The main question that comes up when looking at states that used to be successful and now are disaster zones, namely former European colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America, is how they ended up the way they are. Why did Argentina go from being one of the wealthiest countries on a per capita basis to an economy known for instability and inflation? Why did Rhodesia go from being the breadbasket of Africa to an inflation-wracked and famine-riddled disaster zone? And, as this article will explain, how did South Africa go from being a prosperous and stable society, the last one so remaining on the Dark Continent, to a land known mainly for its horrific murder stories and criminal gangs?

In South Africa’s case, we have already told part of the story: the Western world partnered with the communist world to destroy it after doing much the same thing to Rhodesia. Unlike Rhodesia, however, where betrayal and embargoes were the prime reasons it was destroyed, there is another factor in South Africa’s decline. That additional factor is that George Soros and what became his Open Society Foundation got involved and pried what was a successful, closed society open, wrecking it in the process.

Listen to the audio version of this episode here:

The root of Soros’s hatred for the old South Africa wasn’t necessarily that apartheid inflicted petty but constant indignities upon the lower orders, but rather that it was a closed society rather than an open society.

For those who don’t know, the closed vs. open society paradigm was popularised by Karl Popper in the wake of World War 2. The idea, essentially, is that a closed society is one of rigid tradition and hierarchical rule, much like Rhodesia, Britain before the Reform Acts, nearly every Medieval and Renaissance state, or the abominable Nazi government. As can be seen from the sort of societies that were to some extent closed, closed societies ran the gamut from good, like Britain, to evil, like the NSDAP, and the system itself was not, historically, evil. It only became considered so after World War 2 thanks to Popper and his acolytes, namely Soros. They saw closed societies as being evil, as they were essentially illiberal and not open to what they would call progress, and what their tradition-minded enemies would call subversion. Open societies, by contrast, are ones of egalitarianism and political rights, and can generally be thought of as liberal democracies.

South Africa was, under apartheid, very much a closed society. While the whites had political rights, the society was deeply hierarchical, split between, to use their terms, whites, Indians, coloureds (mixed race), and blacks. Further, it was a deeply Afrikaner country, having been so for hundreds of years before apartheid (the groups who would become the Afrikaners were largely there before the Zulus arrived), and so was deeply tradition-focused. However, that was, to some extent, changing by the last decade or so of apartheid. As Ronald Reagan noted in 1986, “Black workers have been permitted to unionize, to bargain collectively and build the strongest free trade union movement in all of Africa. The infamous pass laws have been ended, as have many of the laws denying blacks the right to live, work and own property in South Africa’s cities. Citizenship wrongly stripped away has been restored to nearly 6 million blacks. Segregation in universities and public facilities is being set aside.”

By contrast, most Western societies were, by the same time, entirely open. Centuries of tradition had been burned on the altar of liberal democracy, with old national customs, traditions, and forms of governance wiped away by the time 1970 rolled around. The UK’s landed elite and its traditions were mostly gone, the French monarchy and aristocracy were firmly replaced by democracy, and America’s regional differences were melting away as Big Business capitalism replaced local customs and the federal government got more and more involved in daily life. With the exception of the peerage having something of a resurgence, or at least holding steady, those trends have only worsened since but were still present half a century ago. It is that ideal of an open society, a mass democracy, that led Soros to help destroy South Africa.

Unlike most theories of Western destruction involving billionaire financier George Soros, the one involving South Africa is one that both he and his son Alex brag about. Like Muslims building mosques on the site of their victories, the Soroses seemingly can’t help but admit that they turned the last functional country left in Africa into the anarchic hellhole it is today.

Here is how George Soros himself described his involvement in South Africa, something he described as the beginning of his “philanthropic work,” and how the theory of an open society is what got him involved:

The concept of open society was first proposed by a French philosopher, Henri Bergson, in his essay: “Two Sources of Morality and Religion”. It said that one source of morality is traditional, and that is associated with closed societies; and the other is universal, and that is associated with open societies.

The philosopher Karl Popper, very much influenced by fascism and communism, argued in the 1940s that universal ideas can also pose a threat to the concept of open society, if those ideologies claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth. Because the ultimate truth is not attainable by humans, those who claim to be in possession can impose their will only through repressive measures. He proposed the idea of an open society based on the recognition of our imperfect understanding, which requires critical thinking and tolerance for dissenting opinion, freedom of speech, freedom of association—so, in fact, a liberal democracy.

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I started my philanthropic work first in South Africa, which had all the institutions of an open society, but it was closed and racialized; then I began work in Hungary and Poland; and then, one thing led to another, and I developed a network within the former Soviet Empire. As the Soviet system collapsed in a very revolutionary period, I established foundations in some 26 or so countries. When things calmed down, I concentrated on the problems of globalization, and, in fact, the foundation went global.

Then, to my greatest astonishment, I found that principles of open society are endangered in my own adopted country, in the most established open society, the United States. I became involved personally and politically, but that is a subject for another day.

Soros also described South Africa as “a closed society with all the institutions of a first world country, but they were off limits to the majority of the population on racial grounds.” He added, “Where could I find a better opportunity for opening up a closed society?“

In other words, Soros looked to South Africa and saw a country that was functional but closed, and so saw it as an opportunity to try out the playbook for turning a closed society into an open, “liberal democracy.” He succeeded in 1994, about a decade and a half after his involvement in South Africa began, and the consequences for white and black South Africans alike have been awful.

Alex Soros, the son of George Soros, the current head of the Open Society Foundation (OSF) (Soros’s appropriately named charity), and the likely heir to the financier’s fortune, bragged about his dad’s work in destroying South Africa as well, providing a few more details. He said:

This year, the Open Society Foundation for South Africa celebrates its 25th anniversary. My father opened the Foundation in Cape Town in 1993, on the eve of the country’s first democratic elections the following year. I had the extraordinary honor of meeting Nelson Mandela around that time, and I remember sitting rapt, listening to him talk about his experiences in prison and leading the struggle for South Africa’s liberation from apartheid. I grew up knowing how important South Africa’s story is, and the country’s progress has informed both my and my father’s views of what is possible.

My father first visited the country in 1979. He went to see a friend he’d met in New York who had returned to his home country to teach. My father’s friend took him places white South Africans rarely visited—such as Soweto and Transkei—and introduced him to people in the townships, as well as anti-apartheid activists of all backgrounds. At that time, South Africa was the epitome of a closed society. Due to apartheid, the overwhelming majority of South Africans were deprived of basic rights, and any South African could pay with their life if they ran afoul of the apartheid regime.

My father felt compelled to act, and he started by providing bursaries for 80 black students to study at the University of Cape Town, which at the time was a predominantly white university. The operating theory was that with education, black South Africans could be the leaders of a democratic country if it overcame racial prejudices and economic and political exclusion. This was his very first major act of philanthropy and the beginning of a journey that eventually led to the creation of the Open Society Foundations.

Ignored in that spiel is that Mandela was imprisoned for terrorist activities; he was the head of the communist-trained and communist-minded ANC’s military wing, and he was involved in bombings of civilian buildings. Also ignored by Alex Soros is that South Africa’s apartheid system’s worst aspects were, as Reagan noted, being voluntarily done away with in a way that preserved order in the country before Soros got involved. But get involved he did, as Alex further noted, saying he got involved with scholarships. Then came a bigger level of involvement in the 80s:

In the 1980s, apartheid seemed entrenched, and the prospects for a peaceful handover of power seemed remote. But in 1987, my father was asked by leading anti-apartheid figures to finance a meeting in Senegal between the banned African National Congress and white business leaders, academics, writers, and journalists. The conference that followed—the Dakar Conference, as it’s remembered today—was one important step on South Africa’s long road to democracy.

It should be noted that South Africa already had “democracy” before Mandela was given the reins of power and the country collapsed. It simply had a limited franchise rather than being a mass democracy like America, where even violent felons can vote, and their vote counts the same as a doctor’s.

Alex Soros says that post-apartheid, the OSF in South Africa was engaged in activities like “working with the Mandela administration to build houses for black communities through equity partnerships” and “funding all major NGOs that work in communities to advance socio-economic rights.”

Those inside South Africa have a less cheery view of what the Soros clan and its OSF are up to. For example, Dr. Phillip Dexter, a South African politician and chairman of the Armaments Corporation of South Africa (ARMSCOR), noted that the OSF is a “Trojan horse” that carries American leftism into South Africa. As he put it, “We’ve long known that the Soros Foundation, as we’ve seen it, is a front. It’s an NGO, funded like that, but it’s co-funded in many of its programs by the [US] National Endowment for Democracy and various other sources of funds. And essentially they push a liberal agenda and their idea is to try and transform all countries into essentially copies of the USA.” Dr. Dexter added, “I think we must actually monitor them very closely and make sure that we don’t allow them to get away with the kind of excesses that they do. Because, you see they have what we call soft regime change agendas, the one with the media, the press, NGOs and that. But all the time they’re also preparing for what you call hard regime change, which, in the end, they will actually mobilize people to overthrow the government, as we saw the so-called, the orange revolutions in Eastern Europe and that type of thing.”

Similarly, Dr. Roysln Fuller, who wrote “Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose,” said that the OSF is focused on pushing the society in which it sits to be “very liberal,” saying, “So I think what you could see in Africa is possibly a repeat of Eastern Europe, where, as we know, Soros and the Open Society Foundations have involved themselves for many years trying to push those societies to be very, very liberal, which has resulted in a lot of cases of those societies becoming less liberal.“

Joining them was macro analyst Alex Krainer, who noted that the OSF tends to destabilize society and be quite divisive. In his words, “While they profess seemingly laudable goals and principles that seem attractive and desirable to many people, values like education, freedom of expression, environment, social justice; in practice, Open Society Foundations always end up having a divisive influence in society and often participate in destabilizing activities.“

Continuing, he noted that the OSF uses its progressive rhetoric to trick people into supporting its agenda, which is quite bad for the host country. As he put it, “Open Society Foundations always latches onto progressive sounding agendas, ostensibly to help those who are disadvantaged and marginalized . . . But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In the end, all that passion gets diverted to Open Society Foundations’ ultimate agendas, which are aligned with the interests of the Western occult oligarchy.”

In short, George Soros’s OSF came to South Africa with the goal of prying it open, as it was a tradition-minded, closed society. It then used its cheery progressive rhetoric to pave the road to hell by doing its usual sort of thing, using leftist rhetoric to pull politicians into its orbit and advance an “open society” agenda, something the end of apartheid and Mandela did. They succeeded widely in that goal, gaining great influence in South Africa (South African politicians still meet with them), and the result is that South Africa is currently an open society and an utterly horrible place to live for nearly everyone involved.

As one pastor put it, describing Soros’s role in destroying South Africa and turning it into the hellhole it is today, “[Soros] divided South Africa with this open society, removed the culture, removed the law, removed the foundation of the society, turned the races against one another, and then you take the nation and you create now an open society.”

Alex Soros added, describing the effect of the OSF’s work in South Africa, “This work is taking place in what was once an implacably closed and repressive country. While there is no denying that South Africa still faces enormous challenges, there are abundant reasons to be hopeful.” So, what does that “hopeful” situation look like? That we’ll explore below.

The effect of Western involvement in South Africa, namely the sanctions/embargo regime and Soros’s OSF-based subversion, is that the country is an utterly horrible place to live, whether one is white or black. Namely, the transition to “open society” has empowered the vengeful Zulu plurality and Xhosa minority (Mandela was a Xhosa), with dire economic results and widespread crime turning South Africa into a dangerous hellhole.

Whereas pre-1994 South Africa had a quite strong economy, albeit one injured by sanctions, the economic legacy of Mandela and the ANC gaining power is an obbession with DEI and a faltering economy.

One of the manifold economic issues South Africa faces, thanks to it being pried into an open society, is an incredibly awful welfare situation. As of 2023, 24 million South Africans, most of them black, received welfare grants, while a mere 7.4 million South Africans paid taxes. That 3.24-to-1 grant-to-taxpayer ratio is, of course, entirely unsustainable. Further, though such a welfare grant-to-taxpayer ratio is a millstone around the neck of the country, the leftist ANC sees the welfare system as an achievement.

That’s still not all. In addition to the welfare system, South Africa has an outright “reparations” program for “victims of apartheid.” That program amounts to yet another transfer program through which the overburdened productive part of the population has to see its income flow to unproductive friends of the ANC, which is exactly what one would expect of liberal democracy, the goal of Soros’s OSF, as in a democracy the wolves can always vote to eat the sheep for dinner.

Somehow, welfare are reparations are but a drop in the bucket of South Africa’s economic issues. Though millstones, they are mere featherweights compared to South Africa’s government-mandated DEI policies.

The affirmative action problem is the result of multiple laws, the biggest of which are Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) laws. B-BBEE aims to “redress the inequalities of the past in every sphere: political, social and economic” and “promote economic transformation and enable meaningful participation of black people in the South African economy, through increased participation in ownership and management structures, increasing the involvement of communities and employees in economic activities and skills training.” It does so by, consulting firm Baker Mckenzie notes, requiring that “every organ of state and public entity must apply any relevant code of good practice issued in terms of the B-BBEE Act when, amongst other things, determining the qualification criteria for the issuing of licenses, permits or other authorizations, when determining their procurement policies and when developing criteria for entering into partnerships with the private sector.”

In short, B-BBEE requires racial preferences in hiring and promotion and handing shares of ownership to blacks. The state measures compliance via a scoring system that tracks compliance based on how companies use racial preferences to hire black workers, promote those black workers to management positions, and hand company ownership to blacks. As the state’s organs only engage private companies in procurement contracts and issue licenses and authorizations if they comply with the B-BBEE requirements, the laws effectively burden all private industries that either do business with the government or require any sort of license to operate.

One of the best examples of B-BBEE’s bitter fruits is the story of Eskom, South Africa’s electric utility. Eskom is devoted to B-BBEE compliance and has even considered firing thousands of experienced white workers to ensure it meets the B-BBEE racial requirements. Predictably, that has gone less than well, and the country is now on the verge of a potentially weeks-long, if not irreversible, blackout:

South Africa is on the verge of “collapse” amid rolling blackouts and warnings a total power grid failure could lead to mass rioting on the scale of a “civil war”.

Western embassies including the United States and Australia have advised their citizens in the country to stock up on “several days worth” of food and water and be on high alert during extended blackouts sweeping the country.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a national “state of disaster” on February 9 in response to the record electricity shortage, which has seen state-owned power company Eskom institute rolling blackouts – dubbed “load shedding” – lasting up to 12 hours in some cases.

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The US Overseas Security Advisory Council convened a meeting with representatives from several large US-based corporations with operations in South Africa, as well as a number of local companies, to discuss business security concerns amid the energy crisis.

At the meeting, a recording of which was viewed by MyBroadband, a US government official said while a total power grid failure was unlikely, it was “something we need to start thinking about”.

They said one of the biggest dangers was the amount of time required to bring the system back online from a total collapse.

“Eskom estimates, in the best case scenario, it would take six to 14 days to restart the power grid,” the official said. “There are a few feeder lines from other countries, but not enough to help with a black start situation.”

The official warned of mass looting and civil unrest if the grid collapsed, quoting an unnamed individual as saying, “What’s left after a blackout would be what was left after a civil war.”

B-BBEE isn’t the only issue South Africa has in terms of affirmative action and DEI. The Employment Equity Amendment Act, which became law in April 2023, requires “equity,” meaning racial-ratio-based employee representation of staff members in all companies employing 50 people or more.

The racial discrimination issue isn’t limited to employment. It’s also a major feature of South African university admissions:

Race has over the years been a key feature of admissions in South African universities. Under apartheid, universities used race-based admission policies to exclude the majority of Black students from access to higher education in general, and from well-resourced historically white universities in particular. Drawing from the constitution, which advocates for “fair discrimination,” or affirmative action, universities in the postapartheid era developed inclusive race-based policies aimed at redressing these inequities. The government set targets for the number of Black students for universities to admit, which, by doing so, deracialize and diversify their student demographics.”

It is now more or less impossible for white students, even when far more qualified than black applicants, to gain admission to centers of higher education, even including veterinary schools. So, while the economy struggles to be productive, the university system refuses to mint graduates who might fix it, or at least be productive and contribute to society.

The result is that South Africa’s economy is devolving, both in terms of complexity and even just in being able to employ people. As even Harvard admitted in a study titled “Growth Through Inclusion in South Africa,” things are looking quite poor for the country:

The early 1990s marked a victory for generations of freedom fighters, and the future of an inclusive South Africa was set in motion. There was no telling what could be accomplished with the full force of South Africa’s human capabilities, creativity, and resilience in combination with its industrialized economy and established comparative advantages in global trade.

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The Rainbow Nation seemed poised to leverage its substantial economic assets at full strength. In 1995, South Africa supported the 47th most complex economy in the world — on par with China (ranked 46th) and far ahead of any other African nation (Tunisia was next at 66th). There was good reason to believe that the economy would grow rapidly, and opportunity would expand to many more South Africans.

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South Africa’s economy is stagnating and, in fact, losing capabilities, export diversity, and competitiveness. While the racial composition of wealth at the top has changed, wealth concentration in South Africa has not and remains very high. Moreover, the broader structures of the economy have not allowed for the inclusion of the labor and talents of South Africans — black, white, and otherwise.

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Income per capita has been falling for over a decade. Unemployment at over 33% is the world’s highest, and youth unemployment exceeds 60%. Poverty has risen to 55.5% based on the national poverty line, yet many more households depend on government transfers to sustain meager livelihoods.

That’s what “inclusive” South Africa turned into, thanks largely to its transition from a closed society focused on tradition and prosperity to an open one focused on “inclusion.”

Americans often wonder what “the end of the world as we know it” will be like. If you want a glimpse at an even more chaotic, Mad Max-style hell, just look to South Africa’s fallen cities like Johannesburg and Durban, or to its illegal mining gangs, copper thieves, cash-in-transit robbers, and farm attackers. In fact, as of 2023, South Africa was the most crime-ridden, violent country in Africa. Yes, it’s even worse than Somalia.

The crime issue takes many forms. For example, there are illegal mining operations called zama zamas that essentially operate as private armies mixed with low-tech mining operations. K9 Reaper, a South African community safety professional, described them to us by saying: “There’s another serious issue – zama-zama’s. They are illegal gold miners who use the old mining systems to mine gold-bearing ore. They’re heavily armed and operate on the same level as terrorists, complete with supply chains and training camps. They have tunneled all over the West Rand in Johannesburg and can access any area of the city as a result.”

Other crime issues include copper cable thievery and truck robberies, particularly of cash-carrying trucks. Describing those two crimes, K9 told us, “Another big issue is copper cable theft. During rolling blackouts – of which we have many daily – copper cable thieves will steal electrical cable. And because our country lacks the funds, supplies, and manpower to replace the stolen cable, a repair can take weeks. Which leaves you in the dark” and “We have trucks ambushed and looted daily. Trucks are literally ambushed to be looted. Rocks are placed under tires, drivers are sometimes murdered, and the contents of the truck are taken. This happens on a daily basis.”

While those special sorts of crime are particularly bad, violent crime generally is worse than one might imagine of America after the apocalypse. Again according to K9: “South Africa is in serious trouble . . . We have 2 to 3 violent incidents of civil unrest daily, 80 murders daily, 80 hijackings daily, one woman raped every 4 minutes, and 3 to 4 kids murdered daily.”

Even NPR, not known for its realist view of crime, noted that crime in South Africa is spiraling out of control and that private security is all but a necessity for those who can afford it:

[A robbery is] an all-too-common story in South Africa, a country that in the past year has seen an average of 75 killings and 400 robberies with aggravating circumstances every day, according to official statistics. While it may be Africa’s most developed country, it also has one of the highest violent crime rates in the world.

Experts have warned that the South African police are losing the battle against crime — and that has led those citizens who can afford it to turn to a booming private security industry.

“It’s not getting better, it is getting worse,” said Anton Koen, a former police officer who now runs a private security firm that specializes in tracking and recovering hijacked and stolen vehicles. “The murder rate is the highest in 20 years, violence is getting worse because our justice system seems to be failing us, the public of South Africa.”

All that is without including the worst form of crime in South Africa, or at least the most horrific: farm attacks. In such attacks, criminals, break into farms and kill the inhabitants in horrific ways, often motivated less by the desire to rob than the desire to inflict horrific pain and suffering upon the primarily white inhabitants. K9 Reaper described to us the sickening pain inflicted upon innocent victims and the racial angle of the attacks:

Ok, so farm attacks in South Africa are extremely brutal events. You’ve got people who are breaking into farms, farmhouses, etc. And they’re not just taking stuff. They’re staying for hours and hours once they’ve brutally tortured these individuals.

Now, the torture can be anything from pouring boiling water over them to literally putting their babies in stoves, burning them with hot irons, shoving broken glass bottles up female anatomy, dragging alive individuals behind vehicles, hanging them, burning them. It’s really, whatever you can imagine as the worst torture method possible; that’s what these individuals are doing.

And one of the favorites, unfortunately, is to attack the farmhouse, break-in, and it tends to always involve rape, unfortunately. So they will rape the daughter, no matter how old she is. Whether she is five years old, ten years old, twenty, etc. And they’ll rape the mother, all the other females. And they do it in front of the males, every single time. The male family members will obviously be tied up, usually shot in the leg, then they’ll proceed to rape the other family members in front of them. Now usually, when they do the rape thing, it usually involves someone dying. And it’s usually the male member of the household because they tend to shoot them when they leave.

Farm attacks seem to be a very racially driven thing in South Africa…at the end of the day, the attacks are mostly blacks attacking whites because that’s just how it is. And somehow, that’s just not apparent enough for people to accept. And, obviously, there’s the brutality behind it when it comes to blacks attacking whites with regard to farm attacks. There’s definitely a racial element to it.

One example is representative of what sorts of crimes occur in these horrific attacks. In a 2011 farm attack, a boy was drowned in boiling water, and his mother was sexually assaulted and killed:

A 12-year-old boy was drowned in boiling water and his mother raped and killed in a violent house invasion in South Africa.

Three men, one of them the family’s gardener, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to breaking into the family’s home in Walkerville, Johannesburg, where they attacked Tony Viana, 53, and brutally raped and killed his wife, Geraldine, reported Elite Daily.

The couple’s son, Amaro, was gagged and tied up. He was drowned in a bath of hot water “because he would recognise them”.

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[F]ollowing the hearing, the three men joked and laughed as they walked back to their cell.

The government largely refuses to deal properly with crime, either because it wants it to happen or can’t solve it. 95% of farm murders go unsolved, crime gets worse and worse, police and military personnel are suspected of providing criminals and attackers with equipment like signal jammers and automatic weapons, and the ANC-led government shows a general lack of interest in tackling the country’s immense crime problem.

In addition to crime, there are terrible riots that the government is unable and often unwilling to stop. For example, the country saw widespread rioting in 2021 that resulted in billions of dollars in damages and an unclear number of people killed. While the death toll is unclear and the damage, for a country with a small economy and limited infrastructure, stratospheric, what is clear is that the rioters were stopped not by a state that either couldn’t or wouldn’t stop them, but by armed militias mainly composed of white and Indian civilians who found fighting preferable to seeing their neighborhoods burned and families slaughtered by bloodthirsty criminals.

The pre-Mandela government was able to keep nearly all of this from happening. Crime was low. Farm murderers and huge riots were nearly non-existent. Women could walk safely around cities that glistened rather than be kidnapped and sexually assaulted in cities that stink with raw sewage. The economy functioned, universities produced competent graduates, and things generally functioned. Those were the results of South Africa’s closed society, the system despised and subverted by Soros.

Now South Africa is, generally, an open society. There are elections that matter little given the state of the country, “rights” for all, particularly violent criminals, and anarchy reigns in place of order. Those are the bitter fruits of bringing liberalism to the Dark Continent, and track closely with what happened in Rhodesia and the Congo.

But, of course, that’s not what Soros and the others involved cared about. What was wanted was to destroy the closed society that South Africa was and replace it with an opne one. In terms of that, they succeeded wildly. Unfortunately, he cost is not of concern when ideology is the motive.