Thread: OBAMA'S SOUTH AFRICAN INSPIRATION: WHY IT MATTERS

OBAMA'S SOUTH AFRICAN INSPIRATION: WHY IT MATTERS



by JOEL B. POLLAK 28 Jan 2013

In an interview with Breitbart News Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made the astute observation that Barack Obama is not just skeptical of our Constitution, but also has an alternative model in mind: the South African constitution. That document has been the object of fascination and envy for the American legal left ever since it was negotiated and passed in the mid-1990s, during South Africa’s transition to democracy.

The left is obsessed with a particular section of the South African constitution: its Bill of Rights, which includes so-called “positive,” or socioeconomic rights: the right to housing, the right to a clean environment, the right to health care, the right to food and water, and so on.

South Africa's Bill of Rights also prevents discrimination on the basis of a wide range of categories, including both gender and sex, culture, sexual orientation, and pregnancy.

If that sounds like the wish list of the American “progressive” movement, that is because it is: many of the legal scholars who influenced South Africa’s constitutional negotiations were from the United States. One of the most important was professor Frank Michelman of Harvard Law School, whose contribution to South Africa’s doctrine of socioeconomic rights was lauded last year by South African Constitutional Court justice Sandile Ngobo.

Michelman, who taught at Harvard when Obama was a student, was also one of the few faculty supporters of Critical Race Theory pioneer Derrick Bell.

Bell believed that the American legal system enshrined white supremacy, and that the Constitution--even after the Civil War amendments--was fundamentally racist. The only to redeem it, he argued, would be through the passage of amendments that guaranteed socioeconomic rights.

Obama was profoundly influenced by Bell’s ideas, and used them to teach his own law classes at the University of Chicago. He echoed Bell’s views of the Constitution as a “deeply flawed” document in an infamous interview with Chicago’s WBEZ-FM in 2001, when Obama observed that the Warren Court of the 1960s had been too timid to apply principles of equality to the “redistribution of wealth” and “political and economic justice.”

That task, then-State Senator Obama said, could not be entrusted to the courts within the limits of the Constitution as we know it; “redistributive change” would have to wait until the left had assembled “the actual coalitions of power” necessary. Today, Obama has done just that--and his attempt to divide and marginalize the Republican Party is aimed at removing potential opposition to the fundamental changes he wishes to enact.

In addition, the courts may no longer be the obstacle that Obama once feared. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was familiar with Bell’s ideas, and lectured at least once on Critical Race Theory. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee, recently expressed a preference for the South African constitution. More broadly, enthusiasm for socioeconomic rights seems widespread among the cohort Obama brought to power.

There are, however, three widely recognized problems with socioeconomic rights. One is that they are not justiciable--that is, there is almost no way for a court to enforce and protect them. For example, the classic case that established the vitality of South Africa’s socioeconomic rights, known as Grootboom (2000), also demonstrated their limits: Ms. Grootboom’s right to housing was upheld, but she died years later without a house.

Another problem is philosophical: socioeconomic rights are not inherent in the individual, but granted by government. Therefore they enshrine the supremacy of the state above the individual. And since they are not enforceable right away but must be “progressively realized,” socioeconomic rights tend to degrade the value of other rights, such as the so-called “negative” liberties--freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and others.

The third problem is political: paradoxically, the fact that socioeconomic rights exist may relieve pressure from governments to provide the promised socioeconomic benefits. In South Africa, for example, the government was proud of having given its citizens the rightto health care, but refused for several years to provide life-saving Aids medicines. The result was that millions died--their bodies destroyed, their rights theoretically intact.

Other countries that have included socioeconomic rights in their constitutions have taken a softer approach. The Irish constitution, for example, includes “directive principles” that outline socioeconomic rights as policy goals without giving them the force of law. But in the U.S., “progressive” legal scholars still nurture the hope that obstacles to fulfilling the dream of socioeconomic rights will prove merely political, administrative--and temporary.

The American left has long drawn inspiration from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Obama has described that political cause as the reason he was drawn to politics, as well as one of the reasons he joined Jeremiah Wright's extremist church. As Obama's own example demonstrates, not every expression of solidarity with the anti-apartheid struggle was a healthy or even helpful one; some merely used it to advocate for radicalism.

It is worth noting that socioeconomic rights were not the necessary outcome of South Africa's struggle against apartheid. South Africa's liberal (in the classical sense) opposition, then known as the Democratic Party, opposed apartheid but also opposed the inclusion of socioeconomic rights, for many of the reasons above. That history of criticism, and the predicted failures of socioeconomic rights, have been largely overlooked by American admirers.

President Obama’s call to give “meaning” to the rights in our founding documents, and for “collective action” as a means for “preserving our individual freedoms” and providing “every citizen” with “a basic measure of security and dignity” clearly points toward the eventual creation of socioeconomic rights on something like the South African model. Sen. Paul deserves credit for recognizing that--and the dangers that poses to our Republic.


Obama's South African Inspiration: Why It Matters

South Africa’s White Farmers: An Endangered Species?


BY Palash R. Ghosh | December 03 2012 1:06 PM


It is more dangerous to be a white farmer in South Africa than it is to be a policeman in this country awash in crime and violence.

The threats posed to South Africa’s ever-dwindling population of white (mostly Afrikaner) landowners has become so grave that a group of activists and farmers marched to the capital of Pretoria over the weekend to demand the state protect them and their property.

In the wake of hundreds of attacks and murders, the farmers – represented by two farmers associations, AfriForum and Solidarity -- asked Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa to declare such assaults “crimes of priority.”

"Farm murders are not only a crisis,” said AfriForum Deputy CEO Ernst Roets in a statement.

"They are a catastrophe."

Roets blamed the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party and the South African Police Service of ignoring the plight of rural white farmers who are increasingly vulnerable to violence perpetrated by dispossessed blacks almost two decades after the fall of apartheid.

The farmers group claimed that farmers – particularly white farmers – are four to six times more likely to be murdered than the general public.

In a memorandum presented to government officials, the farmers stated: "These murders are marked by a unique level of brutality – often worse than that found in terrorist attacks. The argument that farm murders are 'only murder' does not hold water."

According to the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa, almost 1,600 farm murders have been reported since 1990, although independent think-tanks place the actual number at 3,000.

According to South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, the country’s murder rate stood at 31.9 per 100,000 people, among the highest in the world, and 30 times the homicide rate in the UK. The figure for South African police, 51 per 100,000, and for farmers, 99 per 100,000.

The most recent high-profile killing of a white person on a South African farm involved the brutal murder of a British-born engineer named Chris Preece, who purchased a farm near the border of Lesotho.

He was hacked to death for about $340 in cash and a mobile phone.

The march on Saturday commemorated the second anniversary of the slaughter of white farmer Attie Potgieter and his family. In one of the most brutal crimes in recent memory in South Africa, Potgieter was repeatedly stabbed near Lindley in the Free State while his wife and 2-year-old daughter were forced to watch. The assailants subsequently executed the two females with gunshots.

One of the protesters, Susan Nortje, Mrs. Potgieter's younger sister, told the Daily Telegraph: "If you kill a rhinoceros in South Africa, you get more time in jail than if you kill a person. I don't think people understand. We must show people what's really happening."

Another protester, Magda Pistorius, lost her husband in an attack last year.

"Physically, I have recovered," she said. "But emotionally, it will never go away. The government has to do something to stop this whole story. This whole country is so lawless. It's easy to rob and steal. The justice system is a mess. Everyone else here has got their human rights. But what about ours?"

However, given South Africa’s many other social ills – including 25 percent unemployment (50 percent for black youths), labor unrest and an ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis – the plight of white farmers is unlikely to garner much sympathy from the ANC. In addition, the lingering resentment from apartheid further diminishes the importance of white landowners’ concerns in the eyes of black lawmakers.

Indeed, when the farming association presented its demands to the police minister, a government spokesman named Zweli Mnisi blasted the group.

"They are only representing people based on their color,” he stated, according to the Telegraph. “For us, racializing crime is problematic. You can't have a separate category that says, farmers are the special golden boys and girls. You end up saying the life of a white person is more important. You cannot do this."

Moreover, President Jacob Zuma, who is almost guaranteed to gain re-election next year, has repeatedly condemned the white domination and control of South Africa’s economy and called for a massive transfer of wealth to the black majority, including the redistribution of white-owned farms.

Only about 8 percent of South African farms are now under black ownership – far short of the 30 percent target by 2014 envisioned by former President Nelson Mandela.
"The issue is potentially explosive," Lechesa Tsenoli, deputy minister for land reform, told Reuters.

White farmers are especially targeted because they are viewed by impoverished rural blacks as having wealth.

"For farm workers at the bottom like me, we are not allowed to talk to farm owners directly," a black farm worker told NBC News.

"The [white] farmers disrespect us to a point they would use the 'K-word' [kaffir, pejorative for blacks.]”

Andre Botha of Agri SA, a farmers' union, points out that attacks on farmers stem from poverty, not politics or race.

"There might be segments within the South African population that would like to use words such as genocide, but farm attacks are a result of criminal activities," he said.
"It's an obvious result of the lifestyle that we chose. Farms are a soft target.”

Perhaps the most sensational case of murder of a South African farmer occurred two years ago, when neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terre'blanche was hacked to death by two black farm workers. But even that killing was fueled by a pay dispute, not race.
Meanwhile, whites (principally descendants of British, Dutch and French settlers) account for only 10 percent of South Africa’s total population. The number of white farmers in the country is now down to 40,000.

South Africa