Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

The Ciskei libertarian experiment failed in South Africa. It was an effort to resist
the elimination of Apartheid, on the way to democratic rule in South Africa.

"Crack-Up Capitalism: How Billionaire Elon Musk's Extremism Is Shaping Trump Admin & Global Politics"

Now, while Trump and Musk are working to eliminate democracy in the
United States, Trump is going after South African democracy again:

Trump threatens to cut funding for South Africa over land policy
6 hours ago
Basillioh Rukanga in Nairobi & Khanyisile Ngcobo in Johannesburg
BBC News
[...]Last month, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law a bill that allows land seizures without compensation in certain circumstances.

Land ownership has long been a contentious issue in South Africa with most private farmland owned by white people, 30 years after the end of the racist system of apartheid.

There have been continuous calls for the government to address land reform and deal with the past injustices of racial segregation.

South Africa's president responded to Trump with a post on X ..

South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality. The South African government has not confiscated any land.

The recently adopted Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal…

— Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 (@CyrilRamaphosa) February 3, 2025

: "South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality. The South African government has not confiscated any land."

He added that the only funding South Africa received from the US was through the health initiative Pepfar, which represented "17% of South Africa's HIV/Aids programme".

The US allocated about $440m (£358m) in assistance to South Africa in 2023, according to US government data.

Elon Musk, who was born and grew up in South Africa and is now a Trump adviser, has also joined in the debate, saying the new law discriminated against white people.

"Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?" Mr Musk said to Ramaphosa in a post on X.

* South Africans' anger over land set to explode
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44278164
[...]
The Natives Land Act left the vast majority of the land under the control of the white minority and set the foundation for the forced removal of black people to poor homelands and townships in the intervening decades until the end of apartheid three decades ago.

One other South African response to Trump's meddling in another country's affairs.
NOTE: that is yet another thing Trump said he would not do:

SA-US Relations | Malema hits back at Trump

eNCA

183,318 views Feb 3, 2025 #LunchTimeUpdate #DStv403 #QuestionThinkAct
EFF leader Julius Malema has criticised United States President Donald Trump for cutting future funding to South Africa in response to his interpretation of its land reform policy. #LunchTimeUpdate #DStv403 #QuestionThinkAct
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsMT3-BraRU

Anger over these forced removals intensified the fight against white-minority rule.

In 1994, leader of the African National Congress (ANC) Nelson Mandela became the country's first democratically elected president after all South Africans were given the right to vote.

But until the recently passed law, the government was only able to buy land from its current owners under the principle of "willing seller, willing buyer", which some feel has delayed the process of land reform.

In 2017, a government report said that of the farmland that was in the hands of private individuals, 72% was white-owned. According to the 2022 census white people make up 7.3% of the population.

However, some critics have expressed fears that the new land law may have disastrous consequences like in Zimbabwe, where seizures wrecked the economy and scared away investors.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn01z1yy0jno

Will the Libertarian effort to repress non-white votes in America succeed more than it already has ..

TRUMP LOST. Vote Suppression Won. (by Greg Palast)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175714976

Will the Libertarian effort to take over the American government
on the way to the elimination of democracy in America succeed.

From the post this post sits in reply to"

[...]The Ciskei experiment: a libertarian fantasy in apartheid South Africa

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Related: [...] JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
[...]Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

That’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.

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[Insert: So there you have it, Vance is young, the tech moguls have long-term plans. NOTE: No Libertarian party has ever won an election to lead any country of the world, so one decades in the making solution of these tech oligarchs appears to be to not only eliminate elections, but also to eliminate countries. See:
[...]
Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
[...]Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.
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In the 1980s, South African libertarians set up a deregulated zone that they sold to the world as ‘Africa’s Switzerland’. It was a sham, but with its clusters of sweatshops, it was very modern – and in some ways it anticipated the world we live in today

By Quinn Slobodian
Thu 23 Mar 2023 17.00 AEDT

A standard globe shows an uneven mosaic of colours, pixelated more densely in Europe and Africa, easing out to broader stretches across Asia and North America. This is a familiar vision of the world, the one we have been taught since childhood: each patch of land with its own flag, its own anthem, its own national costume and cuisine.

But we make a mistake if we see the world only in this jigsaw of nations. In fact, within each nation are numerous unusual legal spaces, anomalous territories and peculiar jurisdictions. The world of nations is riddled with zones – city states, havens, enclaves, freeports, hi-tech parks, duty-free districts and innovation hubs – and they define the politics of the present in ways we are only starting to understand.

At its most basic, a zone is an enclave carved out of a nation and freed from ordinary forms of regulation. The usual powers of taxation are often suspended within its borders, letting those who invest in the zone effectively make their own rules. Zones come in a bewildering range of varieties – at least 82, by one official reckoning. At one end of the socioeconomic spectrum, zones can form part of networks of cross-border manufacturing. Often ringed by barbed wire, these are sites for low-wage production. At the other end, we can see a version of the zone in the tax havens where transnational corporations secrete away their earnings.

In an interview in 1988, libertarian economist Milton Friedman declared that “a relatively free economy is a necessary condition for a democratic society”. But then he added: “I also believe there is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy.”

Beginning in the 70s, the zone offered an alternative to the messiness of mass democracy, and therefore a way of preventing the destruction of a free economy that Friedman feared. Today the zone also holds out a promise cherished by much of the contemporary political right – that capitalism can exist without democracy.

[Insert: This is the real meaning of Trump railing against crime, immigration and lawlessness in the U.S. It doesn't matter that most all of Trump's vitriolic accusation is false. That doesn't matter to Trump, Musk et al. The point they are pressing on populations is that democracy gets in the way of capitalism. Democracy impedes people like them. They pose as caring for voters while doing all they can to eliminate the voice of those very same people. They are artificial people who love democracy for only the loopholes if offers to exploit it as much as they are allowed to do.]
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