Re: [OT] Documentary on South African farm murders

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

. . .

Exactly.

Knowing that the selection of news stories is based primarily on "if it
bleeds, it leads", it would be perfectly understandable if the average
news consumer who wasn't hearing about South Africa and its problems,
then assumed things must be going swimmingly, otherwise the problems
would be in the news. Yet we almost never got news from South Africa
even though some pretty dire things were going on.

I think it's reasonable to assume that the legacy media was quite aware
of what was going on in South Africa but worried that reporting on it
might play into what they might call "racist tropes", like the idea that
once blacks are in charge of a country, it inevitably becomes a shit
hole. That, of course, might give "fuel" to the idea that blacks *here*
are a major problem and start to unravel the progress made since the
Civil Rights era.

I don't agree. The explanation for not covering South Africa is news
judgment, what their readers were interested in. American newspapers
were already in their long decline and got rid of foreign correspondents
and foreign coverage.

When I was a kid, the afternoon paper, the Daily News, competed on being
THE American newspaper with an emphasis on foreign stories. They had an
amazing 32 foreign correspondents -- full time, not freelancers -- at
the height. Their stories were regularly distributed by UPI and appeared
elsewhere in papers that had little foreign coverage or didn't have
correspondents in those countries.

I think at one point, they were second only to New York Times in the
number of foreign correspondents. btw, Washington Post was a third-rate
paper prior to Watergate.

Now, though, the idea that South Africa was a multi-racial success story
is revealed to be a lie. The legacy media are AGAIN faced with yet more
anger from a public that feels betrayed by their lies of omission, just
as they feel betrayed by media efforts to cover up Biden's dubious
mental capacity.

The weird thing is that the documentaries I've seen indicate that South
Africa was actually working quite well in the 10 or 15 years after
apartheid ended;

Maybe it was better than today, but I wouldn't say it with quite so much
praise. A friend went there on a railway engineering project. Foreign
visitors were routinely targeted by thieves and there was plenty of
concern about violent crime. When he was actually working with the
railroad or engineering staffers on the project, everything was fine,
but he still had to get to and from his hotel. The master contractor
ended up stiffing him on much of his consulting fee and expenses.

No. It was not a good place to do business unless your company was a
huge international engineering firm whose fees were routinely paid by
wire transfer. My friend was a freelancer.

it was only with the election of the third
post-apartheid president, Jacob Zuma, that the wheels began to come off.
Zuma ushered in an era of massive corruption and the destruction of the
country's institutions by replacing competent people with cronies who
were kicking back massive sums to Zuma and his inner circle.

If the media had actually reported any of this, it should have become
clear that black regimes are not inevitably corrupt since things were on
an upswing under the first two black presidents. Instead, the problems
begin when crooks like Zuma get elected and might well be reversed if
different, more ethical leaders are chosen. I think Ramaphosa was felt
to be more in this vein than Zuma but, so far, he has not done a stellar
job by any standard and actually lost the ANC majority in parliament for
the first time since the end of apartheid.

It's going to be interesting to see how the ANC reacts to the massive
setback they experienced at Trump's hands. Will they confront their
problems and clean up their act or will they react with anger and/or
denial and ramp up the repressions of whites? The media are clearly
making every effort to nitpick every slight inaccuracy in Trump's
presentation to make this all seem like a "nothing-burger" while utterly
failing to disprove the basic contention that South Africa is massively
racist against whites (and Indians and Coloured (mixed race) people.

They didn't receive a massive setback from Trump. Trump, by saying so
many false and stupid things, allowed them to appear to stand up to
Trump. All anybody knows is they withstood the false Trump charge of
genocide against the Afrikaaner farming families, especially with the
picture Trump used that wasn't of a massive grave site.

Trump could have taken them to task for utter failure to take rural
violent crime seriously enough that the national government was actually
doing something useful about it.

What's South Africa going to do if no one wants to farm? Now that I've
done a tiny bit of reading, the proposed land expropriations would
simply be done using violent crime as the precipitator of the crisis,
failing to address violent crime. After all, the criminals will simply
attack the next family, even if black farmers, who come to farm the
land. If they think they'll be killed, they'll stop farming too.