Reviews of New Books
By
Roger Bate, Karina Rollins, Blake Hurst
WHERE RACE RULES, LIBERTY FLEES
By Roger Bate
South Africa: The First Man, The Last Nation
By R. W. Johnson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288 pages, $31.80
South Africa holds a far more prominent place in international politics than its economic size would suggest it should. Its influence comes from its extraordinary past. South Africa's transition from the dark days of apartheid to democracy was far more peaceful than the doomsayers' predictions. Perhaps because of this moral capital, South Africa is now considered a leading developing country. It may have to compete with Nigeria for economic importance, but politically, it is certainly the most important country in Africa.
R. W. Johnson is a South African historian and political commentator, one-time Oxford don, and former director of South Africa's Helen Suzman Foundation, which has supported the country's transition to democracy. His writings, including this book, defend the classical liberal principles of the rule of law, protection of property rights, limited government, and the free market. These unwavering principles make the book unpopular among South Africa's current ruling elite, who, like many other rulers, are attracted to statism and big government.
This book charts the country's history from the first hominids to today. Johnson details the earliest inhabitants of South Africa, the Khoisan hunter gatherers, later devastated by the Bantu peoples who moved down from the North, as well as the Europeans who settled in the Cape. Johnson describes in some detail the many wars and skirmishes between the various Bantu tribes. He also gives a clear history of the battles between the early European rivals in South Africa, and between the Europeans and the Bantu tribes. His analysis of the run-up to the Anglo-Boer War and the politics thereafter provides an important backdrop to the beginnings of apartheid, and the current political make-up of South Africa.
Johnson offers an excellent summary and analysis of the apartheid policies and their roots in colonial rule. After the 1948 election, war leader Jan Smut's United Party was defeated by the Nationalist Party. The "Nats" then began their task of ruthlessly separating the races and controlling the economy to advance Afrikaner interests.
Apartheid was a massive exercise in social engineering, classifying people by race, and establishing economic pecking orders on the basis of those classifications. Millions of people were dispossessed and crowded into nominally independent homeland states where they had little means of supporting themselves and led wretched lives. The Nationalist government interfered in almost every facet of the economy, maliciously frustrating any black business ambition at enormous cost to the whole economy.
Any political dissent was brutally repressed. By the 1960s, the African National Congress, under the auspices of Nelson Mandela, was turning to violent protest. Early violence targeted only government infrastructure such as electricity pylons. But these acts were sufficient to cause the ANC leadership to be either convicted of treason or driven into exile.
Johnson carefully analyzes the growing influence of the South African Communist Party on the ANC, and builds the case (the crux of his book) that because of the taste for state power that it developed as a result, the current ANC government has much in common with the Nationalist Party that dictated for more than 40 years. In its many years in exile opposing the apartheid regime, the ANC supposedly fought for freedom and democracy. Yet it brutally abused its own people in its military camps, and was anything but democratic in its decision making.
As Johnson puts it, "the tragedy of South Africa is that it has always been ruled-and still is-by elites which seek their own group self-interest rather than that of the country as a whole." As the ANC government implements its own affirmative action program, known as Black Economic Empowerment, it repeats the race-linked policies of apartheid, only this time in favor of a black ruling elite, and on a far grander scale. Although economic freedom increased in South Africa after the first democratic election in 1994 (largely because race-based economic laws were repealed), state interference is returning. With absurdly restrictive labor and wage laws and attempts to institute price controls, the ruling elite is showing itself to be as illiberal as its whites-only predecessors.
One of South Africa's most pressing problems is its HIV/AIDS pandemic, which features prominently in Johnson's book. He describes bluntly how the ANC has denied the problem and refused to provide medicine to those in need. In 2002, President Mbeki's government let 45,000 babies die when a simple antiretroviral treatment at birth could have saved them. "The sheer callousness of the new ANC elite toward the black unemployed and those suffering from AIDS is difficult to describe, surpassing the cruelties of Verwoerd and the old Nat elite," writes Johnson. The government has also supported Zimbabwe's dictator Robert Mugabe and turned a blind eye to his ongoing human rights abuses.
Johnson's book is a clear, well-written, and important review of South Africa's turbulent and troubled history. But it makes for depressing reading for those who wish for real freedom in that country.
Roger Bate is a resident fellow at AEI.
OUR ENEMY'S FRIENDS
By Karina Rollins
Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left
By David Horowitz
Regnery, 296 pages, $27.95
In cities across the country, Americans protesting George W. Bush's foreign policy carry posters of the President with a Hitler mustache, and signs that read "We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers." A keynote speaker at the massive "peace" demonstration at the Capitol in 2003 proclaims that "I don't want to talk about bin Laden. I want to talk about a terrorist called George Washington. I want to talk about a terrorist called Rudy Giuliani. The real terrorists have always been the United Snakes of America."
Columbia University professor Nicholas De Genova preaches that "peace anticipates...a world where the U.S. would have no place." After 9/11, The Nation's Katha Pollit tells her teenage daughter, who wanted to fly an American flag out the window: "Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." Best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, in reaction to her daughter's kindergarten class being asked to wear red, white, and blue the next day, wrote: "I fear the sound of saber-rattling, dread that not just my taxes but even my children are being dragged to the cause of death in the wake of death." Not wanting their daughter to feel like an outcast, Kingsolver and her husband agreed to dress her in the flag colors. "And because," Kingsolver adds, "my wise husband put a hand on my arm and said, 'You can't let hateful people steal the flag from us.' He didn't mean terrorists, he meant Americans."
Ever since 9/11, left-wing academics, writers, celebrities, politicians, and journalists have been falling over themselves to denounce as imperialistic and racist everything from flag-waving to the ousting of Saddam Hussein. Last year, speakers at the national Democratic convention warned of the danger that threatens this country-George W. Bush. Holly-wood fabricator Michael Moore is believed and respected by millions.
The worst sin, in the eyes of such people, is to call the enemy by name: radical Islam. Since the day 3,000 people were slaughtered, the day human beings jumped, fully conscious, from the 92nd floors of the burning towers, the primary concern of the Left has decidedly not been how to prevent the next attack, but how to protect allegedly endangered civil rights and stem the fictitious wave of "Islamophobia" sweeping the country.
Americans. Millions of them. Demonstrating in solidarity with everyone from the Butcher of Baghdad to Palestinian suicide bombers to Muslim clerics who call openly for our deaths in American mosques.
How can this be? Truth-seeking rabble-rouser David Horowitz provides the answer in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. The Left doesn't judge each U.S. action on its own merits-U.S. action is by definition an evil to be fought. It doesn't matter what happened on 9/11. It doesn't matter that al-Qaeda brazenly trumpets its desire to annihilate America. It doesn't matter how many people die in the next attack. America's imperialism, its racism, its sexism, its homophobia, its greed and malice are the cause of it all. Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers thus become the victims, and their victims become the perpetrators of injustice.
Millions of Americans truly despise their own country, because, as Horowitz explains, they live by the revolutionary utopian credo-the belief in a perfect future. Horowitz points out that what communists and fascists have in common with today's radicals is that they are "motivated by an abstraction--the vision of a future that did not exist and had never existed, but which they were convinced they could create." This fantasy "is the reason radicals discount the freedoms and benefits of the actual world they live in. Their eyes are fixed on the revolutionary future that is perfect and just. Measured by this impossible standard, any actually existing society--including America's--is easily found deficient, even to the point where it is worthy of destruction."
Ironically, such a worldview leads leftists to embrace precisely the kind of moral absolutism they abhor in George W. Bush's war on terror: "The radical's universe is thus Manhichaean, a world divided between good and evil"; as a result, a radical's "political actions are always a choice between an oppressive present and the progressive future."
Unholy Alliance can be tedious--too many pages rehashing every instance of the Iraq war and its build-up; too much detail and effort spent defending America over past conflicts like the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s-but every American would do well to read this book and remind himself how many of his countrymen are rooting for the bad guys. There are indeed two Americas-one that wants to defend itself, and one that longs for its destruction. "America can win a war against any external foe," believes Horowitz. "It is the war at home that will ultimately decide America's fate."
Karina Rollins is a TAE senior editor.
FARMING...WHO NEEDS IT?
By Blake Hurst
Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization
By Richard Manning
North Point Press, 240 pages, $24
Richard Manning is not happy with the way that the human race has evolved. In Against the Grain, he places the fall of man at about the time the first human grew the first crop--since then, everything bad that has happened to the human race can be blamed on what he calls "catastrophic agriculture."
Yep, hunter-gathering is the way to go. After all, agriculture is responsible for poverty, and genocide, and malnutrition, and obesity, and, who knows, the common cold. Manning does lay many diseases directly at the foot of agriculture. It's a heavy burden we farmers bear, as we go about decreasing mental and physical alertness and ruining the egalitarianism that was mankind's good fortune before potato, corn, and wheat plants made their cursed appearance on the world stage.
Manning is nothing if not doggedly single-minded. If he were a football coach, he'd call a time-out in the final minute of a football game with a 50-point lead in order to score again. From smallpox epidemics, to wars, to the Soviet-engineered famine in the Ukraine, to the millions starved by China's "Great Leap Forward" it is all agriculture's fault. In case you missed the point, he'll add to the litany in the next breath, and on every page of this book until you've sworn off eating anything but roots and nuts and whatever squirrels you can trap in your front yard, just in the hope that he'll stop.
Manning is also a fervent critic of processed food, with special scorn reserved for corn, the most prevalent crop on American farms. Corn as cattle feed is bad, but corn as sweetener is worst of all. He drags up decade-old legal problems of a major corn processor as his main evidence in his indictment of the unsuspecting maize plant. He credits the inspiration for this book to his observation that Americans are fat, and that obesity is caused by corn, or at least the foodstuffs made from corn. While our society would probably have survived without the 64-ounce Big Gulp soda, it's doubtful that corn deserves the designation of public enemy number one.
Manning blames the decline of farming in the Northeast to irrigation projects in the West. His proof? The number of irrigated acres in the West is roughly equivalent to the abandoned farmland in the Northeast. In Manning's world, coincidence is causation. Some irrigation projects didn't make economic sense. But the thin forest soils of the Northeast began to be abandoned for the fertile prairies of the Midwest long before the Bureau of Reclamation began its mission of making the desert bloom like a rose.
Manning criticizes agricultural technology because farmers purchase it from other people, which is somehow bad. My grandfather used to save open-pollinated corn from his corn crop to plant the next year. I buy hybrid seed corn from a "large multinational corporation." This year, my hybrid corn out-yielded my grandfather's best yield by a factor of five. Manning would deny farmers the benefits of the division of labor and specialization. In the Third World, activists fight productivity-raising and life-saving technology simply because users of that technology must participate in the world economy.
Throughout the book the elephant in the corner of the room is the simple fact that we can't feed the world's population without sophisticated farming methods. Manning wants farmers to farm organically, sell locally, and preferably kibitz with each of our customers. These kinds of farms are all growing, providing new opportunities for farmers, and are a boon to upper income people bored with fast food and suspicious of technology. But they can hardly feed the world's population at a price the world can afford. Manning alludes to his preferred solution with the rather frightening sentence: "If the human endeavor takes as its primary reason for being the feeding of however many people issue from senseless acts of reproduction, then the human endeavor is pointless." Better to never have been born than to eat highly processed foods and wash them down with high-fructose flavored colas. As for this result of a senseless act of reproduction, I'm going for a beer and pizza.
Blake Hurst is a Missouri farmer. He and his wife have raised their three children on the fruits of modern agriculture.
