Re: [OT] Documentary on South African farm murders

On 2025-05-25 12:01 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

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.
 

Fair enough. That sounds like another plausible explanation for the lack of South African news in recent decades. In any case, I think we agree that South Africa rarely made the news in this part of the world after the end of apartheid.

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.
 

I don't know; I've never been there. Maybe it was already fairly dire under Mandela and Mbeke.

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.

Well, maybe that was wishful thinking on my part. Anyway, if you look at the two links I posted yesterday, the Heskov interview and the documentary, even if you don't view the videos, read the comments and you'll see many, many comments from South Africans saying that they are both very accurate as to what's going on in South Africa where their own media don't cover it accurately if they cover it at all. Ramaphosa *was* exposed. Whether he does anything about it is still to be seen.

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.

I didn't see all of the meeting with Ramaphosa but I saw a place with many white crosses commemorating the murdered farmers that was definitely in South Africa, not Congo, in the Katie Hopkins documentary - the 68 minute one - that I posted yesterday. As I understand it, the media are claiming that the footage was of an incident in Congo.
The other issue in what you said is the meaning of the word "genocide". Most people assume it means (attempted) wholesale mass slaughter of an entire population like the Holocaust but as Rob Heskov points out in the *other* video I linked yesterday - the interview with Dave Rubin - the UN definition is FAR broader than that. While the events in South Africa are nowhere near the scale seen in the Holocaust, they do arguably satisfy the UN definition.

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.
 

There's no doubt that Trump could have done a better job. Even when his heart is unquestionably in the right place, his execution is often lacking.

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.

Unless there's a massive change in attitude on the part of the South African government, they will soon find that they've followed the same path as Zimbabwe, which turned from the bread basket of Africa to a basket case when they let black "veterans" (and apparently most of them were NOT veterans) seize the property of very productive farms and quickly run them into the ground. South Africa will end up depending on foreign aid just to eat because they've destroyed their agricultural base on ideological grounds.
South Africa has already experimented with letting black farmers try their hand at running farms themselves and those were utter failures because the blacks involved had no significant farming skill or education. (I don't know how they selected the farmers; perhaps they were merely ANC loyalists from the cities who envisioned a comfortable life and got a rude awakening. Or maybe they chose experienced farm labourers who'd never had any contact with the business side of things because they were closely supervised by experienced farmers in their previous jobs.) I'm sure blacks *could* farm successfully but it would take a combination of education and experience that previous black farmers apparently didn't have.
--
Rhino