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:
The reason this happened is that the Indochina was the original Rhodesia: a colonial conflict in which the Americans and communists worked hand in hand to destroy colonial, Christian society and spread communism
That lens is the only one that makes the war make sense
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First, we dragged the French along and let them waste their strength, political capital, and blood while providing just enough aid to keep them from losing but not enough to win
Then, when Dien Bien Phu came, we yanked it all away so that they lost in a humiliating defeat and their colonial project, and related war effort in Algeria, took an irrecoverable black eye
The French Empire was finished, and the communist bayonet, aided by our lack of commitment and domestic French leftist agitation, killed it
With that French defeat came the partition, and with it the crowding of the capitalists and Catholics into South Vietnam, with Diem as their leader
We backed Diem in a way that only made him unpopular, and once Diem leaned into pro-Catholic policies, something that would have separated the South from the North and given it a continued reason for resistance, the CIA murdered him and replaced him with a succession of awful and ever more incompetent puppets
Lee Kuan Yew notes in From Third World to First that this was a terrible idea
The central reason the American Revolution proved successful in creating a free and prosperous nation is that the Founders, many of them Virginia and New York gentry, embraced rather than rejected hierarchy
This separated, in practice, our Revolution from the horrors of the egalitarian French Revolution, and is what led to America’s subsequent success as France floundered, though both used similar language about rights and liberty
Continued below 👇
This often gets forgotten because 1) they rejected creating a British-style peerage after the war (though they did create the Society of the Cincinnati), and 2) the war is now framed not as a dispute over local sovereignty but rather as a rejection of British culture
That’s an incorrect interpretation of what happened
The central fact is that American culture remained resolutely English in the decades after the war, however much some radicals hated England
This is obvious even in superficial respects.
The White House is a Palladian country house. 4/5 of our first presidents were country gentlemen who ran plantations as their cousins across the ocean ran estates. They are with silver, constructed country manors, hunted the fox on horseback, drank port by the gallon, and otherwise followed the culture traditions of their English ancestors
Similarly, the Scots-Irish, though significantly more hostile to Britain, retained the traditions of their Borderer ancestors, particularly surrounding local leadership by the major men of quality
Every study of the economic contributions of immigrants has shown that only some East Asians - namely the Japanese - and those of European descent in any way contribute to the public coffers on a net basis. The other groups drain them in a huge way
This same general thing bears out in America: the net fiscal impact of those "undocumented folk" is severely negative...
A rat done bit my sister Nell // with whitey on the moon
If anything symbolizes the noxious race communism strangling our civilization, it's this song, Whitey on the Moon, a paean to the stultifying Stone Age spirit of the global favela
A short 🧵👇
(video by @kunley_drukpa)
The long and short of it is that we face a time for choosing.
Will we embrace what is represented now by SpaceX and Apollo — greatness, aesthetic beauty, and feats of technological brilliance and daring beyond anything seen before?
Or will we embrace the global favela — the spirit, smell, and aesthetic of the steaming, putrid air of a decaying village in Dahomey?
There are a great many people that identify with Whitey on the Moon
They claim to want no leaps forward until everyone is pampered by the nanny state, living in luxury because someone else paid their doctor's bill, as the song's sullen artist indicates
But what they really want is a dragging of all of us into a global favela. They hate any form of achievement, because it reminds them there is nothing they could ever achieve
They, like the glowering savage in the picture below, want to crush anything excellent, beautiful, or marvelous merely because it is so; it reminds them that their ancestors never invented the wheel, and barely escaped the Stone Age
What separated Rhodesia from the rest of the West?
One key matter: it focused on excellence in an age when all others transitioned to ruthless egalitarianism
As Ian Smith put it in the clip below, “We simply have a standard”
That standard is what made the West great
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This is, I think, really the key differentiating factor and is what makes it so interesting to me
In an era when America was in the throes of Civil Rights egalitarianism, tearing down everything to make communist-connected rebels happy, and England was at war with its heritage, taxing those who embodied that heritage out of existence while confiscating their houses, Rhodesia chose the other path
That other path was the one that really matters: it was simply having standards
Their elections are the best example of this. Those weren't racial, but rather required those who were to vote in national elections first prove to the country that they could be stewards, shown through their being stewards in their own lives
Hence the property qualification: requiring the equivalent of $60k in 2024 USD in Rhodesian property, they largely succeeded in screening out those who were irresponsible.
Below, Elon argues DOGE is fighting the bureaucracy, and thus might restore Democracy in America
He's right to call bureaucracy the enemy of the people, but wrong to say it's the enemy of democracy
The two go hand in hand, as the West's 20th century decline shows
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First, what Elon told Rogan was partially correct, but mostly incorrect
He said, “The reality is that our elected officials have very little power relative to the bureaucracy until DOGE. DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy—it's the first threat to the bureaucracy. Normally, the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they're not, that the revolution might actually succeed, that we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy.”
In some ways, that is obviously correct. DOGE is indeed at war with the bureaucracy, as shown by the firings, the court cases, the budget freezes, and so on
Elon, and thus DOGE, recognize that the federal bureaucracy is not only overly expensive, but has been spending and regulating in a way that makes it hard to do anything in America, particularly anything worth doing. Business is burdened by taxes and constrained by onerous regulations. Hiring is difficult, and firing an incompetent employee of a "protected" race is nearly impossible. Innovation is stifled by aging bureaucrats. The Deep State has been weaponized against conservatives, and most bureaucrats go along with it because they just want their pensions.
So, DOGE is indeed at war with the bureaucracy, is winning some battles, and the bureaucracy is clearly the enemy of the American people
But he is wrong in saying that the bureaucracy is the enemy of democracy, by which he means modern mass democracy, or a near-universal adult franchise, which hereafter I'll just call democracy
That is wildly off, and proof of that comes from America and Britain throughout the 20th century