In his study of James Burnham’s thought, James Burnham (1984 & 1999) and more recently in an essay, ‘Why the American Ruling Class Betrays its Race and Civilization’, the late Sam Francis, analysing theories formulated by Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels and Georges Sorel, has argued that white élites promote multiculturalism and hostility to any form of national identity because they consider it to be an obstacle to their transnational interests. These élites no longer have any concept of “their people”. To quote Sam Francis: ‘Just as the managerial ruling class rejects independent nationhood and national sovereignty as organizational forms, so it will also reject ideologies such as nationalism that justify and reflect national sovereignty, independence, and identity, as well as any ideology or belief that justifies any particular group identity and loyalty – national, regional, racial, ethnic, cultural or religious’. See Sam Francis, ‘Why the American Ruling Class Betrays its Race and Civilization’ in Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time, edited by Samuel Francis, with a foreword by Wayne Lutton, The Occidental Press, Mt. Airy, Maryland, 2006, p.393.
19 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1 trans., Thomas Witney, Harper Collins, London, p.298.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
A letter from Lagos
Adapt and Die
By Dan Roodt(First published 2005)
During the time of National Party reforms in the seventies and eighties, the cliché "adapt or die" used to do the rounds. Nowadays, given the highest murder rate in the world, this should be modified slightly to read, "adapt and die". For the endemic social violence in South Africa is probably incurable.
Optimists think that violent crime can be solved through better policing, more efficient courts and more secure prisons. Even assuming that such improvements were possible underconditions of hard-core affirmative action, it must be admitted that criminal justice treats thesymptom and not the cause of social violence. The Department of Correctional Services, for one, has lost 496 out of 500 former Deputy Directors since 1994, representing most of the intellectual capital in the department. Newcomers may learn their job properly, or they may not, but they have to be flown to overseas countries to find out how prisons work as most of those previously involved in managing our prisons are no longer there.
South Africa used to have a problem of political violence. It was not as bad as elsewhere in Africa, but for some reason elicited hysterical international condemnation. However, actors in political violence are mostly driven by some sort of creed or belief system. Whether such a person is a communist, an anarchist, a neo-Nazi or an ethnic or religious guerilla fighter, he is usually amenable to persuasion or compromise. Even a group of Muslim suicide bombers might declare peace if they were given a territory in which to set up an Islamic theocracy,governed only by themselves and not subject to any outside influence.
In the same way, South Africa's so-called liberation movements who were at one time fanatically convinced of the need for violent and bloody revolution, laid down arms and bombs upon being told that F.W. de Klerk would surrender power unconditionally. Solving political violence is often intractable, but not impossible.
Not so social violence. Endemic crime, the breakdown of the social fabric, a sense of drift regarding norms of good conduct, point to a far deeper problem. The freedom fighter or urban terrorist is ultimately rational, despite a value system that normal society might find idiosyncratic.
But what is "normal society"? It is only the sum-total of behaviours prevalent in any given society at any given time. The Aztecs, infamously, practised daily human sacrifice to appease their sun god. It might revolt many of us today, but to them it was entirely normal. South Africa currently sacrifices about 87 humans per day to violent crime, or 32 000 per year. Those are only the ones who actually die. Scores of others are injured, maimed, traumatised, robbed, raped, burgled and so on.
In any suburb today an entire history of murders, hijackings, and other violent events can be written, if only the locals were narcissistic enough to consider their own history worth recording for posterity. On the other hand, social violence lacks the charm and grandeur of political violence as it is usually not committed in the interest of some glamorous cause like national liberation or world revolution but simply to acquire some hapless person's BMW or rape his wife because she happened to be inside.
However, some time ago a Johannesburg newspaper engaged in chronicling some local history in the suburbs of Westdene and Lakefield in Benoni. Nearly every resident had a story to tell, an entire litany of mayhem. Mr. John Gee miraculously survived a shot through the eye, but now feels traumatised. His wife says, "One lives in fear in one's own home. One does not sleep. One prays for protection, yet only more fears come."
But who are the authors of South Africa's social violence? Even asking this question presents one with a sense of discomfort, because most violent criminals in South Africa are young black men between the ages of 16 and 36. As one surgeon who had stitched together at least three child rape victims, two of whom were infants, said recently, "Probably white men commit such acts too; it is just that no-one in South Africa has come across such a case."
Of course, it would be preposterous to say that all young black men are prone to violence. Judging from our daily experiences in crime-torn South Africa, however, a sub-section of that population, large enough to cause more havoc than even a well-equipped guerilla army of a few thousand men, has taken up practices such as heists, hold-ups, murders, sexual violence exacted upon women and children, and so on.
Explanations for such deviancy are manifold. The ubiquitous answer of it being due to apartheid might have been satisfying if other African societies never subject to group areas and a homeland system did not display similar traits. The Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone come to mind. There is a whole nature/nurture debate around black violence, except that no adherent of the "nature" side would publicly admit to being one, for fear of being branded a racist. Even though mainstream American cancer research has conclusively shown that black men have higher levels of testosterone than their white counterparts, few would hazard the notion that this might be linked to their greater propensity for violent crime.
America has a gargantuan prison population of two million, over half of which consists of African-Americans. This is despite their minority status in the USA, comprising only 12% of an overall population amounting to 290 million. South Africa could neither afford nor succeed,given the dire state of our criminal justice system, in jailing a similar number of black male offenders. Currently, only 10% of murderers in South Africa get arrested and only 6% are convicted. Any murderer therefore has a 94% chance of getting away with it.
If by some miracle all serious criminals in the country had to be caught and imprisoned, the prison population would surely treble or quadruple from the present 200 000, which is already high by world standards. Not only is such an improvement inconceivable under current conditions, but it would also be politically unpopular with the ruling ANC who would be incarcerating large numbers of young black males who are mostly its own supporters at the polls. Few whites, if any, commit violent crime and there are only 3 900 of them in prison, mostly for white-collar offences such as fraud or insider trading on the stock exchange.All that remains in the world's most violent society, is precisely to adapt and die. Twice as many South Africans of all races now die of murder than of road accidents - even though the road accident rate is also the highest in the world, surpassing that of Turkey. Crime extends to trade in driver's licences, so that a large number of drivers use so-called "bought licences", hardly a contribution to road safety.
There are some people naive enough to think that "something can be done about crime" in South Africa, mostly opposition politicians who dream about diverting funds from arms procurement to policing, but this would be futile. There are already three times as many private security personnel as state-employed policemen, and even they do not succeed in containing what has become Africa's only peacetime killing field.
"I killed them because they were white." These famous words were spoken last year by William Kekana, who participated in one of the most horrendous incidents in which the entire family of Mr. Clifford Rawstorne was wiped out, consisting of his fiancée, baby, as well as his own mother. Even this massacre of an entire family would not have made headlines, were it not for the fact that one year-old Kayla was executed on her very first birthday with a shot in the head. Needless to say, the two adult women were first raped before being killed. Both William Kekana and his accomplice, Charles Fido Baloyi, fell into the high-risk group of young black (and Coloured) males who commit almost all violent crime in the country.
South Africa actually has a Minister of Safety and Security, which to some might seem like an example of absurd humour. His Excellency Mr. Charles Nqakula, whose official résumé proudly states that he was once "a waiter and wine steward", has immortalised himself by euphemistically stating that there was no real crime problem in South Africa, except that it was "a little on the high side".
All in all, South Africa has got remarkably used to its new-found status as the crime capital of the world. The high-rise districts of Hillbrow and Berea in Johannesburg have been officially designated by Interpol as having the highest murder rate in the world, that is, 600 people per 100 000 population members per annum. Consider for a moment that such a figure represents 12 times the rate found in inner-city ghettoes in the United States, often seen as no-go zones by many Americans.
One British immigrant to South Africa who has survived three car hijackings, refuses to emigrate, stating that he is now accustomed to having Kalachnikovs pointed at him from pointblank range. Everyone knows a relative or friend who has been killed or at least subjected to some form of violent crime, and no South African can remotely imagine a society where people do not live behind razor wire, electrified fences, high walls, burglar bars and similar decorative props.
Outsiders might find our lifestyle bizarre, but many pundits in South Africa consider our society to be much more "normal" now than at any time in the past, which was tarnished by ethnic separation albeit without the present large-scale violence. At the height of segregation and apartheid under Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa was almost as peaceful as Switzerland but she was immoral. Today we are the apotheosis of racial morality and political correctness, yet as violent as the Congo or Liberia. Surprisingly, however, our economy continues to function amid the carnage. No economist has ever studied this as far as I know, but not only is crime our biggest industry - bigger than gold-mining or manufacturing - it also stimulates consumption as stolen goods are replaced; it is a boon to the insurance and security industries and ultimately makes surgeons and undertakers rich. The government earns billions of rands in Value-Added Tax on stolent goods being replaced with new ones. So crime pays.
News about killings or shoot-outs no longer elicits the slightest surprise. It is part of our daily existence, and one assumes the lethal risks attending to something as simple as going shopping or driving to work. My wife, for example, has twice been to the local shopping centre where in the one instance a shoot-out was taking place in the parking area so that she had to hide between the cars with our 18 month-old son in her arms; in the second case an armed robbery had just taken place with the robbers casually strolling by with their guns and their loot.
Everyone knows someone who has been killed, raped or maimed. Just this week, the wife of a friend and former literary editor of Die Burger, François Smith, was stabbed to death with a screwdriver in their home in Wellington, near Cape Town. Her murderer was a 16-year-old squatter camp resident whose race was omitted by the press but presumably few, if any whites, reside in his particular squatter camp which is dedicated to black Africans. Lisbé Smuts-Smith was a well-known academic and head of the Afrikaans literature department at the University of Cape Town. Just two weeks ago, another UCT academic, mathematician Brian Hahn, was attacked by a former student, dr. Maleafisha Steve Tladi (35). Hahn died in hospital a week later, while Tladi was released on bail of R500 (about $80).
Two years ago Louw Rabie, a brilliant albeit reclusive geologist and brother of author Jan Rabie, was beaten to death with a fence pole by two Coloured men to whom he had lent some money a week earlier. Police in the small Cape town of Montagu readily caught his murderers because they happened to have drinking money during the week, taken from his home. He was 80 years old, but in good health. He is reputed to have been one of the most brilliant geologists and intellectuals this country has ever produced, writing copiously throughout his life but disdaining publication and public esteem. Africans with their oral tradition are fond of saying that "when an old person dies, a library burns down". What strikes me about the relentless killings of educated whites, is that the criminals are indeed "burning down the libraries" of this country and physically exterminating the intellectual class, much like Pol Pot did in Cambodia.
The media are celebrating youth, dance, colour, being black and exuberant - as opposed to the quiet studiousness of middle-aged and elderly whites, the bearers of knowledge and understanding. Are these learned whites who are being killed in exuberant, paradisiacal outbreaks of violence simply the remnants of a civilisation that is being eradicated in the name of decolonisation? No government spokesman has ever condemned such killings; so we may assume that the present regime is completely indifferent to them, where such killings do not enjoy their tacit support.
Around our local school in the past week there have been two car hijackings, as well as one murder. It is not really considered to be an exceptionally violent area. Most of this is not even reported in the press, because there really is not enough space and ordinary crime is no longer newsworthy. It needs some further sadistic element to make the front page, such as babies getting killed or raped, or elderly farmers being tortured to death. Farming in South Africa is now arguably the most dangerous profession in the world with more than 1600 farmers * murdered since 1994, often in macabre and dehumanising ways.
To the outside world, white South Africans are congenitally evil. If our murderers and rapists had been white and their victims black, Europe or the United States would long ago have sent an expeditionary force to put a stop to it. At present, news of white suffering in South Africa inspires the occasional yawn in Western capitals. This is why a recent article in The Despatch, detailing the rape of a dog by three black men, gave me some hope that a chord will be struck somewhere in the coolly indifferent breasts of our fellow-Westerners. Even if the lives of Louw Rabie, Brian Hahn, Lisbé Smuts-Smith, Kayla Rawstorne and tens of thousands of others are of no value to them, perhaps they will take pity on the mongrel bitch in Grahamstown that was recently raped by three black men. Or perhaps two black men, as the third one protested his innocence upon being dragged out of the shack by screaming, "I came here to relieve myself. These two were raping the dog when I arrived!" Cruelty to humans, especially white humans, is today a normal feature of our society, just like human sacrifice used to be in the culture of the Aztecs. Cruelty to animals, or non-consensual sex with dogs, may still evoke some sympathy, not only locally, but also internationally. I therefore feel sorry for Masganda - the name of the dog concerned - who was rescued with a bleeding vagina and in need of veterinary attention, but perhaps this lowly creature of uncertain lineage could become a martyr for our cause in alerting opinion-makers and political leaders of our plight.
Cycling has become a popular sport in South Africa. However, its practitioners regularly get shot at by gangs of black youths in the street, so that many of them carry guns and knives for self-defence on their bicycles. Members of the Johannesburg mountain-bike club were outraged a while ago when two cyclists, Scott and Lloyd Griffith, were charged with murder after an armed battle with their four black assailants, one of whom succumbed to his wounds.
Most of the time, however, whites are helpless victims of crime. The government has recently passed a new gun law which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to own a fire-arm. They have also abolished rural commandos of military reservists entrusted with crime-prevention in the country, without any police units replacing them. Occasionally the newspapers carry stories of crime victims successfully defending themselves against attacks, offering armed resistance. As a result of the new gun law, this will soon end and we shall simply be able to hide or flee from our assailants. Defending oneself against a marauding robber or rapist might be a manifestation of racism, and is therefore frowned upon as being a kind of "right-wing" response.
Being robbed of one's vehicle or household belongings is now considered quite normal, and often people ascribe escaping with their lives to their own astuteness, such as being friendly to the robber, helping him load the effects into a vehicle, not looking him in the face so as not to recognise him afterwards, et cetera. A friend of mine in Kempton Park kept up a reasonable conversation with the thieves emptying his house, tied up as he was with a gun pointed at him. He survived, although his elderly mother was badly roughed up and had to be hospitalised. In other instances, of course, people are not so lucky and they become just another murder statistic. Then they simply adapt and die.
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The first draft of this article was submitted to the British Spectator, who turned it down about a year ago. I have now updated it with references to more recent incidents. Probably no mainstream newspaper in South Africa will publish it, because it refers to the race and gender of violent criminals, which is taboo here as elsewhere in the Western world. As George Orwell said, however, "during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act".
In the interest of drawing attention to the anarchy that exists in South Africa, the author qualifies his copyright on this article and invites everyone to post it on his or her website, copy it and mail it to friends and mailing lists, translate it into other languages and to distribute it far and wide. The only condition is that no element must be changed or censored.
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* NOTE: As the author requests, I have published this article without amendment, however, it should be noted that it was written in 2005, whist the South African economy was still in reasonably good shape. The figure of 1,600 farm killings is the figure admitted by the South African media, however, the actual figure is at least 3,072. Sarah
8% of gang rape suspects are white
According to a report in this evening's London Evening Standard, only 8% of gang rape suspects are white, whereas white women and girls made up 50% of all victims in 2008 (Down from 69% in 1998 - possibly due to the growing phenomenon of white flight away from the inner cities).This means that 92% of rape suspects have not been identified as white. 32%, four times as many as whites, were identified as black and 24% were, what the report refers to as being of "different ethnicities". Of the remaining 36% the race is not recorded, however, given that there have been no recent prosecutions involving white gangs (which would certainly have been widely publicised) we can assume that a similar percentage break down applies, which would mean that at least 88% of suspects do not come from within the indigenous white population.
The report also indicates that the numbers of gang rapes are increasing alarmingly.
Given that the much vaunted "benefits" of immigration are yet to be quantified, they would have to be quite something to balance out the downside wouldn't they?
