http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eKZdHo-95OI/TQIq12KOJTI/AAAAAAAAACA/YvuXwJs7c8I/s1600/charlize-theron.jpg

I tried to Google it and the first few results had it reversed. Nothing escapes the zombie hordes in the end…

Apartheid was trying to physically remove blacks and whites, which was the right thing to do. It didn’t die after centuries like Sparta, it was murdered in decades by white people thousands of miles away.

I get the appeal of being fatalistic and trying to think it was destined to fail anyway, but we’ll never know now.

Rule #1: The House always wins….

The Spartans provide another example. They viewed the Helots as members of a separate and inferior ethnic group. The Spartans effectively kept the Helots subjugated for a long time but eventually Sparta faltered and their remaining descendants were absorbed into the far more numerous Helot masses.

The arrangement where you rule over a bunch of your own downwardly mobile cousins is far more stable in the long term, at least in terms of genetic continuity. The elite might well get circulated, but the people as a whole continues to exist going forward, since the new elite comes from the same ethnic group as the old one.

It may not be a hard and fast rule, but when thinking about a system, it is probably best to assume that sooner or later the under-man is going to have his day, if only because the ruling elites grow decadent and weak-willed. Apartheid was premised on the idea that the blacks could be kept down indefinitely.

One thing that strikes me is that Hayekian attention to tacit knowledge completely evaporates among libertarians at such moments, and the crudest ideological broad-strokes are taken as adequately representative. I stayed in SA for a few weeks in the 1980s, long enough to get a sense of the place, and the most remarkable take-away was the general civility. Of course there were tensions and dysfunctions, but millions of people engaged in multi-millions of ordinary interchanges across racial lines every day, with enough tolerance for the social order to keep it working. People generally got on with each other OK, criminals excepted, and blacks were not slow to recognize criminal scum when it was sticking sharpened bicycle spokes into spinal columns. There were an incredible number of functioning work-arounds, so that formal laws did not determine fine-grained social reality. Whatever the problems with Apartheid (and I think they were very real), it is simply absurd to conceive them as something verging upon an absolute evil, legitimating any action whatsoever in opposition.

On the most crucial metric — feet-voting — it has to be noted that a vast tide of Black-African opportunity seekers poured into the place. (“What do you think of Alex[andria, a black township on the edge of Johannesburg]?” one of these migrants asked me proudly. Before I had a chance to answer, he had already described it as “The best city in the world.” — OK, that’s at least partially insane, but it reflected something I picked up on numerous other occasions.

Pretty funny how, on a site dedicated to classical liberalism, criticizing the legacy of a person best known for a populistic form of racial agitation, being put into jail for attempting to violently overthrow the government, implementing ‘socialist’ government policies to rectify perceived ethnic inequities, results in one getting directed to stormfront. Because supposedly your views would find a more agreeable audience there.