USA to admit 40,000 refugees. Guess who goes to the head of the line?

If you guessed Palestinians or Afghans, let me remind you that this is President Donald J. Trump's America, not the woke train wreck that preceded it. America is becoming great again! Anyhoo, a report from Reuters today says the new administration is discussing a refugee admissions cap of around 40,000 for the coming year, with a majority allocated to... wait for it... white South Africans!

Some readers may be puzzled by a story about white South African "refugees". Walt has written several times about the plight of the Afrikaners -- those of Dutch descent known as "Boers" (meaning "farmers") -- trying to get out of the moribund black-ruled state before their land is taken from them.

See, for instance, "Aussies welcome Boers fleeing South African land grab", WWW 14/3/18. Woke governments like those of Canada, the Disunited Kingdon and Joe Biden's USA have not welcomed them. "They're white supremacists, you know... believers in apartheid... racists... Nazis... Hitler..."

Not so the government of Australia, which (as the post linked above says) decided seven years ago that they were the kind of immigrants who would contribute something to a country where they would't be subject to anti-white racism.

Now the USA has done a 180 from the woke refugee policies of the Dimocrats. In an e-mail cited by Reuters, Angie Salazar, the top refugee program official at the Department of Health and Human Services, told state-level refugee workers that she expected the cap to be 40,000, with about 30,000 of those spaces allocated to  devoted to Afrikaners.

The 40,000-person cap would be a sharp drop from the 100,000 refugees brought in by Demented Joe in fiscal 2024, but higher than the record-low 15,000-person ceiling set for fiscal 2021 before the end of President Trump's first term. 

A separate person familiar with the matter said that in addition to the 40,000 figure, a cap as low as 12,000 had also been discussed. President Trump froze refugee admissions immediately after taking office in January, but weeks later launched a programme for Afrikaners, saying the white minority group suffered racial discrimination and violence in majority-Black South Africa.

I, for one, welcome the Boers to my corner of the forest. Chances are they'll do well here, like the Heysteks, who immigrated to Alberta, Canada in the late 1990s, when the black Africans took over the most prosperious country in Africa and started running it into the ground. Here's daughter Susanna and her family, playing some very Canadian fiddle tunes.

 

If you liked the music and/or want to know more about the Heysteks and why they left South Africa, check out "South Africa's loss is Canada's gain", WWW 28/4/19. 

Guys wanting to propose marriage to Susanna (age 15 in the video) are advised to check out her most recent bio, here. She plays the viola now.

What 30 years of black power have done to South Africa

As Walt's friends and regular readers know, I called Zimbabwe -- known in earlier, better days as Rhodesia -- home for some years in the 1990s. Zimbabwe (aka the Land of Bambazonke) was one of the last African countries to achieve independence from their colonial masters, in this case "Great" Britain. Today, 44 years after independence, Zimbabwe is an economic basket case, an effective one-party state ruined by its government's ignorance, incompetence and kleptomania.

While I lived there, I often visited RSA, the Republiek van Suid-Afrika, or Republic of South Africa, which was on the verge of overthrowing the National Party and its apartheid régime of racial separation. The 1994 elections, held for the first time under a one-man-one-vote system, brought to power the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela. The ANC has ruled South Africa ever since.

In the run-up to the handover of power to the black majority, my friends and colleagues told me, "You just watch. The blacks are incapable of running a country. In a few years, it'll be just like 'up north'." 

This weekend, the people of South Africa are celebrating -- sort of -- the 30th anniversary of freedom from the rule of the white settlers. In the week leading up to the anniversary, countless South Africans were asked what three decades of freedom from apartheid meant to them. 

The dominant response was that while 1994 was a landmark moment, it is now overshadowed by the joblessness, violent crime, corruption and near-collapse of basic services like electricity and water that plague "the new South Africa" today.

The 1994 election changed South Africa ("Republic" has been dropped from the official name) from a country where black and other non-white people were denied not just the right to vote, but many basic freedoms. Apartheid laws controlled where they lived, where they were allowed to go on any given day, and what jobs they could have. 

After the fall of the apartheid system, the country's new constitution guaranteed (supposedly) the rights of all South Africans regardless of their race, religion, gender or sexual preferences. However, it doesn't give all those "marginalized" folks the white houses, white cars and white women they coveted. 

Nor has it brought about freedom from want. Quite the opposite. The black majority -- more than 80% of the population of 62 million -- are still overwhelmingly affected by severe poverty. The official unemployment rate is 32% --, the highest in the world -- and more than 60% cent for young people (aged 15 to 24).

South Africa is still the most unequal country in the world in terms of wealth distribution, according to the World Bank, with race a key factor. More than 16 million mostly black South Africans (a quarter of the country's population) rely on monthly welfare grants for survival. 

Seth Mazibuko, an anti-apartheid activist in the 1970s, sums things up, thus, "Let us agree that we messed up." So they did. Things are worse now than when the Afrikaners were in charge, and the chances of returning to those not-so-bad-after-all days are slim and none.

VIDEO: South Africa's loss is Canada's gain - Susanna Heystek

Among the South African farmers who saw the handwriting on the wall back in the 1990s (see my earlier post, today) was the family of Susanna Heystek (great name for farmers!), who joined the "white flees" leaving for the Old Dominions, in this case Canada, where the challenges to farming are of a different nature (read: colour) than they are in Suid Afrika.

The Heysteks settled in Alberta (Canada's answer to Texas!), and Susanna began playing the violin at age five in her hometown of Rocky Mountain House. She went on to study violin in Red Deer and joined the Red Deer Youth and Community Orchestra, of which she was concert master. After graduating high school, she went on to study at the Victoria Conservatory of Music and joined the Artemis Trio. The trio competed at the provincial level in British Columbia and won first place in the Senior Chamber category. Last year, Susanna had the honour of being accepted into the National Art Centre Orchestra's apprenticeship program.

Susanna has developed into a fine classical violinist, and also plays the viola, but hasn't forgotten her country roots. Here she plays "Bowing the Strings", written by Canadian fiddler/composer, Ned Landry. This was recorded in Airdrie AB on 9 May 2015. Intercut are some nice pictures of the wildlife of the homeland of her Afrikaner ancestors, plus picture proof that this talented young lady can still handle the ropin' and ridin'.



Further reading and viewing: Click here to visit Susanna Heystek's website, where you'll find her bio, plus links to other music videos and lots of other good stuff. On the landing page is the link to my favourite of all the classical pieces Susanna has recorded, "The Last Rose of Summer".

Aussies welcome Boers fleeing South African land grab

Walt has some good news for all the Boers (Afrikaner farm folk) who were wondering what they were going to do when the black invaders come for your farms... not to mention your cars and your wives and daughters! (See "South Africans won't slaughter white farmers... at least not right now", WWW 3/3/18.) If you're smart enough to get out while the getting is good -- before South Africa turns into Zimbabwe -- Australia will welcome you!

Peter Dutton, Australia's home affairs minister, told the Sydney Daily Telegraph today that the Aussie government is ready to consider issuing special visas to South African farmers due to the "horrific circumstances" they face -- land seizures, violence and murder, at the hands of the now-"empowered" black majority. Such is the level of violence in South Africa that thousands of mainly white, Afrikaans-speaking farmers have taken to the streets to protest and plead for help.

Last October, #BlackMonday protests (pictured) were organized after the AfriForum civil rights group released figures showing a murder rate for South African farmers of 156 per 100,000 -- well above the already high national average and making farming in that country arguably the most dangerous occupation in the world outside a war zone!

South Africa's new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has vowed to pursue the same course as Zimbabwe's former dictator, Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe (who's still alive, by the way!) in expropriating farmland owned by whites without compensation. South Africans of all colours -- black, white and striped -- are worried that doing so will destroy the country's already tottering economy, just as it did in Zimbabwe, Zambia and other black-ruled countries.

At the same time, the number of slain farmers, farm workers, and family members — most of them white — had hit 71, surpassing the estimated death toll for 2016.

Now Australia stands ready to offer help. "If you look at the footage and read the stories, you hear the accounts, it's a horrific circumstance they face," Mr Dutton told the Telegraph. He said Australia has refugee, humanitarian and other visa programmes which have the "potential to help some of these people." He had asked his department to look at the options, he added, "because from what I have seen they do do need help from a civilized country like ours."

Escaping the inevitable decline of South Africa

There hasn't been a lot about South Africa in the news lately. Compared with the "Arab spring" sweeping North Africa, the Western campaign to turn Libya into a heap of rubble, civil wars in west and central Africa, and famine in east Africa, not much is going on in the south.

Yet South Africans of the pale pink variety are deserting the ship which is slowly sinking into the morass of corruption, incompetence and chaos that is Africa today. They are coming to "white" countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada in record numbers.

The UK, however, is not a preferred destination because South Africans, particularly the Afrikaners, remember that it was once-great Britain (and later the United States of Civil Rights) that forced majority (i.e. black) rule on a country that wasn't ready for it, and was getting along quite nicely, thank you, as it was.

The Afrikaners - white South Africans of Dutch, German and French Huguenot descent - had their first real beef with the British in the mid-19th century. They got understandably tired of being told by English missionaries how to deal with the "noble savages", how to govern their society, even how to worship. So they left, trekking north across the Oranje and Vaal rivers to establish their own republics: the Transvaal and the Oranje Vrijstaat (Orange Free State).

Fair enough? Not in the eyes of the British. There followed a series of wars between the imperialist Brits and the fiercely independent Boers, as the Afrikaners became known. ("Boer" means "farmer", and that's what most of them were.) The first was in 1880-1. The second and third lasted from 1899 through 1902 and are collectively known here as "the Boer War".

The conflict is known in South Africa as "the Anglo-Boer Wars", which is more accurate as the British were the instigators. They sought to impose one-man-one-vote democracy, enforced racial equality, English law and the English language on a society not suited to any of those things. (Reminds you of the Middle East today, doesn't it?) For their part, the Afrikaners wanted only to be left alone.

The British won the war, not without more than a little difficulty in spite of a huge superiority of men and materiel. The definitive account of how they did so - including a description of British concentration camps - is to be found in The Boer War, by Thomas Pakenham (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979; Futura Books, 1982). An earlier, shorter book of the same title was written by John Selby, and published by Arthur Barker Ltd., London, 1969.

In his The Boer War, Selby states, as the fact is, that although the British won the war, the Boers won the peace. One of the terms of the 1902 treaty that ended the war was that the Afrikaners could decide racial questions for themselves. In 1948 the mainly Afrikaner Nationalist party won the union-wide election. It then applied the policy of separate development - "apartheid" - to the entire country.

Selby says: In 1899, although world opinion favoured the Boers, many individual countries supported the British. In 1968 it seems that world opinion is against the South African government...but as in 1899, a large body of opinion is on their side. This group applauds the success the South Africans have made of their ecnomy...and it watches, with some sympathy, the South African government trying to do its best for the country.

That was in 1968. The campaign of the one-worlders and reverse racists against "white supremacy" intensified throughout the 60s, particularly in Britain and America. Britain divested itself of its African colonies, long before they were ready to manage their own affairs. And in the USA the civil rights movement and that great lover of racial equality, LBJ, brought about the "reforms" that have produced the peaceful and harmonious society Americans enjoy today.

We return to Selby: There are obviously some things that are wrong in South Africa...but to many observers the present government appears to be handling their task with common sense, and to be trying to be as fair as they can to all races, faced as they are with such a racial mixture.

The government undoubtedly believes that, geared as it is to Western industrialization, South Africa without white men to run it would certainly face economic ruin and might even become a Congo or Nigeria. And they are not willing that either should happen.

The South African government to which Selby refers handed power to the black majority in 1994, thanks largely to pressure from the "white" governments of the West. The world waits now, hoping (but not betting) that Selby will be proven wrong. White South Africans, however, are voting once more...with their feet.