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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   34849 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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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.

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

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.

You underestimate exactly how incompetent Qatar and UAE are. The Khaleejis couldn't win against the houthis, and they literally share a land border with them. Khaleejis themselves are not very competent; the vast majority of state capacity is in the hands of foreigners, such as arabs or westerners.

A rebellion doesn't occur because the guest-workers do not have a mind for rebellion, and their inferiority is constantly reinforced. No khaleeji even pretends that they owe rights to them, unlike in the west.

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