It seems Ilana Mercer is still pining for the good old days of apartheid in her native South Africa.
Mercer’s June 24 WorldNetDaily column attacks Michelle Obama and her daughters for visiting the Apartheid Museum during their visit to South Africa. Mercer writes that “Apartheid was a contemptible caste system,” but then she shifts into full condescending apologist mode (italics hers):
What else will the proprietors of the thoroughly Americanized Apartheid Museum fail to divulge? As is chronicled in Chapter 5 of [Mercer’s book] “Into the Cannibal’s Pot”:
“Had the sainted Mandela ascended to power in the 1960s instead of languishing on Robben Island and in Pollsmoor Prison [Mrs. Obama’s destinations in Cape Town], he would have nationalized the South African economy and banned private enterprise. That’s what the ANC’s Charter called for in 1955. That’s what South Africa’s black-ruled neighbors to the north did.”
Except for Rhodesia before Robert Mugabe, minority-ruled South Africa, with all its problems, offered Africans more than any other country on the Dark Continent.
Mercer never criticizes apartheid as racist, which it most certainly was. Indeed, she makes it clear that she thinks blacks in Africa are too stupid and/or corrupt to govern themselves:
In the “first 23 years of apartheid, between 1948 and 1981, the South African economy grew at a rate of 4.5 percent.” Of course, in the famous words attributed to both Disraeli and Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Duly, Marxists put the high-growth rate down to exploitation.
However, when “exploitation” was replaced with “liberation” – and Africans broke free of the colonial yoke to gain political independence – they promptly established planned economies, in whose shadow nothing could grow, plunging their respective countries into despair and destitution.To the liberal West, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere were the faces of black liberation, but both leaders cut a swathe of destruction through the rural economies of their respective countries, Zambia and Tanzania.
While South Africa is not quite a one-party state, it is a dominant-party state. Demographics dictate that Mandela’s African National Congress will likely never lose an election to one of the country’s tiny, tokenistic opposition parties. One shudders to think what the ANC – now slowly Sovietizing South Africa – would have wrought on the sophisticated, industrialized economy of the country had it been given the opportunity circa 1960.
Mercer concludes by noting something she claims is “air brushed out of a slanted historical presentation”: “By staving off crime and communism, the apartheid regime, a vast repressive apparatus though it was, saved black South Africans from an even worse moral and material fate.”
For Mercer, it seems, the end justified the means. And it appears she doesn’t want to concede that apartheid was racist because she harbors the same racism that fed the regime.