Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Extracts from Ilana Mercer’s latest book (Part 1)

“Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is dedicated “To my Afrikaner brothers, betrayed.” - (Ilana Mercer on her blog - www.barelyablog.com)

ILANA MERCER is a US-based, classical liberal writer. She pens a popular weekly column—“Return to Reason”—for WorldNetDaily.com. With a unique audience of 8 million, the site has been rated by Alexa as the most frequented “conservative” site on the Internet. Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana also contributes to VDARE.COM, the foremost authority on immigration policy, and to London's Quarterly Review. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, an independent, non-profit economic policy think tank. (Sourced from Ilana Mercer’s Smashwords Profile)

A FEW REVIEWS

“The Western press promptly forgot all about South Africa after Nelson Mandela assumed the presidency. The commissars of allowable opinion pretend atrocities have not been taking place, and smear anyone who mentions them. Ilana Mercer will have none of the lies and omissions of the commissars and the cowards. For the sake of white and black South Africans alike, her compelling account deserves a wide and sympathetic audience.”

-- THOMAS E. WOODS, Ph.D., historian, author of the New York Times best-sellers, Nullification, Meltdown, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and the critically acclaimed, The Church Confronts Modernity.

“Ilana Mercer’s well-documented, encompassing study is at once heartbreaking, infuriating, illuminating and instructive. Ethnic cleansing is underway in the once great nation of South Africa, but Americans hear nothing of it; they are deliberately shielded by the same parties that served to bring it about, the liberal elites in Western governments and the press who believe that white South Africans ‘have it coming.’ It is white guilt and the so-called right of black reprisal extrapolated to ghastly extremes; political correctness on steroids, and all in the name of craven progressive ideology. If the West is ever to occupy anything resembling moral high ground – not to mention avoiding this fate itself – it will have to come to terms with its part in South Africa’s demise, and the misery, degradation and naked horror of those who now suffer.”

-- ERIK RUSH, columnist and author of Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal–America’s Racial Obsession. Erik was the first to break the story of President (then Senator) Barack Obama’s ties to the militant, Afrocentric, Chicago preacher Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

“If you want to witness the end result of what in America is called ‘diversity,’ you must read Into the Cannibal’s Pot. ‘Diversity’ is a euphemism for racial retribution administered mostly by guilty white liberals in universities, corporations, and government. It is a thoroughly collectivist notion that condones punishing the current generation of white males for the sins of the past. It’s most extreme form is practiced in post-Apartheid South Africa, and its effects are meticulously documented by Ilana Mercer (who also writes marvelously): rampant black-on-white crime, racist labor laws that have created ‘The world’s most extreme affirmative action program’; the confiscation of private property; economic socialism; state-sponsored terrorism; and, most sickeningly, the idolization of the corrupt and murderous Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe. The Western media ignore all of this because of their ideological love affair with the communistic African National Congress and, frankly, their support for many of these same policies.”

-- THOMAS J. DILORENZO, professor of economics, Loyola College, Maryland, author of the best-selling The Real Lincoln, Lincoln Unmasked, and most recently, Hamilton’s Curse

“The truth shall set you free,” a memorable Biblical phrase tells us. It does not say the truth shall make us comfortable or happy. Into The Cannibal’s Pot fits this mold: it is an interesting, important, well-written and well-documented book that informs the reader but is likely to upset, perhaps even anger, some or many of them.

-- THOMAS SZASZ, the author of The Myth of Mental Illness, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, and many other books.

“Egalitarianism leads to democracy; democracy leads to socialism; socialism leads to economic destruction; and democratic socialism in multicultural societies leads to death and democide. This, in shocking detail, is what Ilana Mercer illustrates superbly in her case study of post-apartheid South Africa. America’s political and intellectual ‘elites’ will ignore this book, because it is politically ‘incorrect.’ We can only do so at our own peril.”

-- HANS-HERMANN HOPPE, Austrian school economist, libertarian political philosopher, emeritus professor of economics, University of Nevada, distinguished fellow, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, author of Democracy: The God That Failed, and

The Economics and Ethics of Private Property

Click here to read more reviews and commentary on Amazon.com

TAKE NOTE: The following extracts of this book were sourced from the Smashwords edition, where approximately 20 percent of the content can be viewed for free. Because Smashwords does not deliver the content in print form, but in various digital formats – the extracts I’ve published here will thus not reference any page numbers. 

PREFACE

It is no surprise that a manifesto against majoritarianism would not find favor with the mission of most American publishers. Opposition to mass society was once an accepted (indeed, unremarkable) theme in the richly layered works of iconic conservatives such as Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham. Today, by contrast, such opposition is considered as damning as it is impolitic.

And don’t even think of writing a less-than hagiographical account of Nelson Mandela. Time magazine’s Richard Stengel has serialized his tributes to Saint Mandela. (Stengel has completed two. Perhaps a third is planned?) But an opposing voice to the media paean for the democratic South Africa and its deity, written by a dissenting South African exile—this cannot be countenanced. “What menaces democratic society in this age is not a simple collapse of order,” forewarned Alexis de Tocqueville, “but a tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit and condition.” In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, this sameness of mind and spirit manifests in a convergence of opinion - even in the neatly bifurcated America.

Thus, while almost every other postcolonial insurgency in Africa has been scrutinized, rival views of post-apartheid South Africa are unwelcome. Despite the country’s body count since “freedom,” the foundations of what was a joint Anglo-American undertaking are not to be faulted or questioned.

The loss of 300,000 innocents murdered since democracy dawned is therefore regularly diminished. People slide into extenuation: “We have our problems, but we now have, I’m proud to say, a working, wonderful democracy in South Africa.” These words were uttered by the roaming Justice Richard Goldstone, who - unlike this writer’s father - attached himself to the anti-apartheid cause only once it became fashionable, safe and professionally expedient.

In itself, the tale of the publication of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa bears telling. For while this polemic respects no political totems or taboos, it is faithful to facts. These facts cried out to be chronicled. They should not have had a struggle to find their way into print.

Yet struggle they did.

“Ilana, if you’d only give me something like Corinne Hofmann’s Back from Africa, publishers would pounce,” promised one literary agent. Hofmann’s salacious account of her time as the sexual plaything of a virile African tribal chief was described by The Times Literary Supplement as “a dated tale of exotic desire and disillusionment.”

As the PC pecking order stands, Into the Cannibal’s Pot might also have been pounced upon had its author been more like economist Dambisa Moyo of the trendy Dead Aid. That popular book consists of derivative deductions which had been reached decades ago by Peter Thomas Bauer, the doyen of development economics. (To give Ms. Moyo her dues, Dead Aid is dedicated to the late Lord Bauer.)

The following is an assessment from a well-known academic publisher whose stock does not exactly fly off the shelves:

I’ve long been aware of Mercer’s writing. Though I rarely agree with her, she’s quite a presence on the right side of the blogosphere. This is an extremely well- written and provocative work. I was riveted as I read it.

…The problem here is that the market for a book with such a clear political bias is that much smaller. So I just don’t think we could take it on.

“There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea,” said Dr. Johnson. This is my position with respect to political parties stateside and in South Africa. How can a book that discounts the venerated vote and disavows all political parties have a political bias? Into the Cannibal’s Pot is manifestly against politics! A partiality for small government and big society - in other words, for civilization - is not a “political bias.” No, the prejudice was that of the petitioned publisher; his was a prejudice against an unorthodox perspective that comports with the classical liberal philosophy, and with reality.

Another publisher made the following excuse:

We recently had the chance to review your manuscript. Like everything you do, it is well-written and worthy of publication. However, we do not believe we can successfully market it.

This particular editor added that the imprint would be concentrating instead on the timeless topic of the Olympic Games in China. Obviously that is a far more inspiring subject than this writer’s “unhealthy” preoccupation with the methodical ethnic cleansing of the Afrikaner farmer.

Other respondents lavished praise on a “closely argued stylish effort” (for which, of course, they did not care to make an effort).

To go by the Left’s postmodern strictures, truth is not immutable but subject to a process of discovery. As a practical matter, then, how is a synthesis of the South-African situation to emerge if the antithesis is disallowed?

Let us not discount the publishing world’s ongoing drive for the bottom line and the lowest common denominator. (The publisher who refused to bear Christian Witness, citing the prospects of poor profits, is an example.) This uncompromising dedication does not lend itself to contrarian material, not even when the facts are pressing (and almost too horrible for words). After all, a complicit publishing establishment can shirk responsibility and seek comfort in the fact that the marketplace for books no longer adjudicates the product’s worth. Actually, nowadays this marketplace does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the millions of subjective preferences consumers demand and publishers deliver. Mackenzie Phillips’ squalid story of incest and insanity outsells Ludwig von Mises’ pearls of wisdom. For some this cultural foot-and-mouth will be faith-inspiring, for others deeply distressing.

ABBREVIATIONS USED

• Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
• African National Congress (ANC)
• Black Economic Empowerment (BEE)
• Central Business District (CBD)
• Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
• Dutch Reformed Church (NGK)
• Firearm Control Act (FCA)
• Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC)
• Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)
• South Africa Institute for Race Relations (SAIRR)
• Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)
• National Party (NP)
• Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC)
• People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD)
• Progressive Federal Party (PFP)
• South Africa (SA)
• South African Medical Research Council (MRC)
• South African Police Service (SAPS)
• Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS)
• University of South Africa (UNISA)
• White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)
• Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU)

-- END OF PREFACE

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