I found the novel on university-level courses in the early 2000s. IIRC the academic reading of the text was that Lucy being raped was the symbolic payback for all the years of apartheid.
I think academics also liked the book as Lurie despises his students for their ignorance. Many of them identified with this.
I was going to mention that Coetzee left for Australia long ago but Steve knows of course.
When I researched archives of female civil rights activists, even I was surprised to see the number of accounts by both black and white women who were sexually brutalized by movement brothers and pressured to take no action to stop it. Someone who was there told me that even the NOW didn't want to include violence against women in their charter, unless the victim was a minority and the assailant a white man. The nascent anti-rape movement combed the nation to find such cases as their first and most important ones.
I’m guessing there is enough nuance in the writing of both the movie and the book that your average liberal literary type can pick which characters to hate and which characters to admire. Does anyone know if this book has been removed from the canon since the great awokening? A new generation is now in control.
I'd like to think he will tell the actual story in SA of Blacks killing Blacks in large nimbers and leaving whites alone (presumanly to kill themselves).
Certainly Murder is a SA crisis and the similarities with USA are huge.
Eventually there will be blow back as Settler colonialism rolls out after decades or even centuries of life being treated as of little value. Guns & hatred. Eventually in SA and Israel, the settler colonialists will end up being treated as cheaply as they treated their vicitims.
It doesn't matter what he said. He would have tried to cover up, and Trump already knows tons of people who try to cover up from his own experience.
Every single country is based on settler colonialism. Just a few weeks ago, Razib Khan had genetic papers on his substack about how male Finns threw out the German males out of Finland and took their women like 3k years ago. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/germans-are-from-finland-finns-are Do Finns have regrets about their ancient history? Pleeese! In t's also very funny how Germans reclassified the Finns as close to the racial Aryan ideal in WW2.
All this harping about settler colonialism is just about how much one hates Jews and one hates competent whites in general. It's simply a competence and intelligence envy, of a systemically murderous type.
I am just saying that settler colonialism is a fact of life in every single nation on this planet.
In contrast there to, Nazis were specifically the committers of holocaust, one of the few instances of REAL genocide in the 20th century. In contrast to imagined genocides, like the South Africa accusing Israel of at ICC, recently. The other real ones were the Turkish genocide of Armenians and Hutus genocide of Tutsis in Ruanda.
In all 3 cases, the perpetrators were murdering citizens of their own state too - in case of Nazis, Nazis murdering German Jews.
Oh, and look and see - South Africans aligned with governing parties murdering Afrikaners with South African citizenship. But that is 21st century, though.
a fact of life that pretty much every country is ashamed of, even the US, but not apparently Israel.
You really are disgusting - thankfully the British jews that march in protest on behalf of Gaza are decent human beings.
As you probably know, this is all existential for Israel, as America fades away Israel disappears faster. You really need to sort out the practicalities of mass murder in the 21st non-American century, not just the moralities..
m droy, perhaps you get to pick and choose, as far as who should be ashamed of what? And regarding collective responsibility, maybe you get to decide how distant is distant enough, in allowing the replacement of Shame with A Shrug?
It would not surprise me if 'your people' are among those entitled to shrug, if they prefer that to confession and atonement.
I don't know the kind of people you are used to discussing things with, but here in the new Sailer comments section we have a higher standard for intellectual discourse. You will convince no one here by declaring him 'disgusting'. If anything it will engender a sense of pride in your target.
You consider it obvious that the thing you call "Settler Colonialism" is bad because, you know, Nazis and stuff? Then the game becomes arguing about which situations are and are not 'settler colonialism'.
Perhaps for those of us who didn't major in gender studies engineering you could define the term rigorously and make a clear argument about why it is always and everywhere bad? Maybe set some parameters for how long ago it had to happen for us to forget about reversing it?
Settler colonialism is clear enough but since you want to find ways of ducking reality how about:
Bombing civilians, shooting children, starvation, blocking aid, lining up and executing health workers, none of this by accident but with deliberate intention.
But thankyou - it is hard to show just how flat out determined some people are to fail to see flat out evil, because in normal life this stubbornness seems rare. You are a great example of what it is to be a non-humane human.
I would add a few communist genocides to the list -- Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot at the very least. Stalin gets two: the murder of Russians and the Holodomor. And so on.
Communists never committed genocides IIRC. They did commit very extensive massacres - into ten millions of peoples. But that doesn't classify as a genocide. It is obviously very, very evil too. However, to be a genocide it must be an intentional elimination of a specific people in racial terms*. Not just ethnic massacres but eliminations. For example Turks annihilating Armenians or Germans annihilating Jews. It also exludes killing innocent bystanders in the course of conducting a war against military targets. That's the reason real genocide is rare.
*OK, maybe in religious terms too, if there is a 1:1 correspondence. LIke being a Jew is fulfilling the religious, ie halachic criteria of being a Jew. So one may not be ALWAYS picked up on a DNA test, if one was originally German, Russian or Japanese and then did an orthodox Giur.
I know the categorical definitions -- holomodor might wiggle in. But I am averse to the consequences of elevating one type of massacre over another. The end result trickles down to hate crime laws within a society, which are grossly politicized in application and are a perversion of equality before the law. I fully endorse recognizing various hatreds in the media and outside the courtroom, but all crimes must be treated equally before the law, regardless of the defendant's racial/sexual/ethnic/etc. intent and the victim/offender dyad. Much healthier for society. And as we see in Britain, these laws inevitably elevate "hate speech" over far more serious and real crimes. Don't think it can't happen here too -- it does already.
Lots of secular Jews - both Lurie and Ettinger are Jewish names - suffer from self-hate. If one isn't a Torah believer, one just sucks it up from the antisemitic convictions of non-Jews around one-self.
I thought Rhamaposa’s demeanor was better than Trump’s in their Oval Office show.
Trump is a ten-minute expert on South Africa. Elon has obviously been his tutor.
I met Rhamaposa briefly 20 years ago after he had left his union leadership position and swiftly became an uber-wealthy businessman mining the country’s efforts to promote ownership of businesses by blacks. Always dapper…suits by Brioni. The suit size is much larger today. Like Trump, he must really like cheeseburgers. He owned the McDonald’s franchise in RSA for many years.
Steve Sailer's review has given me an idea to write a novel called "Anacostia Story." It would mostly be about black-on-black murder and white flight. The Westover area of Anacostia, which still had a few leftist whites a couple of decades ago, could figure prominently for the white victims. And perhaps a white volunteer save-the-world dreamer schoolteacher for some middle-school off East Capitol Street.
I suspect Coetzee has been cancelled. Not with a bang, but a slow puncture. Pity. He’s an excellent writer. And Australia. What to say. It’s cracked up around him. At this point, I suppose, all he wishes is a gentle passage into the good night.
Yep, Australia! Like from the fire into the frying pan, lol - OK, I am exaggerating, but only a bit. Just read the new novel by Garry Disher "Desolation Hill", and he is now like totally in, into land acknowledgements, wokeness, covid hysteria, cancel culture - you name it!
That last line really is the mindset of the Western liberal. While walking the dog this morning with my wife, who has gotten quite right wing over the years, she commented that all the rhetoric about equity and equality is really about positioning minorities to be in a position to oppress the people they consider their historic oppressors. There's no real desire for equal standing or treatment, it's all just a beard for a desire for domination.
Now, that's been obvious to me and people that follow Steve and other commentators for a long time. But I do think it's really starting to seep into the political consciousness of an increasing share of the public that are not typically highly engaged on cultural or political issues. It's clear that the left in the US is really dedicated to the idea that whites deserve political, economic, and cultural disenfranchisement, and at the first opportunity when back in power they will resume their efforts on this quite openly.
This really is an intolerable possible outcome for myself and millions of Americans, and frankly I think many would accept very "out of the box" methods to prevent it rather than play by the supposed rules and be good losers about it at this point. Obviously a massive iceberg floating out there is our fiscal situation and the impact that will eventually have on society, but I do think this issue is another one that could easily become something very messy.
The other side kept enjoying little victories and pushing harder. New generations found the low hanging fruit of anti-discrimination gone and they had to get creative. Up until now it's been a boiling frog situation, but I think that analogy has reached its limits. The average white person is starting to say "Owwwwww, this water is hot!"
There was some real discrimination - like if you were black you were not permitted to do qualified professional work in the white part of town. But that is long, long gone by the 1960s. From then on, it was only built on court cases relying on demonstration of disparate impact. Which, as we all know, does not really have to reflect racial discrimination.
Thank goodness for YouTube putting the UK's transition front and center, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. The historical record is important. An event can be disembodied and whitewashed, a video history cannot.
> the portrayal of the fate of South Africa’s white farmers in Disgrace is too starkly horrifying for even journalists to ignore.
That hasn't aged well. The journalists who wrote the NYT's account of the Rhamaposa/Trump meeting weren't starkly horrified in the slightest by the alleged accounts of so-called violence and purported ethnic cleansing. "Kill the Boer" is harmless poetic license in a pop tune, not policy.
Arguments for apartheid: prevention and mitigation of savagery, mass murder, mass rape; maintenance of first world infrastructure; improving conditions in Bantustans; competent administration of important resource rich country with significant white human capital; preservation of a distinct people whose arrival predates the bantu
Arguments against: all the above offends the progressive sensibilities of the western media and intelligentsia
Literally all debates about colonialism are like this
Even in totally white societies like England, there were continuous fights over franchise from the 17th till 20th century. Personally, I think Prussians solved it best (fairest) with their tripartite chamber rule based on the amount of taxes paid.
It would have worked better than apartheid in South Africa too.
You are right. If the white South Africans had been smart, they would have realized that ten percent of the population couldn't rule South Africa forever. South Africa should have become a two-house parliament. The lower house would have been democratically elected by percentage of party vote. The upper chamber would have given the whites 40 % of the seats to act on a brake on the idiocy of the democratic lower house.
Yep - and of course it would have run counter to the one man one vote mantra.
Actually, the Prussian system was different - votes had different weights but went into the same one chamber partliament. Obviously, lefties hated the system.
In South Africa, the system would have privileged some rich Blacks and strongly diminished the voting power of poor Afrikaner whites - of which there was quite a lot.
> Literally all debates about colonialism are like this <
Colonialism wasn't a winner. People simply do not like being ruled over by other people--people who are not "us"--even if the governance may be superior. People also do not like being a loser caste in their own nation. People like to feel they are ruling themselves and feel better about themselves if they are not "at the bottom" racially-ethnically even if they personally aren't elite but just ordinary working people getting by.
And all this is not only human, but thoroughly reasonable.
And there is a very simply solution to it that everyone decent understands: nationalism. Separate peoples, separate nations.
I haven't seen the film but absolutely loved the book, terrible as the story is.
I found the novel on university-level courses in the early 2000s. IIRC the academic reading of the text was that Lucy being raped was the symbolic payback for all the years of apartheid.
I think academics also liked the book as Lurie despises his students for their ignorance. Many of them identified with this.
I was going to mention that Coetzee left for Australia long ago but Steve knows of course.
When I researched archives of female civil rights activists, even I was surprised to see the number of accounts by both black and white women who were sexually brutalized by movement brothers and pressured to take no action to stop it. Someone who was there told me that even the NOW didn't want to include violence against women in their charter, unless the victim was a minority and the assailant a white man. The nascent anti-rape movement combed the nation to find such cases as their first and most important ones.
I’m guessing there is enough nuance in the writing of both the movie and the book that your average liberal literary type can pick which characters to hate and which characters to admire. Does anyone know if this book has been removed from the canon since the great awokening? A new generation is now in control.
tremendous piece Steve
we are all Eugene Terreblanche now I guess
I watched the trailer just now. I'm surprised Steve didn't mention that Icon Films, Mel Gibson's company, was the producer.
Good review. I’m glad now I never read the novel, even when it was huge. Not that it sounds bad, but it sounds too harrowing.
I'm wondering what Ramaposa said to Trump.
I'd like to think he will tell the actual story in SA of Blacks killing Blacks in large nimbers and leaving whites alone (presumanly to kill themselves).
Certainly Murder is a SA crisis and the similarities with USA are huge.
Eventually there will be blow back as Settler colonialism rolls out after decades or even centuries of life being treated as of little value. Guns & hatred. Eventually in SA and Israel, the settler colonialists will end up being treated as cheaply as they treated their vicitims.
But it is not happening yet.
It will, and will the US follow?
It doesn't matter what he said. He would have tried to cover up, and Trump already knows tons of people who try to cover up from his own experience.
Every single country is based on settler colonialism. Just a few weeks ago, Razib Khan had genetic papers on his substack about how male Finns threw out the German males out of Finland and took their women like 3k years ago. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/germans-are-from-finland-finns-are Do Finns have regrets about their ancient history? Pleeese! In t's also very funny how Germans reclassified the Finns as close to the racial Aryan ideal in WW2.
All this harping about settler colonialism is just about how much one hates Jews and one hates competent whites in general. It's simply a competence and intelligence envy, of a systemically murderous type.
Are you excusing settler colonialism? Or do you think civilised nations grew out of that?
Nazism, lebensraum was settler colonialism - was that ok?
You are placing yourself in a very very ugly corner.
You certainly disgust me.
I am just saying that settler colonialism is a fact of life in every single nation on this planet.
In contrast there to, Nazis were specifically the committers of holocaust, one of the few instances of REAL genocide in the 20th century. In contrast to imagined genocides, like the South Africa accusing Israel of at ICC, recently. The other real ones were the Turkish genocide of Armenians and Hutus genocide of Tutsis in Ruanda.
In all 3 cases, the perpetrators were murdering citizens of their own state too - in case of Nazis, Nazis murdering German Jews.
Oh, and look and see - South Africans aligned with governing parties murdering Afrikaners with South African citizenship. But that is 21st century, though.
a fact of life that pretty much every country is ashamed of, even the US, but not apparently Israel.
You really are disgusting - thankfully the British jews that march in protest on behalf of Gaza are decent human beings.
As you probably know, this is all existential for Israel, as America fades away Israel disappears faster. You really need to sort out the practicalities of mass murder in the 21st non-American century, not just the moralities..
m droy, perhaps you get to pick and choose, as far as who should be ashamed of what? And regarding collective responsibility, maybe you get to decide how distant is distant enough, in allowing the replacement of Shame with A Shrug?
It would not surprise me if 'your people' are among those entitled to shrug, if they prefer that to confession and atonement.
My People? They are just british, non faith of of many faiths.
I don't get this post?
Is this a "you can't criticise genocide but i am not directly defending it" post?
Fxxx me - you really don't care do you.
I don't know the kind of people you are used to discussing things with, but here in the new Sailer comments section we have a higher standard for intellectual discourse. You will convince no one here by declaring him 'disgusting'. If anything it will engender a sense of pride in your target.
You consider it obvious that the thing you call "Settler Colonialism" is bad because, you know, Nazis and stuff? Then the game becomes arguing about which situations are and are not 'settler colonialism'.
Perhaps for those of us who didn't major in gender studies engineering you could define the term rigorously and make a clear argument about why it is always and everywhere bad? Maybe set some parameters for how long ago it had to happen for us to forget about reversing it?
'Disgusting' and 'horrible' are Yaron Brook's favorite two pejoratives. Also Trump's.
Settler colonialism is clear enough but since you want to find ways of ducking reality how about:
Bombing civilians, shooting children, starvation, blocking aid, lining up and executing health workers, none of this by accident but with deliberate intention.
But thankyou - it is hard to show just how flat out determined some people are to fail to see flat out evil, because in normal life this stubbornness seems rare. You are a great example of what it is to be a non-humane human.
I would add a few communist genocides to the list -- Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot at the very least. Stalin gets two: the murder of Russians and the Holodomor. And so on.
Communists never committed genocides IIRC. They did commit very extensive massacres - into ten millions of peoples. But that doesn't classify as a genocide. It is obviously very, very evil too. However, to be a genocide it must be an intentional elimination of a specific people in racial terms*. Not just ethnic massacres but eliminations. For example Turks annihilating Armenians or Germans annihilating Jews. It also exludes killing innocent bystanders in the course of conducting a war against military targets. That's the reason real genocide is rare.
*OK, maybe in religious terms too, if there is a 1:1 correspondence. LIke being a Jew is fulfilling the religious, ie halachic criteria of being a Jew. So one may not be ALWAYS picked up on a DNA test, if one was originally German, Russian or Japanese and then did an orthodox Giur.
I know the categorical definitions -- holomodor might wiggle in. But I am averse to the consequences of elevating one type of massacre over another. The end result trickles down to hate crime laws within a society, which are grossly politicized in application and are a perversion of equality before the law. I fully endorse recognizing various hatreds in the media and outside the courtroom, but all crimes must be treated equally before the law, regardless of the defendant's racial/sexual/ethnic/etc. intent and the victim/offender dyad. Much healthier for society. And as we see in Britain, these laws inevitably elevate "hate speech" over far more serious and real crimes. Don't think it can't happen here too -- it does already.
I haven't seen the film or read the novel but the Luries have the modern leftist self-hatred mindset. So does the novelist.
Lots of secular Jews - both Lurie and Ettinger are Jewish names - suffer from self-hate. If one isn't a Torah believer, one just sucks it up from the antisemitic convictions of non-Jews around one-self.
OK, Ettinger is maybe an exception.
I thought Rhamaposa’s demeanor was better than Trump’s in their Oval Office show.
Trump is a ten-minute expert on South Africa. Elon has obviously been his tutor.
I met Rhamaposa briefly 20 years ago after he had left his union leadership position and swiftly became an uber-wealthy businessman mining the country’s efforts to promote ownership of businesses by blacks. Always dapper…suits by Brioni. The suit size is much larger today. Like Trump, he must really like cheeseburgers. He owned the McDonald’s franchise in RSA for many years.
In light of the online discourse that has been ongoing for decades, the events at the White House yesterday were truly extraordinary.
With hindsight, one can't understand the Jews that stayed put in Ukraine in 1941 instead of fleeing East. But that is it, hindsight is 20/20.
Steve Sailer's review has given me an idea to write a novel called "Anacostia Story." It would mostly be about black-on-black murder and white flight. The Westover area of Anacostia, which still had a few leftist whites a couple of decades ago, could figure prominently for the white victims. And perhaps a white volunteer save-the-world dreamer schoolteacher for some middle-school off East Capitol Street.
I suspect Coetzee has been cancelled. Not with a bang, but a slow puncture. Pity. He’s an excellent writer. And Australia. What to say. It’s cracked up around him. At this point, I suppose, all he wishes is a gentle passage into the good night.
Yep, Australia! Like from the fire into the frying pan, lol - OK, I am exaggerating, but only a bit. Just read the new novel by Garry Disher "Desolation Hill", and he is now like totally in, into land acknowledgements, wokeness, covid hysteria, cancel culture - you name it!
He used to be a reasonable guy...
That last line really is the mindset of the Western liberal. While walking the dog this morning with my wife, who has gotten quite right wing over the years, she commented that all the rhetoric about equity and equality is really about positioning minorities to be in a position to oppress the people they consider their historic oppressors. There's no real desire for equal standing or treatment, it's all just a beard for a desire for domination.
Now, that's been obvious to me and people that follow Steve and other commentators for a long time. But I do think it's really starting to seep into the political consciousness of an increasing share of the public that are not typically highly engaged on cultural or political issues. It's clear that the left in the US is really dedicated to the idea that whites deserve political, economic, and cultural disenfranchisement, and at the first opportunity when back in power they will resume their efforts on this quite openly.
This really is an intolerable possible outcome for myself and millions of Americans, and frankly I think many would accept very "out of the box" methods to prevent it rather than play by the supposed rules and be good losers about it at this point. Obviously a massive iceberg floating out there is our fiscal situation and the impact that will eventually have on society, but I do think this issue is another one that could easily become something very messy.
The other side kept enjoying little victories and pushing harder. New generations found the low hanging fruit of anti-discrimination gone and they had to get creative. Up until now it's been a boiling frog situation, but I think that analogy has reached its limits. The average white person is starting to say "Owwwwww, this water is hot!"
There was some real discrimination - like if you were black you were not permitted to do qualified professional work in the white part of town. But that is long, long gone by the 1960s. From then on, it was only built on court cases relying on demonstration of disparate impact. Which, as we all know, does not really have to reflect racial discrimination.
Thank goodness for YouTube putting the UK's transition front and center, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. The historical record is important. An event can be disembodied and whitewashed, a video history cannot.
> the portrayal of the fate of South Africa’s white farmers in Disgrace is too starkly horrifying for even journalists to ignore.
That hasn't aged well. The journalists who wrote the NYT's account of the Rhamaposa/Trump meeting weren't starkly horrified in the slightest by the alleged accounts of so-called violence and purported ethnic cleansing. "Kill the Boer" is harmless poetic license in a pop tune, not policy.
Arguments for apartheid: prevention and mitigation of savagery, mass murder, mass rape; maintenance of first world infrastructure; improving conditions in Bantustans; competent administration of important resource rich country with significant white human capital; preservation of a distinct people whose arrival predates the bantu
Arguments against: all the above offends the progressive sensibilities of the western media and intelligentsia
Literally all debates about colonialism are like this
Even in totally white societies like England, there were continuous fights over franchise from the 17th till 20th century. Personally, I think Prussians solved it best (fairest) with their tripartite chamber rule based on the amount of taxes paid.
It would have worked better than apartheid in South Africa too.
You are right. If the white South Africans had been smart, they would have realized that ten percent of the population couldn't rule South Africa forever. South Africa should have become a two-house parliament. The lower house would have been democratically elected by percentage of party vote. The upper chamber would have given the whites 40 % of the seats to act on a brake on the idiocy of the democratic lower house.
Yep - and of course it would have run counter to the one man one vote mantra.
Actually, the Prussian system was different - votes had different weights but went into the same one chamber partliament. Obviously, lefties hated the system.
In South Africa, the system would have privileged some rich Blacks and strongly diminished the voting power of poor Afrikaner whites - of which there was quite a lot.
> Literally all debates about colonialism are like this <
Colonialism wasn't a winner. People simply do not like being ruled over by other people--people who are not "us"--even if the governance may be superior. People also do not like being a loser caste in their own nation. People like to feel they are ruling themselves and feel better about themselves if they are not "at the bottom" racially-ethnically even if they personally aren't elite but just ordinary working people getting by.
And all this is not only human, but thoroughly reasonable.
And there is a very simply solution to it that everyone decent understands: nationalism. Separate peoples, separate nations.
I'm well aware of this. People prefer active malice from their own over benign neglect from others