"No one cares about the ANC's black victims."

Because the reason this goes without outrage or condemnation in the west is who is behind it. (If SA was led by a non-apartheid white PM or party there would be headlines for immediate action).

It took years to denounce Mugabe, whom the ANC supports, until his violence against white farmers and black opposition became too obvious to ignore.

Still there were no calls to overthrow or invade Zimbabwe.

Indeed whenever the British were critical of Mugabe the topic of white colonialism was always brought up.

Why the US were so silent on the issue is less clear. Probably they didn't want to upset the South African government.

...what I find so vile about this. Why did you not title your post: "No one cares about the ANC's black victims"?

I see that's from the Telegraph, Marcus, I thought it was a little too well written to be from you.

I will restate what I have written elsewhere: I know very well how badly things have gone in South Africa post Mandela. It breaks my damn heart to see this happen. I was there when Mandela was released, and when he was voted in. I have never seen people so happy as that day. I have not forgotten the feeling of hope and optimism, that this was the country that would finally get it right in Africa, and could serve as a model for advancement across the continent. So it breaks my heart to read of things like this, or to hear Julius Malema say that things were better off under Apartheid. It's beyond a tragedy; it is a crime both against the present and against the future.

But mark me well Marcus. I am only willing to open this conversation with people who are absolutely, 100% clear about the evil of Apartheid. I am not going to waste a nanosecond on my time with anyone whom I even suspect of euphemism or equivocation on that point.

Which brings me to another point about internationalism and solidarity. There is in South African an immense new middle class that believed in the promise, and has been betrayed, that is both black and white. Now you know, and I know, what happened: the ANC compromised too much with tribalism and racialism at the end, especially after Mandela retired, and acted with criminal irresponsibility towards the problems of crime and violence. They are not happy with their ruling class, not at all, but they are not going to spend any time with people who are just looking to gloat or to score points. They are looking for honest, rational answers.

Enter Objectivism within the larger operation of capitalist internationalism.

We have those answers. We can point out that their great tragedy is that they were exposed to the same evil ideas that we've been battling, but without the intellectual immune system that the Enlightenment installed in Europe and North America. To a certain extent the proponents of these vile ideas could be corralled into sociology departments and prevented from causing any serious damage. The peoples of Africa had no such protection; what the damn intellectuals over here did was the equivalent of turning loose tuberculosis bacteria in a hospital for AIDS victims.

Again, this is our great opportunity. But it requires an absolute commitment to treating others by reason, and as rational beings.

What's with the Left's conspiracy of silence over the ANC's brutal massacre of miners in Marikana?

"Try to imagine the global outrage there would be if the police in Russia or China shot and killed 34 protesting workers. And just think what follow-up fury there would be if those Russian or Chinese police then arrested and charged the workers lucky enough to survive the massacre with the "murder" of their fallen colleagues. World leaders would hold press conferences so that they could be photographed solemnly shaking their heads and wringing their hands over those nasty, brutal coppers Over There. Amnesty International would have to hire extra part-time staff just to have enough people to stand sad-faced outside every Tube station in London while wearing t-shirts saying "Protect the Human" and pressing anti-Chinese or anti-Russian leaflets into commuters' hands. Twitter would go mental.

And yet when those very things happened in South Africa – first the massacre of 34 miners in Marikana on 16 August and then the arrest of the surviving miners under a warped Orwellian law of the apartheid era that allows protesters to be charged with murder if the state kills some of their fellow protesters – the global gatekeepers of the human-rights culture said barely a peep. Amnesty issued a feeble statement, hidden deep on its website, about the need for the ANC government to institute a judge-led inquiry into the killings. And then it went straight back to organising global protests to have Pussy Riot released from their Russian jail. For Amnesty, three pretty white chicks are clearly way more important than 34 dead black blokes. Britain’s liberal broadsheets, which pride themselves on speaking truth to power, have published no thundering editorials about the massacre, no stinging critiques of the ANC. World leaders are also keeping schtum...

There is more to the conspiracy of silence over the Marikana massacre than double standards. More fundamentally, the reason there is so little fuss about this act of state terror is because Western leaders and their mates in the human-rights lobby have for years been telling us that the New South Africa, this post-apartheid “Rainbow Nation”, is a living, breathing testament to the values of truth and reconciliation over political conflict and to the elevation of respect for cultural diversity and human rights to the top of the political agenda. And this massacre shoots that myth down. It calls into question, in the most dramatic fashion imaginable, the idea that the New South Africa is a paragon of virtue and an advert for making “human rights” the lingua franca of political life, as the ANC has done. What this massacre reveals is that, in truth, there are deep, seriously unresolved divisions in South Africa, continuing and profound inequality, and rising disgruntlement among black workers with their black rulers. None of that reality is palatable to politicians or commentators over here, who for years have been behaving as if every problem in South Africa was fixed by the reforms that followed the unbanning of the ANC and the institutionalisation of a new kind of PC politics, and so they just ignore it – they ignore the massacre and they ignore the divisions that nurtured it.

Anti-apartheid activists used to argue that those Western leaders who refused to condemn the apartheid regime were cynically putting their own interests, usually their business interests in South Africa, above the lives and liberties of black South Africans. By the same token, the human-rights lobby that has said barely a word about the Marikana massacre is now promoting its own interests, its investment of so much overblown hope and hype in the New South Africa, above the lives and liberties of the black workers who live there."

Casting aside any sudden inexplicable urges I may now have for a good reach-around, this post does pique my interest.

Looking at the success of the global blandification process, of course a significant component of that is the framing of the discussion.

I see, for example the apparently intelligent & liberal minded argue the minutae of reducing the minimum wage.
Of course, the argument is not where the minimum wage ought to sit, but whether the elected can have any mandate to interfere.

Within the paradigm of success - of entrepreneurship - indeed of evolution - there ought be that striving for the new, the unknown, and the fantastic.

Things that we cannot even anticipate.

The left's only innovations have been eloquent destruction, dedicated deceit and scaled mediocrity.

Hugo's post is fascinating; exciting, and I await the next installment, sir.

...abstract poet.

Forget the poor hamster. Perhaps a gerbil. Fancy a nasty felch?

Perhaps you'd like to meet my neighbours: Jeff and Mary Felcher. They own a drinking straw company.

It's like putting hamsters on a wheel to make them run.

My morality, the morality of hamsters, is contained in a single axiom: wheels turn—and in a single choice: to run.

...competition has enormous practical benefits. It results from people being left alone to do their thing.

The point of my article was to counter the pragmatic reliance upon competition as the be all and end all of economic policy.

Compete! they cry. As if that was all that was needed. No, leave people alone to live their lives and in many circumstances they will need to compete to succeed. That's quite natural, but actually, as statist policy, it's quite nasty. It's like putting hamsters on a wheel to make them run.

I must disagree with your statement "Competition is never welcome..."

There are significant and easy ways to extrapolate from, for example, Michael Porters 5 Force Analysis framework, to positions of benefit to be gained from competition.

As one simple example, I am slowly building a national business which will be significantly lifted by the presence of anticipated competition - it will raise the profile of this emerging industry component.

And I think it was T. Jefferson who made a comment about a natural aristocracy among men, consisting of virtues and talents. At least I hope it was Jefferson, because I like the claim.

And it fits Atlas Shrugged, and it fits here.

" In fact, the majority of her heroes are of working-class background and the few that aren't - Francisco, Dagny - do not care for the snobbery of their confreres."

...but she made the point that the middle class was the future, not the already wealthy.

It's obvious what she meant: in a capitalist society, the hierarchy is never fixed.

Yeah, Hugo, this is big, and should be even bigger: consider that some of the strikers -- not informal strikers, but those actually scouted by Francisco and recruited personally by Galt -- included terminal managers at Taggart Transcontinental; these are characters who remain unnamed throughout the entire novel. Terminal managers aren't businessmen per se, but they make decisions, and businessmen depend on the quality of those decisions.

Then you get Mr. Mowen. And the National Alliance of Railroads. And Boyle. And James Taggart.

You're right about the lack of snobbery, too. Francisco and Dagny knew about the finer things in life. They knew the Wayne-Falkland Hotel and private rail cars and silk ties and the music of Richard Halley. They also, apparently, regarded slag heaps and engine-wiping and message traffic management as, hey, important.

Good for them.

And you're also right: no one hears this message.

I could not agree more Craig, and go rather further: I keep pointing out to bloody fools that the majority of businessmen in Rand's novels are crooks, and that's not limited to those taking the government dime (vide The Fountainhead). In fact, the majority of her heroes are of working-class background and the few that aren't - Francisco, Dagny - do not care for the snobbery of their confreres. Yet you can say this as often as you like, but no one ever seems to hear you say it.

"In fact, any careful read shows that many of the most prominent businessmen portrayed in Atlas Shrugged are not heroic at all, and that quite a few are crony-capitalist creeps..."

She hit the ball out of the park when she portrayed the difference between those seeking a state advantage and those who just wanted to be left alone.

Then you get Rand saying that she was only interested in politics so that she wouldn't have to be interested in politics. That is, unless you defend the ideal, you'll never get to operate under the ideal. That was the whole premise of Atlas Shrugged.

Businessmen are not heroes, they don't want to be, they are just living their lives as they see fit. I spoke to this in my piece about competition:

Article

"Competition is never welcome. Not by a company. Not by an individual. Nobody wants it. It rocks the boat, begets very undesirable recalculations of profit forecasts, and generally stinks up the neighborhood. It gives one jitters about finally making it onto the Ferrari F80 waiting list, booking a seat on Virgin Galactic or buying that little island in the West Indies.

If I'm at a party and see a pretty girl across the room, I want every other man in the room to drop dead. I don't need or want the competition. If I have a nice little business, making a tidy little income, the last thing I want to see is a competitor open shop across the street. Let him open it somewhere else. Anywhere else, but not near me. And I'm sure that when the sprinters line up at the Olympic games they hope every other runner gets a very nasty cramp at the very moment the starter's pistol fires. The schmaltz about being "pushed to excel" by your peers or the "bittersweet resonance of defeat" after being beaten by "the better man" is crapola."

I get the sense that more than a few are surprised when successful business people don't seem to be particularly *nice* people. In fact, businessmen are just the same as any cross-section of society. You get the nice ones, you get the shitheads.

In the end, society is led by intellectuals (who are often shitheads themselves), and they provide the ammo for businessmen as well as non-businessmen.

I like it that you've mentioned Orren Boyle so prominently, in a year when Ayn Rand is getting a lot of attention. All of my life one of the accusations against Rand has been that for her, businessmen can do no wrong, all businessmen are heroes, blah blah fucking blah.

In fact, any careful read shows that many of the most prominent businessmen portrayed in Atlas Shrugged are not heroic at all, and that quite a few are crony-capitalist creeps (I know that Yaron Brook dislikes this term, but tough shit: it's popular and it fits, and people get what it means), James Taggart and Orren Boyle being the worst. There's a bigger lesson here, one I fear will be thrashed upon us in the years to come, but this is a damn good place to start.

Thanks for all the kind words. I would like in particular to speak to Craig's point about capitalism being international by its very nature. I entirely agree with that, but I do not think that the moral nature of that has been grasped. In the same way that defending the rights of those in other countries helps protect our own, it is in the best interest of others to defend, say, the United States from attacks by Islamic fascism. If it is okay, I should like to quote myself, writing about the death of Osama bin Laden:

Though 9/11 is the best known of his stunts, it is also rarely completely understood. It is commonly thought that the attacks on September 11th 2001 killed about three thousand people. Not so. The economic fall-out killed about forty thousand children by malnutrition and disease and immiserated ten million human individuals. All of this did not prevent a gang of preposterous fops from charging into print with “Why I Would Have Blown Up The Twin Towers” essays.

http://www.varsity.co.uk/opini...

This point should be made over and over again to certain half-wits. Next time you hear someone making euphemisms about why 'America is so hated', call them on this. This also highlights a certain false dichotomy; I remember that the Hitch once said he disagreed that the attack was an attack on America, it was an attack on civilization itself. That's looking for a distinction where none exists. As the above indicates, not just in a symbolic sense, but in actual, demonstrable consequences, an attack on America is an attack on us all. And that is just as true in terms of attacks on it from domestic enemies. Had the racist psychos of the Confederacy succeeded in their war to shatter the union, does anyone here think that the continent could have been saved in the last century?

I also think that this is where the process of instituting capitalism has to begin. Who are the worst enemies against reason and Capitalism? Okay, the intellectuals, but who after that? I would say the Orren Boyle style businessmen, the products of interventionism. They are destructive twice over: first they violate individual rights on grand scale, and second they poison the case for the only correction of those wrongs by their very existence.

However, ultimately they are the most vulnerable. Dismantle the system of conjoined foreign aid and trade barriers and you benefit a huge number of people, and only need to fight a comparatively small number of people. I'd be happy if I could see that alone happen by the end of my life, but it would also be a very important first step. The difference - well, one of them, one of the most important differences - is that our revolution does not require sacrifice; each achieved step comes with real, provable, cash-on-hand benefits. When you can point to the success that will follow in the wake of the fall of the grotesque system of international exploitation, it will be much more easy to take the next steps.

It's also a matter of justice. Who is the worse offender: some schlub who is on welfare because he's had his mind mutilated by the state school, and all the rungs at his level are knocked out on a ladder, and so takes a couple of thousands a year? Or the Boyle who takes tens and hundreds of millions for the privilege of denying us better products and impoverishing entire nations?

With that moral understanding comes a realization of the power we can wield, as producers and consumers. I don't know if you've looked it up, but Ezra Levant's excellent Ethical Oil argues that a switch to Canadian oil makes a grand way to put the screws on Saudi Arabia and other states like it.

...Moore was too vanilla for the Labour Party which went way left with Clark.

Oh, they hate Douglas. An apostate.

...and there was a thing where he only got two years and then some other guy took over.

Nice job if you can get it...

...not surprisingly Mike Moore was president at one stage.

Anyone read his book about it? I looked at it in NZ about ten years ago, but it cost about $40 just for the paperback. I don't like Mike Moore that much.

...great stuff.

Take the WTO. This organisation is not about free trade, it's about *managed* trade. You know, you get these conspiracists who go on about one world government, but orgs like WTO are the actual threat.

The WTO is this big global bureaucracy that fucks around with regular folks who want to sell stuff to each other. And the lefties despise it because they think it's an arm of capitalism. When in fact, it's a superset of everything they desire.

...holding back the third world you didn't mention.

Those Christian development agencies and charities. 100 years ago in the west it was common to have 10 children and all but one or two to make it to adulthood. As soon as medicine and material wealth improved survival improved and birth rates decreased.

In the third world they supply food and medicine to decrease the child mortality rate but positively discourage any contraception. This has many terrible philosophical consequences, but by far the worse consequence is how this increases and reinforces poverty. Christians are themselves responsible for the poverty trap they claim to fight in the name of altruism.

Well, Hugo, I think we agree on this one hundred percent, but only if we are, you and I, very careful to define our terms.

First of all, I'd argue that capitalism is international by its very nature. (I still love the irony that the SR-71 was built largely of titanium, which was, largely, imported from the USSR. We imported chromium from them as well, all the while they claimed that they would bury us. Who's buried now?) People trade and they want to trade. Nazi Germany tried a form of autarky...didn't work out. Communist North Korea has been "trying" it for decades...not working out so well there, either.

You want international? Just one example, but one that touches people every day. In the US, you rarely hear the term "seasonal fruit" any more. When I was a kid, seedless oranges came from California, and orange juice was made from Florida oranges. Period. And you didn't see either one every day of the year. Now? Oranges come from Florida, California, Brazil, the Middle East, all year long. Was this the result of a government program? No, it was the result of improvements in highway construction, trucking, shipping, refrigeration (in trucks, railroad cars, ships, and storage facilities), in funds transfers, in accounting and record-keeping. Another personal note: I grew up in Florida and the first time I was in the Middle East and saw Israeli and Lebanese oranges I thought, "Wow, this is what these poor bastards call oranges?" No longer. Their oranges are sold here in America and I'm happy to buy them and eat them.

So I'm with you on capitalist internationalism -- but I'm saying that we already have bases on which to build.

Second, destruction of trade barriers and foreign aid? Sure, but I'd say all trade barriers: no government-imposed limits or boycotts or "help" of any kind. No subsidized grain sales to the Soviet Union, no bans on trade with Cuba, no restrictions on Mexican trucks entering the US or on the importation of Japanese automobiles or Vietnamese shrimp. No bailouts of foreign private or commercial or central banks. No "contributions" to the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. No "stability" efforts. None. Just dump it, all of it, and let capitalism and self-interest (and, where necessary, liability law) sort things out.

Yes, the people in the developing world were lied to and sold out -- by Kissinger (as you and Rand both mention) and by others. But so were the rest of us. Meanwhile, capitalist profit-mongers have almost destroyed the term "seasonal fruit."