By John Morse
A stunning article appeared in the Daily Mail of October 30th. Written by Ross Benson, reporting first-hand from Johannesburg, it lifts the lid on the near-collapse of South Africa since white rule ended a few years ago.
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 (and perhaps the innate character? JM) 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’être.
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 £150 a month each, which is often not paid (the social services are being ‘re-organised - 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 ancien 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.
[As stated at the beginning, this article was published on October 30th. The year was 1999. Why don't we hear more of these stories from the mainstream media?? -Editor-]
Source: ELLIOT LAKE News & Views Blog http://elliotlakenews.wordpress.com/2007/11/2...
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