Loading ...Let’s move from March 2015 and the removal of the American flag to April 1994 and the unfurling of a new national flag. This was the banner of the Republic of South Africa, which combined, unaesthetically, the black, green, and yellow of the flag of the terrorist African National Congress with the red, white, and blue of the former flag, and of the Dutch and British flags.
Two things were immediately predictable:
1. The hatred of the left would now be directed exclusively at Israel.
2. South Africa would eventually revert to the continent’s mean. The question was whether it would take one generation or two before it became another corrupt, violent, and repressive African state.
As for point one, as anyone who was a student in the late ‘60s through the ‘70s knows first-hand, the Left is all about anger. Chanting the chants at demonstrations, shouting obscenities at the police, saluting with the clenched fist — it was all hugely exhilarating. Arriving at Berkeley in 1972, I was gratified to discover it was still not too late to throw rocks at the cops. I’d transferred from Reed, where I had always worn to the barricades the best-selling t-shirt in the college’s bookstore: it featured the Reed seal, a griffin rampant, with “Communism, Atheism, Free Love” around the circumference. Apparently, there wasn’t enough room for “Drugs.” In the bad old days, anger was one of them, a stimulant and intoxicant at one and the same time.
In Ayers’s memoir Fugitive Days, writes Jack Cashill,
“…rage” rules. Ayers tells of how his “rage got started” and how it evolved into an “uncontrollable rage — a fierce frenzy of fire and lava.” In fact, both Ayers and Obama speak of rage the way Eskimos do of snow — in so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify it, as Obama does when he speaks of “impressive rage,” “suppressed rage,” or “coil of rage.”
Like the fury of the abusive husband, the rage of the left moves from target to target. And so with the demise of white rule in South Africa, Israel inevitably became “the apartheid state.”
As for the second assumption, economically, Johannesburg is not yet Detroit. This is hardly surprising: South Africa’s gold, platinum, and diamond mines are the largest in the world. The country owns about half of the world’s gold reserves, and De Beers sells at least 60% of the world’s diamonds. South Africa has a GDP of nearly $600 billion, according to government numbers. But the unemployment rate hovers around 25%, in reality probably closer to 40%, and strikes are frequent and violent. And while undoubtedly more blacks are better off economically since 1994, income distribution is more badly skewed than under the old Afrikaner government.