Clearly, the place is headed in that direction. (SEE: Zimbabwe)
By the way, are the men there still raping infants to cure themselves of AIDS?
Posted on 02/15/2007 8:55:22 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
South Africa has seized its first farm - in the clearest indication yet that it is bowing to growing pressure to redistribute land to majority blacks.
Black pressure groups and trade unions have been threatening to begin invading farms unless the government moved quickly to redistribute land.
Among many of South Africa's 50,000-plus white commercial farmers, this first land expropriation by President Thabo Mbeki's government echoes Robert Mugabe's violent land seizures in neighbouring Zimbabwe where at least 4,000 farmers have been evicted from their land, leading to the collapse of that country's economy.
But among blacks dispossessed of their land in 300 years of apartheid, the move marks the beginning of a new era to correct skewed landownership patterns.
White farmers and white-dominated groups still control 90 per cent of prime farmland while blacks remain crowded in barren communal areas.
South African authorities have hitherto moved cautiously on land reform, fearing that any forced seizures will rattle investors afraid of a repeat of a Zimbabwe style situation.
Yet there is also growing recognition that equity in landownership within a reasonable time is unachievable without resort to some "strong arm" tactics to dispossess landowners who will not easily give up what they have already amassed.
The Commission on Restitution of Land Rights said in a statement yesterday that the first expropriation order of the gigantic 25,200-hectare farm owned by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of South Africa (ELCSA) in South Africa's Northern Cape Province came into effect on 26 January. The government will take full possession of the farm for resettlement next month. The government has paid £2.1m for the land although the ELCSAhad wanted more than £5m which it says is the true value of the land.
The fact that Mr Mbeki's government is paying compensation for the land has at least mollified analysts who deem it unfair to compare South Africa's land reform with Zimbabwe's. Maans Nel, spokesman of the main opposition Democratic Alliance said his party's position was that the state should only expropriate as a last resort where negotiations would fail. "There are a lot of other ways to get land... At least four million hectares are coming on the open market every year," said Mr Nel.
The South Africa government has recently hardened its stance on land reforms, accusing white farmers of frustrating negotiations by demanding high prices.
Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana announced last year that she was setting a six-month deadline for price negotiations with farmers after which any targeted farms would be expropriated. Mrs Xingwana has recently been engaged in harsh verbal exchanges with the white farmers after accusing some of them of sexually abusing farm workers and treating them like slaves. The government's critics, however, say white recalcitrance is not the only reason for delays in reallocating land. Bureaucratic sluggishness in negotiations is also to blame .
The ELCSA's farm has been expropriated under a land restitution law that allows blacks evicted from their ancestral lands during apartheid to apply to have their rights restored or to ask for financial compensation.
The church's land was claimed by 471 local families, among them workers on the farm. But the Transvaal Agricultural Union, which represents most white farmers, is against expropriation. One member questioned the principle that land should be redistributed to blacks saying whites took large areas of unoccupied land when they first arrived at the Cape in 1652 to begin their colonisation.
"There were no dispossessions. Our ancestors found vast areas of unoccupied land and introduced modern agricultural methods. Now we are being asked to give back that land. Why?" he questioned.
Such seemingly racist perspectives are widespread among a clique of hardline Afrikaners who still refuse to accept the reality of being ruled by blacks.
Beginning with the enactment of a Land Acquisition Act in 1982, Zimbabwe employed a rule-based method of land reform that stipulated that compensation must be paid for land and improvements. It was only in March 2000, when President Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front faced its first-ever real possibility of losing an election, that the Zimbabwean government endorsed land invasions. Up until then, land invasions were localized occurrences, and largely were deemed illegal. The Mugabe regime's sudden about-face aimed to secure the rural vote, which comprises Zimbabwe's largest voting bloc. The similarities between South Africa today and Zimbabwe in 2000 paint the South African government's expropriation in a more serious light. ...Zimbabwe will follow South Africa's land acquisition program closely in search of vindication for its program; Namibia, which faces popular demands to remedy the sizeable land ownership inequalities that have gone unresolved since the country's independence in 1990, also will be watching carefully. - LINK
How important is agriculture to the South African economy? It seems unlikely that it's as important to SA as it is to Zimbabwe.
Wow! Hope Basildon Peta likes his/her new utopia after all those 'racist' whites have been given theirs.
Zimbabwe Aid Live Concert. Coming soon.
I don't know what White person in their right mind would want to stay in Zimbabwe under that racist criminal dictatorship.
The inflation rate was 1,500% this week in Harare. You think they would see the handwriting on the wall in South Africa. But I guess they like famine and dire poverty better.
"There were no dispossessions. Our ancestors found vast areas of unoccupied land and introduced modern agricultural methods. Now we are being asked to give back that land. Why?" he questioned.
Such seemingly "racist perspectives" are widespread among a clique of hardline Afrikaners who still refuse to accept the reality of being ruled by blacks.
Racist Perspectives --- You have got to be kidding me.
Internationally, only their wine industry matters, but domestically, they might end up w/ famines if they give the land to people who don't know the difference between a shovel and a snow plow.
At this point I can't have much sympathy for any white farmers still in that third-world toilet South Africa. How stupid do you have to be not to see the writing on the wall, even if you've been in a coma during the past five years and missed Zimbabwe?
Time to invest in portable assets - like ocean going yachts and sailing vessels. When the stuff hits the fan you sail to the US and declare yourself a refugee, then sell the boat. The last time I looked the S. African currency export limits were very low.
What a weird sentence. What a distorted perspective. What a horrible place.
I would like to see historical evidence of such dispossession.
1971 : Idi Amin takes power in Uganda
One week after toppling the regime of Ugandan leader Milton Obote, Major General Idi Amin declares himself president of Uganda and chief of the armed forces. Amin, head of the Ugandan army and air force since 1966, seized power while Obote was out of the country.
Ruling directly, Amin soon revealed himself as an extreme nationalist and tyrant. In 1972, he launched a genocidal program to purge Uganda of its Lango and Acholi ethnic groups. Later that year, he ordered all Asians(mostly from India) to leave the country, and some 60,000 Indians fled, thrusting Uganda into economic collapse. A Muslim, he reversed Uganda's friendly relations with Israel and sought closer ties with Libya and the Palestinians. In 1976, he made himself president for life and stepped up his suppression of various ethnic groups and political opponents in the military and elsewhere.
In 1978, Amin invaded Tanzania in an attempt to annex the Kagera region and divert attention from Uganda's internal problems. In 1979, Tanzania launched a successful counteroffensive with the assistance of the Uganda National Liberation Front, a coalition of various armed Ugandan exiles. Amin and his government fled the country, and Obote returned from exile to reassume the Ugandan presidency. Amin received asylum from Saudi Arabia. He is believed to have been responsible for the murder of as many as 300,000 Ugandans, though he never stood trial for his crimes.
Amin died on August 16, 2003, in Saudi Arabia.
This doesn't sound so much different from some of the eminent domain thievery that's going on here.
We have monitored the situation in Zimbabwe very carefully, and will not make the same mistakes while doing the exact same thing in exactly the same way that Zimbabwe did.
As good Socialists, we learn from past experience.
Mass starvation is in store....
Everybody loves something for nothing, as long as they aren't the ones paying for it...and they never learn that they are the ones that WILL end up paying.
I suggest fertilizing your fields with a 50-50 mix of salt and borax, while their is still time. That is as close as you'll come to being able to hand it back as your ancestors found it.
Oh, and burn the buildings & equipment on the way out.
PS. I wonder what Charlise Theron will say when mommies farm is taken. I suppose she'll blame the Bush administration!
But among blacks dispossessed of their land in 300 years of apartheid,
1948-1994 is FAR from "300 years".
Whites deserve it - they have spread Western oppression around the globe.
Just like the Jews deserved having their stuff seized by the Nazis in the 30's and 40's. The Jews ran the banks and (since there was a market crash) they had obviously mishandled things.
So you can see, stealing stuff is the right thing to do. :D
(/sarcasm)
Have you spent much time in South Africa? Do you really consider it to be a "toilet"? Much of the country is spectacularly beautiful, and Capetown is a great city - superior to every other African city I've visited.
So if investors wouldn't be concerned... they would proceed at breakneck speed? Scary...
Because you're white, the ruling majority is black, and the international community doesn't care about racial discrimination against whites or Jews. Leave now, and go somewhere where white people should be relatively safe, like Australia or Finland. I'd suggest the US, but I have my doubts if whites are even safe there after Nifong and the Long Beach beatings, among other incidents.
Clearly, the place is headed in that direction. (SEE: Zimbabwe)
By the way, are the men there still raping infants to cure themselves of AIDS?
Marie Antoinette, much-reviled "last queen of France," wasn't really as bad as so many said at the time of the French Revolution in the mid-1700's. She never said, "Let them eat cake," in response to complaints that the people had no bread. In fact, it was her maid who remarked that Parisians had so little food that the scrapings from the bottom of a bread pan would be a feast. That became twisted into the classic phrase of perfidious indifference so well known today.
Yes, she was a wastrel and an adultress, but her husband, to whom she was married at age 15 by her Austrian Empress mother to cement relations between Austria and France, was both impotent and fat. Somewhat telling of her character, when she followed her husband to the guillotine during the French Revolution, her last words were an apology to her executioner, when she accidentally stepped on his foot.
I bring this up merely to employ that infamous phrase with regard to the starving people of Africa, particularly South Africa. Not because I am insensitive, but because I wish to highlight the folly of the welfare mentality.
Two days ago, Brian Williams, the MSNBC anchor now slated to replace Tom Brokaw as NBC's network news anchor, penned an article entitled, "The struggle to survive in Malawi," a small country near the southern tip of the African continent. He attributed the rampant starvation there today to "years of bad harvest, erratic weather and the devastation of AIDS." He notes that these conditions are becoming typical throughout Africa.
But, as is so typical of the controlled media today, Mr. Williams neglected to note that this famine has been self-inflicted. He didn't say a word about how the vast farms of Zimbabwe, nee Rhodesia, in particular, which fed so many Africans until now, have been lain fallow. Because it is the black Africans doing it, you see.
Zimbabwean farmers, so productive that they had been supporting far more than the population of their own country, have been removed from their farms, if not killed outright, due to the racist policies of their black government rulers.
"Kill the Boer, kill the farmer," a phrase first uttered by ANC member of Parliament Peter Mokaba, is the mantra now shouted aloft by crowds of blacks at all manner of public meetings and demonstrations. The South African Human Rights Commission notes that this slogan is not hate speech, but merely a manifestation of "the constitutional rights to free speech."
More than 1,300 Zimbabwean farmers and farm workers and their families now have been murdered by roving bands of young African blacks, while authorities have stood by and literally watched, in what is nothing more than "ethnic cleansing," a euphemism for genocide.
The remaining white farmers are unable to leave their country because other countries, notably the USA, erect impassable immigration barriers to whites, while allowing a flood of nonwhites across their borders.
You don't hear about the carnage in Zimbabwe because it is politically incorrect to note the murder of whites by blacks anywhere in the world today. Zimbabwe President Thabo Mbeki calls the execution of white farm owners and workers, "the final stage of the revolution." Final because, presumably, they are now running out of white people to slaughter.
In the article referenced above, Brian Williams states that, "donations keep these people alive. The U.S. is the single largest donor, but there is only enough food to feed 500,000 people, just one sixth of what they need." Touching, indeed, but not nearly the whole story, as we see by bringing in the South African connection.
And, of course, those TV commercials depicting the fly-ridden, emaciated black children of Africa fail to note that these kids would be well fed if the white African farmers had been left alone.
Let them eat cake.
I know, those kids didn't kill the farmers and slaughter the livestock and cut up the farms to squat on and eat the seed corn in the sheds and so on, but there is a limit to those for whom I will feel responsible. Just now, we have malnourished children in America, for example.
African blacks, both those in government and those in the death squads, are responsible. They have killed their golden-egg-laying goose and have nobody to blame but themselves for today's lack of food.
Let them eat cake.
Of course, we in America who were so instrumental in driving whites out of political power in Africa must shoulder some responsibility, too. However, all the American liberals formerly so adamant about boycotting companies doing business with South Africa have morphed into neoconservatives and now care only about killing the enemies of Israel (including hundreds of thousands of Arabic children). They certainly show no concern about the murder of white children in Africa.
Now we are expected to feed Africa, though that continent possesses the most verdant soil in the world which, if cultivated properly, could serve as breadbasket to the rest of the human race.
Just as we have created a welfare class in America, which will persist so long as we continue the handouts, and which is an undeniable magnet to hordes of illegal immigrants, now we are expected to extend that mentality to other countries, as well. It isn't working here. It won't work there.
They wanted total self determination. Now they want all whites killed or driven from their countries while we open our borders to them.
Let them eat cake.
I had the pleasure of vacationing in the Western Cape for two weeks in 2003 and like you indicated it is beautiful. From Cape Town to Stellenbosch to Oudtshoorn, Knysna, George, et al, it is a spectacular area of the world to visit, both geographically and culturally. I would love to return someday. Sadly, I fear it is going down the same path as Rhodesia. I really hope I am wrong.
Why post the rantings of a lunatic white supremist on FR?
After all, the programme worked so well in Rhodesia. /drippingwithsarc
When apartheid came to a sudden - and relatively bloodless end - I was stunned. I had been sure it would become a cauldron of butchery beside which the horrors of Kenya and Rhodesia would pale in comparison. So I think, to some extent, comparisons are odious. Nonetheless, the dangers of total collapse and brutal race war are great...
For awhile anyway. Look at Somalia, once a nice place put together by the French, now after being turned over to the Somalians, it's run down.
I think a strong argument can be made that most of not all African countries are worse off in material ways than they were during the colonial period.
No.
start with the "native land act" of 1913
Give it 5 years of "pure" black land -reform rule...then tell how great it is
Agreed.
But not for long.
Give it time.
I get periodic reports from the underbelly of that society.
Give it time.
And South Africa falls further into the Abyss....
The blacks DEMANDING the land back aren't even of the tribes and peoples that originally lived on these lands.. this is all race hustling and poverty pimping, just on a grander scale.
Everyonce in a while they are correct. Sadly, posting them does the cause harm.
I have never seen any other post by "OnRightOnLeftCoast" similar to this, so I'm at a loss to account for his actions here.
Rhodesia used to be stable and productive as well. It would be a sad turn of events to see South Africa choose the Mugabe path and ruin themselves just like he ruined Rhodesia.
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