Of course, I read this with great regret and sadness, because it’s my home town being written off:
Johannesburg: The slow death of a city that may have outlived its purpose
Johannesburg is in an advanced state of decay, destruction, ruin, crime, waste, and all of it seems, sometimes, like a mirror image of South African society. We grieve over the once-great city in a veritable cult of grief.
But we are too afraid to look in the mirror because our vanity overwhelms our misery — we are, after all, a great people, and a great people we have to remain…
In and around the city, the families and communities in its suburbs and on the periphery are struggling to live full lives. As days and weeks go by, the denizens are losing reason to value their surroundings. The taps run dry frequently, energy supply is interrupted regularly, flagship institutions, and all those little things like roads, pavements, pedestrian crossings, traffic signs, road signs and robots are bleeding like wounds that will not heal on a body in terminal decline.
The city is depleted, and lacking in the nutrients and the energy necessary to bring it back to full functionality.
We can point, as we may, to mismanagement, maladministration, lack of planning, a lack of foresight and vision. We can, also, consider Johannesburg as a city that has reached the end of its natural life and is approaching the end of its purpose.
Johannesburg, as we came to know it, was established by European settler colonists in about 1886 for the sole purpose of exploiting the gold buried in the rocks below. Those gold deposits are finite. If it’s not entirely finite, mining it is becoming more expensive, while demand may well increase.
Yeah, what the hell. It’s just a shell of a place, an aggregation of concrete, glass and tarmac: it’s too difficult to govern or manage, so why bother?
One might also say the same thing about Manhattan or Los Angeles. In fact, one might say the same thing about all the major cities of the world, where concentration of the population has become too difficult and in most cases, too dangerous.
So let the animals take over and feast on the bones. And when the bones are gone and the animals need to go further afield to survive… then what?
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time to go to the range.
Large Scale Parasitic Collection Centers
Everybody feeding off everybody else and nobody contributing anything.
When the larder runs bare the parasites will spread outward and find their just rewards. We wait, ready. ‘Twas ever thus.
I feel the same about Memphis.. I grew up there, rode my bike from the burbs to downtown, went to Memphis State (now University of Memphis) after my time with Uncle Sam. Still have a brother living there. It’s now one of the top murder capitals of the south. The neighborhood I grew up in went from quiet blue collar to sketchy shithole. There’s no rescuing it and there’s nothing left for me there but memories and the graves of my parents.
Know how you feel. Grew up when a trip to Memphis was a real treat, and wasn’t afraid to go anywhere in the city.
Now, I live “out in the county” and only go into Memphis when I absolutely have no other choice.
I never set foot out of the house unarmed, even in the county, because “vibrant urban youth”.
One of my out-of-town sons asked me if I carried a gun when I went to Memphis.
I replied, “No, when I go to Memphis, I carry TWO guns.”
I refuse to say anything about Manhattan; particularly not after a bunch of crazed worshippers of a paedo prophet brought down an beautiful edifice, a monument to American business, has now elected a mayor of the same religion, who has promised to bring down the rest of the island employing a different, but just as effective measure.
the way I have seen cities devolve, I think each should be surrounded by a river with the bridges being choke points. When the cities sink low enough into the primordial ooze, destroy the bridges.
I travel to & through Oregon quite a bit for work, and have for the last 15 years. The difference between now & then is striking. Portland and Salem were always leftist shitholes, but most of the outlying towns were still pretty well taken care of. Now the entire state feels like it’s given up. The outlying towns were legislated out of keeping their place nice, so there’s an apathetic despair of “what’s the point of even trying anymore?” Oregon has succeeded in forcing the whole state to be Portland. Washington state is probably 5 years behind the full on “giving up” stage, but its coming.
New York, LA, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Capetown – same sad story all.
When blacks run a place anywhere in the world for more than a few terms, corruption, decay, violence, disease, misery, anarchy and death inevitably follow.
One only has to look at what was and compare that to what is. What was was designed, built, used and maintained by whites, and what is was used, allowed to rot and often looted into ruin by the non-whites who drove the whites out and took over. In sub-Saharan Africa, there are still pre-WWII masonry buildings and steel bridges standing that were built during Europeans’ African colonial eras all over Africa, but now the Euros are gone along with their knowledge, and the roads around the structures have crumbled into muddy tracks and inter-city roads and railroads are overgrown with jungle so badly that hardly a motor scooter can pass along the muddy path to get from city to city, and the once beautiful buildings are filthy, graffitied, peeling, sad structures with broken windows and sagging doors. “New” construction is mostly tin and tarpaper slum shacks mingled with with so-called streets that are literally open sewers.
About a century ago, W. E. B. DuBois hoped The Talented Tenth would lift American blacks out of their miasma of ignorance and Jim Crow racism, but their number wasn’t sufficient to carry the mass of the other 90%, and in recent times the Ten Percent are fleeing their black erstwhile compatriots’ neighborhoods, villages and cities and are moving into white areas, because they don’t want to live there either. I have to believe even they see the problems in black communities as incurable, while not being willing to admit it. Notice the Obamas, for all their rhetoric, are living in Martha’s Vineyard and the Kalorama area of DC, not Newark or SE DC.
It is a sad reality we and Africa face, and no Savior has appeared to solve the problem.
Kim wrote an essay years ago “Let Africa Sink”, and sinking it is and sink it will, as long as blacks with their primitive tribal cultural values run the show.
Explained well here.
https://thelawdogfiles.substack.com/p/you-can-take-the-clans-out-of-africa
A local priest tells the Navy SEAL team to “Go with God” as they evacuate refugees. Lt. Waters replies, “God already left Africa,”
Let Africa sink. well, it is.
Whites build. Blacks destroy.
Cities were evolutionary responses to certain conditions that arguably no longer pertain. They made sense for trade, transport and defense in classical history, which dovetailed seamlessly into the industrial revolution. They also served humankind’s propensity for birds of a feather to flock together, which is the social aspect of mutual defense. Existing cities are artifacts of their old use case. The only new cities to have been founded in the last 100 years or so are in China, to provide infrastructure for the manufacturing they have spooled up. When Dad was a corporate envoy to China in the late 1980’s & early 1990s, Shenzhen, China’s premier manufacturing center, literally did not exist. It was created as one of the last acts of their command economy, to capitalize on the impending turnover of Hong Kong before they openly imported Capitalism to fuel their socialism. (Interestingly, there were several other command cities built, and abandoned.)
Cities need to be re-evaluated in light of modern Western context. Having exported manufacturing elsewhere, and having decentralized knowledge work as a whole, the only remaining constructive use cases for cities are cultural and healthcare related. Another grim aspect and purpose that cities serve is as a reservoir for poverty. Humans just tend to wash up there. A few months ago, I had this observation passing through NYC:
https://x.com/JohnLockeson/status/1982861677600084305
“Cities are dumb, brittle places that cannot survive without a constant input stream of food, fuel and supplies. With manufacturing gone and knowledge work decentralized, it’s an open question whether they can even generate (as opposed to capture) enough value to justify their continued existence.
At some level, their residents understand their fragility in their bones, and turn to Big Brother to sort it all out for them.”
And that, I think explains American big cities: they have pivoted from wealth creation to wealth capture, and understand at some level that socialist structures and methods are better adapted to parasitically extracting value from production. With their concentration of votes, they can dominate the political arena, and make best use of the post Constitutional gravy train.