Sam Vimes
Over the past few weeks I’ve been bemused by the irrational and ever so slightly over-the-top glorification of marvel’s Black Panther movie as being somehow emblematic of a real-life black power movement, of speaking truth to power, and all sorts of bizarre leftist meta-narratives about race, history, colonisation, slavery, you name it and the media has embraced it.
A great example follows below – the fictional Wakanda serving as a woke version of #resistance in the US perhaps?
Will ‘Black Panther’ change the face of US politics?
I likely won’t see the movie, as I’m completely sick of over-hyped Hollywood dross and virtue signalling dressed up as entertainment, but even for the liberal media, the amount of kowtowing and hyperventilating that’s circulated over this “perfect black superhero movie for the 21st century” is nothing short of extraordinary.
But that’s not the story; the real narrative here is the one wherein the media is legitimately talking about the fictional nation of Wakanda in the movie as somehow being representative of what Africa could have been, if somehow the legacy of European colonisation could be erased. Naturally, to the utterly deluded mind of liberal Hollywood and the media that remora-like feeds off the verbal bollocks that they utter, this appears perfectly legitimate, given they’ve been fed a decades-long diet of such academic rigour as African American Studies and other such postmodern flim-flam. It’s almost like the history of inter-tribal violence and enslavement between warring African tribes, the centuries old Barbary slave trade and other such historical details such as black slave catchers can be neatly white-washed from history – Europeans are solely responsible for the African continent’s current sorry state.
James DeWolf Perry makes the inconvenient truth very clear here.
But now, the liberal disease is spreading to the real life issue of land confiscation in South Africa, and the shear insanity and stupidity on display on social media leaves my blood boiling.
For anyone that missed it, on 28th Feb 2018 South Africa’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to confiscate land owned by white South African farmers without compensation. This is the culmination of years of threats by the ANC-led government of the country, including what many claim to be a campaign of intimidation and violence against white land owners in the country under the guise of criminal enterprise, to ‘reclaim’ the land from the previously dispossessed.
Despite the lessons to be learned from South Africa’s neighbour to the north, Zimbabwe, and the disastrous policies of violent land grabs and expulsion of white farmers from their land in that country that began in the early 2000’s under dictator Robert Mugabe, the South African government appears hell bent on learning nothing. Hyperinflation and the decimation of the currency, food shortages, murder, the displacement of tens of thousands of black Zimbabweans from the very land that they had occupied quite happily for several generations, leading to mass starvation, and illegal immigration of desperate citizens to South Africa and other neighbours – these were the legacy of Mugabe’s insane land grab. I would hazard a guess as to suggest that modern Zimbabwe is about as far from the fictional Wakanda as any country could possibly be.
South Africa’s politicians have clearly opted to follow a similar policy of national economic suicide, notwithstanding the fact that the supposed villains of the story, the white farming community, have every right to the land they occupy given that vast areas of the country were completely uninhabited by any bantu tribes at the time the land was settled.
But don’t let a good Marxist fiction and a recreation of history get in the way of a good political narrative and an appeal to victimhood – it’s been far too easy for Western media to portray South Africa’s apartheid legacy as the rationale behind the ANC government’s continued abject failure to govern the country in a sound and sensible manner.
But it’s the ignorant fools at media sites such as this one that really got my goat, who seem oblivious to history, economics and facts, and seem to think that this move by the South African government constitutes the opportunity for a real life Wakanda, as if Zimbabwe just didn’t quite do it right the first time. This article is so typical of the leftist obsession with race and victimhood, and is the perfect epithet for our time – myopic stupidity mixed with an almost unbelievable wishful thinking, but perfectly marketed at the idiot class that laps this stuff up.
Look no further than the words of the architect of the parliamentary vote, one Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), to understand what the country is dealing with:
“If you are a farmer and you have lost ownership of the land to the state, then the portion of the farm you are using to produce whatever you are producing should continue uninterrupted. [But] idling parts of the farm … should be reallocated to someone else who will use it for production.”
Let’s be honest, how much of this land will end up being used for beneficial farming by the sort of black South Africans that the EFF claim to represent, those living in abject poverty? Yes, exactly 0% – the only beneficiaries will be party cadres who will use the land to promote their own financial interests.
Looking at this from afar, there’s a proper civil strife brewing now in a country that in 1994 was heralded as the beacon of African democracy and hope. What a difference 24 years makes – but hey at least SJW’s in America that bloviate about the real Wakanda can now claim that at last, with white farmers to be forcibly removed from the land, South Africa can finally shine like the beacon of light it should be. Good luck with that – it worked out so well for the Zimbabweans.