Cannibal Lecture
Ilana Mercer on reparations
Apartheid and the Atlantic slave trade have generated an endless, media-generated pretense of remorse, especially in America and Great Britain. Spectacle aside, the real motive is to define, and therefore control, the past by reading it as an aspect of present political aims. “[R]itual apologies,” argues Jeremy Black, author of “The Slave Trade,” “are moves in a political game that relies on “fatuous arguments about ‘closure’ [and] ‘resolution,’” but fails to reach closure, since the purpose of such policies is to keep the imagined wounds suppurating.
Plainly put, racial-grievance politics are levelled, in general, by Africans who were never enslaved or who were not born into apartheid, against Europeans who did not enslave or segregate them. Only in the West could such a vicarious cult of self-flagellation thrive. As I wrote in my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, “White South Africans are told to give up ancestral lands they are alleged to have stolen. Should not the relatives of cannibals who gobbled up their black brethren be held to the same standards?”
Part of the problem is our ignorance of Southern African history. There was bitter blood on Bantu lands well before white settlers arrived. The Bantu were not indigenous to South Africa. They migrated there out of central Africa and, like the European settlers, used their military might to displace Hottentots, Bushmen and one another through internecine warfare. Continue reading
The Sick Man of Europe
Charge of the Light Brigade
The Sick Man of Europe
By Stuart Millson, moonlighting again
Engulfed by 220,000 Covid-19 infections and with a death toll to date of 32,000 souls, the United Kingdom has, in the current pandemic, truly become the “sick man of Europe” – the evocative phrase used in the 19th-century to describe the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Second only to the United States in its rate of infection and overtaking the former viral epicentres of Italy and Spain, Britain’s ability to deal with the virulent virus now sweeping the world has been, at best, ineffective. Despite the magnificent efforts of the National Health Service – not to mention the work of the British Army in building a temporary hospital in just nine days – our country’s response has been found wanting.
Despite the examples before us of countries such as New Zealand and Taiwan, which had the foresight to immediately close their airports, thereby preventing the circulation of the disease and its possible circulation back to countries not yet infected, the United Kingdom – with the agreement of its scientists and public health officials – allowed its runways to remain open. Only now, a month after the disease was given time to embed itself, has the Government finally decided to apply quarantine rules to airport travellers – a classic example of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. [Editorial note; travellers quarantined accordingly will be trusted to isolate themselves!] Continue reading →
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