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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Why not have separate countries? My understanding is there are some (or we’re) largely white areas of SA. Why not divide SA in 1994 between the white and non-white?

They're trying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania

Apartheid was originally supposed to genuinely divide SA into separate countries, but the white areas wanted the cheap labour to keep flowing. The current momentum for that, such as it exists, is around Cape secession, which would create a plurality Cape Coloured state (mixed-race, Khoisan/White/Indonesian/Xhosa ancestry - also, the official term, none of the connotations of 'coloured' in the US). Generally Cape Coloureds get along with whites, vote for the white liberal party, and local governance is much better, still a fair bit of corruption but more skimming off the top than ruining everything. Huge problems with drugs (mostly methamphetamine and meth cocktails) and gangs in the Coloured community, but more as street crime rather than controlling officials. South African ethnic and political divides can't be fitted into a neat black/white divide, even if it looks that way from the outside.

It is interesting that two things seemed to have doomed SA: immigration and not having enough kids. Keep in mind the black population in SA is not ancient (in fact the Afrikaans predate most of the black population).

Seems to me there is a message for modern western nations and they are failing it.

in fact the Afrikaans predate most of the black population

Eh, that's not quite true. The bantu populations were already in South Africa, just not in the western half. I guess it is true in the sense of ethnogenesis—e.g. Zulus as Zulus, instead of a variety of Nguni tribes—but they were still around.

The bantu populations were already in South Africa, just not in the western half.

"Just"? If you paste South Africa into Europe it stretches from Estonia to the western border of Germany and Austria

Sure, I don't mean to downplay that.

Afrikaaners are probably above replacement today. What TFR do you want, 5?

For a long time the Afrikaners were quite happy with Bantu immigration (which did, to be fair, predate by some decades Dutch settlement) because it was a source of cheap labor. This is also why they didn’t all retreat to the Western Cape when they had the chance.

But this is the same argument today for letting in the 3rd world — cheap labor.

Yes, apartheid SA was not actually a based dissident right state. I bet they cooked with seed oils too.

but the white areas wanted the cheap labour to keep flowing.

Missed opportunity. They could’ve easily got cheap labour by creating work visas

But seriously: apartheid-era South Africa attempted to do pretty much exactly this. The plan was to establish separate, independent, sovereign states for blacks to live in, with blacks being allowed to enter white South Africa only temporarily as "guest workers". A fun bit of historical trivia: by the end of apartheid, the South African government had declared 4 such "black homelands" to be independent*, and had deemed some others "self-governing", with an eye towards eventual independence. As far as I know, this is one of only 2 cases of a post-WWII nation-state willingly separating from, and granting sovereignty to, a part of its territory (the other being Singapore's expulsion from Malaysia in 1965, though I suppose the Velvet Divorce could arguably count as well).

Related to the foregoing, apartheid South Africa also had a kind of internal passport system which allowed blacks to be present in urban areas only with government permission, which was generally granted only for purposes of employment by a white employer.

*a claim recognized by no other national government, nor by the UN

They wanted to establish some white enclaves at the end of apartheid, iirc, but the ANC wouldn't have any of it.

Wonder with the benefit of hindsight if they’d do it all again but resist caving to the sanctions

So basically, it's similar to what the Chinese do today, except without the eventual sovereignty part.

“We wanted workers, but we got people instead” —Max Frisch

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program” —Milton Friedman

You should visit Qatar sometime

The Khaleejis were smart, but it hasn’t been very long. If the laborers actually rebel en masse, they are powerless. (The US isn’t going to fire on tens/hundreds of thousands Indian and Pakistani laborers to preserve Gulf Arab rule, especially given the importance of the relationship with their countries of origin). They do cycle them out, invest heavily in surveillance, take precautions, but it’s not not dangerous.

The danger isn't rebellion. The danger is the softening of attitudes by the Gulf Arab elite that lead to gradually more and more rights for guest workers until it alters the demographics of the country.

Modern demographic inversions are almost always non-violent and gradual.

This is the people group that notably doesn't have an underclass of descendants of slaves, despite importing more than 2x as many slaves and the most prolific nation in the Atlantic, because they were brutal enough to sterilize them before they sold them for labor. I suspect they're culturally quite innoculated against that particular threat.

The US isn’t going to fire on tens/hundreds of thousands Indian and Pakistani laborers to preserve Gulf Arab rule,

Why bring the US into this? Qatar can just hire mercenaries that will happily shoot up these labourers, who will then instantly surrender (remember these are Indians - Britain ruled them with much worse control and military superiority for centuries)

From where and how fast? When 200,000 people storm your palaces you really don’t have a lot of time to react, and the biggest mercenary groups are strongly tied to state actors like Russia and Ukraine who won’t want to involve themselves in that kind of conflict.

To organize, train and arm 200k people would be effort taking lots of time and money, this would be definitely noticed and nipped in the bud long before even by much more incompetent regime than Qatar or UAE.

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You can't have separate countries for them in SA for the same reason Reds and Blues can't cleanly separate in the US- very Blue areas in the US are extremely strategically dependent on the Red areas.

That's a core part of Blue political anxiety (and female anxiety in general, for that matter)- at any moment, the Reds could just say "no, fuck you", start demolishing the power lines, shut the gas off, and ruin the water supply. By the time the Blues can raise a city militia to stop this their ability to pose a threat to the Reds will have been destroyed- cities don't produce their own food, water, or power.

Hence, apartheid- Blues need to make sure Reds are so poor and so uneducated that unless a foreign country was donating materiel strictly for ideological reasons they'd have nothing to sell. It helps if you're a resource economy because being labor and being able to direct labor are two very different skillsets (again, standard "rules for rulers" stuff- just a lot more distributed amongst the population of Blue white South Africa).

Where are the natural resources buried? Blues know, but not Reds.
How do you extract those resources? Blues know, but not Reds.
Can you trade for foreign war materiel? Blues can, but not Reds. (Hence the foreign embargo on Blues.)

The reds would probably win a civil war(at, to be clear, absolutely ruinous human cost). But the source of Blue anxiety is not a civil war scenario; it's the red political victories which they suppose will lead to an authoritarian regime because they can't pass an ideological turing test.

Blues need to make sure Reds are so poor and so uneducated

The standard theory is that as Reds get rich and educated, they overwhelmingly turn Blue all by themselves. It's not like this is unique to the US, either - the educated are high-openness globalists just about everywhere. How do you figure this would be the result of a deliberate Blue ploy, like "make sure" seems to suggest?

Because we can see with our eyes how educated nationalists and other red sympathetic counter-elites are persecuted.

"We would be honored if you would join us" is a good and necessary strategy to prevent rivals from popping up, but it's always second to a control mechanism to prevent people that refuse from attaining any dangerous level of power.

In fact politics can be understood today as that mechanism of integration breaking down (because of the higher need for control due to acceleration of change) and techno-capitalist elites figuring out they can get a better deal out of the nationalists than the globalists and thus coalescing as a red sympathetic counter elite despite being more naturally aligned with globalism historically.

Here's a map from 2011.

There are no large contiguous area with a white majority, although perhaps in 1994 it would have been different.

Really 1948. It was the Apartheid government that facilitated mass movement of people between black and white areas of SA, because they believed they could keep blacks on the pass system forever.

The pass system?

Blacks moving outside of their ethnic homelands were obliged to carry a dompas(internal passport) in order to work in white areas.

Huge self own.

Semi related... the Cape area was largely uninhabited when the Dutch showed up, with just a few thousand hunter gatherers and pastoralists spread out over a huge area. (For a fun project, see how much badgering it takes Claude or ChatGPT to admit that). At the time, the entire population of the South Africa was only about 200,000 people.

Would you subscribe to the implied general principle, though? If a few million Africans snuck into one of the more deserted parts of Wyoming and built a thriving colony there, do you recognise their claim to sovereignty?

Yeah, I think people who have lived on a land since 1652 have some rights. If some Africans snuck into Wyoming and lived there for 370 years, I think I'd feel pretty strongly they have a right to be there.

Turnabout...

Would you subscribe to the implied principle that the people who deserve land are the original settlers of that land? In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even. Will you demand the Bantus go back to the jungle so that South Africa can be rightfully inhabited by hunter gatherers again?

In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even.

The Bantus were in Eastern South Africa (the bit where most of the modern population live) in 500 AD, the first Boers arrived in the 1650s. They were there for a good thousand years before the Dutch turned up. The Khoisan (or rather, their partial descendents the Coloreds) are still there in the West.

Yes. Thank you for the clarification. The Dutch beat the Bantus to the Cape but there was a small Bantu population in other parts of South Africa before they arrived.

Would you subscribe to the implied principle that the people who deserve land are the original settlers of that land? In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even. Will you demand the Bantus go back to the jungle so that South Africa can be rightfully inhabited by hunter gatherers again?

No, I think I stand by the rules I outlined here - the Bushmen have no claim against the Bantu except where their lands were directly taken by the latter. That being said, I think a lot of people instinctively subscribe to some sort of notion where sovereignty can be passed more easily the more similar conquerors and conquered are, so for example intra-European border shifts are accepted in ways in which Ottoman conquests in Europe were not.

Ready to have your mind blown?

Bantus and whites are more closely related than Bantus and Khoisan!

Depending on how you measure. There'd already been a little intermarriage centuries before.

Unwilling to answer?

Here(it's Fst) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Full_Fst_Average.png/2048px-Full_Fst_Average.png shows San-Bantu 0.01 and distances between Bantus and various European groups from 0.15 (Greek, Basque) to 0.28 (Sardinian)

Here (euclidean distance) Bantu-San is painted with 45% relative similarity and Bantu-Europeans are about 10%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Genetic_similarities_between_51_worldwide_human_populations_(Euclidean_genetic_distance_using_289,160_SNPs).png

/images/17417614397249808.webp

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On a branching tree model? Doesn't count. There isn't really a branching tree inside species.

I'm aware of the genetic distance thing. I used the vague "similar" on purpose.

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The Cape was first settled by Europeans in the early middle of the (still ongoing) wave of Bantu migration to Southern Africa, sure.

Do you have any good sources for this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion

The population that was actually native to the cape region were the Khoisans

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