They just had a big ol’ bash for Nelson Mandela’s birthday in the UK. Will Smith, Annie Lennox, and even crackhead Amy Winehouse made an appearance. Nelson Mandela, of course, is a terrorist who fought long and hard for majority rule in South Africa. He spent many years in jail for a real terrorist crime: attempted sabotage of trains in South Africa with bombs. He and the ANC movement ultimately succeeded, and South Africa has since gone down the tubes with out-of-control violence, rape, economic troubles, and overall chaos.
You would not know about this somber reality from the happy celebration in Europe. Much of the anti-Apartheid movement there was part of a broader and rather extravagant exercise in self-loathing. Nationalism was deemed the origin of the two very terrible World Wars, and it too was the root of colonialism. Colonialism undoubtedly had many evils attached to it, though in practice it varied quite widely from place to place, and those evils should be compared with the evils that preceded European rule or followed in the restoration of majority rule.
After abandoning their colonial empires out of necessity, Europeans in the 60s had little to feel guilty about. So after condemning their parents–about whom they could do very little–they set about an orgy of condemnation of the small number of whites still living in Africa. They labeled them as the apotheosis of evil and treated them far more shabbily than the far more murderous Soviet Union and friends.
Europe swiftly threw Rhodesia and South Africa in front of the bus in the 70s and 80s, while saying little about the mass murder of fellow Europeans in Hungary (1956) and the Czech Republic (1968). It’s very easy to be generous with the lives and fortunes of people that are distant from you. The European indifference to the problems of majority rule in Africa is akin to the American liberal indifference to the problems working-class whites face on such issues as school bussing or gun control. Liberal policymakers send their kids to fancy private schools and live in well-protected high rises and gated communities. Yet their co-ethnics with far less wealth must deal with race riots in high school and out-of-control crime enabled by misplaced compassion. The way Europe has treated European settlers in Algeria, Rhodesia, and South Africa is the same phenomenon: costless “charity” with other people’s lives. It’s an opportunity for irresponsible self-satisfaction, self-condemnation, and other ugly practices.
Looking for dragons to slay, the Europeans also opened the floodgates to mass immigration from their former colonies in the 60s. What began as a trickle is now a raging torrent. From the murder of Theo Van Goth and Pim Fortuyn to the Paris riots of 2006 and the all-too-frequent “honor killings” on the streets of Britain, unease has grown into real fright and despair.
What should the leaders who brought about this doomed course do? Surely they won’t talk straight about what’s happened and what needs to change going forward. Better to forget and celebrate the likes of Nelson Mandela, whose black-ruled South Africa has predictably emerged as failed state replete with corruption, disorder, and all of the other traits of Africa as a whole. Minority rule coupled with prosperity and order has been replaced by failure on every mark of good governance save one, majority rule, which is cold comfort to people murdered in their beds by thugs.
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