re: Trump now looking into South Africa white genocide / land theft

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President Donald Trump tried Thursday night to move the conversation away from his former lawyer implicating him in federal crimes by tweeting out a common talking point of white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

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For nearly 50 years, starting in the late 1940s, the black Africans who make up the majority of South Africa’s population were subjected to an official government policy of institutionalized political and economic discrimination and strict racial segregation by the white European minority who ruled the country under a system known as apartheid. (In practice, discrimination against black Africans had gone on for hundreds of years before it ever became official policy.)

Among many, many other infringements on their basic rights, black South Africans were legally barred from living on, operating businesses in, or owning land in vast swaths of the country that were set aside for whites only. By the time apartheid formally ended in 1994, nearly 90 percent of all land in the country was owned by whites — despite the fact that they made up just 10 percent of the population.

Land reform efforts aimed at remedying this situation began when apartheid ended. But after nearly 25 years, the huge disparity hasn’t gone away: A 2017 auditby the South African government found that whites still owned 72 percent of private farmland in South Africa.

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In 2016, the country’s parliament passed a bill allowing for “the expropriation of property for a public purpose or in the public interest, subject to just and equitable compensation.” In other words, the government could legally force white landowners to give up their land in return for a fair price. The land would then be redistributed to black South Africans.

But that process, too, has been slow — and people are getting tired of waiting. Support for a small, far-left political party that advocates for nationalizing allland in South Africa has been growing.

So now, with elections looming next year, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has decided to take more drastic action: amending the constitution to make it legal for the government to seize land withoutproviding compensation.

That move is being welcomed by many in the country, but not everyone is convinced it’s a good idea. Some, including investors, worry that it could trigger a catastrophic economic crisis like the one that occurred in neighboring Zimbabwe when it enacted similar reforms in 2000. There, rapid land seizures panicked investors, causing them to flee the market in droves. That led to massive hyperinflation and food shortages that effectively collapsed the country’s economy: Experts put the cost to Zimbabwe’s economy at around $20 billion.

But another group of people — including white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and members of the alt-right in Europe and the United States — see the South African land expropriation plan as much more than a potential economic misstep: to them, it’s a full-scale genocide against the country’s white minority.

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There’s just one problem: The story isn’t real. There is no evidence of a widespread campaign of violence and murder targeting white farmers in South Africa.

As journalist Lynsey Chutel with the news outlet Quartz Africa reported in detail in June, white farmers have historically been the victims of violent attacks in South Africa — though it’s not always clear whether an individual attack was motivated by racial animus or simply because white farmers are “Isolated and believed to be wealthy.”

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Moreover, Joe Walsh at the New Statesman found that murder rates in South Africa’s affluent, predominantly white suburbs are far lower than murder rates in the poor, predominantly black townships. “If there was any kind of genocide being carried out against white people in the country then the safest areas of the continent’s most dangerous city would not be predominately white,” Walsh wrote in May.

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After a peak in 2001/2002, the number of farm attacks—rape, robbery and other forms of violent crime short of murder—has decreased to about half,” Chutel wrote. “Similarly, the number of murders on farms peaked in 1997/1998 at 153, but today that number is below 50.”

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