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There is no doubt that the police would've been massacred if they had not open fire.

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There's no excuse for the violence but the terms and conditions of the platinum mine workers must be appalling to inflame that level of anger.

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I can only see this leading to more violence.

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Ilana Mercer’s, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, is an unusual book. Yet it is unusual in the best sense of the word.

At once autobiographical and political; philosophical, historical, and practical; controversial and commonsensical, Cannibal succeeds in weaving into a seamless whole a number of distinct modes of thought. This is no mean feat. In fact, its author richly deserves to be congratulated for scoring an achievement of the highest order, for in the hands of less adept thinkers, this ensemble of voices would have fast degenerated into a cacophony. By the grace of Mercer’s pen, in stark contrast, it is transformed into a symphony.

Mercer (pictured, above left) is a former resident of South Africa. She is intimately familiar with her native homeland in both its apartheid and post-apartheid manifestations. Yet it is precisely because she is all too well aware of the latter that she is now one of its legions of emigrants.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from Mercer’s flight from South Africa to the United States that she had ever been any sort of champion of apartheid. Not only has she never supported these (or, for that matter, any) racially themed institutional arrangements, Mercer’s “paleo-libertarianism” — a variant of the classical liberal tradition — positively precludes any such sympathy with its affirmation of “natural rights” and “individualism.”

Still, as she amply demonstrates, not by any social indicia does “the New South Africa” even remotely approximate the old as far as quality of life is concerned. As is more often than not the case with revolutionary-like innovations, the transition from apartheid to democracy has visited upon the residents of South Africa — especially its white residents, the Afrikaners — all manner of evil that, ostensibly, were not envisioned by those legions of Westerners for whom “change” of any kind can only be a benefit.

For one, far from being “the post-racial” idyll to which the abolition of apartheid was supposed to lead, the ruling African National Congress — the party of Nelson Mandella — is no less “committed” to “restructuring society around race” than were the “apartheid-era Afrikaners.” There is, however, one critical difference between South Africa under majority black rule and South Africa under minority white rule: “More people,” Mercer informs us, “are murdered in one week under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.”

Mercer’s verdict upon the New South Africa is blunt and decisive: “Dubbed the ‘Rainbow Nation,’ for its multiculturalism, South Africa is now, more than before, a ‘Rambo Nation’.” (Emphasis added.)

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