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| Re: THE SICKENING REALITY [boodskap #39899] |
Sun, 04 March 2001 20:01 |
Jan
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Frikkie Potgieter skryf in boodskap news:97kulr$a3f$1@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net...
> Hi folks,
>
> A stunning article appeared in the (London) Daily Mail, written by Ross
> Benson, reporting first-hand from Johannesburg. It lifts the lid on the
> near-collapse of South Africa. .
>
> I find it ironic that these correspondents are the same ones who slated the
> former government, but now finds one far worse, incapable, corrupt and
> inept.
>
> Scripture quotes:.."If God is with you, who can be against you"... One
> could ask, against the background of the South African situation...."If your
> partnership is corrupt, who can defend you"...?
>
> THE SICKENING REALITY OF A
> "FREE" SOUTH AFRICA
>
> So, South Africa is a shining example of diversity, democracy, and racial
> harmony, right? WRONG! Here's a few highlights:
>
> In South Africa:
>
> * A woman is raped every 28 seconds.
> * Doctors are leaving in droves.
> * Beggars live in the marble foyers of derelict banks.
> * Farmers are butchered in their fields.
> * The parks and beaches have become killing fields.
> * Car-jackings are a daily occurrence.
> * The murder rate is running at 27,000 a year.
>
>
> Self-destruction
>
> And how may one measure that catastrophe? South Africa's regression towards
> primeval barbarism, which Benson details, is quite neatly summarised at the
> head of his article: "A woman is raped every 28 seconds, qualified doctors
> are leaving in droves, while beggars and goats have set up home in the
> marble
> foyers of derelict banks. South Africa today has become a nation on the edge
> of self-destruction."
>
> Law and order have to all intents and purposes broken down in South Africa.
> Any sense of security no longer exists. Says Benson of the country's crime:-
> "Farmers are butchered in their fields. The parks and beaches have become
> killing fields. Car-jackings with mind-numbing violence are a daily
> occurrence. The murder rate is running at 27,000 a year."
>
> Benson then repeats the horrifying statistics for rape, of which more will
> be said.These figures, he comments, "breed the kind of fear that has you
> leaping
> at shadows, jumping red lights and climbing out of bed in the middle of the
> night to check, yet again, that you have double-locked the doors."
>
> For you to protect your home even halfway adequately, it now seems that you
> need to pay an 'armed response' security firm. But whatever you do is never
> enough. One black businessman told Benson that he had lost count of the
> numbers of his friends who had been mugged.
>
> Everyone is in the firing line. No social gathering can take place without
> horror stories being exchanged. But at this point we get some hint of the
> censorship that hitherto has been mobilised to keep as much as possible of
> the truth from the public gaze (presumably an increasingly difficult task in
> the ever-worsening crisis engulfing the country). A white security man
> commented on the criminal mayhem: "It's happening to your friends, your
> brother, his wife, your sister, your mother," but, "it isn't something you
> read in the papers or hear about on the television news any more."
>
> Adds Benson: "He carried a gun, but he wasn't fooling himself. He knew it
> could happen to him. In Mandela's 'Rainbow Nation' the dream is running
> blood
> red."
>
> Clearly, South Africa's new ANC (African National Congress) Government is
> almost neurotically aware that the legitimacy of its rule is at stake here.
>
> Decline of a city
>
> Nowhere is the situation worse than in Johannesburg, where it is exemplified
> in all its worst manifestations. Benson gives a graphic description of how
> that unhappy city has declined. Here too, he comes courageously close to
> modern-day heresy in giving the White Man his historic due as the true
> creator of South Africa's original productive infra-structure (a subject
> today largely taboo in a world sold on the 'politically correct' elevation
> of
> the non-European at the expense of the European), and also focusing on the
> White Man's predicament now.
>
> In a striking characterisation of the city, Benson writes:-
>
> "Built on the largest seam of gold ever discovered, this was once the
> richest city in Africa, a gleaming steel-and-glass citadel rising out of the
> brown
> ocean of the Veld, a testament to the economic power of the white community
> that built it, but also an example of what can be achieved by hard work and
> individual enterprise."
>
> And now? "the skyscrapers are still there," he continues, "but the people
> who gave them life and prosperity have gone, driven out by hordes of
> squatters,
> beggars and illegal traders who bought Mandela's promise of a 'better life
> for all' - and demanded instant delivery."
> He continues:-
>
> "Barbecues made of old oil cans blaze in the marble foyers of what used to
> be the headquarters of banks and airlines. There are goats tethered in
> hallways.
> Corrugated iron huts have sprung up on the once-manicured lawns.
>
> "This is not an environment in which any respectable business person, be
> they black or white, can live or work - and most have fled."
> Benson next proceeds to a grim and frightening account of what has been very
> rapid urban and social decay in the centre of a city in which I once lived
> and worked myself. Now, even big business is quitting a metropolis of which
> it was once the raison d'tre.
>
> The country's flag carrier, South African Airlines, has taken refuge in the
> distant outer suburbs. The big mining houses (which practically built the
> town) and even the Stock Exchange are to follow suit. It is evident they can
> hardly remain in a city centre in which it is unsafe for their employees to
> travel to and from work. Benson also reports that the Carlton Hotel has
> closed and sold all its contents, and "the Holiday Inn is a deserted
> fortress, its 800 empty rooms protected by reinforced steel shutters." It is
> as if the London Hilton, the Dorchester and our other luxury hotels were to
> close down because order had totally collapsed, and the city had become
> uninhabitable! All this is the tale of one of the world's major cities
> crumbling into chaos and dereliction, perhaps one day in the not too distant
> future to become as defunct as ancient Babylon.
>
> It is now impossible even to walk in any degree of safety to the South
> African Supreme Court building to get one's case heard. The alleyways
> leading
> to it are prowled by muggers who, says Benson, "are not open to appeal."
> Although the court still goes through the motions of administering the law,
> this has, comments Benson, "helped ease the backlog of cases" in a country
> where, as other commentators have noted, 'affirmative action' has led to the
> colonisation of the bench by magistrates who are illiterate, incompetent,
> corrupt and racially and politically biased, and routinely bail murderers
> and
> rapists back into the community to re-offend. Cases are never dealt with,
> crime explodes - no law, no order!
>
> Fear at night
>
> No wonder Central Johannesburg is now so much a place to avoid, especially
> at night. "As dusk falls," says Benson...
>
> "... the streets start filling with prostitutes and criminals pushing drugs,
> and pills that turn a black skin white - before eventually killing you (if
> AIDS hasn't claimed you first; up to 10 per cent of the population is
> carrying the virus and three quarters of the entire health budget will soon
> be spent on treating the incurable).
>
> "You can hear the occasional sound of gunfire rolling down from Hillbrow, by
> cruel coincidence Johannesburg's first integrated neighbourhood."
> To many, including me (who once lived in that very high-rise district), this
> does not seem so much of a coincidence.
>
> Implicitly referring to the consequences of 'affirmative action', Benson
> describes how...
>
> "... the police keep promising to move in and clean the place up; they never
> do, and if they did it probably wouldn't make any difference: the Minister
> in
> charge of so-called security recently admitted to parliament that a
> policeman is three times more likely to commit a serious crime than an
> average member
> of the public." Summarising his observations of Johannesburg, Benson
> comments:-
>
> "So much for the dream. This is the reality - and it is a shocking one,
> worse than I had anticipated. I have seen cities abandoned in war. This is
> the
> first city I have ever seen abandoned to the barbarians in time of peace.'
> So what of the luckless Whites, themselves abandoned amid this chaos to the
> consequences of 'multiracial democracy'? This, Benson makes clear, is not
> only a tale of de facto displacement by conditions of social chaos which
> white people find utterly intolerable; this in itself has caused mass white
> migrations. In Johannesburg those who opt to remain in proximity to the city
> have retreated to its northern outer suburbs. But there is a mass movement,
> in effect recoiling on the old pioneer routes, back to Cape Province, the
> region of South Africa in which Europeans first touched land. It is
> estimated that in five years 80 per cent of the country's Whites will be
> clustered
> towards the Cape.
>
> Even in the Cape there is now a project to establish at least one urban
> area, some miles into the interior outside Cape Town, which will in practice
> be a
> fortified settlement. With property priced beyond what most Blacks, and
> quite a few poor Whites, could possibly afford, it is, at the size of
> Monaco, to be
> protected by a 33,000-volt fence and patrolled by armed guards.
>
> But in addition, fearful of lawlessness, the white population is also being
> harassed and persecuted by the law. As Benson comments:- "The government has
> lost the battle of the streets but they have control of parliament, and they
> have used their power to pass legislation aimed specifically at one ethnic
> group."
> Instead of apartheid, there is now 'affirmative action', whereby Whites are
> de jure displaced from their jobs and deprived of their incomes to make way
> for Blacks, without regard for the latter's qualifications or abilities, but
> purely on racial grounds in order to "redress past imbalances." The result?
> Air traffic controllers are now being appointed who cannot read their
> instruments. According to Commissioner of Police George Fivaz, 30,000 of his
> officers are "functionally illiterate." To supplement the facts quoted by
> Benson, one may add the purging of the health services over two years ago
> (as
> also reported at the time in the Daily Mail, by Peter Younghusband, the
> paper's then South African correspondent) by the Minister of Health
> Nkosazana
> Zuma, who replaced district surgeons and doctors with Cuban recruits
> competent neither in the English language nor as medical practitioners.
>
> Working class whites thrown on scrapheap
>
> Working class Whites are now being dumped and paid a miserable dole to make
> way for Africans. Benson quotes the example of a bus driver sacked after 17
> years service. For blue-collar Whites, "the economic trap-door has opened
> beneath them and dropped them below the poverty line. Unemployed and never
> likely to be employed, their children ragged and barefoot, dependent on
> benefits of o150 a month each, which is often not paid (the social services
> are being 'reorganised - and there's a sinister phrase!). Some families can
> no longer afford to feed themselves."
> These now rely on church soup kitchens.
>
> Apparently, whilst the violently racist anti-white politician Patricia De
> Lille says that Tony Blair has donated �20,000 to the home for sick children
> for which she works, "no-one," says Benson, "is digging in their pockets to
> help poor Whites. They are off the end of Mandela's rainbow, without a pot
> of
> gold in sight."
>
> The Government in the new South Africa is intolerant of opposition.
> According to white Democratic Party opposition leader Tony Leon, "they want
> everyone to
> be 'on side'. If you criticise them - and we do vigorously - they call you
> neo-nazi racists" (a strange epithet considering that Leon is Jewish). It
> seems that even Patricia De Lille - whose Pan-Africanist Party's slogan is
> "One settler [i.e. white person], one bullet" - has been "battered by this
> accusation." The cause? She has been taking the ANC Government and its
> Ministers to task for the stupendous corruption whereby they have turned
> themselves and their most privileged supporters into a new class of fat cats
> (all very typical of post-colonial Africa).
>
> Free school lunches promised by Mandela fail to reach the children; family
> allowances are not paid; council houses are so jerry-built they are
> virtually
> uninhabitable. But when these failures come under criticism as in the case
> of de Lille the response of the Government under the new president Mbeki is
> to
> threaten her with expulsion from parliament for being 'racist', and bring in
> legislation to outlaw criticism of a person's 'private life' which might
> "impair their dignity." De Lille asks where the money for these public
> projects went, and answers "into someone's pocket."
>
> There was corruption under South Africa's ancient regime, as there is any
> country in the world under any government. But it was never, as it is today,
> on a scale sufficient to cause the collapse of whole areas of public
> administration.
>
> In a nutshell, then, thanks to Ross Benson, we now have an overview of the
> 'New South Africa' from which to take stock. What we see is a picture of
> vicious and exploding crime, of chaos verging on anarchy, of corruption and
> incompetence way beyond anything in the country's past, and of the racial
> harassment and persecution of the white minority - the people who actually
> built the country in the first place, and without whom there would have been
> literally nothing for their successors to take over and bring to ruin.
>
> It is not a picture which those with their heads screwed on the right way
> did not predict, decades ago, as the likely outcome of majority rule -
> though
> such people were then, and would still now be, vilified as "right-wing,
> racist reactionaries." or worse. Such a fate has come upon Ross Benson, who
> has been roundly denounced in sections of the South African media, according
> to a second article by correspondent David Jones, also writing from
> Johannesburg, published in the Mail two weeks after his own.
>
> Backlash
>
> The Mail's own letters page witnessed a similar backlash of censorious
> intolerance in the week following the publication of Benson's report. This
> response looked a little like a co-ordinated 'write-in' against Benson by
> aggrieved ANC supporters in Britain. This was in spite of Jones'
> characterisation of his piece as a "painfully accurate article about the
> demise of post-apartheid South Africa." It is worth pointing out that
> neither
> Benson nor Jones have any record of being 'racists' or supporters of
> apartheid - something that ought to be self-evident, to those in the know,
> by
> the fact that they have access to the columns of a major national newspaper
> like the Daily Mail.
>
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