For those who don't know, Orania, which @Volkstaat10 does a great job publicizing, is the Boer community in rural South Africa that serves as a safe haven of sorts from the anarcho-tyranny that is the rest of South Africa
It has its own currency, maintains Christian values, and generally serves as a way for those who wish to exit from South African society. It's much the same impulse, though even more total, as the one behind @extradeadjcb's @exit_org
Key to Orania's success is that it is Afrikaner only. The Afrikaners there do their own work, no maker how dirty, without relying on external, African labor. This is what their symbol, the child rolling up his sleeve, symbolizes
The result of that hard work is that they keep their community rooted in Afrikaner tradition and free of the caustic policies of South Africa generally, namely its DEI insanity. They can grow, work, and prosper without having affirmative action mongers shoving race communism down their throats
The other side of the Afrikaner-only coin is that the media frequently and unfairly slanders it as a "whites only" town in which racists...well it's not clear what exactly the hand-ringers thing is going on; as is evident from the pictures, all they're doing is building a nice community
But regardless of Oranians not presenting a threat to anyone or anything but the Rainbow Nation's post-1994 founding myth, the media, and critics smear it and try to get the government to destroy it.
Orania is enshrined in the South African constitution, and so it's protected by that provision, but given the anarcho-tyranny present in the country, is probably more protected by South Africa's declining state capacity
What ties the whole project together is that Orania can, and does, defend itself.
For one, it screens residents, and even visitors, requiring guests to get permission to visit before they can do so
More than that, it can actually defend itself: the citizens of it are armed, trained, and united by the ties that bind to such an extent that they will defend it. Like America in its frontier days, the Oranians have guns, carry them, and are ready to use them
The result is a peaceful society with nearly non-existent crime, much unlike everywhere else in South Africa
The smears of Orania are absurd. For example, a black writer visited, was treated with kindness and hospitality, and then smeared the little community, titling his article, "Inside creepy ‘Whites Only’ village Orania with own currency and bizarre rules… including asking permission for visitors"
He the article, he described the rules as "bizarre," saying, "The village has its own national holidays, its own currency - the Ora - and day-to-day life is governed by a bizarre set of rules including having to seek permission from the town council before receiving visitors."
Hilariously, he also tried to dispute the fact that Orania has nearly no crime, claiming that merely the statistics were different. "Local estate agent Marli says business is booming as more Afrikans - who make up just four per cent of the population - seek a safe haven from South Africa's crime-ridden townships. The country has one of the highest crime rates in the world, with a murder rate of 45 per 100,000, compared to 6.3 in the US and under one per cent in the UK. While the community has often claimed to be "crime-free", this has been widely disputed by others who claim statistics are not gathered there as they would be in the rest of the country," he said.
Whatever his ramblings, the truth is that Orania is quite safe and secure, which contrasts mightily with the horrific crime situation in South Africa generally
Particularly, it's very different from the general situation the Boer farmers find themselves in, where marauding gangs of thugs attack them near-daily and commit murder nearly weekly
Those farms are isolated, and so prey to attackers. Orania, by contrast, is a united community that, because of its numbers and shared purpose, is willing and able to defend itself
As "liberal democracy" rots every country that adopts it, turning everywhere into Zimbabwe, the world is a much, much more dangerous place. Further, it's getting more so every day
The solution to that, if one cares about his family, is to get them to a haven like Orania. Doing so might present temporary pain and annoyance, but is much better than seeing a child drowned in boiling water (a farm murder atrocity, as @k9_reaper noted in a recent podcast interview), out of an unwillingness to make a move
Further, in a time when all world differences and culture are being subsumed by globohomo's Marvel movies and rap "music," Orania has preserved historic Afriker culture
That is worth a great deal, and is something that more ought try to do
If you found this post interesting, check out my recent thread on crime in South Africa:
One thing I've seen missed in the housing price debate on here the past few days is that, while the price of houses has increased tremendously in fiat cost over recent years, valued in real money it has held steady for a century
A short thread with some helpful charts🧵👇
This is one helpful chart given its length, and though it only goes to 2020, it does show the general trend:
Priced in real money, housing has actually gotten less expensive, even despite increasing in square footage, quality, and complexity; think of all the extra plumbing and electrical wiring now compared to 1900!
Meanwhile the fiat value has rocketed upward tremendously, as anything exponential eventually does
The only time housing increased priced in gold is when gold was artificially suppressed as inflation raged from the mid-1930s to gold being legal to purchase again in the 70s
Here's a chart going up to today and back to 1889: the house price hasn't changed much, priced in gold, and really the only spike was when gold's price was artificially suppressed
This lack of generational continuity is a big problem, as it leads to denying responsibility to the past and future which, in turn, creates a leftist political bent
Americans must learn to be Grosvenors rather than Vanderbilts; America's post-Depression history shows why🧵👇
The lack of "Old Money" in America is often celebrated, as it seems to signal total meritocracy, democracy as applied to the social scene, etc.
But that's not really true. America in, say, 1890 was a meritocratic time: Rockefeller, Carnegie, the Vanderbilts, etc. built and maintained vast fortunes and were able to do so because the general freedom of action allowed by the time created opportunity. They were free to unleash their genius, in other words, and so created vast fortunes
But it was also an era in which "Old Money" not just existed but dominated the social scene. A great example is Mrs. Astor's New York Four Hundred. Composed almost entirely of families of "gentlemen" in that the family money had been had for at least three generations, it ruled New York society and determined what was posh, fashionable, accessible and so on.
Those with talent, in short, were free to make their fortunes and often rose not just to business, but political prominence
Meanwhile, there was still a tradition-minded cohort that ensured old traditions, manners, customs, and so on were respected
They watched for excess - for example it was they, as represented by the Morgan dynasty, that kept banking in America long the province of gentlemen with strict moral standards (@NormanDodd_knew has done a fantastic job highlighting this)- and, as necessary and salutary integrated the "new men" into the social framework
What that accomplished was keeping society, both with a capital S and without, on the right track. Men and women dressed respectably, acted respectably in public, were inculcated in the view of service to the state (namely in the military) as a good thing, understood their duty to the different classes, and so on
Notably, it was the new men who never joined that group, men like Henry Clay Frick, who had the worst Gilded Age reputations for treating workers poorly
Nothing is perfect, of course, but America remained a stable and prosperous place, avoiding socialism and/or revolution as happened in much of Europe, and the sons of the wealthy volunteered in units like the Rough Riders and first air force (composed mainly of the Yale flying club) when war broke out
As Lee Kuan Yew put it, ending 3rd World behavior: “[We told them] stop spitting, stop littering … you can’t go around peeing everywhere as you did in the old squatter villages”
California's doing the reverse, and thus its decline🧵👇
And this has been something Singapore is serious about: they'll beat you with a cane if you litter, pee in the street, or commit some other crime of 3rd Worldism
Meanwhile they'll execute you if you traffic drugs or commit similarly anti-social crimes
They take maintaining order seriously
Why that works is obvious
Civilization, is, at a base level, destroyed by entropy. Everything that works together to create something other than a state of nature gradually decays, both as nature wears on it and those in charge gradually forget how to repair it or why it was once repaired at all
Rome's aqueducts are the classic example of this, but there are a multitude. Congolese infrastructure is probably the prime one of our times. Modern before the Belgians were forced out, now everything has fallen apart and is inoperable, with both a malice-caused refusal to maintain and an ignorance of how that maintenance is done being to blame
So, the decay over time is, over the long term, what destroys everything, from the aqueducts and mines to the civilizations they represent. That's obvious
Critical to know about the "Cold War" is that, for most of it, "we" aided and abetted communists as they committed the worst atrocities imaginable across the globe:
"We" helped enforce "equity" in its base form, at bayonet point
A few examples, and the reason why, in the 🧵👇
Right after WW2, in China, is a good place to start
There, Chiang Kai-shek could have won, could have kept China free of communism after ridding it of that plague.
Instead, as even liberal historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin notes in The Cold War's Killing Fields, Gen. Marshall aided the Red Chinese. He forced Chiang into pointless peace talks, then yanking aid, all while refusing to aid Chiang as he fought against Mao and Soviets in Manchuria. Marshall remained implacably opposed to Chiang because he was trying to defeat the communists rather than let them into the government (pg 78). Eventually, with US aid gone and the Soviets aiding Mao, China fell to communism, the "political changes" Marshall wanted. This was much like the sort of betrayal and backstabbing via peace conference later seen in Rhodesia's fight against communism
What followed were horrors of the worst sort, with tens of millions left dead as China's very fabric as an ancient civilization was ripped apart by Reds somehow even more destructive of history than the Bolsheviks. Mao, meanwhile, busied himself with molesting teenage girls
Another example is Algeria. Long a French colony in which millions of Pieds-noirs, or ethnic French who made it their home, settled, brutal murderers calling themselves rebels fought to "free" their country from just and effective French Administration
America, as could be expected, sided with the rebels, with historian Irwin Wall showing that America saw the murderous rebels as pushing an acceptable sort of decolonization revolution, and eventually France being pressured into abandoning the colony and its inhabitants because of that pressure.
So, French were forced from Algeria, the Pieds-noirs had to flee as the communist rebels with whom the "free world" sided for anti-colonial reasons inflicted horrors upon the domestic population. Eventually, the atrocities were awful enough that the Pieds-noirs fled, with the rebels essentially succeeding in effecting an ethnic cleansing of them, one Washington saw as acceptable
This is a critical point that we must remember as we work to reverse America’s South Africanization:
Framed as being for equality, civil rights, and such, there are many laws designed specifically to effect anti-white racism
It’s those laws we must destroy🧵👇
First, as to South Africa, the main issue are the “Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment,” or BEE laws
These are effectively affirmative action on steroids and compliance with them is required for any business that needs a license from or to work with the government must comply
The state measures compliance via a scoring system that tracks compliance based on how companies use racial preferences to hire black workers, promote those black workers to management positions, and hand company ownership to blacks
This leads to obscene, country destroying distortions
Not least of which, it effectively means that it is impossible to hire white workers, as at only ~7% of the population, quota-based hiring and promotion means only a few can ever be hired
This can even lead to job cuts to meet quotas: electric utility Eskom, known mainly for constant rolling blackouts, was considering firing thousands of its experienced white engineers to meet racial quotas
This is one of those common sentiments that mistakes human flourishing with access to comfort and cheap calories
Yes, grain is cheaper than ever and air conditioning is wonderful, as are antibiotics. But entirely gone are sovereignty and eudaimonia
That matters🧵👇
This is one of my pet peeves, and you see it everywhere
"If you have refrigeration/ice cream/air travel/whatever" you are "living better than X person you might want to be"
Typically kings and Rockefeller come up
What this misses is that that's far from all humans care about in terms of living well
Take the Declaration of Independence. What are the inalienable rights so necessary that they justify revolution?
"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
That roughly translates to sovereignty and eudaimonia, or the Greek concept of self-fulfillment through human flourishing, with a heavy dash of societal ordered liberty thrown in, that man from ancient time until relatively recently held to be sacrosanct and critical for a good life