The War Nerd: The Art of Turf War
BY
GARY BRECHER
ON APRIL 19, 2015
There’s a war on now in South African cities, but no one’s calling it what it is. South Africans, mostly Zulu, are attacking shops run by foreigners, driving the aliens (mostly Zimbabwean, Somali, Nigerian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi) out of their neighborhoods.
You can call these “riots” if it makes them seem smaller and safer, but the truth is, this is war. This is what war looks like, most of the time.
Like most wars, this one is undeclared, chronic, unresolvable, and grounded in ethnic hatred. It’s been going on for a long time. How long? Well, where do you want to start? Most of the rioters are Zulu; the Zulu were well on their way to becoming the dominant military power in all of South Africa when they met another, even grimmer power, the British Empire. That broke their power, but not their sense of being the rightful owners of a substantial chunk of the Southeastern corner of the continent. Now the Zulu have to figure out what they’re doing in a multi-ethnic, impoverished South Africa, and like most ethnic groups, they’ve chosen to focus on the most visible and vulnerable group around, the alien-looking and -sounding small businesspeople in their neighborhoods. Jews in Eastern Europe,
South Asians in Uganda,
Igbo in Northern Nigeria, or Chinese in just about all of SE Asia (
here,
here,
here).
In fact, during our three months in East Timor, there were trucks going around with loudspeakers blasting “Chinese get out now!” And rumor had it that the police had been told to do a very tight check on the visas on anyone who looked Chinese. When you’ve been in Timor a while, “Chinese” means someone taller and paler, better dressed and not as hard as the Timorese norm. You start to realize how fluid all these racial/ethnic differences are. I never thought of Chinese as tall in California but in East Timor that’s what you look for, tall and pale.
It’s a very typical pattern—standard human behavior, I’m sorry to say—with the bigger but less financially savvy ethnic group asserting its power through pogrom against the smaller, wealthier aliens.
Pogrom, like it or not (and what’s to like, really?) is one of the most common faces of war. War isn’t usually anything like a fair fight. Why should it be? Would you lead your favorite brother into a “fair fight” with people who have cannon and rifles? That’s basically insane, especially when there are much easier, safer ways to make war.
One of the weirdest things about war buffs is that they read every book they can find about Gettysburg, Waterloo, and Stalingrad while ignoring all the real wars happening now. There’s this nostalgia for battles between large groups of men in uniform, under a straightforward chain of command, meeting to blow each other to pieces.
That’s one of the faces of war, but not the most important one. Most wars, over the long span of human history, are turf wars by smaller, informal groups. These are wars without big battles, for the simple reason that big battles get a lot of your people killed. You have to be in a pretty insanely enthusiastic mood to do Pickett’s Charge. It makes a lot more sense to do what South Africans are doing now, if your goal is to drive the enemy (whoever strikes you as being the enemy) out of your district.
You know how many people have died in the attacks on foreigners in South Africa, so far? Six. Six KIA. Compare that to one day at Gettysburg, Waterloo, or Stalingrad, and you see the effectiveness of this kind of low-level war. It may not be pretty, terrorizing small businesses, but then war isn’t a very pretty business in general. The only people who think it is are the ones who spend their lives gaming Gettysburg and Waterloo, and the only reason they think that is that they’ve never experienced post-amputation in a field hospital in the hot American summer, after a Minie ball shattered your ankle. That isn’t pretty at all, from what I’ve read. And there were more than 50,000 men who went through something like that in three days at Gettysburg.
Compare that to what the Zulu are doing in South Africa, and you develop a kind of…well, maybe not “respect,” but let’s say, “appreciation” of low-level urban warfare using exemplary terror instead of mass casualties.
Violence like what’s happening in South African cities now is a good illustration of what the fat guy said in “Apocalypse Now”: “Terror is your friend.” In fact, you could argue, if you were being cynical, that terror is kinder than conventional war in some ways. To drive the Army of Northern Virginia out of one corner of Pennsylvania, more than 50,000 men had to die; to drive thousands of immigrant shopkeepers out of Durban and Johannesburg, so far only six have died.
We’re talking about exemplary terror, where one death resonates so widely that it has more effect than thousands of battle casualties in conventional war. There’s always been a tradition of this kind of killing (it’s one of the reasons that tribes and armies are so inventive about all the ways you can make prisoners die slowly and agonizingly), but as more and more people get jammed into the cellphone world, it becomes more and more effective, and the set-piece battle where you count casualties by the thousand starts to seem more and more like a cruel waste of time.
Text messages have been very effective in driving out foreign businesspeople in South Africa. Armies talk a lot about “force multipliers,” but it’s hard to imagine anything more effective than a single text message, a few million electrons, forcing thousands of people to flee. And that’s what’s
just happenedin South Africa:
Late on Thursday a widely disseminated text message claimed that “a train of Zulus” had departed for Johannesburg.
‘These men are armed and they are going to be killing any foreigner they meet tomorrow,’ the text message said.
The source of these messages remains unclear, but their proliferation has sowed panic and confusion among migrant communities.
While these rumours have so far, proven to be false, its effects have already been felt.
Foreign owned stores around Johannesburg have been closed for at least two days already.
‘The unfounded rumours have caused more damage to our members than anything else,’ [a representative of the foreign businesspeople] said.
And c’mon here, this isn’t so new to Americans. You, or if not you then your parents, went through “the riots.”
Watts,
Detroit,
DC, Baltimore, Chicago . . . the list goes on. Those riots are usually
blamedfor accelerating neighborhood segregation and white flight from the cities, but in most ethnic war, getting the enemy tribe out of your turf is the point, not an unwanted side effect. It was definitely, explicitly, the point of the previous generation of race riots in the US. These were white riots (Yeah, the fukking stupid Clash, don’t even get me started on those waterheads…)—
real white riots, attacking any dark face they met, killing black and brown people in the nastiest ways they could.
So it’s not a matter of blame, if your goal is to get the foreign shopkeepers out and you succeed in driving them out. That’s, uh, success. It may be a short-sighted or immoral success, but we’re talking war here, and morality doesn’t do well in that habitat.
This kind of low-level urban war usually works. It worked to maintain and increase ethnic segregation in both rounds of white vs. black riots in the US, and worked far more effectively against the Chinese on the
West Coast of the US in the late 19th and early 20th century. The anti-Chinese fever that hit West-Coast whites in the late 19th century resulted in the
Chinese Exclusion Act, specifically barring Chinese immigrants to the US.
So, with enough momentum, the low-level urban killings happening now in South Africa can lead to permanent, official segregation designed to keep out the people you fear. Most of the time, these people belong to a group with more experience in small business, or willing to work for lower wages. It’s always about money, but that doesn’t mean that the ethnic dimension is an illusion, as hard-core Leftists always insist, because (in case you haven’t noticed), money isn’t distributed evenly, and ethnicity is one of the ways it gets un-evened up. I’m speaking a dominant language here, a conquest language, which makes it more likely I’m rich. Alas, in my case . . . well, long story, but still, most of the time, the generalization holds.
What’s confusing for a lot of Americans is that unlike our seemingly simple notion of “race” as a matter of skin color, the South African riots aren’t about black vs. white. Most of the small shopkeepers being terrorized into fleeing are black Africans, and the rest are brown immigrants from South Asia. The difference isn’t white/black, but then that’s a specifically American way of seeing “race,” and a very rare one in world history. Most of the “race” disputes in history have been about which language you speak, which god you grovel to, and how you make a living rather than what shade you are.
The
immigrants are competing at the lower, and lower-middle, end of the economic spectrum. There may be something like three million
Zimbabweans in South Africa a very big minority when you consider the total
population is about 52 million.
Most of these Zimbabwean immigrants are just trying for day-labor jobs (skilled Zimbabweans tend to go to richer countries like the UK rather than South Africa). But that’s the kind of immigration that often makes people angriest, because it hits at the lowest-paid workers, the ones who are just getting by even before they’re swamped by desperate immigrants.
...this ain't the 1860s no more you got freedom now...if at any time the white man don't want me here I'll take my Haitian ass back to Haiti in a heartbeat...
...the same white man who was or is "keeping him down"
...
about this cac?
..black people acting like scorned hoes that can't let a nikka go...
