This article is some white nationalist BS. I read it because I’m interested in South Africa’s past, present and future, without knowing anything about the publication or author.

In case you don’t make it to the end (and it’s really not worth your time), it essentially makes the point of “Apartheid wasn’t all that bad, and South Africa would be better off if it was still a segregated society with separate areas ruled by whites and blacks.”

No, really.

Then it delves into trying to make an equivalency between the fact that the United States has laws which limit immigration and apartheid. Aka, “We’re no better than white South Africans because we don’t let everyone who wants to come into this country.”

It then leans heavily into the white-nationalist Great Replacement Theory conspiracy, and tries to paint Black Lives Matter as an attempt not at, you know, getting police to kill fewer black people, but to somehow discredit the political perspective and power of all white Americans.

The _Claremont Review of Books_ looks and sounds like a respectable publication, but it’s clearly not. And no-one should take them or this author seriously.

This seems like an attempt to give an air of credibility to a deeply racist and inauthentic worldview that we’d all be better off leaving in the past with Apartheid and the klan.

Look, I’m from South Africa. Things suck.

…but this is an annotated review by a conservative think tank that pushes an agenda, by a highly opinionated lady who… honestly, doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about and has never lived there. She’s just dog whistling for conservative clicks.

Do yourself a favour and read the actual book she’s reviewing. It’s good.

This is blatant and quite distateful propaganda:

> The whole point of apartheid was that blacks could rule themselves, in their own homelands.

No. I don't think that was the whole point at all.

> South Africa has come full circle: Under apartheid, electricity was unreliable in black townships; after 30 years of ANC rule, electricity is unreliable everywhere. Middle-class homes own gas generators as a matter of course in case of sudden outages. Even mineral and metal mines, the powerhouses of the economy, cannot count on a steady supply of power, which is one reason why AngloGold Ashanti, a successor company of Anglo American, closed its last remaining gold-mining operations in South Africa in 2020, the end of a streak dating back to Ernest Oppenheimer’s founding the company in 1917.

> Every suburban home is equipped with fortress-like gates and electric fences to prevent break-ins and push-in robberies, as well as with neighborhood private security to substitute for the ineffectual police. Trucks are robbed on the highway so frequently that the port of Durban is losing business to Mozambique, where the roads are safer. Railroad companies find it impossible to maintain service on lines where vandals have ripped up the tracks to sell for scrap. Food imports keep rising as the country becomes less and less able to feed itself due to misguided agricultural policy, aimed more at redistributing land to favored constituents than to producing crops.

Truly reads like a dystopian novel.