The Outstater
When Good Intentions Go Bad
WE ARE GLAD to learn that Indiana University occasionally offers study-abroad courses in South Africa. What a wonderful chance for students to learn what happens when you discard the tenets of Western Civilization solely because they were developed by white people.
To begin, because college students are interested in fairness above all, the World Bank keeps something called a Gini coefficient. It is a 0.00-to-1.00 measurement of wealth inequality with black-run South Africa’s latest score is 0.63, making it one of the most unequal countries in the world (even corrupt Brazil, for comparison, is only 0.52). The score would suggest a society where income is heavily concentrated in the hands of a very few. In fact, the richest 10 percent in South Africa under black rule own over 85 percent of household wealth, while over half the population has more liabilities than assets and 62 percent are affected by poverty.
Economic equality, you will recall, was the reason used by Richard Lugar and Jimmy Carter for kicking out the hated white Afrikaners, who, not so incidentally, were not really colonizers but had built the country from scratch. A friend associated with the Indianapolis Economic Club, values the insights he gained spending a day with F.W. DeKlerk, one of the club’s guest speakers and president of South Africa as Apartheid was being dismantled. Here is his account of their conversation:
“DeKlerk asked what I thought of Richard Lugar, (then on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and active in the negotiations over South Africa). I enjoyed opining as to the senator’s overrated standing and corrosive actions. DeKlerk’s smile and nod were priceless, and he went on to tell just how destructive Lugar in particular was to the negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC). In his mind, Lugar caused long delays (three to five years) and shackled DeKlerk’s efforts to better secure a political solution with the radicals. He further predicted South Africa’s implosion.”
In any case, in 1994 the new South African leadership inherited a situation arguably better than any other post-colonial polity. There was stability and prosperity with plenty of natural resources, a strong manufacturing sector and an excellent university system. As DeKlerk predicted, it didn’t last long.
Today, South Africa’s debt-to-GDP ratio is an alarming 71 percent as the government borrows heavily to fund social programs and infrastructure amid slow to zero growth. And if national defense is important, the once formidable air force, navy and army have been reduced to ferrying and security services for top officials. Only six of 330 aircraft, for example, are operational due to equipment and expertise shortages.
I can pull up more dismal statistics if you wish but it is enough to say that the race-Marxists of the governing ANC have achieved “equity” in 30 short years by reducing both whites and blacks to the default setting of a Soweto slum.
Eve Fairbanks, a former political writer for The New Republic who has lived in South Africa for the last decade, tells of the nation’s degradation in her book “The Inheritors.” This from the review, “The lights Are Going Off in South Africa,” in the Claremont Review of Books:
“‘We blacks saw businesses we thought had no challenges,’ a farmer tells (Fairbanks). ‘But we were lying to ourselves.’ There you have it in a nutshell: Black South Africans thought their white neighbors were rich because of the things they had. As it turned out, nice things didn’t stay nice for very long without the codes of behavior that kept them nice. Being a white South African looked very easy from the outside, but it turned out to depend on lots of little habits that, even with the best will in the world, would have been hard to explain in advance.”
The lesson for our traveling IU scholars? Respect for life and private property is the first thing to go when envy and a blind pursuit of social justice take hold — that and government integrity. And yes, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu were frauds, media manufactured ones.
For in South Africa today, where official theft is normalized, a law was recently passed allowing the expropriation of land from whites without reimbursement. In the last couple of decades it is estimated that as many as 3,000 white farmers have been murdered by blacks. A popular political party has chanted “Kill the Boers” at rallies in recent years.
We would like to take comfort in the 7,800 miles of ocean between us and Cape Town. To do so, though, requires us to ignore the actions of our own Charlestown, Indiana. The city government there in 2017 tried to evict hundreds of residents from a neighborhood of mid-century homes because municipal planners wanted a higher quality citizenry living on better floor plans.
This year, a Democrat mayor in Rhode Island tried to seize a private developer’s subdivision so he could build government-subsidized “affordable” housing. The owner, ironically, was threatened with a charge of trespassing.
Finally, there is Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, where the city leadership inexplicably failed to fund basic water service and now faces infrastructure repair costs estimated at $2 billion a year, not including the utter debilitation of daily life and the almost total deterrence of private investment. Understandably, the city has experienced the most dramatic population decline of any U.S. city this decade.
But back to those study-abroad courses at IU. They are designed to provide students with “academic credit, cultural immersion and hands-on experience” overseas. A chance, again, to live the ideology on your tee-shirt.
So, how about some “immersion” in the new radical Islamic Syria? Christian and Jewish students would study remotely of course. — tcl
Comments...