South Africa is in crisis, the country’s political establishment is into turmoil. The country is preparing for civil war and the Suidlanders have put together a Civil Defense plan. The Suidlanders are an emergency plan initiative officially founded in 2006 to prepare a Protestant Christian South African Minority for a coming violent revolution. While most people in South Africa ignored the warning signs that anarchy was not only possible but likely, the Suidlanders started to prepare. The same globalist forces that worked to destroy South Africa are at work destroying what is left of the civilized west by forced integration. South Africa’s present is the west’s future if it continues down its current path. People need to be warned of ‘The Coming Revolution’ and ‘The Future of the West’ so they too can prepare to become part of ‘Our Emergency Plan’. International mainstream media has been proven unreliable time and time again. They cannot be trusted to warn people. But Brexit, Trump and the 2016 Italian Referendum proved that social media and word of mouth is still the best way of sharing the truth. So, go ahead, Share these pages. This Special Report by Alex Newman below, gives an idea of what is going on in a far away place that could be close to home. South Africa is likely close to a civil war.
Genocide and Communism Threaten South Africa
Along a highway on a grassy hill, thousands of white crosses — each one representing an individual victim of brutal farm murders, or plaasmoorde in Afrikaans — are a stark reminder of the reality facing European-descent farmers in the new South Africa. One of the iron crosses was planted last year in memory of two-year-old Willemien Potgieter, who was executed on a farm and left in a pool of her own blood. Her parents were murdered, too — the father hacked to death with a machete. Before leaving, the half-dozen killers tied a note to the gate: “We killed them. We’re coming back.”
The Potgieter family massacre is just one of the tens of thousands of farm attacks to have plagued South Africa since 1994. Like little Willemien’s cross, many of those now-iconic emblems represent innocent children, even babies, who have been savagely murdered, oftentimes after being tortured in ways so gruesome, horrifying, and barbaric, that mere words could never adequately describe it. The death toll is still rising.
Like countless South Africans, Andre Vandenberg has lost multiple relatives to violence in the so-called “Rainbow Nation.” In separate incidents, according to Vandenberg, a motorcycle exporter and former military man who now lives in the United States, two of his female cousins were brutally and repeatedly raped in front of their husbands. One of the women was pregnant with the couple’s first child. All five victims were murdered. After sodomizing and killing the husbands, in both cases, the ruthless attackers raped Vandenberg’s cousins again.
Enduring the horror for hours, one of the women was eventually shot. The other had a tire filled with gasoline put around her neck and set ablaze — the agonizing punishment known as “necklacing,” which was once commonly meted out to black opponents of the predominantly black African National Congress (ANC) now ruling South Africa in an unholy alliance with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and an umbrella group for labor unions. Nelson Mandela’s wife, Winnie, was known for publicly supporting the barbaric act. Nobody was ever arrested in connection with those two farm attacks.
Before Vandenberg lost his cousins, his father was killed by a truck driver in a suspicious accident. The drunken suspect, apparently a respected figure within the ANC, was arrested at the scene. However, under pressure from the ANC, the killer was released on $100 bail. Again with help from the ANC, Vandenberg said, the driver fled and was never prosecuted for the killing. No explanation was ever given by authorities, despite repeated appeals for answers.
After being deported back to South Africa from the United States over an alleged failure to report a change of address, Vandenberg’s brother was killed, too. Within a year of his arrival, he was brutally murdered. Witnesses watched the murder unfold and told police, but as has become typical, nobody was ever prosecuted. A male cousin of Vandenberg’s, meanwhile, was shot in the chest while being robbed. And as is often the case, the murder was labeled an “accident” by authorities.
“It’s racial crime,” insisted Vandenberg, an Afrikaner descendant of Dutch settlers, in an interview with The New American. “The ANC people are using genocide — they’re pro-genocide. Long term, they want all the property that belongs to the whites.” The black-led ANC-communist regime is “twice as racist” as the former white-led apartheid government ever was, he added. And along with its supporters, the South African government is willing to do “anything” to accomplish its goals.
When top ANC government leaders, including South African President Jacob Zuma, chant about exterminating whites, “some people think they’re just singing songs,” Vandenberg said, becoming visibly uncomfortable at the thought of it. “But I think they’re very serious about that. That’s why we have all the farm murders…. What they do, their followers will follow.”
In its defense, the ANC regime points out that crime affects all South Africans; and it is true, the country has one of the highest murder rates in the world — blacks, whites, people of Asian origin, and others are all terrorized by it. But respected independent experts who have investigated allegations of anti-white genocide in the Rainbow Nation have concluded that the government is not being honest about the wave of genocidal murders. The ANC’s national spokesman declined repeated requests for comment.
Genocide
Following a fact-finding mission to South Africa in July, Dr. Gregory Stanton, head of the non-profit group Genocide Watch, announced his conclusions: There is an orchestrated genocidal campaign targeting whites, and white farmers in particular. The respected organization released a report about its investigation shortly afterward. On a scale the group developed to identify the phases of genocide, South Africa has been moved to stage six: the preparation and planning phase. Step seven is extermination. The eighth and final stage: denial after the fact.
Among the startling discoveries, long known to South Africans and analysts monitoring the powder keg, was evidence pointing to the ANC regime itself. “There is thus strong circumstantial evidence of government support for the campaign of forced displacement and atrocities against White farmers and their families,” Genocide Watch leaders said in their report, entitled Why Are Afrikaner Farmers Being Murdered in South Africa? “There is direct evidence of SA [South African] government incitement to genocide.”
According to experts and estimates compiled by citizens who track the killing spree, at least 3,000 white farmers in South Africa, known as Boers (from the Dutch word for “farmer”), have been brutally massacred over the last decade. Some estimates put the figures even higher, but it is hard to know because the ANC government has purposely made it impossible to determine the true extent. With the total number of commercial farmers in South Africa estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, analysts say as many as 10 percent have already been exterminated. Even more have come under attack.
It is worse than murder, though. Many of the victims, including children and even infants, are raped or savagely tortured or both before being executed or left for dead. Sometimes boiling water is poured down their throats. Other attacks involve burning victims with hot irons or slicing them up with machetes. In more than a few cases, the targets have been tied to their own cars and dragged along dirt roads for miles.
The South African government, dominated by the communist-backed ANC, has responded to the surging wave of racist murders by denying the phenomenon, implausibly claiming that many of the attacks are simply “regular” crimes. Despite fierce criticism, authorities also stopped tracking statistics that would provide a more accurate picture of what is truly going on.
In many cases, the murders are simply classified as “burglaries” or even “accidents” and ignored, so the true murder figures are certainly much higher than officials admit. The police, meanwhile, are often involved in the murders or at least the coverups, multiple sources report. A white South African exile living in the United States told The New American that when victims are able to defend themselves or apprehend the would-be perpetrators, many of the attackers are found to be affiliated with the ruling ANC or its youth wing.
Experts are not buying the government’s coverup. “The farm murders, we have become convinced, are not accidental,” said Dr. Stanton of Genocide Watch during his fact-finding mission to South Africa. It was very clear that the massacres were not common crimes, he added — especially because of the absolute barbarity used against the victims. “We don’t know exactly who is planning them yet, but what we are calling for is an international investigation.”
Indeed, most unbiased analysts concede that the thousands of brutal killings and tens of thousands of attacks are part of a broader pattern. And according to Dr. Stanton, who was also involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and has decades of experience examining genocide and communist terror, the trend points toward a troubled future for the nation.
“Things of this sort are what I have seen before in other genocides,” he said of the murdered white farmers, pointing to several examples, including a victim’s body that was left with an open Bible on top and other murder victims who were tortured, disemboweled, raped, or worse. “This is what has happened in Burundi; it’s what happened in Rwanda. It has happened in many other places in the world.”
Speaking in Pretoria at an event organized by the anti-communist Transvaal Agricultural Union, Dr. Stanton also lashed out at the effort to dehumanize whites in South Africa by portraying them as “settlers.” The label is meant to paint Afrikaner white farmers — descendants of Northern Europeans who arrived centuries ago, some as far back as the 1600s — as people who do not belong there.
“High-ranking ANC government officials who continuously refer to Whites as ‘settlers’ and ‘colonialists of a special type’ are using racial epithets in a campaign of state-sponsored dehumanization of the White population as a whole,” Genocide Watch said in its latest report. “They sanction gang-organized hate crimes against Whites, with the goal of terrorizing Whites through fear of genocidal annihilation.”
It is the same process that happened prior to the infamous genocide against Christian Armenians in Turkey, Stanton explained. The dehumanization phenomenon also occurred against the Jewish people in Germany under the National Socialist (Nazi) regime of mass-murderer Adolf Hitler, well before the Nazi tyrant began implementing his monstrous “final solution.”
Unfortunately, South Africa might be next in line. “Whenever you have that kind of dehumanization … you have the beginning of that downward spiral into genocide,” Stanton noted, adding that the situation in South Africa had already moved well beyond that stage. The next phase before extermination, which began years ago in South Africa, is organizing to actually carry it out.
“We are worried that there are organized groups that are in fact doing that planning,” Stanton continued during his speech. “It became clear to us that the [ANC] Youth League was this kind of organization — it was planning this kind of genocidal massacre and also the forced displacement of whites from South Africa.”
Genocide Watch first raised its alert level for South Africa from stage five to stage six when then-ANC Youth League boss Julius Malema began openly singing a racist song aimed at inciting murder against white South African farmers: “Shoot the Boer” and “Kill the Boer” were some of the lyrics. Described by the anti-genocide group as a “racist Marxist-Leninist,” Malema has also been quoted as saying that “all whites are criminals” and threatening to steal white farmers’ land by force. He said the farm murders would stop when Africans of European descent surrendered their land.
After the calls to genocide made international headlines, the South African judiciary ruled that the song advocating murder of whites was unlawful hate speech. Genocide Watch moved South Africa back down to stage five. Incredibly, however, the president of South Africa, ANC’s Jacob Zuma, began singing the song early this year, too.
“We are going to shoot them with the machine gun; they are going to run; you are a Boer [white farmer]; shoot the Boer,” the South African president sang at an ANC rally in Bloemfontein in January, an incident that was caught on film and posted online. Since then, the number of murdered white South African farmers has been growing each month, according to reports. Other senior government officials, meanwhile, have openly called for “war.” South Africa is now back at stage six.
“This is the kind of talk that of course is not only pre-genocidal, it also comes before crimes against humanity,” Dr. Stanton said, urging everyone to remember that they are all members of the human race. “Those who would be deniers, and who would try to ignore the warning signs in this country, I think are ignoring the facts.”
There is also increasing “polarization,” where the target population — white farmers in this case, and even moderates of all races — are portrayed as an “enemy,” Stanton explained about the march to genocide. And that phenomenon is ever-more apparent in South Africa today, with the situation starting to spiral out of control.
Meanwhile, the South African government is stepping up efforts to disarm the struggling white farmers — stripping them of their final line of defense against genocidal attacks. As has consistently been the case throughout history, of course, disarmament is always a necessary precursor to totalitarianism and the eventual mass slaughter of target groups. In fact, arms in the hands of citizens are often the final barrier to complete enslavement and even extermination.
“The government has disbanded the commando units of white farmers that once protected their farms, and has passed laws to confiscate the farmers’ weapons,” Genocide Watch noted on its website in an update about South Africa posted in July. “Disarmament of a targeted group is one of the surest early warning signs of future genocidal killings.”
Even mere possession of an “unregistered” or “unlicensed” weapon — licenses have become extraordinarily difficult to obtain, if not impossible — can result in jail time. And in South Africa, especially for whites, prison is a virtual death sentence, with widespread rape and HIV infections being the norm.
Those who do surrender their guns may find themselves defenseless in the face genocidal terror — again, a potential death sentence. South African exiles who spoke with TNA said that many of the guns confiscated from whites by officials have later been found at the gruesome murder scenes of white farmers.
The United Nations defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.” The term also includes actions other than simply wholesale slaughter, though. According to the UN, among the crimes that can constitute genocide are causing serious harm to members of a specific minority group; deliberately inflicting conditions on the minority aimed at bringing about its destruction in whole or in part; seeking to prevent births among the targeted population; and forcibly transferring minority children to others.
South African Sonia Hruska, a former Mandela administration consultant who served as a coordinator in policy implementation from 1994 to 2001 before moving to the United States, told The New American that many or even most of those conditions have already been met — and any single one can technically constitute genocide if it is part of a systematic attempt to destroy a particular group. “Acknowledge it. Don’t deny it,” she said. Other activists and exiles agree. Meanwhile, Hruska and other experts say that the government is encouraging the problem, actively discriminating against whites, and in many cases even facilitating the ongoing atrocities.
“Forced displacement from their farms has inflicted on the Afrikaner ethnic group conditions of life calculated to bring about its complete or partial physical destruction, an act of genocide also prohibited by the Genocide Convention,” Genocide Watch said in its most recent report. “In our analysis, the current ANC leadership also publicly uses incitement to genocide with the long-term goal of forcibly driving out or annihilating the White population from South Africa.”
Of course, not all South Africans — especially city dwellers — are convinced that there is an ongoing genocide in their country, or even that one may be coming. The vast majority of blacks and whites would simply like to live in peace with each other.
However, virtually everyone who is paying attention agrees that without solutions, the precarious situation in the Rainbow Nation will continue to deteriorate, going from bad to worse, sooner rather than later.
Communist Threat: Land, Mines
Behind the genocide lurks another issue that is inseparable from it — the ongoing communist effort to completely enslave South Africa under totalitarian rule. In fact, aside from white supremacists, who have seized on the problems in the Rainbow Nation to spread hate against blacks, most activists believe the stirring up of racial tensions is not an end in itself. Instead, it is a means to the ultimate end of foisting socialism on the nation while eliminating all potential resistance.
The issue of land distribution, which has become one of the key drivers of the downward spiral, is among the greatest concerns. The white minority in South Africa still owns much of the land despite ANC promises to redistribute it to blacks. But the redistribution that has occurred — as in neighboring Zimbabwe — has largely resulted in failure, with redistributed farms often failing quickly while producing little to no food.
Despite the atrocious track record so far, extremists, including elements of the ANC-dominated government, are now hoping to expropriate land from white farmers more quickly, with some factions even arguing that it should be done with no compensation at all. And the communist agenda here, as in virtually everywhere else where forcible land redistribution has been adopted, has even broader goals than just enriching cronies.
“Whatever system of land tenure is adopted in South Africa, the communists — in the long run — have in mind to take away all private property. That should never be forgotten,” Stanton warned, noting that he has lived in communist-run countries before. “Every place you go where communists have taken over, they take away private ownership because private ownership gives people the power — the economic power — to oppose their government. Once you have taken that away, there is no basis on which you can have the economic power to oppose the government.”
Of course, this would not be the first time a similar tragedy has happened in southern Africa. When Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe seized power in Zimbabwe (formerly known as Rhodesia, once one of the richest countries on the continent — “the breadbasket of Africa”), he began a ruthless war against the white population and his political opponents of all colors.
The country promptly spiraled into chaos and mass starvation under the Mugabe regime when the tyrant “redistributed” the farms and wealth to his cronies, who of course knew nothing about farming. The regime butchered tens of thousands of victims, and estimates suggest that millions have died as a direct result of Mugabe’s Marxist policies. Many fled to South Africa.
Whites who refused to leave their property during the “redistribution” were often tortured and killed by the regime or its death squads. With Mugabe still in charge, the tragic plight of Zimbabwe continues to worsen today. But the mass-murdering despot is still held in high regard by many senior officials in the ANC.
“As a group, Afrikaner farmers stand in the way of the South African Communist Party’s goal to implement their Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist New Democratic Revolution and specifically the confiscation of all rural land belonging to White Afrikaner farmers,” Genocide Watch officials noted in their most recent report.
Beyond land, there is also the mining sector, which is crucial to keeping the rapidly deteriorating South African economy afloat. With the recent labor unrest and miner strikes focusing international attention on the “Rainbow Nation,” there are still more questions than answers. What has become clear, though, is that at least certain factions within South Africa’s ruling elite are seeking to exploit the crisis to advance the cause of nationalization.
Politicians and aspiring powerbrokers seized on the escalating crisis — multiple gold and platinum mines were idled because of the ongoing strikes — to whip up hysteria for political purposes, analysts said. In mid-September, over a thousand soldiers were deployed to support an embattled police force, as the ruling ANC regime and its communist partners sought to blame business for the tensions.
The ruling alliance consisting of the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the Conference of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) implausibly claimed after an inquiry that mining companies were to blame for the chaos: “It is therefore our considered view that employers have an interest in fanning this conflict to reverse the gains achieved by workers over a long period of time.”
According to the ruling alliance, the mining businesses were deliberately stirring up union rivalries to suppress wages and benefits. However, credible analysts largely rejected the allegations as preposterous; the firms in question have already lost huge amounts of money as many of their mines remained shut down because of the strikes. Stock prices plunged, too.
Meanwhile, multiple communist agitators within and outside the ANC renewed their calls to nationalize the mines. The move, however, was hardly a surprise. Consider that even before seizing power, state ownership of the sector was established ANC policy. “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable,” Nelson Mandela said in a 1990 statement from prison.
They are still at it today. Marxist agitator and former ANC Youth League boss Malema, famous for corruption, inciting genocide against white South Africans, and demanding that the regime nationalize virtually the entire economy, inserted himself at the center of the growing labor unrest. He called for, among other schemes, nationwide strikes and the nationalization of the whole mining industry.
After Malema was expelled from the ANC earlier this year, the suspiciously wealthy communist racist — he lives far beyond his means and was recently charged with corruption — has started to attack South African ANC President Zuma, a polygamist and fellow open communist who also regularly sings the infamous hate song calling for the extermination of whites. After strikers were killed by police last month, Malema, apparently upset that Zuma had not sunk South Africa into total communist tyranny quickly enough, said, “How can he call on people to mourn those he has killed? He must step down.”
Observers, even those within South Africa’s ruling alliance, however, suggested the unrest was actually being carefully orchestrated by power-hungry elements within the communist-backed ANC itself. Even top officials within the alliance are suspicious about what is going on. According to COSATU President Sdumo Dlamini, for example, Malema supporters within the ANC were hoping to plunge South Africa into deeper chaos to solidify their power. “We also understand that there have been certain individuals behind him who are funding this for their own political ambitions,” Dlamini said. “Julius Malema may be the point person running at the front, but we know that there are big guns behind him.” And big money, too.
Dlamini said COSATU was “very angry” that unsuspecting mine workers were being used as pawns by opportunists, sometimes even being killed in the process. “This is a systematic, orchestrated, long-time plan that is unfolding now,” he added. “The ANC as the ruling party shouldn’t be afraid to be bold, condemn and expose…. The ANC must continue to identify and deal with those who fund this chaos.”
Communists, of course, have historically been known to create the superficial impression of internal division to further their agenda while collaborating together behind the scenes — the use of strategic disinformation, as defectors have called it. Obviously, there are occasions when would-be communist despots fight among themselves as well. It remains unclear what, if anything, may be going on outside of the limelight between the ANC, the SACP, and other totalitarian forces working to crush individual liberty and all resistance within South Africa.
Other analysts attributed the expanding labor unrest to widely different causes, ranging from anger over the ANC regime’s lawless corruption to genuine grievances about dangerous working conditions and low pay at the mines. Tribal tensions have also been cited as playing a role, though just how significant is difficult to determine.
Numerous observers have attributed the violent tensions to rivalries between the ANC-linked National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which is the largest member of COSATU, and its increasingly influential rival known as the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). Some experts said the crackdown on protests was an effort to quash the AMCU before it further splintered workers’ support for the ruling ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance.
Critics have accused the AMCU, which touts itself as anti-communist and has long criticized the established powerbrokers for corruption, of fomenting the unrest. The South African Communist Party even called for AMCU leaders to be arrested after the incident, and among the ruling communist establishment, fears about the renegade union are reportedly growing.
The chaos has been ongoing since early this year, but it exploded and entered into the international headlines in August after dozens of striking miners were killed in what has since been dubbed the “Marikana massacre.” Police, who were reportedly fired upon by armed demonstrators, returned fire, killing more than 30 people.
Top government officials — many of whom have personal stakes in the situation including shares in the mining firms — have vowed to crack down on the strikes. Proud communist revolutionary Jeff Radebe, the “Justice Minister” in the ANC regime, said at a September 14 press conference that authorities were intervening because the mining industry is crucial to South Africa’s crumbling economy. “The South African government has noted and is deeply concerned by the amount of violence, threats and intimidation that is currently taking place in our country,” he told reporters, warning that anyone taking part in “illegal gatherings” would be “dealt with” very swiftly. “Our government will not tolerate these acts any further.”
Critics of the harsh response warned that raids and use of force against miners would likely contribute to further unrest. Perhaps that is the desired outcome, with anarchy helping to pave the way for police-state measures. While the crisis was growing, however, Marxist genocidal forces seized the opportunity to unleash an even larger bloodbath.
A newly formed U.S.-based group of human rights activists and South African exiles known as Friends 4 Humanity, founded to raise awareness about the genocide of the South African minority, told The New American at the time that the number of racist attacks and murders against Afrikaner farmers had surged dramatically amid the labor unrest. There were at least 30 documented attacks in the first two weeks of September — many resulting in multiple murders.
“Since the beginning of 2012 we have noticed that murders increased to approximately one every second day, with some victims as young as six months,” said Sonia Hruska, the former Mandela consultant who is also a founding member of the new organization. “However, since the start of the mining unrest it has now escalated to as much as at least one attack a day with multiple fatal victims.”
Impeding the Plan
The New American magazine warned readers almost two decades ago that the ANC leaders of the anti-apartheid movement and their foreign backers, despite the establishment media’s bogus claims, were deliberately plotting to condemn that nation to communism. The signs were all over the place — literally. For example, Nelson Mandela made a public appearance in front of a giant hammer and sickle with SACP chief Joe Slovo. Now, after almost 20 years of patient waiting, that conquest appears to be nearing its final phases as anti-communist whites are slaughtered to make way for a collectivist “utopia” ruled by the ANC and the SACP. Troublesome blacks were exterminated by the ANC and its allies before 1994.
Among South Africans and foreigners concerned about the ongoing problems and a looming calamity, however, there is a wide range of thoughts about what should happen.
Dr. Stanton of Genocide Watch promised the Afrikaners that he would visit the U.S. Embassy and bring the issue to the attention of world leaders. However, he also urged them not to give up their guns and to continue resisting the communist “ideology” espoused by so many of the political and party leaders that now dominate the nation’s coercive government apparatus.
So far, efforts to garner the attention of the “international community” appear to have been largely unproductive. The Dutch Parliament, though, narrowly defeated a recent bill calling for the government of the Netherlands to investigate and help combat racist violence directed at Afrikaners in South Africa by offering expertise and judiciary support while helping to preserve threatened basic rights, such as freedom of the press. Despite failing to pass, the effort was taken as a sign that world opinion may be changing, albeit slowly.
Activists are also calling on European governments and the United States to immediately begin accepting especially vulnerable white refugees from South Africa as a high priority. There are less than five million whites left in the country, about 10 percent of South Africans, down from almost a quarter of the population decades ago.
Analysts say that giving them asylum may prove tough politically — partly because it could expose the myths of Nelson Mandela and his communist ANC being “heroic” so-called freedom fighters.
Even if it were possible, millions of white South Africans would refuse to leave the land of their forefathers anyway, at least at this point, knowing that if they left, the Afrikaner culture and language may disappear forever. “Up to a million people have already emigrated, almost as many as left Lebanon during the civil war. However, mass emigration would mean the demise of our nation, together with our unique language, history, literature and culture,” Pro-Afrikaans Action Group (PRAAG) chief Dan Roodt told The New American. “You must also remember that to most of the Western countries, we represent unwanted immigrants, despite being educated, law-abiding and Christian. Despite being persecuted, very few actually get political asylum as the mass media still portray South Africa as a model democracy.”
Like a significant subset of the Afrikaner minority, Roodt wants his people to have their own autonomous homeland in Southern Africa, a proposal that the ANC regime rejects out of hand. “Many of us want to stay and fight and turn the tables on this anachronistic left-wing, racist regime,” explained the controversial Afrikaner advocate.
Other South Africans hope the international community will intervene to protect persecuted minority groups — either militarily if the downward spiral continues, or at least through sanctions and diplomatic pressure. More than a few sources who spoke to The New American said foreign action is a necessity: They view South Africa as a sort of “canary in the coal mine.” The Rainbow Nation might be the first to go, but Western civilization, they say, will not be far behind.
Unsurprisingly, the establishment press has barely reported a word about the looming potential catastrophe in South Africa. However, there is hope: Activists say that if Americans get involved, even just helping to raise awareness, a bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions may well be averted.
It will certainly not be easy to roll back the blood-red tide of communism and genocide in South Africa. The roots have been firmly planted, nurtured by Western governments and communist tyrants for decades. But for South Africans of all colors, and for humanity itself, activists insist that the battle must go on. It will.
Mandela’s Legacy: The Freefall of South Africa
Rapes, murders, disease, corruption, poverty, communism rampant – and maybe genocide
The horror stories about life in South Africa under apartheid are endless, of course, and the fall of that morally repugnant political system is universally hailed as a triumph.
But two decades after the white-led government relinquished power, and especially in the afterglow of worldwide praise for the nation’s former president Nelson Mandela after his passing at age 95, an objective look at South Africa today is very disturbing.
In fact, even among the harshest critics of apartheid and racial oppression, there is an acknowledgement that in many ways the “rainbow nation,” under African National Congress and South African Communist Party rule, is heading downhill.
Fast.
“What I said during my several visits to South Africa, during the era of apartheid, is that blacks weren’t for personal liberty; they mostly wanted to change the color of the dictator,” George Mason University Economics Professor Walter Williams, who studied the apartheid system, told WND.
Mandela’s recent death prompted analysts immediately to opine that South Africa is facing a fork in the road that will define it for generations to come: an acceleration of the ongoing shift toward tyranny, or not.
“This is the first time I have felt anxious about the future,” admitted Leon Louw, a prominent anti-apartheid activist and executive director of the South Africa-based Free Market Foundation. He told WND that throughout all of the turmoil in South Africa in recent decades, “We never felt pessimistic, we felt optimistic all along, but now, I feel worried for the first time.”
Today, he said, “most government positions, most of the cabinet are … the ultra-left, socialists and communists.”
That some things are better than under apartheid is not disputed. Many more blacks are in the middle and upper classes and the standard of living has improved for millions since the revolutionary 1994 events.
But still, unemployment, poverty, AIDS, murder, corruption and crime all have surged, and South Africa now regularly tops the charts worldwide in terms of rape and murder as average life expectancy has plummeted. Also troubling to broad swaths of the public, as well as many analysts and economists, is the direction government and society itself are heading.
President Jacob Zuma, for example, still regularly sings “struggle” songs advocating the mass-murder of European-descent South Africans. And genocide experts even say planning and preparations to exterminate and drive out certain minorities in South Africa are well under way while vicious hate crimes escalate, as WND has reported.
What, then, is the status of South Africa as its leftist leaders move ahead in a world without the influence of Mandela for the first time in generations?
Economy
Officially, about 25 percent of South Africans are out of work, double that from 1994. If one counts “discouraged workers,” the real rate is closer to 40 percent.
Experts who spoke with WND pointed out that official figures do not tell the whole picture because large numbers of South Africans work outside the formal economy, at least partly due to burdensome government labor-market regulations.
However, there is little doubt that the nation has a massive and chronic unemployment problem affecting all races, and especially blacks, despite intensifying “black economic empowerment” schemes.
Since the end of apartheid in 1994, on the surface at least, it would appear economic conditions in South Africa have improved substantially. The real Gross Domestic Product, for instance, has risen by more than 30 percent over the last 20 years.
But the fact that the real GDP-per-capita growth for other emerging markets during that time was 115 percent sheds light on South Africa’s deficiencies.
Shortly after the fall of apartheid, South Africa did see some moderate economic growth, at least compared with the previous decade of civil turmoil and punishing foreign sanctions.
The growth phenomenon was largely attributed by economists to an influx of foreign investment, relaxation of draconian race-based economic restrictions imposed under white rule and an end to harsh foreign sanctions aimed at the apartheid government.
“To my mind, the main reason for the improvement in South Africa’s growth performance after 1994 lies in the lifting of economic sanctions and the subsequent reintegration of the South African economy with the global economy,” says Jac Laubscher, group economist for the South African financial company Sanlam.
Competing views
Louw, the Free Market Foundation chief, argues there is no debate: The vast majority is now better off, despite some individually troubling scenarios.
He said the South African government is “very peculiar” in that it constantly harps on how bad things are in its nation, noting, “All of that is an excuse for more power, more intervention, more patronage, more racial, race-based policies.”
He called the sometimes-government-propagated insinuations that life for blacks was better under apartheid “implausible” and “extremely bizarre.”
One of the most important measurements in analyzing the question, he said, was the proportion of blacks with incomes above the white average, which he said “certainly tells a very different story.”
In 1994, Louw explained, about 200,000 blacks had incomes higher than the average whites. Now, that figure is closer to three million, even though white incomes have gone up drastically in real terms, too, he said.
The other side
But other indicators suggest something else.
Between 1995 and 2000, for example, the respected U.S.-based National Bureau of Economic Research found a dramatic decline in real income among South Africans.
“Average incomes of South African men and women fell by about 40 percent between 1995 and 2000, and … there has been little improvement since then,” concluded the NBER study, released in 2005. “The brunt of the income decline appears to have been shouldered by the young and the non-white.”
“South Africans are worse off than they were before the end of apartheid, at least as measured by real incomes,” the researchers argued at the time, noting the poor were hit hardest.
Meanwhile, statistics cited by other experts suggest that by 2006, the number of people in South Africa living on less than $1 per day had doubled over the 1994 rate.
And in 2008, the United Nations reported that a quarter of South Africans were still living on less than $1.25 a day, with more than 40 percent living on less than $2 per day.
Quality of life
Ironically, perhaps, considering the oversized influence of communism on the political scene, South Africa now has among the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world.
Mandela, the first president of the “rainbow nation,” was a Central Committee member of the South African Communist Party, which remains a formal ANC alliance partner in ruling South Africa today.
While many experts and especially economists warn that measures of income equality are counterproductive, the dramatic and growing disparities are trumpeted by Marxists and big-government proponents within and outside of South Africa calling for even more drastic state control over the economy.
The U.N. Human Development Index, or HDI, reveals a bleak picture in terms of where South Africa has gone over the last two decades.
Prior to 1994, despite apartheid, South Africa’s HDI ranking was steadily climbing upward, and the nation was ranked well above most of Asia and the Arab world, and far ahead the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. It was also higher than the world average.
But by 2001, South Africa’s HDI score had fallen below the 1975 level.
Today, the ranking – which takes into account life expectancy, health, education, income, poverty, economy, equality and more – is 121 out of 187 countries, and significantly below the world average.
Under ANC-Communist Party rule, South Africa has fallen more than 50 places on the index, despite the added emphasis the ruling establishment placed on the metric. Officials still blame apartheid for the embarrassing numbers.
While access to decent housing, electricity and running water has expanded significantly since 1994, huge swaths of the population still live in shanty towns, and progress toward relieving poverty has largely slowed over the last decade.
There are positive indicators, with anecdotal evidence of prosperity, including having among the highest levels of active cell phones in the world. On the other hand, metrics such as life expectancy and health paint a darker picture.
Between 1960 and 1990, overall life expectancy in South Africa went from 51 to 61. While whites were still far better off, historian and apartheid critic Hermann Giliomee explained that racial gaps had started to narrow.
In 1994, average life expectancy in South Africa was generally accepted to be around 64, comparable to Europe.
By 2009, according to The Lancet journal, average life expectancy had plummeted back to 54. Today, the U.N. puts it at 53.4.
The global average, by contrast, was 70 in 2011, according to the World Health Organization.
Part of the spectacular decline is attributed to the fact that South Africa in 2013 suffers from among the worst rates of AIDS on earth, too; often being dubbed the “AIDS capital of the world.”
Other diseases also pose problems.
How bad is it really?
Louw said both the left and right have an agenda in making South Africa appear worse off than it is.
Forces on the right, he said, want to make the current regime and leftists in general look bad, and some also have a “racial agenda – blacks can’t govern, that sort of thing.”
“The agenda on the left is toward more socialism, bigger government, more nationalization, more retribution against whites, and so on,” Louw said. “It is interesting to see the right and the left have this very bizarre, unusual common interest in simply falsifying data.”
Indeed, despite claims and anecdotal evidence to the contrary, Louw said it is an “objective fact” and “not debatable” that blacks as a whole are better off, even economically, now than under apartheid.
Crime, corruption, racism
One of the worst plagues to wreak havoc in 2013 South Africa is violent crime, with the nation now widely lambasted as the rape and murder capital of the world.
“The objective data all points to a massive rise in crime,” said Louw. “The anecdotal data does the same; people are nervous, people don’t walk around the streets at night, and everybody knows somebody who has been carjacked, or robbed, or brutalized, or even killed.
“This is a simple manifestation of the breakdown of the state,” he said. “Government is just appallingly bad at everything it does: education, healthcare, infrastructure, security, everything that is a government function is in shambles.”
He told the story of a man who was found dead in his car. Everyone at the scene “spontaneously started grabbing his valuables and putting them in the trunk of the nearest car,” Louw explained.
“Everybody assumed that a complete stranger was safer than the police for this person’s valuables,” Louw said, noting that he returned the items to the man’s grateful family later.
“The police are inefficient, they are corrupt, they run the roadblocks that are kind of the modern version of highway robbery – collecting what I call ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ fines,” he added.
Official estimates suggest that between 15,000 and 20,000 people are murdered each year in South Africa, about 50 murders per day, or around 31 per 100,000 individuals over the year.
In reality, international organizations such as Interpol have argued that the real murder rates are likely twice as high as South African authorities admit.
Anecdotal evidence, especially when it comes to murders of Afrikaner farmers, also very strongly suggests that officials are dramatically understating the extent of the killings.
South African-born Ilana Mercer, author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” noted that Mandela’s presidency led to a society where “more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.”
Ironically, depending on whose figures can be believed, South Africa, with its strict gun-control regime, has a murder rate in the neighborhood of 1,000 percent higher than in the United States.
Rape numbers also drastically underestimate the real prevalence, experts say, and show that South Africa recorded more than 132.4 rapes per 100,000 people in 2010 – the worst in the world. The official U.S. rate is less than 27 per 100,000, according to the FBI.
Other evidence indicates the true figures for South Africa are far higher.
A study conducted by the Medical Research Council, for example, found that more than one in four South African men – 27.5 percent – admitted to having raped at least one woman or girl. Almost half of those said they had raped multiple victims.
Another survey by the same organization later found that 37.4 percent of men admitted to perpetrating a rape, with more than one in four women saying they had been raped.
“Most people don’t bother to report crimes,” said Louw. “This is a manifestation of the failure of government, and that is basically true of everything the government does.”
Widely cited estimates suggest some 500,000 rapes occur in South Africa every year.
But few perpetrators are convicted. Indeed, on corruption, South Africa ranks at 72nd place worldwide on the Transparency International index, earning a 42 out of a possible 100 (with 100 being the cleanest).
The police force, packed with actual convicted criminals, is viewed as the most corrupted institution.
Racism
Despite the dream of a “rainbow nation,” polls and surveys suggest that racism and de facto segregation remain widespread in South Africa, which experts say is driven in large part by government and politics.
Critics of the ANC-SACP regime say racial tensions are certainly not eased when Zuma and other top officials publicly sing “struggle” songs at political rallies about massacring whites with machine guns – especially considering the many thousands of European-descent farmers and family members brutally slaughtered by blacks since 1994.
Dr. Gregory Stanton, head of Genocide Watch and a man who personally fought against the apartheid system, warned last year that South Africa was at Stage 6 out of 8 on the road to genocide: the planning and preparation phase.
“There is thus strong circumstantial evidence of government support for the campaign of forced displacement and atrocities against white farmers and their families,” said Stanton, after a fact-finding mission to South Africa last year. “There is direct evidence of government incitement to genocide.”
The end goal is to impose communist tyranny on South Africa, Stanton argued.
While blacks suffered under official racism during apartheid, the reverse is now true, many experts and Afrikaners say, with whites and mixed-race individuals being targeted by race-based so-called “black empowerment” legislation in everything from employment and business to welfare and charity.
Think “affirmative action” for the majority – on steroids.
Some 90 percent or more of government workers are black, well above their ratio in the population, and virtually all of the welfare and housing grants go to blacks as well, critics point out. So, the racial quotas go only in one direction.
A poll taken last year, almost two decades after apartheid, showed that more than 80 percent of blacks still believe blacks in South Africa are poor because of the former regime.
Public sentiment
Incredibly, polls taken about a decade after the fall of apartheid showed that some 60 percent of South Africans felt the country was better managed under the previous, white-led regime.
“It’s not that they want to return to apartheid, but in retrospect it was a time when trains ran on time,” poll director Robert Mattes was quoted as saying in 2002 media reports from South Africa. “It was a harsh, repressive, but seemingly efficient government.”
It was not clear whether more recent polls had been conducted on the subject, but the results of the 2002 survey sent shock waves around the world.
Still today, despite the ANC and SACP stranglehold on power, some of the most prominent figures in South Africa publicly acknowledge it.
“This government, our government, is worse than the apartheid government, because at least you were expecting it with the apartheid government,” claimed Bishop Desmond Tutu after the ANC-SACP government, under pressure from communist China, refused to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama.
In recent months, one of the most extreme figures in South African politics, Marxist and virulent racist Julius Malema, the former ANC youth leader, also claimed that the current regime was worse than apartheid.
“Our people did not die for a house that will not last for three months,” he argued, suggesting that government ought to be building houses, in line with his new political party’s plan for full-blown socialist rule and nationalization. “There is nothing dignified about the houses.”
Malema, also known as “Juju,” ended his speech by singing the infamous “struggle” song advocating the slaughter of white farmers, a common theme among his new “Economic Freedom Fighters” party, widely viewed as an ANC spinoff.
“Robert Mugabe is a great example of what you must do, with some lessons of course,” Malema was quoted as saying recently.
Marxist despot Mugabe in Zimbabwe, of course, tortured, murdered and butchered his opponents, including white farmers, who were driven out of the country or killed. While it used to export food, Zimbabwe now is dependent on food aid.
Today, virtually nobody in South Africa or abroad seriously believes a return to often-brutal racial segregation and apartheid rule is feasible, much less desirable.
However, discontent over South Africa’s current trajectory is intensifying, as illustrated recently when South Africans loudly booed their president on the world stage at Mandela’s memorial service.
A widely reprinted letter that originally appeared in the Business Day newspaper also highlighted the feelings of despair.
“South Africa is in a serious moral crisis. We are a violent society disintegrating by the day. Ghastly murders are committed daily,” wrote Farouk Araie from Johannesburg. “We have become delusional. Forgetting that life is absolutely intrinsic and inviolable, our country is awash with demonic monsters in human garb, savages fit only for the wild, and satanic beasts ill-equipped for civil society.
“One child raped every three minutes, three children murdered each day,” Araie added. “We are sliding towards the edge of the abyss and our people are crying out for sanity to prevail.”
Causes
Experts and commentators are divided on why “democracy” did not instantly bring the widely anticipated super-boom in prosperity and societal harmony.
But with white supremacists claiming blacks are to blame and black supremacists claiming whites are to blame, there appears to be little middle ground on which to build.
Solutions
Many economists, though, say government policies explain the situation.
“The benefits of liberty and protected private property rights are often lost in discussions of how our blessings can be extended to the world’s poor nations,” explained Walter Williams, the celebrated George Mason University Economics Professor and syndicated columnist. He authored the 1989 book “South Africa’s War on Capitalism,” arguing that the apartheid system represented socialistic forces.
“We often hear suggestions that it is natural resources, right population size, or geographic location that explains human betterment,” Williams noted.
“The United States and Canada are population scarce and have a rich endowment of natural resources and are wealthy,” he added. “However, if natural resources and population scarcity were adequate explanations of wealth, then one would expect that the resource rich and some of the population scarce countries on the continents of Africa and South America to be wealthy. Instead, Africa and South America are home to the world’s poorest and most miserable people.
“A far better explanation of wealth has to do with cultural values that support liberty,” the internationally respected economist explained.
“People in countries with larger amounts of economic freedom, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan are far richer and have greater human rights protections than people in countries with limited free markets such as Russia, Albania, China and most countries in Africa and South America,” Williams concluded.
Leon Louw, who leads one of the most influential think tanks in Africa, echoed those sentiments, saying what South Africa really needs is economic freedom and the rule of law.
“Democracy, in and of itself, is no solution,” he told WND in an extended interview. “What is important is checks and balances, separation of powers, which has virtually vanished in South Africa. We now have basically the executive doing everything – writing the law and adjudicating. The legislature and the judiciary have been rendered increasingly redundant. And we don’t have real law … we have discretionary power, which is the main reason why we have this corruption.”
Alex Newman is an international journalist, educator, author, and consultant. In addition to serving as president of the small media and information consulting firm Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc, he writes for a wide array of publications in the United States and abroad. He currently serves as a foreign correspondent for The New American magazine, a contributor to WND, Bear Witness Central and more. He has also written for numerous newspapers and magazines such as the Gainesville Sun, Liberty magazine, Crisis magazine, The Diplomat magazine, Swiss News magazine, and many more. In addition, he has co-authored two books, including a major exposé of the plot to dumb down American children using government schools, published by WND Books, that hit stores on April 14 (Crimes of the Educators). For the last four years, Alex has been teaching advanced economics to high-school seniors through FreedomProject Education, an accredited K-12 school offering a classical education based on Judeo-Christian values. Alex has a B.S. degree in journalism from the University of Florida with an emphasis on economics and international relations, as well as an A.A. degree in foreign languages from Miami-Dade College. Alex has lived in seven countries (US, Mexico, Brazil, Switzerland, France, South Africa, Sweden) on four continents and speaks multiple languages fluently. His work has been cited by governments and major media outlets around the world, and Alex is a frequent guest on radio shows, TV programs, and at conferences. Alex is a director for the Bear Witness Central organization, which works to protect and preserve the U.S. Constitution.
