Donald Trump is the icon of 21st-century vacuity, and I am no fan. But give the devil his due, he is a kind of vacuum cleaner: he has the ability to spot a vacuum and exploit it. He saw one in diplomacy towards North Korea and cleaned it up. Likewise with the export of US jobs and, in August, he blasted the world with his empty-headed responses to crime in SA. There is no genocide being carried out against farmers in SA, that much we know. But there is something extremely perverse about a fair fraction of a key economic sector being killed off, with everyone from the government to Afrikaner liberals just shrugging and saying it’s normal, crime as usual. A diplomat once told me there was only one country he hated more to be posted to than SA, and that was Israel because of its treatment of the Palestinians. The excessive criminal violence in SA he regarded as extraordinary, but even worse for him was the apparent unwillingness of the ANC government to assert itself against criminals....

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