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April 3, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:33:37

4046 White Land Expropriation In South Africa | Ernst Roets and Stefan Molyneux

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
	Hope you're doing well. I'm here with Ernst Rutz.
	He is a lawyer and the deputy CEO of Afroforum, a non-governmental organization with the goal of protecting the rights of minorities.
	It's twitter.com forward slash Ernst Rutz, R-O-E-T-S. And the website is afroforum.co.za.
	Ernst, thanks so much for taking the time today.
	Thank you very much and thank you for speaking with me about this issue.
	Well, let's start with a big picture topic and maybe get your thoughts on this.
	One of the things that's both terrifying and frustrating to me, Ernst, is how this cycle of history, where there is a clear targeting of a group within a country by both state and non-state actors, where there is poisonous and hateful rhetoric being poured into the stratosphere, where there are increasing attacks, either somewhat encouraged By public figures or at least implicitly condoned through a lack of reaction.
	This kind of targeting, this kind of cornering, these kinds of actions against particular groups have occurred repetitively throughout history and afterwards everyone says, well that was just terrible, we should make sure that never happens again.
	And then it seems we get drawn into the same cycle again and again and again.
	And that is what is so incredibly frustrating to me, looking at the situation in South Africa.
	Because if things boil to a head, it won't be like there wasn't decades of forewarning.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And I think what you're saying is very important and it's very true.
	And what makes it even worse is how...
	We as an organization, for example, repeatedly have to respond to allegations that we are being intolerant.
	So in South Africa currently, the zeitgeist, to use the term, or the political climate, is one in which the most influential political leaders stand up on public platforms and they would sing songs about killing white people, They would make statements in parliament even and at political rallies and they would say things like all whites are criminals and all whites should be treated as criminals.
	And they would say if you are white then you are a thief or if you are white especially and you own land then you are a land thief regardless of how you got that property, regardless of whether you bought that property.
	And then if we as a minority rights organization say this needs to stop, the hate speech needs to stop, the incitement needs to stop, then we are accused of being intolerant.
	So it really is frustrating.
	But I think the silver lining to this dark cloud is that I think now more than ever we are experiencing that there's much more international interest in what is happening in South Africa and that is why I'm very grateful to be able to talk to you about our situation at the moment.
	It is, of course, it does to some degree go against a leftist identity politics narrative to point out that whites can sometimes be victims and blacks can sometimes be the aggressors.
	Because, of course, we have heard for so long that whites are always the evil oppressors and blacks are always the helpless.
	Victims and I must return of course to my Christian roots to explain this that light and dark goes through the heart of every soul and There is no group that is immune from the temptation to do evil Just as there is no group who can never resist or can never accept the opportunity to do good and this idea that things in South Africa are a lot more complex than people think and that it does appear that That the majority,
	both in terms of demographics and in terms of political power, have set their sights on either the stealing from, the stripping of rights of whites, and in particular the white farmers.
	It's hard to miss, but it goes against the kind of narrative that people have had set up in their minds for so long that it, in fact, asks them to overcome a prejudice which I don't think they're even aware that they have.
	Yes, and it's really...
	It's flabbergasting to listen to some of the views that people express.
	And oftentimes it's views expressed in the mainstream on the biggest radio stations in South Africa and TV networks where people would make comments such as South Africa is a democracy, and in a democracy, you should not be allowed to say that.
	So if we, for example, say that we disagree with land expropriation, people would say, well, we're a democracy, you can't say that, which is very ironic, of course.
	So I don't think people understand.
	I think that's part of the big problem in South Africa is that there's a complete lack of understanding of what the difference between democracy and majoritarianism is.
	So in South Africa, the view or the notion is that democracy means Whoever gets the most votes can do whatever they want.
	They can strip people of their rights.
	And we've heard our former state president, for example, saying in parliament, his exact words were, we are the majority and you are a minority.
	You have less rights because you are a minority.
	Absolutely, that is how democracy works.
	Those were his exact words.
	And we've had many other similar statements from political leaders.
	But I think to get to your question, What we experience in South Africa is a very, very aggressively pursued ideology of entitlement.
	And we see that within these so-called liberation movements trying to run a country, as we've seen across the world, that that has never worked.
	So we have the ANC, for example, which is our ruling party, and then we have other smaller parties such as the EFF, which is even more radical.
	Who would actively say to their members that whatever is wrong with you, whatever troubles you experience in your life, no matter what they are, those troubles are always the fault of someone else.
	And it's explicitly stated that it's the fault of white people.
	So if you are poor, it means that some white person has stolen something from you.
	And at the same time, we have an education system that's in a disaster.
	Literally, more than 80% of our schools in South Africa are dysfunctional, according to data that's available in the public sphere.
	But there's not a need to fix the education system, because to acknowledge that our education system is in shambles would be to acknowledge that part of this illusion would be to focus inwards.
	But it's so aggressively pursued that whatever is wrong with you, it's always someone else's fault.
	And I think that's how we got to this point now where we have politicians openly singing songs about murdering minority communities.
	We have seen this script, as you know, Ernst, play out many times over the last hundred or so years, in particular when a poisonous and toxic and divisive ideology like Marxism begins to gain the ascendancy in a political process.
	We, of course, saw this with the Kulaks.
	In Ukraine in the 1920s, we saw this with the under-Chairman Mao.
	This was seen in the killing fields of Cambodia, that there is this argument put forward that anyone who is successful is an exploiter.
	Anyone who has more than you only has it because they've stolen from you.
	And when you pound this toxic, virulent idea into people's minds, it stokes a very demonic force in their hearts.
	And then they feel that all actions, including Torture, rape, and murder, and so on, may be justified in the just recompense of that which was taken.
	The idea that wealth is created, not always transferred, seems to be beyond the ken of this.
	And what's so frustrating is that we look at the conflict between Marxism and Nazism that was erupting in Germany in the 1930s.
	And we say, well, Nazism has been discredited, and rightly so.
	Evil, toxic ideology of divisiveness, of racism, of socialism, and so on.
	But Marxism is like this weird zombie that continues to march across the intellectual landscape, consuming cultures, countries, entire peoples, and it seems almost impossible for people to say, well, they have a Marxist ideology, that is something that must be strongly opposed because of the disasters it always produces.
	Yeah, it's exactly the case.
	And it's quite strange to listen how people argue this.
	And I'm sure you've heard it a lot, and we hear it regularly in South Africa, when we talk about this policy, for example, about expropriation of people's property without compensating them.
	And we would point out and say, well, that was tried repeatedly.
	It was tried in the Soviet Union, it was tried in communist China, it was tried in Venezuela, in Zimbabwe, and all of these countries.
	And then people would say, yes, but How will we know if it would work here if we don't even try it?
	So this thing about real communism has never been tried.
	I mean, we get this regularly.
	And it's really strange.
	As you've said, I think Nazism was an evil ideology.
	And there are probably different ways in which you can measure how evil an ideology is.
	But if death count is one, then you can certainly say that communism is much worse.
	And we have at the moment in South Africa, or Recently, for example, there was a push by the South African government.
	I'm not sure if they're still pursuing it, but it was in the news about a year ago that they wanted to rename one of the big streets in Pretoria, which is our capital city, to Mao Tse Tung.
	Now Mao Tse Tung is probably the most evil person ever to have been on this earth.
	And we have people making comments within our ruling party who would say that they are inspired, the words they use, by the policies of Robert Mugabe, and they are inspired by Hugo Chavez, they are inspired by Fidel Castro, they are inspired by Joseph Stalin.
	So it's literally, and what we're seeing now in South Africa is, that's the disingenuineness or the dishonesty about this whole policy.
	What we see our government doing is they are aggressively trying to implement The policies that has led to the world's worst economies.
	And you can go down the list from the bottom.
	Basically, you can look at all of those policies.
	That's what we are trying, what they want to do in South Africa.
	And then the argument is, yes, but how will we know if it'll work if we don't even try it?
	It's really flabbergasting.
	And if you disagree with this, then you are labeled a reactionary or a racist or, you know, all sorts of terms or intolerant.
	And it's really frustrating to see what's happening in South Africa.
	There's nobody who had a sane moral bone in their body, Ernst, who would say, well, you see, national socialism, that was in Germany, and it was terrible.
	But if we try it in Brazil, maybe it'll work.
	That ideology has been discredited, and I don't know how many people have to die.
	I don't know how many countries have to get ruined.
	I don't know how many economies...
	Have to be flushed down the toilet in order for this toxic ideology to finally be rejected by mankind.
	And, of course, it has been my goal as a public intellectual for many, many years to work as hard as I can to discredit the toxicity of this ideology because it is as clear as sunrise.
	It is as clear as throwing a rock off a cliff and knowing which way it's going to go, which is down, exactly what happens.
	If this land appropriation is going to occur, we've seen this happen before in places like Zimbabwe, and the script is always the same.
	Yeah, well, I think we can add to that the ANC, which is the ruling party in South Africa, quite ironically say that their ideology is not only socialism, it's socialism and nationalism.
	So national socialism, that's basically what they say their policies or their ideologies.
	And I think by that same logic, if the argument is yes, but real socialism or real communism has never been tried, We might as well say, yes, but real apartheid has never been tried, so let's give it another go.
	Real slavery has never...
	I mean, you could take any horrible ideology...
	And say that, well, if we photocopy it this time, we're going to get a completely different picture.
	Now, another thing that's frustrating, Ernst, for me, and I'm sure for you as well, is this has all been openly stated ahead of time.
	This, we're going to change things slowly and persistently so that the population that we're targeting doesn't react too strongly, that does that boiling frog submission to the gradual increase in temperature.
	This has been a multi-decade plan laid out in advance for Published, publicized, available for people to read.
	This is not coming out of nowhere.
	Yes, exactly. That's very important, what you're saying.
	The boiling frog metaphor was something that was used by our current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the early 1990s during the negotiations for a new South Africa, for the new constitution.
	He was the Chief Negotiator of the ANC back then.
	He's now the state president.
	And he was asked by one of the opposition parties who were in many ways agreeing with the ANC that what are their plans to deal with white people in South Africa?
	And then he used the boiling frog metaphor to say, listen, we can't just take everything all at once.
	But as you said, also, it's written down.
	So I think the more important reference point here is the ANC's own policy documents.
	So one of the Interesting things about our ruling party in South Africa is they put a lot of effort into writing their ideas down and publishing it.
	So they have what they call their strategy and tactics documents.
	And one of the things they describe, some ANC leaders have even described it as their religion, is what they call the National Democratic Revolution.
	And what that means is basically, and it's written, I'm not even paraphrasing, I'm basically quoting from their own documents now.
	During the early 1990s, as we know before, The fall of the Berlin Wall, the ANC was very much aligned with the Soviet Union.
	They were funded by the Soviet Union.
	They were sent to Vietnam to learn from Ho Chi Minh and to learn about how they fought against the Americans.
	And they were taught this so-called people's war strategy that was developed by Mao Zedong, which was basically a strategy that boiled down to targeting your rivals, not your real enemies.
	So they weren't really fighting against apartheid.
	They were fighting against competitor black organizations, such as the Black Consciousness Movement, Azapu, and so forth.
	And they really targeted them, and 20,000 people were killed as a result of that.
	But what the ANC then did during the early 1990s was brilliant from a strategic perspective.
	They said that they shouldn't be that outspoken about their communist ideology.
	They should rather portray themselves as being in favor of freedom and so forth.
	And eventually they did so.
	And then what the ANC has written after that negotiations, after the so-called New South Africa began, in 1996 or 7, I think, in the strategy and tactics document, they said, well, now we have the power.
	Now we have achieved the state.
	We have achieved the victory.
	And they describe it as a beachhead.
	So think of D-Day. It was a temporary victory.
	They had all these Agreements with the National Party, who was the former government.
	And now that they've achieved state power, now, that's their words, they should use the state mechanisms to further the revolution.
	And that's why we're here in South Africa, people talking about a second transition, which means that now that they do control the state, now we need to move this country into a socialist state.
	Right. And this kind of incrementalism, according to democratic principles, was, of course, the national socialist agenda in Germany, just as it was, of course, the communists who initially were going to try and gain power through, quote, peaceful means in Russia in 1917.
	This is an old and tried revolutionary tactic.
	And, of course, one of the reasons why they want to go so delicately is that the world as a whole Of course, gives the South African government and the ANC as the progeny of the sainted Mandela quite a pass, as well as, of course, at least from America alone, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in foreign aid.
	And that, to me, is an astonishing thinking.
	One of the reasons, I think, why it's moving so slowly is not so much that they don't want to alarm the white population, which seemed to me, Ernst, entirely alarmed already, but because they don't want to provoke a reaction Or any judgment from the world community in terms of investment, in terms of foreign aid, or just in terms of negative publicity.
	And I think that shows where the vulnerable spot can be, which is one of the reasons why I think these conversations are so important.
	Yeah, I agree with you 100%.
	Especially since the ANC is seen in the world as the party of Nelson Mandela.
	I was at the United Nations in New York recently, and if you go to the bookstore there, I counted.
	There were more books about Nelson Mandela in the UN's bookstore in New York than all the other state leaders, state presidents combined.
	And so we know the United Nations in particular is very proud of the new South Africa about the so-called miracle that happened in 1994.
	And the ANC has achieved a very big international win of approval.
	So the ANC is sort of the sweetheart or the darlings of the world in terms of the fact that there was a, what is described as a non-violent revolution, although there actually was a lot of violence in South Africa.
	But, and I think this is the, I think strategically, I think something that we need to zoom in on is the fact that The ANC, and we've seen that, we've personally experienced that at AFRI Forum, that the ANC, our government is very, very sensitive to political scrutiny abroad.
	Recently, we saw the Minister of Home Affairs in Australia, Peter Dutton, make a comment about white farmers who are being targeted in South Africa, and our ruling party was furious about that.
	Various cabinet ministers publicly attacked the Australian government for saying so, and I think that this I think this is something that we need to focus on, is to make sure that the international community becomes aware about what is really happening in South Africa, who is the ANC really, and to get people to speak out about it as you are doing at this moment.
	Let me play devil's advocate position for a moment, Ernst, and make the case, which I've seen, of course, many times in comments, in articles, in interviews, and so on, where The blacks, and I don't want to make this big amorphous group called the blacks.
	I mean, there's many, many different tribes, eight official languages, many other languages and so on.
	But in general, there is this perspective from the blacks that the whites came and stole the land and we're just taking it back.
	The whites came and colonized and brutalized and raped and murdered and we're just taking it back.
	We're trying to protect ourselves from these evil colonial oppressors.
	What is the response that you would have to these kinds of accusations?
	Yeah, thank you. We're actually busy making a documentary film exactly about that, which will be published probably in a month or maybe three months or so.
	The question is, how did white people get land in South Africa?
	And the answer is there were three different ways in which white people got land.
	The first is empty land.
	And I know that's controversial, but it's very well documented.
	I'm sure we can't go into history in too much detail, but I can maybe reference the Mufekane was a massive...
	I'm sure people abroad know of Shaka Zulu.
	You can go into a little bit more detail.
	This is an armchair show.
	We don't mind. We're not afraid of details here.
	We've got no commercial breaks and just whatever you want to get out.
	This is a good forum to do it.
	Okay, well, let me then give a bit of context.
	In 1652, the Dutch settled in Cape Town, what is today known as Cape Town.
	It was supposed to be a halfway house for people traveling around Africa so that they can stop there and get refreshments and so forth.
	Long story short, the population grew.
	The intention wasn't to settle there permanently.
	Eventually, it was annexed by or colonized by the British.
	And by that time, the local community did not see themselves as Europeans anymore.
	They saw themselves as Afrikaners, which is also known as Boers in the rest of the world.
	So there was friction, especially between the Boers and the British in what is today known as Cape Town.
	And eventually they decided to move, the Boers, to move deeper into South Africa.
	And just to put this in context, particularly for our American listeners and viewers, the Boers have been In South Africa, in many cases, longer than the whites have been in America.
	And so just saying, well, just leave, well, that's like saying all to the whites in America, well, just leave, because it's not your country.
	And this becomes progressively difficult to untangle historically, but I just wanted to put that in context.
	Yeah, yeah, thank you. So, eventually the Boers started moving into South Africa, but more or less the same times, I think slightly before, remember, as you said, we have 11 official languages in South Africa, so we have many different black tribes.
	We have Khozas and Zulus and Sutus and a whole variety of them.
	But more or less the same time, most of them slightly before 1652 or before that, were moving down from what is today known as Cameroon, Central Africa.
	They were moving down, migrating down.
	And actually, the indigenous people in South Africa were the Khoisan, or the Bushmen, as they are known.
	I'm sure many people have seen the gods must be crazy.
	So those are the original inhabitants of South Africa.
	And they were actually driven out of their land by black tribes.
	And so, but just before the Great Track happened, that was the reign of Shaka Zulu.
	Shaka Zulu died about 10 or 20 years before the Great Track.
	And he had this massive expansion of the Zulu Empire campaign, and that sparked wars over the entire country, which is known as the Mifekane or the Defekane.
	The Mifikani or Defikani basically meant that black tribes had a massive war among each other.
	There were tribes fleeing from the Zulu Empire that was expanding.
	And there are different estimates, but most estimates are between one and two million people died as a result thereof.
	So when the Great Track happened, there were also other cases.
	Let me give you another example.
	The case of, I think it's called, in the Koza community, where a young Koza girl, I think she was the daughter of the chief, if I recall, had a dream about, they were already aware of what was happening with England and of the British involvement in South Africa.
	And she had a dream about Russia and somewhere they heard about Russia and that they need to burn or slaughter their livestock and burn their crops.
	And that would mean that the Russians would come and save them.
	And so they've done that, and then 10,000 or 20,000 Corsa people died as a result thereof.
	So if you read the diaries of some of the great track, the Boer leaders who were moving into South Africa, you will see there were conflicts between whites and blacks, but there were also notes about how they moved into areas and it was just empty, and there were skeletons everywhere, and there was no one in sight.
	And there were areas that were simply uninhabitable, Because in South Africa, you need to...
	South Africa is actually a very dry country.
	So there were some estimates saying that you can only survive on about 30% of South Africa's surface if you can't dig boreholes.
	So the point that I'm trying to make, that's the first point, is there were massive parts of South Africa that was empty.
	The second reason was negotiations.
	So there were very well-known cases.
	There were literally dozens of cases where fur truckers As they were known, I'm using the word furtrakis, which was what the Boers were called when they moved into what is known as South Africa today.
	There were literally dozens of negotiations between the Boers and black tribes, such as the Zulu, almost all of those tribes.
	The best known case is the case of Petretif and Chief Dangan.
	Chief Dangan was king of the Zulus.
	He was King Shaka's brother.
	He killed King Shaka and he became the chief.
	And Petretif was one of the Boer leaders.
	So, Pete Retief negotiated with Chief Dangan for a big piece of land, which is in KwaZulu-Natal, as it is known today.
	And there was a treaty signed between them that Retief had to go and get some cattle that was stolen by Sikoniela and give those cattle back to Dangan.
	And they signed a treaty.
	The treaty is in writing that if they do that, then they can get this massive piece of land.
	And so they went, they got the capital, they went back to Dungan, and then Pitretif and all of his men, I think it was 200 men, if I recall, were all slaughtered.
	So they were all killed, but the treaty was signed.
	So there were many such cases.
	It's not wildly off the sort of radar of something like the Louisiana Purchase or the Purchase of Manhattan and so on.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't go into those details too much, but it's more or less along the same lines.
	So there were many such cases where land was bought.
	There were even cases, as I spoke about the empty lands, when the Fuertrakkars eventually or the Boers eventually established the Boer republics of the Free State and Tromsvall, which later became combined into South Africa, some black tribes came to them and said, well, this used to be our land before the some black tribes came to them and said, well, this used to be our land before the Mifekani, and There were many such cases as well, and it's documented.
	So that's the second way in which they got land.
	And the third one is probably the most controversial, and that's why conquest.
	And that's very controversial because that's the argument that whites stole black people's land.
	But I think we need to see that within a bigger historical context, and that is that it was common practice among the different black tribes in South Africa that you could get land by way of conquest.
	That's why the Bushmen or the Khoisan now live in the desert, the few of them who are left.
	They used to live in the Drakensbergs.
	They used to live all over South Africa.
	They're now living in the desert because their original land, they were driven off.
	So, conquest is also the most controversial.
	It's also known as human history as a whole.
	Up until a very, very small slice of the modern era, when Christianity helped develop ideas such as universal rights, property rights, and subjugation and equality under the law, that was human history.
	That was human history as a whole, and to single out one group, one race, one tribe as the only progenitor of evil in a constant jostling for land and resources that characterise all of human history, just kind of racist, in my humble opinion, but sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, that's exactly the point, that even during this great trek, there were still black tribes who had wars against each other and so forth.
	But in South Africa, the notion or the mainstream notion is at least that If black tribes have wars against each other and they take each other's land, there's nothing wrong with that.
	But if you are white and you take someone's land, then you are a land thief.
	And also then the counterargument to that would be, yes, but it wasn't white people's land in the first place because they came here by boat.
	So what that argument basically boils down to is to say that if you arrive on someone else's land by foot, You have a better right to claim it than if you arrive by boat.
	That's basically what the argument is in South Africa.
	Because white people came by boat into what is today known as Cape Town.
	Black people crossed the Limpopo River, coming from Cameroon, the Great Lakes, the Malawi Lake, and so forth.
	They came down into the northern parts of South Africa.
	And there's really only one group in South Africa who can legitimately claim that they were the first inhabitants, and that's the Khoisan people or the Bushmen people.
	It's almost like a parody of Animal Farm.
	You know, like two legs good, two oars bad.
	And I don't think anyone would say that if you were, say, an immigrant into America, I guess they would all have to come by boat, but if you were, let's say, an immigrant into Europe, that you didn't have any property rights because you crossed the Mediterranean rather than some other methodology, that would be kind of...
	Kind of crazy. All right.
	So, yeah, there was the treaties, there was empty land, and then there was, of course, the wars and so on.
	But, of course, I think everyone can unpack what's actually going on with the demand for recompensation and so on for this kind of stuff.
	It's just that, well, the whites have added the most value to the land, and they're the current owners.
	Therefore, they're the ones you want to target.
	I mean, it's the old thing, like, why do you rob banks?
	Well, that's where the money is. And it's why do you want white people's land?
	It's because that's where the value is.
	Currently in most of South Africa.
	Yeah, exactly. I just want to add to the African and European reference you made, a question I've been asking repeatedly in media interviews in South Africa, no one has been prepared to even answer that, is people would say, yes, but we as white people need to remember that Africa is black people's continent.
	Therefore, when white people come to Africa, they are visitors here.
	What a can of worms to open when it comes to Europe, right?
	That's exactly the point.
	That's exactly the point. So the next question is, okay, well, if that's your view, are you saying that white people in Europe can say to black people who are fleeing there that Europe is white people's continent, you're not welcome yet?
	Because that would be racist.
	Well, no, I would go even further, Ernst, because according to that logic, non-whites who've been in Europe for hundreds of years, Who speak perfect English, who are part of the culture, who contribute.
	They must be kicked out according to this theory.
	It's not just people coming in.
	It's people who've been there indigenously for hundreds of years must also be kicked out.
	And that is, of course, wrong.
	And it would be the initiation of the use of force.
	It would be racist. And so this argument doesn't translate, of course.
	And it's a foundational hypocrisy that people don't really want to address.
	Yeah, that's definitely the case.
	And I think that's part of the problem is there are so many...
	Inconsistencies and so many lies about what's currently happening in South Africa.
	I mean, we can go down the list, but let me give you another example.
	We have the state president now, Cyril Ramaphosa, going to the World Economic Forum, encouraging the international community to come and invest in South Africa.
	And he would say to them that your investments are safe with us.
	Please deposit money into the bank I wish to rob, because that way there's more for me to steal.
	That's exactly the point. And we have cabinet ministers going even further, saying, please come and invest in agriculture in South Africa.
	While there's a motion that was already accepted, adopted in our parliament, that that land is going to be expropriated without compensation.
	So that's the basis of a sound investment, is the knowledge that your investment is safe, that your property will be protected.
	So it's a two-phase hypocrisy.
	So they would say to the international community, come and invest, your investments are safe.
	And within South Africa, they would say, We're going to take property and we're not even going to pay you for that.
	So let's talk about one of the big hot-button issues.
	I myself have visited South Africa twice and remember coming away, certainly the second time, with a more nuanced and complicated understanding of the situation.
	So let's talk about apartheid, which of course is considered to be A lot of the bitter crop that is growing up into the current discontent.
	You know, like, you whites came and you're racist and segregationist and you reap what you sow and blowback and karma and all of this.
	Is this the cycle of violence that's going to be stopped by that kind of justification?
	But let's talk about apartheid.
	And, you know, I was trying to do some research before talking to you and I just kept running into the usual Very leftist, very, well, it was just racist and evil and so on.
	Yes, it was racist. Yes, it was immoral.
	But if you look at the 70,000 whites have been murdered since the end of apartheid, if you look at the farm murders, if you look at the squatter camps that the whites are being forced into, it's hard to say there was absolutely no reason for it and whites had nothing to fear from the end of apartheid.
	So let's talk a little bit about how it came about, what it was, and what the fears were around changing that system.
	Yeah, that's a very important question, and also in terms of the whole issue of apartheid.
	The problem in South Africa is, or part of the problem, is that there's, firstly, this broad agreement that apartheid was wrong.
	I think there are very, very, very few people, I would say less than 1% within the white community, which is already a very small minority, who really think that we need to go back to that system.
	I mean, there's a lot of frustration with the current system, but I think the overwhelming view is the previous system and the current system Well, before I make this point, let's just give context.
	I think part of the thing is we have this ideology of entitlement and an ideology of victimhood, which effectively means that portraying South Africa's history as bad as possible is incentivized for the South African government, because the worse things were The more their claim would be to implement things such as black economic empowerment.
	So you never hear someone, or very rarely hear someone within the ruling party say, you know what, maybe we are starting to exaggerate about what happened in South Africa's history.
	And that is actually the reality.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but also it's an old tried and true technique that when your economic system isn't working, You come up with a scapegoat, which was the case in Germany and has been the case with the counter-revolutionaries under Stalin.
	When your economic system isn't working, you point at whoever has some success and you say, those people are the reason you're poor, those people are the reason things aren't working, and if we just go and kill them or drive them away or take their stuff, everything will be a paradise.
	And it's a classic kind of redirect of the legitimate anger of people who aren't successful under a terrible system.
	Yeah, and also the further we move away from apartheid in South Africa, the more we are reminded of it.
	We hear people in the government speaking more about apartheid now than they did 10 years ago.
	But so what happened, it's almost created this void.
	There's no one who really wants to defend apartheid.
	So what's happening now is it's a carte blanche.
	People can say whatever they want about apartheid, and there's no one there to sort of point them out.
	So now we have people saying apartheid was a policy of genocide, We have people saying that apartheid was a policy of slavery.
	We have all these comments, and we have recently started saying to people, listen, we should criticise our history, but we should just make sure that we are factual.
	And you cannot say apartheid was a policy of genocide, because within the first decade of apartheid, the black population doubled, and within the next decade, they doubled again.
	And of course, as you can expect, you would then be accused of being an apartheid apologist or an apartheid denialist.
	So that's currently the frustration in South Africa.
	It's just not correct to say genocide, of course, the purposeful direct or indirect elimination of an entire cultural, ethnic or racial group.
	And if the population is swelling enormously under particular policies, then what did it go from 2 million to 16 million over the course of apartheid for blacks?
	That is... Well, that's the exact opposite of, if the numbers went the other way, you'd have a case, but if they're going this way, you can call it immoral, and you can call it segregationist, you can call it racist, these would all be accurate terms, but to call it genocide is an insult to groups who actually have been genocided in history.
	Exactly. And there has been people, I think it's really offensive to, as you said, to people, to the Tutsis in Rwanda and people who really experienced genocide to try to say that what happened to them or what happened in South Africa is equal to what happened there.
	You don't want to hijack the Jewish Holocaust or the Holocaust under the Nazis for your own political agenda.
	That's a horrifying thing to do.
	Well, that's exactly what's happening in South Africa.
	But I think, maybe to answer your previous question, just to give a bit of context, and I'm sure I would again be accused of being an apartheid, a nihilist, or whatever, for saying this, but we need to, I think all legitimate historians in the world would agree to this, is you need to evaluate history within a historic context.
	It's easy to stand back today and to look at what happened 100 years ago within our current moral framework and criticize, and yes, we should do that, But we should just have a bit of context.
	And I think part of the context as to how this system developed, this apartheid system, was South Africa is a fairly big country.
	Of course, it's very small in comparison to the US, but in comparison to other countries, it's fairly big.
	And it's a very diverse country.
	So the argument was, the argument that led to this system was that South Africa should not see itself as a country in itself, but more as something similar to Europe.
	And that different tribes or different communities Should have their own piece of land where they can govern themselves.
	And that's how the system of what they called separate development developed.
	So they would say, well, this is a piece of land for the Zulu community.
	The Zulus are going to have their land here.
	The Sutus are going to live there.
	The Afrikaners are going to live here and so forth.
	And of course, that's the difference between what is known as grand apartheid and small apartheid.
	So that was sort of grand apartheid.
	And over time, that started Of course, there were racist sentiments as well.
	But over time, that started developing into smaller apartheid, where people would put up signs on benches or beaches to say, if you want to sit on this bench, you have to be black, and if you want to sit on this bench, you have to be white.
	And I think it just became impossible to really defend that system morally.
	And I think what the apartheid was also a fairly easy target in the sense that the Afrikaners who governed the country back then put a lot of effort into codifying everything.
	They put everything into state law.
	So it wasn't just practices.
	So they would say, well, these are the different communities, so let's make a law, let's write a law.
	And that's how the Natives Land Act came into force and all these different pieces of legislation that were applied.
	So was it wrong?
	Of course it was wrong. Should we go back there?
	Of course we shouldn't go back there.
	But we should be historically accurate and we should be honest when we evaluate South Africa's history.
	And I think part of the reason why we are in this problem that we are now in South Africa, and maybe that's a lesson for people in the US and other countries to learn as well, is we've reached this point now where Race relations is at an all-time low, largely because of the fact that we are not honest about our history.
	We should criticise our history, we should be critical about it, but we should just ensure that we remain factual in our analysis about what happened in South Africa.
	And added to that, when people are dishonest or when people fabricate their own history, those people should be pointed out without fear of being labeled a so-called apartheid apologist, because that's what's happening in South Africa.
	But I think we need to put much more effort into ensuring that we are honest about our history.
	And I appreciate the sensitivity in which you are treating, obviously, a very difficult subject, and I invite people to look into it.
	It was a state solution to a complicated social and ethnic problem.
	Like all state solutions, it had its brutalities, and it, to me, is fundamentally wrong as a whole.
	whole, we should have a separation of race and state and not have any laws that prefer or deny opportunities to anyone of any race.
	But that colorblind legal system remains a little bit of a mirage in the world as a whole.
	That's my particular perspective.
	And another thing too, is that when you have additional resources in your community, and there was, of course, course, a growth in, a huge growth in wealth in South Africa in the, after the Second World War in particular.
	And so one of the things that you can do as a community is you can say, okay, we have more wealth.
	So that means we can either save, we can invest, we can become entrepreneurs, we can upgrade our education, or we can just have a lot of more kids.
	And this challenge as well that the black community, I mean, obviously not as any kind of collective decision said, okay, well, we're just going to have a lot more kids.
	And that is going to be a challenge in terms of maintaining the growth of, economic growth within a community.
	And That is, I don't know, it's hard to blame the Boers for that as a whole.
	And that may be cultural, that may be, I don't know where that would come from, but that's one thing that happened, that the population grew rather than wealth grew.
	And that is part of the legacy that needs to be dealt with.
	And of course, my particular goal is always to increase freedom and to decrease state intervention in these affairs.
	But it does seem to be like a ring of power that people have a very hard time stepping back from.
	Yeah, I think, just to add to your first comment there, I think part of the irony is that probably the biggest criticism of apartheid is something that our government would not acknowledge because they are trying to do the exact same thing, and that is aggressively state-driven social engineering.
	I think that was the main flaw.
	So there were these views, and that was the notion at the time, that different tribes, different nations wanted their own land, but it was enforced by the state.
	And eventually it boiled down to a situation where people were physically or forcefully removed from some areas.
	They said, well, unfortunately, where you live now, and it happened to white and black people, the notion is that it only happened to black people, but it happened to white people as well, where they would say, well, sorry, you white farmers, you live in an area that's been designated to the black people.
	So you have to, we're going to forcefully remove you.
	You have to move. So that's the biggest part of the problem.
	And the irony is that the current South African government is trying to do exactly the same.
	So they would not acknowledge that the problem with apartheid was that it was a state-driven case of social engineering, because that's what they are trying to do.
	And they're doing it with various laws.
	We've got all these black economic empowerment policies and so forth.
	So once again, it comes back to the disingenuity about South Africa's issue.
	So let's talk a little bit about the flashpoint, I think, that a lot of people are concerned about in South Africa.
	One of the things that a primarily urban population doesn't really understand is the connection that people have with the land.
	So, you know, if you grew up in a city, you probably moved around a little bit, you say, okay, well, I got to move from the city to the suburbs or maybe to another town, and it doesn't seem like that big a deal.
	But people who farm the land for 10 generations or more, people who have family members buried on the land, people who have that kind of rooted connection to the land, I'm telling you, well, I don't have to tell you, I'm sure, they're not going to give it up peacefully.
	And, of course, the South African government is saying, don't worry, it'll be peaceful, as if things that the government does is ever peaceful.
	I mean, it is the monopoly of violence, as you've pointed out.
	So what is the flashpoint that might occur?
	Because the farm murders are one thing, but when the government shows up with a writ and a deed and a bunch of guys with guns, that, of course, is the big concern about where things go from there.
	Yeah, exactly. I mean, even the word Boer in Afrikaans, the word Boer as we know in Afrikaans means farmer.
	So Afrikaners as a community have become known as the Boers because it's a community that is known I'm not just saying this, you can go on international platforms and you would hear people across the world saying the Afrikaners or the white people in South Africa are among the best farmers in the world in terms of the land they have and the ability to farm and to create agricultural products and high quality products.
	So it's really ingrained in us as a community.
	I come from an agricultural community myself.
	And yes, what you said is exactly the case.
	There are people who can trace their land back to when it was bought, ironically, and very importantly, five or ten generations ago.
	That's exactly the case with the piece of land or a farm that's the farm where I grew up.
	You can trace it back to actually when it was bought initially.
	And now, of course, the argument is it was stolen land.
	So you buy something and then it has to be taken from you without compensation because it's stolen, allegedly.
	But the argument in South Africa, and that's what we hear regularly, and that's Very ironic and tragic at the same time is people would say, yes, we are inspired by what happened in Zimbabwe, but we disagreed.
	We disagree with the fact that there was violence.
	So now don't worry, white people.
	We are going to take your property.
	But or it's sometimes they would say, no, it's not about white people.
	It's about property. But if you read the motion and if you listen to what they argue in parliament, it's clearly about white people.
	So they would say, don't worry, we are going to take your property, but we're not going to do it in the same way as it was done in Zimbabwe.
	Well, it's not up to the South African government to determine whether it would be violent or not, because the question of whether there would be violence means, or if they say there wouldn't be violence, what they actually say is, we're going to take your property and you are not going to resist.
	And I personally know people who, as I said, they've been on that farm for generations.
	I personally know people who have said to me, They would rather die on their farms than to be forced, forcefully removed, ironically, again, an apartheid term, forcefully removed to go and live in a city.
	And so it's just a fact, as me and you are speaking now, it is a fact that if that happens, there will be people who will resist.
	And I think the situation in South Africa, I'm not trying to be a doom prophet, but if it comes to that point, I'm sure the situation might or has the potential to be even worse than what happened in Zimbabwe.
	We've referenced Zimbabwe a little bit here.
	Could you step people through the sequence that happened in Zimbabwe and how you feel it applies to South Africa at the moment?
	Yes. Well, maybe I should start by saying there are some I've seen clips on the internet, on YouTube, about how people responded when Robert Mugabe became president of Zimbabwe.
	And it's very sad to look at it.
	So there would be people dancing in the street and they would say, well, Mugabe is going to fix this country and there's not going to be corruption.
	And people were describing this ultimate leader who's coming to power.
	And he wasn't in power for a while.
	And then in 2003, if I recall, They really aggressively started with this land grabs policy.
	So he also kept blaming white people for everything that was wrong in the country.
	And eventually there were so few white people left that he had to become more and more aggressive in his blame shifting and his scapegoating.
	And then the land grabs started.
	So people would run, some of his party members would run to farms with tangas or guns or whatever, and they would forcefully chase people off and they would kill people and some people would torture.
	Some people were hacked to death and had their fingers broken and their bones broken and their skulls crushed and so forth.
	And people were forcefully removed.
	And what happened then, I think the most important part of the story is what happened to those farms afterwards.
	And the reality is those farms were not given to the people.
	Those farms were given to friends of the state president.
	And he's loyalist.
	So the more loyal you were to the state president, the bigger your chances are of getting a farm.
	So that's actually what happened, and we know it was, I think, the biggest economic crash in history.
	Well, as it turns out, farms are not like geistries or volcanoes.
	They don't just erupt food.
	It's a lot of careful planning and cultivation.
	It takes high intelligence, consistency, discipline, knowledge, experience to wrestle food out of African soil.
	So, oh, look, these farms make millions of rand a year or millions of dollars a year.
	And then so if we take it over, it's just going to magic.
	No, you just grab things.
	The value doesn't transfer, even if the property does.
	Yeah, that's very important. Agriculture is a science.
	It's not just something that you know how to do.
	And that's part of the notion that we're here in South Africa.
	I mean, in many of our farms in South Africa, the people working on the farms would be black.
	So the argument is then made, oh, you know what, those farmers, they sit in their air-conditioned offices all day, and it's actually black people who are doing all the work.
	So black people know how to farm better than white people, than white farmers.
	And people who say that clearly Do not understand what agriculture is.
	Running a commercial farm, and I think that's another point, is there's a difference between commercial farming and subsistence farming, which is, I think, an important differentiation.
	But running a commercial farm is running a business.
	So you need to sit in the office.
	You need to work, because you're working with markets, you're working with complicated irrigation systems, you're working with negotiations, you're working with imports and outputs and those type of things.
	And so if people say, We work in the fields, therefore we know how to farm.
	What they are actually saying is we know how to be subsistence farmers.
	And yes, if we take the commercial farms and we change them into subsistence farms, it might be good for a few people on ground level, although we've seen that even that doesn't work based on what's happened in South Africa so far based on the available data.
	But the fact of the matter, South Africa is not going to be exporting food anymore.
	South Africa would be importing We're already near the point where we are importing more than we are exporting, despite the fact that we are supposed to be a country that should be very strong in agriculture.
	But there's not an understanding of how agriculture works in South Africa.
	Well, if you want cities, you can't have subsistence farms because they're not able to export, let alone overseas.
	They're not able to export to other countries or to the cities that are 10 miles down the road sometimes.
	So if you want to have an urban culture, and that's to me quite fascinating, and you've talked about this data before, Ernst, that there is a process by which people who feel that their lands or who have evidence or who believe that their lands were stolen by the Boers or by other white people in the past, they can go to the government, they can say, here's my claim, here's why.
	The vast majority of these have already been adjudicated.
	But the people who do it, they don't want the land.
	They don't want to go and be farmers.
	They don't want to go and do that kind of back-breaking work.
	What do they want? You've talked about this before.
	Yeah, they want to live in cities.
	But let me just explain something to give context before I respond to that.
	So I think there are three terms that we need to differentiate between.
	Those three are used in South Africa as if it means the same thing, but it's actually different.
	So the first one is restitution or land restitution.
	And the word restitution means that you need to correct something.
	Some mistake happened and that has to be fixed.
	And we've had a process of land restitution, and it was actually a very successful process.
	If the measure of cases that have been filed and cases that have been dealt with effectively is a determining factor.
	So restitution, the restitution process is to say, someone can go to the government, as you have said, and say, well, listen, my grandfather or great grandfather or my tribe used to live on this land and we were chased off.
	And you have to prove it in some way.
	You can't just make a claim into the void.
	And then that farm can be given back.
	So then, of course, there would be compensation because the person who lives there wasn't the one who took the property in the first place.
	But that process has been dealt with.
	There's been a few hundred thousand claims, and more than 90% of them have been dealt with and have been finished.
	But the frustrating thing that came out of that for the South African government was the fact that 93% of the people who actually filed land claims It came at the end of the process and said, well, no, we don't really want the land.
	Actually, we would rather have money than land.
	So that's the first thing. The second thing is redistribution of land.
	Now, redistribution is much worse than that.
	Restitution can be supported in principle.
	Redistribution is to say, we're going to look at the color of your skin and the color of your skin will determine if you are a legitimate landowner.
	And then there's the representivity argument, which is basically an equality of outcomes argument.
	If there's not equality of outcomes, then there's oppression.
	And so a bigger percentage, or let's put it differently, white farmers are a bigger component of the agricultural community than they are of the South African population.
	And therefore, the argument is, well, that means that there's some form of oppression, so we're going to take white people's land and give it to black people.
	So that's redistribution.
	And we have said it before, you can make a strong argument that redistribution boils down to a crime against humanity.
	If you say based on the color of your skin, you're not allowed to be a landowner.
	But what the South African government is busy with at the moment is not even redistribution.
	It's actually worse. They are busy with the policy of nationalization.
	And that's one of the other things where they are lying to their own supporters.
	So they would say, we're going to give you the land back.
	So there's actually two lies in that.
	So giving the land back as if any white person who owned land has stolen, that's the first problem.
	The second problem is they're not going to give the land to their supporters.
	The policy is that the land must go to the state.
	It must be state-owned land because the state, and that comes back to the animal farm or the 1984 reference, The state always knows better, and they would say that.
	They would say that the state knows better than the people, so the state must be the custodian, and we are going to own it, and then we can decide, we can plan, we can have some central planning system, and we can decide who can live where and what they can do on that property.
	That's nationalization, and again, as we have pointed out, that's what they tried in communist China and in the Soviet Union and in all of those countries, and the results are there for all to see.
	Well, and as I've talked about in other shows, Ernst...
	The population growth in South Africa is largely a function of Boer technology, Boer expertise, Boer work ethic, and so on.
	And if the land is transferred from the Boers and given to political cronies, I'm sure there are very many excellent, competent, industrious, hardworking, and smart black farmers, but they're not going to end up with the land.
	The land is going to go to political cronies.
	And what that means is the excess food production that's supporting the increased population is going to collapse.
	And then, of course, there is going to be the Rwanda-style starvations, and there's going to be all of these horrible footage, and it will be a terrible, terrible event and affair.
	And the Marxists will not be blamed, the ANC will not be blamed, the economic freedom fighters will not be blamed.
	Of course, it will be white people's fault in some manner, in some...
	And then what's going to happen is, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of food aid are going to be pumped in, which is going to be corrupting the governments in Africa, as it has corrupted governments around the world who are recipients of these kinds of aids.
	And then, of course, because there's going to be starvation and increased corruption, then the blacks are all going to try and make it to Europe.
	And this is a potential catastrophe of literally world-changing proportions.
	And I do not feel at all hyperbolic when I make that kind of statement, Ernst, that we need to put pressure on the government in South Africa to stop this crazy goal of this land theft.
	Of this open, racist land theft against whites, because it is the beginning.
	Obviously, it's a catastrophe for the country as a whole, but it is the beginning of a domino that has almost infinite repercussions.
	Yeah, and I should add, you've sort of outlined a hypothetical process that could play out.
	And of course, I'm really hoping that that would not happen.
	But if that happens, one thing that we can add, you said that they would blame white people, which is probably what will happen.
	But we can predict now that they will blame America.
	That's what typically comes out.
	That's what we saw in Zimbabwe.
	Eventually, after almost all the whites left, they turned around and they said, well, it's all America's fault.
	So they would blame the West.
	Just out of curiosity, what was the logical canyon leap, the Evel Knievel jump of reasoning that makes America to blame for Mugabe?
	Yeah, it was a conspiracy theory.
	So they would say that the CIA and the FBI are behind this and they've got this whole policy to destroy all these African countries.
	So there would be some...
	Like discredit black leadership and it's a strong, independent black country.
	It must be destroyed so it doesn't serve as an example.
	Okay, I understand. I understand.
	I don't agree, but I understand.
	Yeah, and I mean, we can predict now that that would be the case, unfortunately.
	So yes, I think it's very important to speak out about this and to raise awareness.
	There are people who are willing to hear within our government, or at least within our country, and I think it's very important that we put pressure on this, because if we simply let this slide, it could have I think we're going to talk about some major consequences.
	But maybe I should add to that, because we are accused by the South African government of lying to the international community.
	And we're actually just quoting their own figures all the time.
	And so, for example, they would say we are lying when we say that land reform is not working.
	They've got all these conspiracy theories, again, almost as you described it now.
	So they would say that we've got this sort of an agenda to say that black people cannot farm, and we've never said that.
	But what we have seen, according to our own government's data, is there where farms were taken from white people and given to black people, according to the Department of Land Reform in South Africa, More than 90% of those farms have failed.
	They either become subsistence farms or they become squatter camps.
	And I've recently spoken with a historian who's very much involved with these land claims from a historical perspective.
	And I asked him about this figure.
	I said, is it really true that less than 10% of these farms are successful?
	And he sort of laughed and he said, no, it's not true.
	The answer is 1%.
	So he said about 1% of these farms are successful.
	And by that, I'm not saying Black people cannot farm.
	The problem is, the overarching problem in South Africa is the point that we've made in this interview, is the problem of, let's call it cultural relativism, or let's use that term, the idea that if there's not equality of outcome, the only possible explanation thereof could be or is that there's oppression.
	So the notion is all people are the same, all cultures are the same, everyone is equal.
	Those people are not able to explain why Ethiopia is poor, because Ethiopia was never colonized by anyone.
	But the argument in South Africa is if you're black and you're poor, it's because white people steal something from you.
	And I think that's part of the problem.
	And the result of this cultural relativism ideology or this notion that if there's not equality of outcome it's because of oppression, is that people are not taught to take responsibility for themselves.
	So in South Africa, I know these arguments have been made in Europe, in the US as well, and I've read Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism, but just to give you context in South Africa, white people, again, according to government data, we're not making this up, so they'll probably accuse us of lying, and then they'll notice that it's their own data that we're quoting, so let me say that up front, is that the average white child in South Africa, 90% of white children grow up with both their parents.
	We know there's been many studies which said that your chances of being successful is much higher if you grow up with both your parents.
	And there are many other problems that we can look at.
	School dropout rates, we can look at crime, and so forth.
	And those issues are not looked at.
	Also, I said earlier that 80% of the schools in this country are dysfunctional.
	And it's not schools I'm not making this up, I'm quoting government data, I'm quoting Statistics South Africa who have said that, and they've actually measured that.
	They said, for example, within black schools as opposed to white schools, in other words, schools mostly attended by black people as opposed to schools mostly attended by white people, In the black schools, the average teaching time per day is three and a half hours.
	In the white schools, it's about seven hours, or I think six and a half hours.
	So there's a massive difference.
	But you wouldn't find the South African government speaking out about this, because if they do, they would have to acknowledge that part of the solution would be to fix your own community.
	And if they say this, then they have to acknowledge that they have to turn down on this racist rhetoric and blaming white people for everything.
	So I think that's the overarching problem in South Africa, which we experience now in a very personal way.
	But I can also comment that we are very concerned about what we are seeing in the US and in Europe, where people are sort of playing or toying with the same type of narrative.
	And it's been tried in South Africa, and the result hasn't been good.
	Well, and I've talked on this show before about IQ Belker, differences between ethnicities, but even if we put all of that aside and we say there's no differences in any of these forums, we can easily see, to go back to the example of the communist takeover of farms in Ukraine, how is it possible because this is the same ethnic group?
	That it went from the breadbasket of Europe.
	I mean, one of the most productive areas of farming in the world was Ukraine before the communist takeover.
	And then they went from incredibly productive farms to millions and millions of people literally starving to death amidst the richest soil, some of the richest soil in the world.
	That's because the economic system transferred the land from productive use to political use, which means to disuse.
	And so even if we cast aside any of the bell curve differences and so on, we can see that the communism is, even if it replaced whites with whites or East Asians with East Asians, it doesn't matter.
	Because once you get that communist system coming in place, the means of production decay and the productivity collapses.
	And that, to me, is the major issue.
	And I've talked about it. It's funny because in South Africa, then, the illegitimacy rate or the single mother rate for blacks Actually, it's lower than it is in many places in the United States.
	I did a show recently with the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson where we talked about 77% illegitimacy in certain areas of the black community in the United States.
	And in the past, before the welfare state, before this toxicity of victimhood and race blaming and race baiting and so on, The black family was stronger than the white family.
	And the frustrating thing is the amount of black potential across the world is so inhibited by the central planning and the socialism and this Marxism.
	In the post-Second World War period in America, you had a massive inflow of blacks into the middle class.
	Incredible unleashing of black opportunity, which then got forestalled and undermined by the welfare state, by, you know, terrible government education, white variety.
	There's so much that we can do to have things be better, but...
	That does involve personal responsibility.
	It does involve diminishing state control over various ethnicities.
	It does require, I hope at some point, we let go of this fantasy of moving these big giant levers to make things better and worse between ethnicities and let freedom reign.
	But there's a ways to go to get there.
	Yeah, I agree.
	And I think maybe to put it in different terms, I don't think it's a It's not a hardware problem as much as it is a software problem.
	In other words, we shouldn't try to look at this problem in terms of race.
	We should look at it in terms of what people are thinking.
	That's why I'm saying it's more a software problem than anything else.
	It's an ideological problem.
	And that's why these farms are failing, these farms that are being redistributed.
	It's not because white people can be farmers and black people cannot be farmers.
	I don't think anyone is trying to say that.
	It's about an ideology or a worldview And that is something that's very concerning in South Africa, as I've said, that That there's this worldview that's very aggressively pursued.
	And unfortunately, I have to add by many within our media as well, that as I said, everything that is wrong with you, every uncomfort that you experience is because it's someone else's fault.
	And if that's your worldview, it's very difficult for you to take responsibility because when you get this farm and something happens, something doesn't go right or according to plan, your immediate reaction would be to say, well, who can I blame for this?
	And that's one thing that this is an ideology that we really need to break.
	I would certainly like to push the ideology argument as far as humanly possible.
	We've got a long way to go there before we're uncovering any potential hardware issues.
	But this is the incredible thing too, and I was thinking about this just in terms of I was growing up.
	I admired people who were successful.
	I admired people who were entrepreneurial, and I knew everybody from different races who had these particular abilities and potentials and had these very interesting and powerful lives of success, of providing value in a free market, of being entrepreneurial.
	And I can't honestly imagine, Ernest, what it must be like to have drilled into you by a lot of hate mongers of every race, that the successful people are evil, that the successful people are exploiters, that those who are really good at managing earth scarce resources are thieves and parasites and colonists and that those who are really good at managing earth scarce resources are thieves and parasites and
	Because what that would mean, of course, is that, let's say that I believe that about the Boers and then I come into possession of a Boer farm, well, I can't take the Boer as my model of how to do things.
	Because they're evil and they're racist and they're nasty and they're exploiters and they're colonists, so you won't even put into practice what the Boers do so successfully because you're so full of hatred for the entire ethnicity.
	And that guarantees, in a sense, not being able to succeed in any kind of free market or voluntary environment.
	And that is, I think, one of the most foundational poisons and the way in which potential in every race, gender, and ethnicity is so stymied by filling people so much with the hatred of the successful that they can't even do what successful people do to become successful.
	Yeah, maybe I can answer that with a short story or a reference to Margaret Thatcher's last day in the House of Commons.
	There's that well-known case where someone I assume from the Labour Party stood up and said, well, yes, you claim that you've achieved all of this, but one thing you cannot deny is that the gap between rich and poor became bigger during your term of office.
	And then she responded and said, that might be true, but poor people got richer.
	And then she said, you would rather have the poor be poorer provided that the rich is less rich.
	And I want to paraphrase that in the South African context.
	And I think there's so much racism within our ruling party that I would like to believe that many of them know that these policies don't work.
	Well, they have to know because their own figures indicate such.
	So they would rather have white people, the gratification they get from hurting white people is bigger than the need to uplift black people.
	So they would rather have white people be, or black people be poorer, provided that white people are less rich.
	That's the situation in South Africa.
	And some are honest enough to say, yes, there are people who would say, yes, that's true.
	We don't care if we lose our jobs.
	Some people who are very influential in South Africa would say those type of things.
	We don't care if people lose their jobs as long as we get the land back, as long as we chase the white people off.
	And if we lose our jobs in the process, that's fine.
	So some are honest enough to say that, but I think an overarching problem is there's certainly a racist undertone to what's happening in South Africa.
	And listen, I mean, as you know, races and ethnicities, we are not separated by land bridges, by oceans, by evolution.
	We are all living together and we really, really have to work very hard to find a way to get along because the alternative is rivers of blood, of course, as the phrase used to go.
	Now, another aspect that, of course, has been talked about a lot in online media, not so much, of course, in mainstream media, is the issue of the farm murders and the brutality, the horror, the...
	Psychotic, torturing brutality of these situations.
	Nothing to do with theft, nothing to do with property, nothing to do with wanting the land back.
	This is, you know, psychotic, almost cult-like slaughters and tortures and rapes and abuses of...
	Largely white, although sometimes black farm workers.
	I wonder if you could tell people what's been going on, what you think the motivations are, and maybe just a couple of instances so people can get a sense of the horrors that are there for the Boer farmers in general.
	Yeah, thank you. This is very, very important.
	I've actually written a book about this.
	It's going to be published soon.
	The book is called Kiel the Boer.
	And the reason why that's the title of the book is because that's a very well-known song in South Africa, Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.
	So the farm murder phenomenon is, it gets quite complex because there are a lot of variables that play a role, but mainly or generally the problem is that Farmers are being attacked and killed and tortured in complete disproportionate numbers, in very alarming numbers.
	So this is one of the other things that the South African government recently said that Afroforum is lying about farm murders, while what they did not know is the figures we were quoting, again, were the South African government's own figures.
	So according to their own figures, over the last 18 years, the average in South Africa was that almost two farm murders occurred every week in South Africa.
	Over a period of 18 years, and almost two farm attacks occurred per day in South Africa.
	And I'm sorry, just to clarify that, so two farm murderers, does that mean two murders of farm people as a whole, or two individual farmers murdered?
	It means people who comply with the definition of a farm murder.
	So I can be the victim of a farm murder despite the fact that I don't live on a farm.
	So I can visit someone on a farm and I can be attacked there and killed and that would make me the victim of a farm murder.
	So that means that a farm murder is basically someone who is murdered during a farm attack.
	And a farm attack, there's a particular definition for that.
	It basically means people coming from outside, attacking the farm or attacking the people who live there, committing one-off a variety of crimes, including murder, attempted murder, assault, rape, arson, and so forth.
	So if someone is murdered during one of these attacks, it's a farm murder.
	And quite often, no theft is involved.
	Wallets are left behind, cell phones are left behind, other valuables, jewelry and so on.
	These are ideological or racial or hate crime murders, I think, obviously with the Marxist agenda of destroying the controllers of the means of production.
	Yeah, what we could determine in the year 2016, or that financial year at least, about 14% of the people who were murdered during farm attacks were tortured.
	And some of the tortures are horrible.
	I've written a chapter in the book that's coming out about the brutality of farm murders.
	And it sounds like ISIS executions if you read some of those stories.
	I can give you a few examples.
	Please do. Let me give you the best known example is the case of Wilhelmine Potritter.
	Now that was a little girl. She was two years old or three years old according to some reports.
	So I think it was a Sunday afternoon.
	She and her father and mother came home to the farm.
	And once they got out of the vehicle, Atipo Triter, her father, he was about 40 years old, he was attacked.
	And there was a big struggle and they were basically struggling all around the house.
	And eventually he was stabbed 151 times with a knife, with a garden fork, and what we call a panga, which is a machete.
	He was stabbed 151 times.
	And based on the investigations of the crime scene, The little girl stood next to her father as this happened, and her footsteps, her feet were soaked in her father's blood, so she literally stood in his blood and you could see her little footprints across the yard.
	After they murdered him, they took her, they shot her through the head, and they threw her in a box in the storage room.
	Then Vilna After having witnessed her husband being stabbed 151 times and they left him with the garden fork through his neck and after witnessing a three-year-old little girl being shot dead, she was then dragged into the house and she was made to kneel and they shot her executioner style through the head.
	They then went and they took the little girl, Wilhelmine, and they threw her dead body over her mother's dead body.
	Then they took 3,000 rand, which is about How much?
	A few hundred dollars they took.
	And they made a sign, the attackers in Sepedi, which if you translate it, it means we killed them and we are coming back.
	And they put it up on the front gate of the farm.
	And eventually those people, they were caught and they were trialed and they were found guilty of murder.
	And then the finding was that their motive was to steal.
	They went there because they wanted to steal money.
	That's what was said in court.
	And there are many such cases.
	There was a person called Knowledge Polis Mandlazi, who was found guilty of murdering five white farmers, or committing five farm murders.
	And he said in court, my hateful white people made me do it.
	And he said for him, killing white people is like going to work.
	And he was found guilty and he was laughing about it during the court proceedings.
	There was another case, a man called Ntutuko Chwene, who murdered a white farmer in the Free State.
	He testified under oath that he didn't have any beef or any problem with that farmer in particular.
	The reason why he killed him was because he happened to be a white farmer at the wrong place at the wrong time.
	And he said that he was influenced by the ANC's repeated singing of Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.
	So he testified under oath that the singing of songs such as Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer led him to murder a white farmer.
	And there are many cases.
	There was a farmer called Roger van Parijs just the other day.
	He was attacked on his farm and they had him kneel and they shoved the samurai sword down his throat.
	There were people who've been stuck in deep freezes.
	There's been people who were a few cases.
	One of them is Johan Streidom, Schumann, rather.
	He was attacked on his farm.
	He was beaten with a blunt object over the head.
	He was then tied behind his pickup truck by his feet while he was still alive.
	And then they drove with him. They dragged him around the dirt roads on the farm for a few kilometers and eventually died when his organs started bursting as a result of this.
	And he's not the only one with whom that happened.
	So I can really keep going.
	These are the most atrocious stories.
	I think I remember reading Ernst about a boy who was Boiled in a bathtub.
	Just astonishing levels of, I mean, pre-medieval barbaric cruelty.
	Yeah, let me tell you what happened in that case.
	It happened in Gauteng province, just south of Johannesburg, on a small holding.
	So it was a mom, a dad, and a 12-year-old boy.
	And they had the three of them locked in different...
	They had them in different rooms.
	And then they...
	I can't remember the exact sequence.
	I'm pretty sure that...
	The first thing they did was they raped the mother.
	Then they shot the mother.
	I can't remember if they killed the father or the mother first, but they shot them dead.
	First the one and then the other.
	And then they filled the bathtub with boiling water and they tied the little boy, they tied his hands behind his back and they threw him head first or face down into the boiling water.
	And he drowned from It's horrible.
	It's something that you don't even want to imagine.
	But that happened just a few kilometers from where I'm sitting speaking to you right now.
	And that's not the only case.
	Actually, let's make it more personal.
	As I said, I grew up on a farm, and a lady who worked on our farm as a secretary, her parents, I have to remember if it's her parents or her grandparents, I think it was her parents, We're killed like that, and her father was also boiled to death in that same way.
	I think what happened to him, if I recall, was they had a shower nozzle.
	They turned up all the boiling water, and they stuck it down his throat, and eventually he was killed as a result of that.
	There was another lady, her husband was dead already.
	Prior to the attack, she was tied to the shower in the house and she was then whipped by like a string that had objects fastened to it.
	She was whipped with it and they then went to the ashes.
	They knew that her husband was dead.
	They took the urn with her husband's ashes and they threw it over her as they were whipping her and they said to her, That we know you're alone and there's no one coming to save you.
	And as I said, I can keep going with these stories.
	It's the most atrocious stories imaginable.
	But the worst part of it is that the South African government is still in denial about this problem.
	If you ask them, then they would say, yes, it's a problem.
	We need to do something. If you ask them, are we going to prioritize this?
	Are we going to have some sort of a government strategy to address this?
	Are you going to stop singing, shoot the bull or kill the farmers or Songs like that, they would say, no, farmers aren't special.
	That's the typical response we get from the South African government.
	And this...
	This is all occurring after the Truth and Reconciliation Committees.
	This is all occurring after whites, to some degree and certainly under international pressure, gave up political power.
	And this is occurring, as you point out, after many decades of hundreds of thousands of land reconciliation, land restitution, that this kind of attempts to reconcile the wrongs of history have not diminished, but may have even provoked the brutality through the appearance of weakness.
	And I genuinely, I mean, it's absolutely appalling to hear these stories.
	And I honestly cannot believe that human beings are born with any of this kind of hatred for other races, for other ethnicities.
	It must be something that is drip fed like a venom into the hearts and minds of people.
	We cannot possibly be born with this kind of antipathy.
	Yeah, I agree.
	And I think, as I've said it.
	it's a very complex phenomenon.
	And I think part of the reason why this is happening is I think there's a bunch of different factors that come together in this.
	And I think probably I would say at least two very important parts of the problem is that there's a culture of violence in South Africa.
	South Africa is a very violent country.
	And unfortunately, we have to say that that culture of violence was very much accelerated by the ruling party when they were still struggling for power in South Africa.
	What happened in the 1980s in the black townships and so forth.
	And you mean with Winnie Mandela and the necklacing and these kind of brutality?
	I wonder if you can tell people a little bit about that for those who don't know.
	Yeah, well, I think the best way to answer that is to say there's a documentary film about this called Tainted Heroes.
	The trailer is on YouTube. I think someone uploaded the entire film to YouTube as well, which is about that.
	It's about what the ANC did to come to power in South Africa.
	And it's atrocious.
	I think I mentioned earlier that they were funded by the Soviet Union.
	So the ANC were funded by the Soviet Union.
	The Soviet Union then felt at one stage that the ANC is not really doing enough.
	They're not really effective enough in terms of their struggle for power in South Africa.
	So, they sent them to Vietnam in 1979 to study from Ho Chi Minh and Vong Giang Jaap about how they succeeded against the Americans.
	And they were taught what is known as a people's war strategy.
	So, this is all in that documentary, Tainted Heroes.
	And the people's war strategy was actually developed by Mao Tse Tung.
	And the essence of that is that people don't matter.
	Even innocent people, if they die as a result of your struggle, That's the case.
	So what happened then, the ANC came back, and they were very much marginalized by then.
	And then they started this people's war in which black rival organizations such as the Black Consciousness Movement, the Inkata Movement, Azapu, and so forth, were aggressively attacked.
	And that's why when people think about violence and apartheid, it's not white and black people killing each other.
	Violence within the black townships.
	It's black people necklacing other black people.
	And that's as a result of this, what I've explained to you now.
	And necklacing, for those who don't know, is when you put a tire around someone's neck, you fill it with gasoline and you set it on fire to basically burn their face from their skull.
	Yeah, and so what would happen then is while this person is burning, there would be a mob around this person dancing and then they would throw rocks at that person and they would kick that person and so forth.
	So it's the most Horrible way to die imaginable.
	And that happened. More than 500 people were killed by way of necklacing in the decade before apartheid ended.
	And more than 700 people were burned to death using other methods.
	But I think the worst part is that although the ANC denies it today, it's written down.
	There are written records of it where ANC leaders were encouraging people to do this.
	And Winnie Mandela is the most well-known case where she said, with our necklaces and with our matches, we will liberate this country.
	Even Tabu Mbeki, former President Tabu Mbeki, people don't know this, he even said that he doesn't condone the use of the necklace as a method of murder, but he refuses to condemn those who use it or who carry it out.
	We've had Chris Harney, who was a very well-known icon in South Africa, struggle icon, who encouraged this.
	We had Alfred Nzor, who was Secretary General of the ANC at the time, who actively encouraged this.
	So there were many such cases, although today, The so-called general knowledge is that the ANC was actually opposed to this.
	But if you really look at what happened, they actively encouraged it.
	Well, and Mandela was also filmed singing The Kill the Boer.
	Yes. In Russia,
	in 1917, the Tsar had, there were maybe a couple of dozen political prisoners, people who were imprisoned for their political beliefs.
	After, of course, Lenin, and then certainly after Stalin, it swelled to hundreds of thousands, and finally millions, that the revolution that was supposed to oppose some sort of injustice ended up enacting many times, many thousands of times, the injustice that it claimed to oppose.
	And looking at the crime statistics both pre- and post-apartheid, You know, this is again, I hate to have to make this point, this is no defense of apartheid, but if you were a black and wanted to say not be raped or murdered or stolen from, you're statistically would be much better off pre-apartheid than post-apartheid.
	I mean, the number of blacks who've been murdered and raped post-apartheid is shocking.
	Yes, I don't have that exact statistics with me, but I can tell you a number that I've seen very recently is deaths in incarceration, in prisons.
	So we frequently hear that the apartheid system was very evil because so many people died in prison.
	And if I recall, it was something like 74 people who died in prison during the incarceration.
	And I took it up with some former police officers who had information about this, and they said, yes, the majority of them died as a result of suicide.
	In South Africa, in one year, there's more than 300 people dying in prisons in South Africa currently.
	That's the irony. We would hear that the Apartheid government was evil because 70 people died in prisons.
	But currently, there's over 300 per year dying in prison.
	That's just one measure.
	We can look at all these different measures.
	But South Africa, as I said, is a very violent country.
	In the last financial year, there were about 19,000 murders in South Africa.
	Which is a ratio, if you work it out, per 100,000, it's 34 people per 100,000.
	In the US, I think the number is around 5 or 4 per 100,000.
	In the UK, it's 1 per 100,000.
	But in South Africa, it's 34.
	It's shocking to think, of course, when you point out the deaths in prison, that in one year post-apartheid, it's, what, more than four times the number of people die in prison than the entire multi-decade history of apartheid.
	And this is the complexity.
	We don't want to say, let's go back to apartheid.
	That was a racist and unjust and segregationist system.
	Of course, again, for me, the libertarian ideal is small to no government, but...
	We do still have to look at the numbers.
	And, you know, I dare say to use the phrase Black Lives Matter, they do, of course.
	And the increase in violence, the increase in rapes, the increase in thefts is horrendous for the black community.
	And it is, of course, horrendous for the white community who live in fear on their farms and who live as caged animals in the cities behind barbed wire, unable to leave, having to take different routes to drop their kids off at work.
	Having to phone security guards to re-enter the house, living in fear every night.
	This is a wretched existence, flamed and fueled by, I think, this Marxist hostility to any successful group.
	Yeah, it's horrible.
	And if you compare, for example, the South African police service to the skyrocketing of private security in South Africa.
	So recently, in the last few years, there seem to have been, although it's worsening now again, there seem to have been It almost appeared as a violent crime was coming under control, and then the police were very proud of that.
	But what they did not say, what they didn't acknowledge was the skyrocketing of private security in South Africa.
	Private security is a massive industry in South Africa.
	It's far bigger than the police force, right?
	Yeah. I'll get the exact numbers, but it's exponentially more.
	I think there are somewhere upwards of half a million private security guards in South Africa.
	I can get the exact number, and I'll get the exact numbers of The prison figures that I mentioned, I'll maybe put it up on Twitter after we publish this interview, if people are interested.
	And I'll get the numbers of the private security industry as well, in comparison to the South African police.
	And that's a new thing.
	It wasn't like that before.
	So if there seems to be, as we've had a few years ago, there seemed to be, it looked almost as if violent crime was coming under control.
	But the main reason, therefore, was the massive increase in private security.
	And also, maybe I can add to that, there's Literally billions of rands in South Africa that our own government is spending on private security to protect them.
	So our own state president, there's a whole private security industry almost that's protecting the South African government and politicians.
	While you would think that They should trust their own police force to do that.
	Well, this goes back to the earlier question about nationalization of land and so on.
	You can, of course, hire private security to defend you against private criminals, but there's no private security force in the world that I know of that can defend you against public predation by the state.
	Yeah, and that's exactly the point.
	And that's where I think people need to understand the concept of a monopoly on violence.
	And that's what governments have.
	Governments have a monopoly on violence, so there's no point in government saying we're going to take your land without violence because what they're actually saying is we're going to take your land and you are not going to resist and that doesn't make sense.
	Yeah, I mean if the woman doesn't resist, it's still rape.
	So listen, I appreciate your time.
	Let's finish, if we can, with now that we've thoroughly depressed people and hopefully not stripped them of their will to live.
	Let's give people who care about this and listen out there, you're listening to this, you're watching this, you need to care about this.
	Simple human compassion for the continued success of South Africa would be part of it, but even if that's not enough of an overriding motive for you, the fact that whatever disasters that may occur in South Africa are in no way, shape, or form going to be contained within South Africa.
	Even if it's just your own selfish desire to not have problems spill over, that may be something for it.
	So what can people do who, at the moment, are feeling kind of helpless and perhaps apathetic and dejected about the possibilities What specifically, let's talk about practical steps that people can take to help.
	Please, thank you. And that's very important.
	And as we've said, discussed in this interview, the South African government is very sensitive about its reputation abroad.
	And I have to be honest, I might have sounded very pessimistic during this interview, but I don't think all is lost.
	I really think we have the capacity or the potential to swing this thing around.
	There's already been a significant backlash and we can already see the South African government trying to sort of backpedal on this or try to explain themselves in a much more comprehensive way than they've done before.
	So I think what we will be doing, I'll say what we plan to do as AfriForum and then what people can do.
	So what we will be doing now is we will very soon embark on an international tour or campaign.
	We will be sending people to Australia, we will go to Europe and I will go to the US in May to talk to as many people as I can about this.
	And we have a website, expropriation.co.za, where there's a memorandum that people can sign in which they can indicate if they are South African or not.
	So they can go to this website and just sign the form and say, I disagree with what's happening in South Africa.
	And why this is important is because it strengthens our mandate to say it's not simply an organisation talking.
	Hundreds of thousands or millions of people who have a very serious problem about what's happening or what could happen in South Africa.
	Can you just repeat that again for the website for the people listening?
	We'll put the links to this below just to make sure people get it.
	It's just the term expropriation, not.com,.co.za.
	So that's the term we use in South Africa.
	And I think another thing that people can do that really is beneficial to us, it's very easy, is actually just to talk about this, to talk about this online, to comment on pages, to comment on Twitter, to comment on Facebook, in comment sections on websites, to really talk about this issue.
	Because in that way, we can raise the bar in terms of getting the message out.
	And for example, as I said, I will be going to the US soon, so I'm hoping to speak to a lot of people while I'm there.
	So people can comment on this, as I've said, but they can also write to their own governments.
	We don't believe that it's a practical solution to expect of other governments, you know, to fly in with jets into South Africa and, you know, force the South African government to stop this.
	Of course, that's unrealistic.
	But simply speaking out about this, we've seen the massive response when the Australian Minister of Home Affairs spoke out about this.
	It was a massive response in South Africa.
	It was the dominating story in the news for a week.
	So if we can get more people, especially people within the media, people who have big audiences such as yourself and others, people, especially if they are connected to governments, to simply come out into the public and say, we are very concerned about what is happening in South Africa.
	And I think lastly, what I can say is to people who are investing in South Africa or who want to invest in South Africa, we are not We're not calling for disinvestment into South Africa, but what we do intend to do is to warn investors, to say to them, your investment might not be as safe as you think.
	So instead of calling on people to disinvest, we would rather encourage people who wish to invest in South Africa to make their voices heard, to say, listen, I want to invest in your country, but I'm not going to invest in your country if the right to own private property is not respected, because that's what this whole thing is about.
	Section 25 of the South African Constitution, which is the right to own private property.
	That's what this entire debate is about in South Africa.
	And property is life.
	Literally life for millions and millions of people, hundreds of millions around the world.
	Property is the capacity to survive, whether it's the property you own or it's the property that other people own which allow them to be productive with the means of production.
	So, yeah, and I really feel this is a battle to some degree of just good versus evil.
	There are, of course, those who wish to tell us that all disparities in group outcomes are the result of white racism.
	And those people are racist, and those people are immoral, and those people are fomenting massive conflict around the world.
	There are other explanations, whether they're cultural, whether they're ideological, whether they're biological, I don't know.
	But we do need to explore hypotheses or conjectures other than universal evil white racism, which I have never found to be the case.
	There are racists in every group, but the idea that it's only concentrated in one Ethnic group is a racist theory itself.
	We need to keep talking and we need to find ways to get along and not to just demonize any particular group in society that has never led to a good outcome ever in human history, quite the opposite.
	So, yeah, just wanted to remind people it's afroforum.co.za, twitter.com forward slash Ernst Roets, R-O-E-T-S. I really, really appreciate the in-depth time that you were able to spend today because it is a very complex issue.
	It does not lend itself well to It's a soundbite and I really appreciate the very clear explanations you've provided us.

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