This is a warning for personal insults. Really I was waiting until a larger discussion played out, but I figure I can put this out there to boost my stats.
[/moderating]
Yeahhhh…it really doesn’t. Lebensraum was a real thing, as was the concept of Slavic Untermenschen. Such tolerance that was extended to useful allies like the Croats and Bulgarians was based on the notion that they had a minimal admixture of Germanic or Turkic blood - still inferior, but not extermination worthy.
Now as it happens my European relatives were mostly wiped out by Ustaše rather than Nazis( Chetniks might have gotten a few as well, due to politics rather than ethnic animus ). But without the latter you wouldn’t have had the former, in practicality if not entirely in ideology. And there was no Ustaše in Poland, Ukraine or elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
ETA: And this is really off-topic. I shouldn’t let myself get baited into this nonsense.
Going back to the origin of the thread, and in view of Trump having decided, as usual apparently out of nowhere, to chime in on the subject, it would seem the land redistribution idea that is being floated has hit the chattersphere lately as the latest example of a long-recurring line among RW commentators that “South Africa is in meltdown” and that “any day now the ANC will show its true communist (or merely racist-revengeist) colors”. Notice the title is not a question of whether the RSA is in a meltdown, but it assumes the meltdown and asks for the causes.
To be fair to XT, he may have assumed facts not in evidence based on what he heard but I don’t think he is in anyway a RW commentator himself.
Oh, certainly I agree with you on that – the chatter is so loud he would have easily picked it up and felt a need to ask more about it. Sorry if it seemed the other way, XT.
Back on topic.
The latest South Africa Economic Update [PDF] from the World Bank (April 2018) says in its executive summary:
(My Underlining)
Politifact points at the reasons why Trump and Fox news are wrong:
I do agree with the opinion of editorials at the Washington Post, Trump and Fox news are playing the hate card to distract from the horrible news Trump and Republicans are geting.
“Democratic Socialism”? They call it Bolivarianism, Bolivar himself would probably choke on his drink (even though he certainly did have a wide populist vein and wasn’t exactly the best of managers), and it’s to Democratic Socialism what Trumpism is to the GOP of Lincoln.
and every Western imperial “capitalist” colonial regime… funny how that is skipped over in this strange discourse ripped out of the year 1983.
the ANC ‘racist and marxist’? They are doing a strange job of the Marxist in their years in power since 1994. They surely have some marxist asshole sub-parties as components of the overall coalition but ANC marxist… funny.
But it can be supposed that this is like the deeply informed predictions and previsions you made about the wonders of American libertarianist approach for the Iraq that would happen.
Very funny calling the ANC a black nationalist Marxist movement… it seems the 1980s era Apartheid supporting with some denaibility years of the Americans are asking for their abusive assertions back.
While South Africa isn’t exactly an economic powerhouse, reports of its meltdown seem premature.
Here’s the Economist’s take as of Nov 20, 2017, as published in The World in 2018:
[INDENT] The tenure of the president, Jacob Zuma, faced a test at the end of 2017 with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) due to choose a new leader, in effect a battle between backers and critics of a discredited presidency. Failure to secure victory for his preferred candidate could sink Mr Zuma, though the ANC will hold on to power until elections scheduled for 2019. A credit-rating downgrade will weigh on investor sentiment.[/INDENT] From an investor perspective, that’s not great but not at all unusual.
Here are their forecasts for 2018:
GDP growth: 1.8%
(Mediocre)
GDP per head: $5,590 (PPP: $13,780)
[PPP takes into account changes in exchange rates. South Africa is a middle income country.]
Inflation 5.4%
Budget balance -4.0
(So the budget deficit is 4% of GDP, which is a little high outside of recession).
For more recent information, the ishares MSCI South Africa ETF has returned 4.18% in US dollars from Jun 30, 2017 to June 30, 2018.
3 year annualized return -1.50%
5 year annualized return 2.51%
10 year 3.2%
Big picture: this isn’t a meltdown. There’s plenty to discuss about the ANC’s management of South Africa’s economy… just like any other country.
That’s a bit out of date. It was written before Cyril Ramaphosa became president, which is a very positive development.
See the more recent and comprehensive World Bank report I posted above.
What, exactly, constitutes an economic powerhouse? For where it is, and its history, South Africa actually punches above its weight economically, I’d say. Second-biggest African economy, only African G20 country, full member of BRICS…
So some land conquest and displacement is legitimate and some is not? On what basis is that distinction to be made as a general rule?
It’s not that some land conquest is legitimate and some is not, but that you have to draw a line somewhere. You have to make a decision that it’s not practical to consider anything earlier than such-and-such. Otherwise you will end up going back to the dawn of recorded human history. It’s similar to a statute of limitations for crimes.
There can be no general rule. It will vary from country to country. In South Africa, there seems to be a consensus that the start of apartheid is the line we should draw. And the land seizures of the 1960s and 1970s are the main ones in question.
If you go back to the 19th century, then you are not only going to be dealing with white invasions, but with the Zulu conquests and the wrongs done by the Zulus to other indigenous nations, and that’s far too much of a mess even to think about. There are more urgent and important issues.
The land seizures and expulsions under the apartheid government are the immediate priority, and nobody is thinking further back than that. This is not about abstract principles, but about living people who were personally wronged. With a few exceptions, the land in question is mostly farm land and tribal land.
Err, no? By “legitimate”, I wasn’t referring to any conquest etc. I was referring to land sales - as in, it’s ridiculous to say that absent Apartheid, White people would have been landless. They would just have had to buy their land from the Black owners like, well, decent people.
This may be the point some are missing. I think their may be a misapprehension among some about just how old apartheid is and when much of this land came into dispute. For the most part these are not directly colonial-era grievances, but rather the result of post-WW II policy. This is still within living memory.
I used a bad term. Look at the size or scale of South Africa and it’s pretty big.
It’s not a growth tiger though: recent GDP growth doesn’t scan well. South Africa has its work cut out for it. Growth in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa (which is generally low income, rather than middle income) has been strong in many places. There is hope for synergy in the region; it would be very nice if South Africa pulled its act together.
Anybody calling the ANC marxist or communist swallowed way to much Cold War koolaid.
It was the Apartheid government who realised that screaming COMMUNIST! while pointing terrified fingers at their opponents got them the support of the Western world to do what ever they wanted as long as they only oppressed communists. Of course once the accusation was made the only place the ANC, and others, could go for help was the Communist Bloc but the core tenets of the ANC were not and are not Marxist.
Now there is a Communist party in South Africa and they are in alliance with the ANC but they get bugger all say in any real political decisions.
If Zimbabwe didn’t exist, I swear American commentators would have to make it up. I’ve disagreed with MrDibble a lot in the past here, but I think he’s more or less right here. At least as regards whether the land reform is a good thing or a bad thing (I know very little about South African history or domestic affairs so I’ll defer to him on the historical background).
Do you think Zimbabwe is the only country ever to expropriate farmland without compensation? Do you think it’s even the only country in Africa to do so?
Land reform, under capitalist lines, socialist lines and communist lines, with or without market compensation, has been done all over the world. Sometimes it works out miserably, sometimes the results are so-so, sometimes the results are quite good. I’m more familiar here with the European context here than with South Africa, but, for example, the communist states of Eastern Europe experienced really big and really interesting variation in how well their agricultural sector performed after it was seized from private owners. (We can do this sort of comparison because most of them kept a private farm sector around, of varying sizes). The Soviet Union which most of us are familiar with, experience results that were disastrous at worse (three famines), and mediocre at best, with state farms massively underperforming private plots. In Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany however that wasn’t the case, and state farms performed comparably to private ones. (In Poland the case appears to be more mixed).
Land reform has also been done all over Latin America, in Africa, and in Asia, and in most cases, as far as I can tell, didn’t lead to a collapse of agricultural production. (Even outside Cuba: Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, lots of other countries in the region did sweeping non-capitalist land reform at various points in the 20th century, and none of them experienced a ‘Venezuela’). In Zimbabwe it did, but in many other countries, as far as I can tell, it didn’t much affect agricultural production one way or the other. This guy is one of the higher-profile African Marxist leaders, and food production following his nationalization efforts seem to have grown at about the same rate it did in the years before.
South Africa obviously isn’t really comparable to either Hungary or Burkina Faso, but then again, it’s not really comparable to Zimbabwe either. It’s an unusual country- one of the few middle income African countries and probably the only really industrialized ones- which makes it hard to predict how the results of this land reform will turn out. I’d guess though that it will turn out to depend on the specific leaders, policies, and methods involved. Zimbabwe was unlucky enough to have Robert Mugabe at the helm, but there’s nothing inevitable about their experience that tells us that land reform without market compensation is always a bad idea. (Incidentally, farmers in South Africa are being compensated. Just not to the level they’d like).
The justice of the situation as opposed to the economics is a different issue, and I can very shortly say I’m entirely unsympathetic to South African whites here. MrDibble has dealt with some of the relevant history, but I’ll add that even if things like the Group Areas Act hadn’t happened my opinion would still be more or less the same. It was wrong for Europeans to colonize Africa, it’s wrong for any country to have a Gini index of 60, it’s wrong for a settler-state ethnic minority to have an average per capita income 8 times that of the indigenous population. From my perspective it’s also wrong to have agricultural land organized in large-scale private estates and we’d be a better world if it were owned cooperatively or collectively, but even if you don’t agree with me on that, the other points stand. I think the land expropriation is long overdue and I’ve gained more respect for SA’s new government after reading about this (and lost more respect for the US government after they decide to weigh in).
Lastly, it’s a bad idea here to take the words of a youtube commentator as gospel truth, especially one who left the country. Exiles are very often not objective observers of the country that they left behind- there’s a reason that they emigrated, after all. As has been pointed out, the South African economy is probably not going into recession this year, white South Africans experience a much lower murder rate than other groups, and crime rates are going down.
Yea, the ANC is definitely not Marxist, and definitely not racist (I think both of those terms are wildly overused and used in inappropriate ways, but whatever your definition, the ANC doesn’t qualify). They’re a centrist, culturally liberal, social democratic party, as best I can see. For better or worse.