I saw this on the wires the other day. South Africa is no longer trendy so the West ignores it, but it offers a glimpse of our future.

South Africa’s University of Cape Town (UCT) was rocked by racially-motivated destruction Tuesday, as a group of students looted several buildings and made a bonfire out of portraits and photographs of white people.

At UCT, a movement calling itself “Rhodes Must Fall” has been seeking to make the university provide more benefits and accommodations for poor students. It has also been seeking to stamp out the legacy of white leaders (in particular Cecil Rhodes) from the era when South Africa was dominated by those of European descent.
The protest movement took a destructive turn Tuesday, apparently prompted by university officials’ request that protesters move a shack they had constructed on Residence Road near several dormitories. The students responded by breaking into several nearby residential buildings, robbing them of portraits and photographs, as well as furniture and other materials, according to News24.

The portraits and photographs, which apparently were mostly or entirely of white people, were piled up and set ablaze.

When I was a young man, one of things that seemed obvious to me was that the fads and tastes of rich people did not scale down to poor people. Seeing communities go from two parent working-class families to divorced mothers and single middle-aged men, it was not hard to see that easy divorce was a terrible idea. Rich people can afford to bust up the marriage. They can carry the cost of a broken home.

Easy divorce was one of the worst things to hit the working classes, but it was not the only rich man fad to wash through the lower ranks. Casual drug use is one obvious example. The sexual revolution is another. These are things that are tolerable when you are immune from the want of money. They are a disaster when you must maintain the delicate balance required of the lower classes.

Not so long ago the rich understood this. They also believed they had an obligation to set a good example for the lower ranks. They also supported laws that backstopped these healthy customs. In fact, a good way to lose your place in society was to fail in your duty to set a proper example.

Today, of course, our elites compete with one another to see who can be the most offensive to decent people. The further down into the gutter they look for inspiration, the more they are celebrated by the culture czars. For instance, black culture is now the high culture, while stodgy old white guys are the butt of jokes.

It’s tempting to think this is deliberate and orchestrated. Guys like Steve Sailer argue that swinging a wrecking ball through the cultural institutions that hold up the middle-class is just part of the war of top and bottom versus the middle. It’s easy to see why people think that. The emergence of a global over-class does correlate to the collapse of middle and working class values in the West.

It strikes me that the root is the weird new religion of anti-racism, egalitarianism and multiculturalism. Even assuming nothing but good intentions, the resulting product is just a ragged anti-white ideology that celebrates every human pathology at the expense of Western tradition, simply because white is bad, meaning non-white is good.

Again, these trends have been a disaster for the working classes and increasingly hard on the middle-class in Western countries. Whatever benefits have accrued to the elites will inevitably be short lived, simply based on math. Rich white countries can afford to indulge in cultural nonsense for a while. Sweden is an obvious example.

In a world where whites are outnumbered even in their own lands, this is a civilizational catastrophe. This brings us back to South Africa. It is a click or two away from facing the same fate as Rhodesia in the last century. Life expectancy in South Africa was 64 when Apartheid ended. Now it’s 56, the same as in Somalia. South Africa is the rape capital of the world, where “corrective rape” is increasingly common.

In a world increasing dominated by Africans, a religion of “hate whitey” is not going to turn out very well for whitey. Since whitey is responsible for the creation of and preservation of civilization, this spells doom for the civilized world. The lesson of South Africa is the lesson for the world. The people in charge need to do what must be done to maintain the pillars of civilization, even when they don’t like it.