Who's to blame for "mostly peaceful protests"?

You could see it coming. Here's what happens after years of crime and corruption, economic stagnation and rising unemployment, the crumbling of the state in key sectors such as electricity and transport, a growing lawlessness in many regions, and an unofficial policy of impunity for violent street mobs. 

What you see in the pix is not "reparations shopping" in Chicago, St Louis, San Francisco or Portland -- all those fine Democratic cities -- but black people rioting and looting in Johannesburg and other cities of South Africa. Happening right now, it's what the gliberals call "mostly peaceful protests" against the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma after convictions on charges of corruption and malfeasance. 

As in the Excited States of America, folks of the coloured persuasion seize on any excuse for rioting and looting. So bad is the situation that the SA government has called up 25,000 army reservists in an attempt to restore order. They will likely find themselves outnumbered, as tens of thousands continue to attack shopping malls and set factories ablaze. ("No more work! Let's go shoppin'!") 

In Durban (the largest city in Mr Zuma's KwaZulu-Natal province), some 45,000 businesses have been affected by the "unrest" (the PC term). Across the country, food and fuel shortages are worsening. At least 200 shopping centres have been ransacked by looters, and national highways have been shut down, endangering alrelady tenuous supply chains.The official death toll, as of this morning, stands at 72, but unofficial reports put the number of deaths in stampedes and shootings in the 1000s.

Who is to blame for all this? Must be whitey, right? Isn't South Africa the country where they have that apartheid system to keep the fuzzy-wuzzies down and the white on top? Errr, no. "Settler rule", as the United Nations called it, ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became president. 

That was 27 years ago. And -- trust me on this, I was there -- that's when the decline of what was theretofore the most developed, most prospereous country in Africa began. That's when smart Afrikaaners started leaving for places where white folks still run things, like Australia and Canada. [Those who went to Canada must be really disappointed! Ed.] 

South Africa was given back to its aboriginal peoples, and has now become just like all the other shitholes of darkest Africa. There's a lesson there somewhere, for those who are not blinded by ant-white racism and political correctness. 

Who's running the municipal governments of Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Baltimore? Not white Republicans! And what is happening in those and similar failing American cities? Persistent crime and corruption, years of economic stagnation and rising unemployment, etc etc. 

The difference between those cities and, say, Johannesburg, is that in the USA, it's all because of things that some white people did to some black people nearly two centuries ago. Maybe if we tear down some more statues, rename some more streets, and start teaching white kids about how rotten they are, the rioting and looting will stop. Right? LMAO!

Fruits of majority rule in South Africa: called in to quell black crime

Until 1994, voting in South Africa was restricted to whites and "honorary whites" (like Japanese), with a limited franchise for "Asians" (= South Asians) and "coloured" (= people of mixed race). If you were black -- sometimes identifiable by the measurement of your lips -- you couldn't vote at all. This was just one aspect of the apartheid (= separate development) system for which South Africa condemned as hopeless neadnderthal racists by liberals and "right-thinking people" around the world.

All that changed on 27 April 1994 when all citizens were allowed to vote, regardless of colour. The result -- a foregone conclusion -- was just what the gliberals and United Nations demanded -- "majority rule". Saint Nelson Mandela became the first black president, and blacks -- the majority in question -- were at last empowered and given their rightful place at the trough. April 27th is now a national holiday -- "Freedom Day".

Those who suggested that the majority were perhaps "not quite ready" to run their country, and that South Africa would "go back to bush, like the countries north of the Limpopo" were dismissed as sore losers, churls, racists, yada yada yada.

In 1994, the murder rate in Cape Town, seat of South Africa's parliament, was on the order of 20 per 100,000 people. Not great, but also not as bad as places like, errr, Chicago. By Y2K it had shot up to 45 per 100,000. In the first six months of this year -- the 25th year of majority rule -- nearly 2000 people were murdered in the Western Cape (Cape Town's province), according to Albert Fritz, a provincial official tasked with ensuring community safety.

Mr Fritz spoke following more than a dozen murders over one weekend in June. "Many of our most vulnerable residents in the province are living in a war zone," he told the meeja. Most of the bloodshed has been in black and coloured areas, particularly a vast area called Cape Flats, where high rates of unemployment and drug abuse have fuelled gang activity.

In a crime made headlines last week, six women between ages 18 and 26 were killed when unknown gunmen entered a home and opened fire. The next day, another five men, aged 18 to 39, were shot dead and one was injured in two separate shooting incidents in Philippi, one of the shanty towns within Cape Flats.

Police Minister Bheki Cele visited Philippi following the "incidents" to announce that the national government will shortly deploy a battalion of soldiers to help police quell a surge in violence in gang-infested parts of Cape Town, a step normally only taken over the Christmas and New Year period when crime spikes in poorer neighbourhoods. This initiative will be known as "Operation PROSPER". Seriously.

Hardly a lasting solution, according to Gareth Newham, of the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, who called it "a short-term, unsustainable response to a crisis." But what would he know? He's a whitey, obviously a racist living (in his mind) in pre-Freedom Day South Africa. Why doesn't he just leave, as so many other "white flees" have done and go to a safe place like, errr, Chicago.

Footnote: In a report this year by the The Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, only three of the world's top 50 most dangerous cities not from the Americas 50 were in South Africa, with Cape Town at 11th overall with a homicide rate of 66.36 per 100,000 residents.

PQ not so PC as TROC?

Too many abbreviations? Walt will provide a glossary. Let's start with "PQ". Before two-letter abbreviations for states and provinces were standardised, "PQ" was the commonly accepted shorthand for "Province of Quebec" or "Province du Québec" to be more PC -- note the accent. Today the correct form is "QC", while "PQ" refers to the Parti Québecois, the quasi-separatist political party which misgoverns la Belle Province.

The PQ, as well as being committed to (one day) seceding from The Rest Of Canada (TROC), is of a decidedly pinkish hue, thus resolutely secular humanist in its values. After the Roman Catholic Church turned its back on its own dogmas in the 1960s, that's pretty much how the majority of  Québecois think things should be.

Religion now has no place in public life, and no religion or creed should receive any special consideration or accommodation. That's politically correct (PC) thinking in Québec and TROC. Or at least it was, until a few years ago, when Muslims started demanding the "right" to pray in the streets, have Islamic religious instruction in public schools, and force their womenfolk to cover all or parts of their bodies against the gaze of infidels. See "Hijab, niqab, burqa -- what's the difference?".

Of course what's fair for the followers of the Prophet must also be fair for the Jews, Sikhs...just about everyone except Christians. Freedom of religion, dontcha know! It's PC! And so Canadians are treated to the spectacle of turban-clad Mounties, looking like extras in Carry On Up The Khyber. Walt is waiting for a Sikh to bring a human rights complaint (or a lawsuit, if in the USA) to force the NHL to let him wear a turban instead of a helmet.

Soccer, of course, is a different story. Soccer players don't wear helmets because -- let's be real -- how can you hurt your head playing a slow sissy game like "football"? Well, OK, you could get beaned by a viciously kicked ball, but wearing anything on your head is still not done... unless you're a Sikh. Along with his holy drawers and kirpan, a Sikh should be able to wear his turban, they say, because it's part of his religion. And anyone who objects is a racist bigot!

So what, said the Québec Soccer Federation? A few weeks back the QSF passed a bylaw forbidding the wearing of turbans or anything else while playing the beautiful game. Accusations of religious discrimination and being less-than-PC immediately emanated from the lamestream media and swivel-eyed loons of the human rights industry. To which Pauline Marois, the PQ premier of Québec replied, so what?! This is Québec and we'll follow our own customs and values.

A couple of weeks later, following condemnation from the Canadian Soccer Federation and a statement from the international governing body (FIFA) that it didn't care one way or the other, the QSF backed down. But there remains in QC the very strong sentiment that accommodation of religious and ethnic minorities has gone too far.

Having determined the direction from which the political wind is blowing, the Québec Minister of Citizenship, Bernard Drainville, has announced that he's pushing ahead with a long-promised "Charter of Values" which (he thinks) will resolve the problem of religious accommodation, once and for all. He pointed to a public opinion poll that asked whether Québecois think religious accommodation is still an important problem. Two-thirds of the 1506 respondents polled said yes.

When asked whether doing away with "unreasonable accommodations" would promote a more integrated society, 70%. Said M Drainville, "We do want this debate to be about what unites us, not what divides us. What unites us. And I do think equality between men and women, between all citizens notwithstanding origin, religion, mother tongue -- I do think these are important values if we want to build in Québec a united society."

A united society... Wouldn't that be something... If putting an end to extreme political correctness in Québec works, perhaps TROC could try it! And if it works in Canada -- as if! -- perhaps the other half of North America could have a go. We could even give the principle a name... something like "majority rule"!