As we stand at the edge of complete economic, political, and social disaster as a nation, I can't help but wonder what the end of the United States will look like. Will it look like Weimar Germany, with its hyperinflation and street battles between socialists (Yes, the Nazis were socialists) and communists ? Will it look like Greece, a bankrupted social democracy with absolutely no chance of ever righting the ship ? Will it look like the mindless mass murders that were the hallmarks of the French and Russian Revoulutions ?
An argument can be made for each of the examples I've listed above. With the Federal Reserve printing money like there's no tomorrow, the hyperinflation and resulting chaos of the Weimar Republic is certainly possible. With 100 trillion dollars in unpaid liabilities due to entitlements, the United States certainly has a chance to become Greece. With the constant attacks on Christianity and Judaism by the Anti-God Left, a French Revolution of sorts on American soil is certainly possible, and as Occupy Wall Street showed in its own incompetent way, a violent Russian Revolution of sorts on American soil may be in our not-so-distant future.
Or could we become post-apartheid South Africa, a relatively wealthy and modern country heading to utter collapse due to racial violence, an out of control leftist government, and a non-existent immigration policy ?
Before we get started, let me make something crystal clear. The fall of apartheid in South Africa was one of mankind's better moments. Apartheid was an inhuman, vile system. As Ayn Rand pointed out in the Virtue of Selfishness:
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"Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination."
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Apartheid wasn't a creation of the Right. Like every other social illness of the 19th and 20th centuries, apartheid was a creation of the Left, much like segregation in the South.
As economist Thomas Hazlett wrote:
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"The now-defunct apartheid system of South Africa presented a fascinating instance of interest-group competition for political advantage. In light of the extreme human rights abuses stemming from apartheid, it is remarkable that so little attention has been paid to the economic foundations of that torturous social structure. The conventional view is that apartheid was devised by affluent whites to suppress poor blacks. In fact, the system sprang from class warfare and was largely the creation of white workers struggling against both the black majority and white capitalists. Apartheid was born in the political victory of radical white trade unions over both of their rivals. In short, this cruelly oppressive economic system was socialism with a racist face."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Apartheid.html#abouttheauthor
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Apartheid was basically begun as a system to protect white union miners from competition from black non-union miners in the early 1900's. (In other words, they have the same racist origin that American unions do.) The National Party government that made apartheid the law of the land in South Africa was a socialist/fascist dictatorship. (One of the battle cries of the apartheid regime was "Workers of the world unite, fight for a white South Africa!")
After the election of Nelson Mandela (a murdering terrorist, despite the accolades heaped on him by the arrogant and lazy mainstream media) in 1994, South Africa began to crumble. Mandela's party, the African National Congress (ANC), wasn't at all interested in building the "Rainbow Nation" that he so waxed so eloquently about. It was a Marxist party hell bent on retribution and the redistribution of wealth. (As an aside note, the National Party ended up merging with the ANC. Collectivists of a feather always flock together.)
A new South African Constitution was written by the ANC which institutionalized the redistribution of wealth. Instead of being a charter of negative liberties like the US Constitution, the South African Constitution was intended to be a license for the South African government to do whatever it wanted for the "common good" of the people. For example, from the South African Constitution:
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"A person or community whose tenure of land is legally insecure as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to tenure which is legally secure or to comparable redress.
A person or community dispossessed of property after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to restitution of that property or to equitable redress.
No provision of this section may impede the state from taking legislative and other measures to achieve land, water and related reform, in order to redress the results of past racial discrimination, provided that any departure from the provisions of this section is in accordance with the provisions of section 36(1)."
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In other words, property rights and indiviual sovereignty in South Africa no longer exist. For example, an Afrikaner farmer could lose his farm because of the actions of a long-dead distant relative. This is a complete and total breakdown of the civil society, since it punishes individuals for for the actions of others.
The South African Constitution also guarantees that all citizens have the right to housing, food, water, public assistance, a healthy environment, and secondary education, much like the old Soviet Constitution. Also like the old Soviet Constitution, it didn't produce a utopia, it produced a dystopia. No government is capable of such largesse, it simply isn't humanly possible, even for a relatively wealthy nation like South Africa. Anger and hatred became (particularly against the white Afrikaner minority) became the norm. Roving gangs of black youths, egged on by ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, began terrorizing Afrikaner farmers. The reasoning behind it was this: If the government can't give it to us fast enough, we'll simply take it because we have a right to it. (Since 1994, over 3000 Afrikaner farmers have been murdered. The vast majority of these crimes aren't investigated by police and are chalked up to common criminals.)
Poverty grew quickly in the post apatheid years. Shanty towns around major cities grew at an alarming rate. Crime quickly became uncontrollable. (The city of Johannesberg, once a major center of culture in the world, quickly became the world's most crime ridden city.) Unemployment became rampant. The immigration system broke down as refugees from Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe flooded over South Africa's borders, adding not only more crime and additional burden to the welfare state, but more racial tensions.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is where America is heading. Like South Africa, we have a government that is more interested in the redistribution of wealth than anything else. The attacks on ranchers in southern Arizona by rampaging illegal aliens from Mexico may not have had tragic the loss of life that the attacks on Afrikaner farms have had, but the situations are certainly similiar. We've already seen how the entitlement mentality creates poverty and crime in our inner cities. How much longer until that situation devolves into shanty towns ? As far as racial tensions go, they're only going to get worse with leftist race baiters like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson running amok.
It may have took us a hundred years to get here, but we don't have a hundred years to fix it, that's for sure.
God help us all.
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