The riots in South Africa, once the dream garden of the world’s leftists, were covered by the media, but most of them blamed Zuma’s corruption and the current situation in South Africa. The British and American mainstream media avoided this point for fear of discrediting the left’s political trump card of identity politics and progressivist social advocacy.
One country, South Africa, triggers two cries in the U.S. after 64 years
My knowledge of South Africa began with Mandela. Through countless interviews with Mandela and related people broadcast by Hong Kong TV, I learned about his glorious revolutionary path and why Americans are particularly concerned about South Africa: In 1948, the American novelist Alan Paton published a best-selling novel about South Africa, Cry, the beloved country, which was a best-seller and evoked the American people’s concern and sympathy for that distant country, which became the DNA of American leftist culture.
In 2012, I read the cover article of The Economist magazine with the same title: Cry, the beloved country – Sad South Africa, with mixed feelings beyond words. At that time, South Africa was still a leftist-supported rainbow country and dreamland, promoting a “Nobel Peace Prize winner leading a color revolution,” and not many Western media outlets of the same magnitude as The Economist were willing to write a major story analyzing South Africa, as they still are.
The world left (self-proclaimed progressivism) from the 1970s, through the United Nations agencies and Western governments, NGOs, together with efforts to create a new South Africa, in 1994 on the world political stage shine, Mandela opened the Nobel Peace Prize winner in politics, I canonized, since then, Nobel laureate – revolutionary leaders, non-violent peaceful resistance, racial reconciliation, become the standard for the color revolution The road was only temporarily suspended when Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the prize two years before him, entered politics and fell out of favor with the world’s left-wing groups over the Rohingya Muslim issue.
Why did The Economist cry so much?
But the rainbow nation, which was the world’s favorite and acclaimed, soon put the left in an embarrassing situation, and to cover up this embarrassment, the media forgot this rainbow picture they had drawn with their own hands. But 18 years later, it finally made the left-leaning Economist magazine Cry again – the previous cry, when the white government was in charge and The Economist labeled South Africa as the hopeless continent, Cry once.
This time the Economist cries South Africa, I summarize as five cries.
One cry is the economic downturn. While Africa north of the Limpopo River has grown at an average annual rate of 6% over the past decade (the decade before 2012), South Africa’s growth rate has slowed to just 2% in the past few years. Rating agencies have just downgraded South Africa’s sovereign debt rating.
Secondly, unemployment is severe, with the official unemployment rate of 25% being grossly underestimated and the true rate probably closer to 40%; half of South Africans under the age of 24 are looking for work. Of those who have jobs, a third earn less than $2 a day.
Third, the quality of education has seriously declined. Education has become a disgrace to South Africa, which ranks 132nd out of 144 countries in primary education and 143rd in science and math according to the World Economic Forum rankings (one more thing: 1+1 can be not equal to 2 with the progressivist math education now promoted in the United States).
Four cries that since the end of apartheid, inequality has increased and the gap between rich and poor is among the highest in the world.
Five cries that South African politics is on the verge of becoming a one-party dictatorship. Here is the original quote from the Economist article, “Nearly two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa is becoming a de facto one-party state.” Before the creation of the rainbow state, “despite South Africa’s repugnant apartheid heritage, solid institutions laid the foundations for its transition to democracy in 1994: a proper parliamentary and electoral system, a good new constitution, independent courts, a vibrant media and a first-world stock market.”
After Cry, this Economist article makes the conclusion that Mandela is a saint and all that matters is his retired successor, Thabo Mbeki, with Jacob Zuma: “Since Mr. Mandela retired in 1999, the country has been in a miserable position.”
Since then, South Africa has gotten worse. I won’t go into it here, except for one fact that the Western left is completely unwilling to confront: the identity politics that Mandela established through affirmative action is the cause of the decline of the new South Africa.
The New South Africa was founded and fell because of identity politics
On July 13, South African Jonathan Witt (@Jonathan_Witt) posted a long series of tweets tracing the causes of South Africa’s decline, with the central point being that “the government has pushed hard for social change through poor social welfare and measures like forced race-based employment/business. businesses, and academics/journalists/business leaders have responded by supporting these policies and imposing them on society as a whole.”
The rise of the new South Africa was indeed due to the vision and pursuit of identity politics by the progressive forces of the world. After the African national liberation movement, the British and French colonizers withdrew from African countries one after another, black-owned nation-states were born in bulk, and a large number of “good students of Mao” seized power and basically became dictators, while only South Africa, the “Pearl of Africa,” remained in white power. Only the “Pearl of Africa”, South Africa, remains white. The world’s progressive forces decided to take a different approach, packaged Mandela in another language (i.e. human rights, universal values), supported his armed forces and canonized him through the Nobel Peace Prize (1993), in recognition of the efforts of Mandela’s forces to end apartheid in South Africa through peaceful means, laying the foundation for the new South Africa.
According to the vision of the world’s “progressive forces,” South Africa’s total GDP in 1994 was about $140 billion, with a per capita GDP of $3,400 (China’s per capita GDP in the same year was $473.49), close to the level of developed countries. With this economic foundation, and with the continuous promotion of identity politics and various progressive (actually socialist) policies, South Africa would become the rainbow country of the world’s progressive model. But it was not to be, and that article in The Economist, Cry for South Africa, made the results clear enough.
South Africa’s failure was not in the abolition of apartheid, but in the failure to create a rational system of true racial equality, equal opportunity, and advancement of the best. After desegregation, the South African government enacted a number of laws to defend the rights of blacks, one of which was the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Act, which scored businesses based on the percentage of shares and skills training blacks received in the business, with a standard score set by the government in order to receive government contracts or participate in public procurement. The BEE legislation was implemented in conjunction with various other forms of legislation, including the Employment Equity Act, the Skills Development Act, and the Preferential Procurement Framework. One of the most significant impacts on the South African economy and society is the Employment Equity Act, which requires racial quotas (equally represented in all job categories and levels) in all industries except defense and intelligence, with at least 25 percent of the staff of any South African government, public sector, and private commercial organization being In any South African government, public sector, and private commercial organization, at least 25% of the staff must be black, and 40% of the board members must be black.
Such a racial quota system violates the market economy principle of survival of the fittest and leads to a serious decline in the professionalism of South African public and private institutions and a degradation of social governance. The South African government confiscates land from whites without compensation in order to achieve parity of outcome between races. Under this reverse-discriminatory racial policy, over 800,000 whites left South Africa from 1994 to 2016, while the total population of white South Africans today is only 4.3 million. Musk, the CEO of Truss, is a white South African who emigrated to another country. They took money and technology with them, and with the South African government engaging in social welfare without economic support, the South African economy went into rapid decline.
The Economist mentioned that education is a disgrace, but did not say that the serious consequences of education degradation, before 1994, South Africa’s medical level is world-class, the world’s first successful human heart transplant from South Africa. But now South Africa’s medical standards have been reduced to the level of a poor country, and it has become a country with a high incidence of AIDS and no defense after the new crown epidemic.
South African politicians have failed to govern the country, and the progressivism is the world’s leading tactic
South Africa has only had four presidents since Mandela. These leftist politicians, who are “revolutionary heroes”, are corrupt and incompetent in governing. In order to curry favor with the Western left and gain support, in addition to identity politics, they are unambiguous in promoting the “progressive” social ideas of the Western left: 1.
- the introduction of same-sex marriage in 2006 – nine years before the United States.
- South Africans are heavily addicted to drugs, with one fifth of the population using drugs. But South African schools also began to introduce Xanax (a drug between marijuana and heroin) education in South African schools in the mid-2010s – 5-7 years earlier than the United States.
- A new law in 2021 that allows women to have multiple spouses at the same time. Let women have equal rights to marry with men in the country – two counties such as Cambridge County, Massachusetts, U.S. Open marriage in 2021.
The 20th century was the century of revolutions, and the implementation of two highly influential ideologies, Communist-Socialism and Islamic extremist religion, can turn a country from rich to poor in 10-20 years. Venezuela in Latin America and South Africa in Africa are vivid examples of the practice of socialism; Lebanon, the so-called “Little Paris of the Middle East,” has been tossed by Islamic religious forces into a poor and chaotic state where 77% of the population does not have enough to eat. Afghanistan was the odd one out. Starting from the 1960s, the military and intellectuals believed in Marxism and wanted to build a workers’ paradise, and established a pro-Soviet regime through a coup d’état. Then with the change of regime, the U.S. started the war in Afghanistan and various religious forces took turns to toss and turn, and now there is no light in sight.
The history of the new South Africa in less than 30 years shows that identity politics and progressivism are the road to hell. If black South Africans do not extricate themselves from the quagmire of identity politics, the days of the world Cry for it will continue. The powerhouse that is pushing South African-style identity politics and progressive social advocacy to the fullest will also be tossed into a second- or third-rate country by itself.
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