South Africa Just Followed Rhodesia's Path to to Ruin; America Must Pay Attention

The Crystal Ball Shows Another Future

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This week, I was planning on returning to the subject of Jeffrey Epstein, with an article on a particularly interesting connection between him, Hunter Biden, and the Ukraine war. However, yesterday morning, I logged onto X to see apocalyptic news out of South Africa.

There, the government chose to follow in the footsteps of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. It did so by enacting a land expropriation law that allows the state to seize the land of whites in the name of economic equity. That is what destroyed what remained of Rhodesia after the Bush War, and it will destroy South Africa for much the same reasons. Further, as the concept of the Great Taking shows, something of the same sort could happen here. So, we must pay attention.

First, I’ll discuss what the new South African expropriation law does, to create a framework for exploring its potentially destructive effects. Next, I’ll describe how just this sort of law destroyed Rhodesia. Finally, I’ll show how this sort of government-led expropriation law lurks in the background of America’s financial system, as shown by The Great Taking.

For my international followers - as of today, South Africas government is preparing to grab land without compensation. We are all Rhodesians now. Please, tell your friends. -K9 Reaper¹

Listen to the podcast version of this article here:

AUDIO: South Africa Just Followed Rhodesia's Path to to Ruin; America Must Pay Attention

The Law

The new South African law is simple: the government may seize property in the name of “equity,” and sometimes needn’t even provide compensation to landowners. As The Western Standard notes:²

The law, which replaces the pre-democratic Expropriation Act of 1975, allows the government to seize land in the name of "public interest."

The state has always had the ability to expropriate land, however the reasons for doing so have changed since 1994 with the advent of democracy in the nation.

Per Section 25 of the Constitution, public interest includes not just public services such as transit and hospitals, but "the nation's commitment to land reform, and to reforms to bring about equitable access to all South Africa's natural resources."

…

Stephen Grootes, President's Land Reform Advisory Panel member Bulelwa Mabasa, who also serves as head of land reform at Werksmans, explained that [times when the government is not required to pay property owners for their land] include abandoned land where the owner is not traceable, as well as land which is solely being held to increase its value. State-held land that is not being used will also be subject to expropriation without compensation.

So, if the government claims you are holding land because you want it to increase in value, as most do with real estate because of inflation (a particularly pernicious problem in South Africa),³ the government can seize it in the name of racial equity without providing a dime to you in compensation. Further, if you own an asset that the thugs in charge want, they can seize it and provide nominal compensation for it.

If you disagree with their assessment of its worth or your reason for holding it, you can try to sue through a court system so anti-white that it determined chanting “Kill the Boer” is not hate speech.⁴

The ruling ANC government has already all but announced that the new law will be used to strip white property owners of their property. In a statement released after the new law became operative, the ANC declared that it is a "progressive and transformative tool to advance land reform in ways that enable inclusive economic growth and social cohesion." Similarly ominously, the ANC added, "This law is a critical step towards fulfilling the vision articulated in the Freedom Charter, which declared, 'The land shall be shared among those who work it'."⁵

Numerous Afrikaner groups are fighting back,⁶ but the news is still dire. What it means is that the ANC, a group rooted in communist theory⁷ and committed mainly to forced DEI,⁸ can use a court system firmly on its side to engage in legalized theft from the country’s few remaining taxpayers.⁹ Paired with that is the implicit threat of violence that comes from state-allowed, if not encouraged, farm attacks and rampant crime, much of which is racially motivated and directed against the Boer population.¹⁰

If this law goes into effect and expropriation occurs under it, it will be a genocide-level event for the Boers not unlike what happened to the whites in Rhodesia. They are a people tied to the soil of South Africa because of their agricultural roots. They have been in South Africa for centuries, so their culture and identity are now African rather than European. Theft of their beloved farmland from them, whether to force them out of the country or into cities, will effectively mean their extinction as a people. Naturally, the ANC is already licking its chops at the thought of doing to them what the US allowed Mugabe to do to Rhodesia.¹¹

Zimbabwe’s Destruction

The destruction of Zimbabwe began with Mugabe’s genocide of the Ndebele,¹² continued with the double-digit inflation that came with his communist economic policies, but then really came to a head in the early 2000s when Mugabe began his “land reform” campaign.

This “land reform” was theft and genocide by any other name.¹³ Under that land expropriation campaign, which American politicians and leading figures, such as Civil Rights “hero” Andy Young supported,¹⁴ Mugabe stole the land of productive white farmers and gave it to his friends, namely his political cronies.

In fact, it featured many of the same characteristics as South Africa’s current troubles.

South Africa first saw a settlement between the ANC and whites in 1994 that prohibited compulsory sales of land for reasons other than a pressing public need, but now the government can take land without compensation in the name of equity.

Similar to Rhodesia, it originally had a rule preventing the compulsory sale or taking of land for economic reasons: Under the Lancaster House Agreement, which transferred power to the black majority, a clause prohibited the forced transfer of land.¹⁵ As such, though there was some purchase of land by the government (using British aid) for transferring it to the black majority, there was relatively little land transfer for the first decade of Mugabe’s tyranny.

Then came the Zimbabwean Land Acquisition Act of 1992.¹⁶ Much like the new South African land bill, it empowered the government to acquire any land as it saw fit but granted landowners some ability to negotiate their compensation amounts. Even under that law, little was effected in terms of land purchase and transfer, as landowners resisted it to the extent they were able and the British gradually stopped providing aid for land transfer. But, though little occurred during this phase, the new law made the expropriation of white land the law in Zimbabwe.

As a result, the guerilla veterans of the Bush War began agitating against the government, which at that point was no longer receiving British aid dollars and so could afford to spend little on the purchase of land, even if its transfer was compulsory.

Thus came the Fast-Track Land Reform Program that was first pushed and then carried out by those veteran terrorists.¹⁷ Showing up to white farms across the country, they took the farms using violence. The Supreme Court of Zimbabwe allowed it, and by 2013 there wasn’t a white-owned farm left in the country.¹⁸

The consequences of the farm expropriation destroyed Zimbabwe.

For one, it became near-impossible for the state to produce food. The farms that had once produced most of the state’s food, from grain to cattle, had been large-scale commercial farms using complex, modern farming techniques. Then the terrorist veterans took the farms and were enabled in their doing so by the state and courts. They knew little to nothing about chemical fertilizers, tractors, other mechanized equipment, or GMO crops. So the farms ran fallow, and the sector collapsed, turning the breadbasket of Africa into a famine-riddled disaster zone.

But that wasn’t all. The collapse of the farms also meant a collapse of farming jobs; the stolen commercial farms had once employed thousands upon thousands of people, somewhere around 30% of the workforce.¹⁹ When they collapsed under the weight of their new owners’ incompetence, all those jobs followed too, throwing a huge proportion of the population out of work.

The scale of the employment disaster and food production disaster was astounding: “Food output fell 45%, and …Unemployment rose to 80%.”²⁰

Then came the financial disaster — hyperinflation — for which Zimbabwe is known. When its trade surplus went from $322 million in 2001, before the expropriation, to a trade deficit of $18 million in 2002,²¹ after the expropriation began and exports collapsed as a result of it having nothing to export, Zimbabwe stopped earning foreign exchange.

The problem grew worse in the ensuing years as the deficit grew larger, meaning Zimbabwe soon had no foreign exchange left. That meant it couldn’t pay the foreign currency-denominated interest on its debts, a problem exacerbated by sanctions and asset freezes. Further, a fall-off in economic activity meant there was little happening that could be taxed. So, the government resorted to printing reams of fiat money to try and pay its debts, purchase products abroad, fight a war in the Congo, and pay for domestic programs. As could be expected, printing so much fiat during an economic collapse led to hyperinflation. At its height in mid-November 2008, the rate of hyperinflation reached an estimated 79,600,000,000% per month.²²

From: Rate of Inflation

Notably, much of that disaster was caused by the “land reform” campaign of expropriation. The collapse in agricultural exports, rocketing unemployment, and foreign sanctions all came because the farms were stolen. Then the world lost faith in Zimbabwe as it printed money to redress those issues, and soon inflation was unimaginably high. The country more or less collapsed as a result, becoming a rotten, hollow shell of its former self.

South Africa faces the same fate if it follows in those blood-encrusted footsteps. It already has sky-high inflation, farm murders, and a declining economy.²³ Stealing land, and thus chasing out what remaining foreign investment and domestic competence it has, would result in the same disaster seen in Zimbabwe.

This Matters to America

Americans ought care about this, just as they ought care about Rhodesia.²⁴

To Where Equity Always Leads

For one, it shows what happens when the race communists are put in charge: utter societal destruction will be effected by them, with nothing left in its wake other than pointless devastation, in the name of “equity.”²⁵ So, when you hear some blue hair with a nose ring prattling on about the need for “equity” in business, politics, or anything else, know that Zimbabwe’s fate is to where that leads and exactly what they want.

The violence of it, the pointlessness of the destruction, the lies and thuggery that bring society to the point of destruction, all of that is what they want because they see it as moral. They see it as natural and just vengeance for a lack of “equity.”

“Our” Assets, Comrade

It also shows that the government always sees your assets as its assets in a time of crisis. As Mugabe’s government let the terrorist guerillas seize white property as a reward for their Bush War service, now South Africa’s ANC government will let its thugs and cronies expropriate Boer property to distract the mob from South Africa’s economic chaos.

Fortunately, with Trump, we have a bit of a reprieve. He wants to cut rather than raise taxes, slash regulation rather than use it to destroy private property, and generally use the government to protect the MAGA coalition that elected him rather than treat it as a penned herd of subservient tax cattle.

But the impulse lurks amongst the halls of power. “You will own nothing, and be happy” is, after all, the motto²⁶ of the current globohomo regime,²⁷ as Carol Roth makes clear in her fantastic book, You Will Own Nothing. And that regime, of course, is largely the same one that destroyed Rhodesia.²⁸

How does it plan on making us have nothing? Well, for one, there is the push into subscriptions rather than purchases: it is now increasingly common to rent a thing rather than buy it outright.²⁹ That means, quite literally, that people “own nothing.”

Then there are also taxes, namely estate taxes, which are how the Western world governments have destroyed the generally right-leaning aristocracies of Europe and American financial empires for the past century.³⁰ When paired with inflation, taxes have wiped out most of the tradition-minded elites who would be, like Tim Mellon,³¹ focused on the long-term good of their countrymen.³²

The Great Taking

But there is another, darker path potentially at play, one that follows in the footsteps of first Rhodesia and now South Africa. That is the so-called “Great Taking,” an idea lurking amongst the halls of power that was identified and popularized by former hedge fund manager David Webb.

This idea is that the law has been secretly rewritten so that you are not technically the owner of securities your broker dashboard shows you own — namely equities, bonds, and the like — but rather a subsidiary of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) technically is the “owner of record” of those securities, and you have a claim on them. This is true: Congress made it law with HR 685 in 2005.³³

Normally, this wouldn't matter, as you have one of the most senior claims on those securities held by the DTCC. But not the pre-eminent claim: under HR 685, in the case of bankruptcy, those on the other side of derivatives bets (the banks) have “super-priority” in the case of a DTCC bankruptcy, which would almost certainly happen during a derivatives-induced financial meltdown.

Derivatives, for reference, are financial contracts whose value is tied to an underlying asset. Often there are derivatives on top of derivatives, often using leverage (debt), meaning that a relatively small change in the price of the underlying asset can cause a cascading failure in derivatives markets. Here’s how the concept was explained in The Big Short:

In any case, what this means is that, in the case of a derivatives-caused meltdown (even Warren Buffett has described derivatives as weapons of financial mass destruction and a financial time bomb)³⁴ that sparks bankruptcies amongst the banks and brokerages, there is a superior claim than yours that can be exercised on the DTCC-owned securities you think you own. They can, then, be confiscated under the color of the law.

Here’s how one author describes the idea:³⁵

The derivatives bubble has been estimated to exceed one quadrillion dollars (a quadrillion is 1,000 trillion). The entire GDP of the world is estimated at $105 trillion, or 10% of one quadrillion; and the collective wealth of the world is an estimated $360 trillion. Clearly, there is not enough collateral anywhere to satisfy all the derivative claims. The majority of derivatives now involve interest rate swaps, and interest rates have shot up. The bubble looks ready to pop.

Who were the intrepid counterparties signing up to take the other side of these risky derivative bets? Initially, it seems, they were banks –led by four mega-banks, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. But according to a 2023 book called The Great Taking by veteran hedge fund manager David Rogers Webb, counterparty risk on all of these bets is ultimately assumed by an entity called the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), through its nominee Cede & Co. (See also Greg Morse, “Who Owns America? Cede & DTCC,” and A. Freed, “Who Really Owns Your Money? Part I, The DTCC”). Cede & Co. is now the owner of record of all of our stocks, bonds, digitized securities, mortgages, and more; and it is seriously under-capitalized, holding capital of only $3.5 billion, clearly not enough to satisfy all the potential derivative claims. Webb thinks this is intentional.

What happens if the DTCC goes bankrupt? Under The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) of 2005, derivatives have “super-priority” in bankruptcy. (The BAPCPA actually protects the banks and derivative claimants rather than consumers; it was the same act that eliminated bankruptcy protection for students.) Derivative claimants don’t even need to go through the bankruptcy court but can simply nab the collateral from the bankrupt estate, leaving nothing for the other secured creditors (including state and local governments) or the banks’ unsecured creditors (including us, the depositors). And in this case the “bankrupt estate” – the holdings of the DTCC/Cede & Co. – includes all of our stocks, bonds, digitized securities, mortgages, and more.

It sounds like conspiracy theory, but it’s all laid out in the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), tested in precedent, and validated by court rulings. The UCC is a privately-established set of standardized rules for transacting business, which has been ratified by all 50 states and includes key provisions that have been “harmonized” with the laws of other countries in the Western orbit. The UCC makes boring reading and is anything but clear, but Webb has diligently picked through the obscure legalese and demonstrates that the amorphous “they” have it all locked up. They can take everything in one fell swoop, without even going to court. Ideally, we need to get Congress to modify some laws, beginning with the super-priority provisions of the Bankruptcy Law of 2005. Even billionaires, notes Webb, are at risk of losing their holdings; and they have the clout to take action.

Webb himself, summarizing the idea, says:

It is about the taking of collateral (all of it), the end game of the current globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This scheme is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets and bank deposits, all stocks and bonds; and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment; land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will likewise be taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.

Perhaps Webb is wrong about the methods our regime will use, in the absence of a public-minded tribune like Trump,³⁶ to deal with the mushroom cloud of collapsing derivatives. But such a collapse is on the horizon, particularly in Europe,³⁷ as we deal with the consequences of the Eurodollar and feckless government deficit spending.³⁸ So, much as in South Africa now or Zimbabwe in the 2000s, there will be baying for blood from those who want the regime to fix their economic woes for them when it has few options left. Unless we have the very best people in charge, people who are willing to stand up for private property when times get tough, it’s hard not to imagine some form of expropriation when that mushroom cloud appears on the horizon.

FDR, after all, expropriated all the gold in America when the Depression came.³⁹ Can you not imagine “the Squad,” doing the same, only with everything in their sights?

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1. https://x.com/k9_reaper/status/1882468120536990095

2. https://www.westernstandard.news/news/south-africa-president-signs-land-expropriation-bill-into-law/61485

3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/370515/inflation-rate-in-south-africa/

4. https://groundup.org.za/article/judge-rules-kill-boer---kill-farmer-not-hate-speech/

5. https://www.westernstandard.news/news/south-africa-president-signs-land-expropriation-bill-into-law/61485

6. https://x.com/ConCaracal/status/1882459084844142802

7. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91B00874R000100200015-4.pdf

8.

9. https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-african-social-safety-net-crossroads-anc-support-wanes-2024-05-09/

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe#The_Bush_War_and_Lancaster_House

16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe#Compulsory_acquisition

17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe#Fast-track_land_reform_and_violence

18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe#

19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe#Post-independence

20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe#Historical_context

21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe#Economic_consequences

22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe#Inflation_rate

23.

24.

25.

26. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328723001131

27. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Globohomo

28.

29. https://www.forbes.com/sites/benjaminvoyer/2023/02/26/are-we-headed-to-a-world-in-which-we-own-nothing/

30.

31. https://x.com/GraduatedBen/status/1871595845759762709

32.

33. https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/685

34. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/derivativestimebomb.asp

35. https://www.laprogressive.com/economic-equality/great-taking

36.

37. My friend Ben Kelleran spoke with VC fund managers Stormy Waters about that here:

Kontrarian Korner #20 - Stormy Waters

38. The Milkshake Returns

39. https://catalyst.independent.org/2023/04/04/us-seized-gold/