President Trump weighs in on the South African land seizure plan

South Africa. AFP. 

President Donald Trump has ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompano to investigate the plan in South Africa to seize farms owned by whites. AFP.  South Africa is attempting to take farms from whites, who own 72% of the farms despite being 8% of the population. Those plans do not involve compensating the farmers for their land. South Africa rejected the claims. 

Some confiscations have already begun. RT reports that a game farm company,  Akkerland Boerdery, has been offered $1.87 million for land that they claim is worth $18.7 million. Economists fear that the confiscations could lead to an economic collapse as farmers could refuse to invest or improve land that they fear could be taken from them. The violence Trump talked about is happening though it is unclear at what rate it is happening at. Farm murders are a small fraction of South Africa's huge crime problem but appear to be racial motivated unlike most crime there. 

I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018

My Comment:
I have to say it was hard to find a good source for this story. The AFP report was bare bones and the RT one has the usual RT caveats. More mainstream media though has gone absolutely insane over this story to the point where they deny that anything bad is happening in South Africa at all. Indeed, they are too busy calling Trump a racist to even give the most basic information about what is happening. I hope to correct that a bit with this post, even though I understand the risk of commenting on such a racially charged issue.

First some context. It is very important to note that there are two major groups of white people in South Africa. There is the English speaking group that is generally in favor of this farm confiscation scheme and the Afrikaans speaking Dutch whites that are being targeted by these programs. The media is painting this as a white vs black issue when really there is an element of inter-white racism going on here as well.

It is also true that the Black people that these lands will be given to don't have much of a claim. The Dutch people that settled these farms were improving land that wasn't settled by anyone. The Xulu majority in South Africa never lived on these farms and have little claim to taking them. Leftists would argue that doesn't matter due to South Africa's recent and horrible history with Apartheid, but they often leave this critical context out of the argument.

One is immediately reminded of the example of Rhodesia. Rhodesia was a UK colony that declared independence and got called racist. They were eventually overthrown by Robert Mugabee and his ZANU rebels. The new Zimbabwe did well for awhile as Africa's breadbasket but then Mugabee brought land reform that is extremely similar to what is going to happen in South Africa.

Zimbabwe went to Africa's breadbasket into a country dependent on food aid because they took land from white farmers and gave it to black ones who didn't have the expertise or experience to run farms. That's a scheme that would fail no matter who was involved racially, you need farmers to farm and you can't replace them with people off of the street.This utterly destroyed the economy of Zimbabwe to the point where they made Venezuela's inflation problem look quaint. It was an utter disaster and it looks like history is repeating itself.

As for the claims of violence, I know that they are true, though the motivation is unclear. Very few people can argue with a straight face that white farmers haven't been killed in several horrible attacks, though a few people on Twitter are trying. Wikipedia has a decent article up about the attacks that is, for now, fairly even handed, so if you want more background that's a good place to start. Given the fact that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and has a leftist bias, it's very likely that the article will be updated in the wake of Trump's tweet to be garbage.

The real question is whether these attacks are racially motivated or just part and parcel for South Africa's incredibly bad murder and crime problem. Murder in South Africa is so bad that it is very possible that the murders are just typical of the insane violence they have there. It is also very possible that the attacks are racially motivated. Does motivation really matter though when people want to kill you and take your stuff? Either way you are dead, and it doesn't matter if it's racism, greed or simple psychotic violence. It should be noted that blacks make up about 1/3 of the people killed in these attacks, though that doesn't necessarily rule out racism as a motive.

Regardless it's very clear that both the land confiscation scheme and the response to these murders is racially motivated. South Africa is very obviously targeting one racial minority to enhance the wealth of their racial majority. And they aren't doing enough to protect these farmers from violence and murders. I would say that this situation is very close to genocide. Taking people's land without fair compensation is always a bad thing, (and I'm not a fan of doing it WITH fair compensation) but doing it based on race is, well, racism. Obviously. The fact that Apartheid happened is not an excuse to do the same thing that happened to blacks to whites.

As far as President Trump goes though, I think this probably works out for him. The media freakout is going to be hugely damaging to the Democrats and media in general. This week they have already defended the illegal immigrant who murdered Mollie Tibbetts, and now they are pretending that what by all accounts would be called a genocide if it wasn't happening to white people, isn't a thing. This is confirming something that people already believe, that the media and the Democratic party hate white people. That hurts them in the 2018 elections and will further erode trust in the media.