Ilana Mercer comes to the defense of poor Pat Buchanan in her Jan. 12 WorldNetDaily column, touting how Buchanan’s view of face and multiculturalism dovetails with her own.
Then, as she is wont to do, Mercer once again laments the death of apartheid in her native South Africa:
America, as Mr. Buchanan observes, was eaten away by the acid of the 1960s revolution, “with its repudiation of Christian morality and embrace of secularism and egalitarian ideology.”
South Africa was relatively unaffected by that revolution. It was a staunchly traditional Christian country. Stores closed on Sundays. Television came late to the place but so did pornography and the gay-rights movement. In South Africa, the influence of Christianity receded after the 1994 democratic transition.
Whereas “Americans are no longer a people,” by contrast, the Afrikaners, as illustrated in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” still linger as a people, clinging to what Barack Obama would indubitably deride as their Bibles, their guns and their bigotries.
Dubbed the white tribe of Africa, this organic nation has, however, ceased to exist as a nation-state, dissolved by democratic decree. The sundering of state sovereignty has, in turn, exposed Afrikaners to ethnic cleansing, a familiar feature of democracy a la Africa.
Despite the Afrikaner’s superior military prowess, they simply “surrendered without defeat.” Ferocious though it was, the South African Defense Force (SADF) ceded to the African National Congress and its representatives.
“You, me and our men can take this country in an afternoon,” said former chief of the SADF Gen. Contand Viljoen, famously, to the reigning chief, Gen. George Meiring. He uttered this comment as President de Klerk prepared to cave into ANC demands, forgoing all checks and balances for South Africa’s Boer, British and Zulu minorities. Yet, the very same Afrikaner people, in the same spirit, went on to peacefully dismantle the six nuclear devices they had built at Pelindaba, west of the capital, Pretoria.
Why did the mighty SADF capitulate to Mandela’s ragtag ANC? Why did the tough descendants of the trek Boers, who have 350 years of history on the continent of Africa – as long as their American cousins have been in North America – give up their birthright for a mess of pottage?
Since it all makes so little sense, my conclusions are more philosophical than factual.
No mention, of course, of the inherent unfairness and virulent racism of the apartheid system the “mighty SADF” was defending.