Ernst Roets exposes South Africa’s post-apartheid collapse under ANC rule, where Marxist-Leninist policies—backed by Soviet ties—fueled land confiscation (like Zimbabwe) and state-sponsored violence against white farmers, despite 90% of political killings targeting blacks. Documents reveal a two-phase revolution: liberal rhetoric followed by radical enforcement, yet Western media ignores chants like "Kill the Boer" as mere metaphors while 50–60% of adults rely on state handouts amid economic ruin. Roets warns of oikophobic backlash for speaking out, but Elon Musk’s exposure and Trump’s Afrikaner refugee order mark rare acknowledgment of a crisis Western complicity helped create—where minority self-governance may be the only antidote to impending collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
So, I think for most Americans, news about South Africa ended in 1994. Both literally, we stopped getting a lot of news from the country, but also people's views about it stopped evolving then.
That was the year that apartheid ended, I guess, officially.
You had elections.
Nelson Mandela is still a hero in the United States, often referred to by politicians.
And it's only been, I think, in...
American media in the past couple of months that stories have come out of South Africa that a lot of Americans have read that actually the country seems to be falling apart and that the government is kind of genocidally racist.
And then President Trump in the past month has basically said the same thing.
And it's shocking to a lot of people, I think.
How bad it is and just how racist it is.
far more than apartheid ever was.
And so I'm wondering, since you've just landed from South Africa, you live there, describe the state of the country right now, if you would...
Yeah, well, perhaps I can start with your reference about the 90s because it's absolutely true.
South Africa and America was very involved with the setting up of the political system that we have in South Africa during the 90s.
And it was, of course, the end of history era.
Everyone is excited about...
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the whole world's going to be liberal and democratic, including African countries.
And Samuel Huntington actually cautioned against this in 1996, saying, you know, when he wrote The Clash of Civilizations, and he said, don't expect of African leaders and African liberation movements to suddenly become Western when you give them Western constitutions, because they are still African.
So they will use, it's the democratic paradox, they will use democratic institutions to promote non-democratic ends.
And that's what we see in South Africa.
We have a parliament, we have a very liberal constitution.
But if you read the constitution and you compare that to reality in South Africa, it's two completely different worlds.
The de facto and the de jure reality in South Africa is irreconcilable.
And so what has been happening in South Africa is firstly, there was this major excitement about the new South African Nelson Mandela, the miracle story, you know, Oprah spoke about this and Charlize Theron, everyone.
And, and, but, The reality on ground level was in many ways the opposite.
From the beginning?
Gradually.
So they started, for example, with these BEE, as they call it.
It's Black Economic Empowerment, which of course has nothing to do with economic empowerment.
They started with that in 1996. And so they actually said initially in the 90s that that's the ruling party's strategy.
They still call it that, the National Democratic Revolution.
Which is about using democracy to promote socialist ends.
And so the revolution, they say, goes in two phases.
The first phase is present yourself as being liberal and democratic and get support, especially international support and local.
And then use multi-party democracy as a way of promoting the goals of taking the country down the road to socialism.
And so recently they even went as far as publishing a document saying...
We are now ready for the second phase of the revolution.
We now have power.
We have control of the state.
We now need to use this to become much more aggressive in our socialist policies.
And we're seeing this in a plethora of new laws all of a sudden in South Africa, which I think it's gotten to the point where it's just not possible to maintain the view that people have had of South Africa for the last few decades and look at what's currently happening in South Africa.
It's two completely different worlds.
And hopefully or...
Happily, at least, a lot of people are starting to wake up to this.
Well, literally, so I have children, and they are taught in schools, and the government prescribes what children should learn in history.
And so the official version is he went to prison because he was a good leader, and the government didn't like that.
I should say that he certainly was the best that the ANC has ever had to offer.
But the reason why he went to prison is because they started Mkanto Isiswe, which was the military wing of the ANC. Which became involved with military actions in South Africa with an attempt to overthrow the government.
And they actually, and this is, I'm quoting from the ANC's own policy documents that's on their own website.
So they had this operation when they started, which was used in the Rivonia trial against Nelson Mandela.
It was a strategy called Operation Mahi Bouye.
And the slogan of this operation was, shamelessly we shall attack the weak.
Well, I think that most people would acknowledge the distinction between military action, which is, you know, a fight, a war, a battle between militaries and attacks on civilians, which is something we call terrorism.
Which was a gang that was involved with violence and killings of innocent people.
And she famously said at a political rally, with our necklaces and our matches, we will liberate this country.
Which, of course, is a reference to the necklace murders, which was very popular in South Africa and still happens in South Africa.
That's when you take a rubber tire, you fill it with petrol or gasoline, and you put it around someone's neck so that it's bound around their arms and you set it on fire.
And then you stone that person while he's burning to death.
And that happened.
There were, I think, 500 or 700 people were killed like that during political violence in South Africa.
And she encouraged this.
Initially, she denied it.
And then it came out that it was recorded of her saying this.
So, yes, it's very bizarre that someone like Queenie Mandela is a hero today.
Yes, so there were some better and some worse people in the leadership.
I think an important...
The first component here that is very well documented, it's not a secret, but a lot of people don't seem to want to know this or recognize this, is the very strong alliance that the ANC has always had and still has with the South African Communist Party and the extent to which they were supported not just by the Soviet Union, also by the Vietnamese and by Mao Tse Tung as well, implementing what they call the People's War Strategy that they got from Mao Tse Tung.
So yes, it was very much the ANC saw themselves as being the African or South African frontier of promoting a socialist or communist revolution.
So, 1 in 10. In South Africa, 85% of income tax is paid by 1 in 30 people.
So, it's a very small number of people, a very small portion of society that pays tax, that is heavily taxed.
And then about almost half of the population in South Africa get money from the government in the form of social grants.
If you add government employees, conservative estimates say that 50% of people in South Africa get money from the government.
Some estimates say it's up to 60% of adults, voting age adults, get money from the government each year.
So then this money, of course, is then used.
It's given out as social grants.
But what's left...
I mean, there are so many examples.
One of the most recent ones is this blacks-only fund that the government has set up, whereby they give money to black entrepreneurs exclusively.
So this is happening.
And then on top of that, so after you spend your tax money to fund these government programs that are discriminating against you, you have to spend what is left to do the things that the government was supposed to be doing.
So the classical definition of a government is that it should protect life, liberty, and property.
The classical liberal view, we're a bit Ciceronian, so we think a government has to do more than that.
But if we use those three things, the government's not protecting our lives.
If this interview that we're about to have is two hours, there will be about seven murders in South Africa in this time.
Government does not protect liberty.
It's actively targeting schools of minority communities, actively denying the identity and the rights of minority communities.
And it's certainly not protecting property.
It's actively involved with the program to empower the government to expropriate private property without compensation.
And then we have to use the money that is left to pay for our own private security, to become involved with organizations, to fulfill the things that the government was supposed to be doing.
One of the reasons that I find this story so fascinating is not simply because, you know, it's like the classical, you know, irony of history.
This, you know, group comes in with one aim and then achieves exactly the opposite.
We're going to have a, you know, we're going to end racism and then make racism much worse, but also because they have gone about it in a way that's almost like American.
The same language, the same diversity is our strength, kind of sloganeering, and it's had the same result, which is to basically kill whites.
And I, I mean, that's just true.
And I wonder if you see that.
It's almost like you imported our kind of intellectual class framework for this project.
So there's a theory, there was this video that just went viral on social media of this guy talking about...
How white people are subhuman and all of that.
And they get, well, this is taught at universities in South Africa.
There's a theory called Azania critical theory.
Azania is a pan-African word for South Africa.
And they actually get this from Americans like Robin DiAngelo, who's this Ibrahim X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, these people.
They get it from them and then they put an African flavor on it, which essentially boils down to a theory that justifies.
The targeting and extermination of the white minority.
And so the theory, to summarize, goes more or less like this.
There's an African term called Ubuntu, which means brotherliness, or it's about your internal humanity.
It's a Zulu term.
And the theory goes that white people are incapable of having Ubuntu.
But Ubuntu...
It's the essence of humanity.
So if you don't have it, you're not truly human.
So it boils down, the logical conclusion is that if you kill a white person, then you did not actually commit murder.
So this is not widely believed in South Africa, but this is taught at universities by university professors, and it's certainly believed by radical elements.
Yeah, and we have these political parties chanting, I mean, you've seen this, you've reported on this, chanting, kill the boer, kill the farmer to a stadium filled with people.
And it's not just rhetoric.
So they would say, no, it's just a metaphor.
But it's preceded by a speech about how white people are criminals and should be treated like criminals, how everything they have is illegitimate and stolen, in which people are encouraged to go and invade their farms and so forth.
And then they chant, kill the boer, kill the farmer, and they make these hand gestures.
Of course, the boer is a reference to the Afrikaner people.
But the reality is also that the farmers are being attacked and killed on their farms.
So it's not just a metaphor.
And our attempt at researching this has found that there's an increase in farm attacks.
Obviously, when the political climate becomes heated or warmer, and these type of statements are made in a way that's highly publicized, you do get an increase in farm attacks.
And it's very brutal and very horrific farm attacks that we've seen.
But in the United States, the country that inspired the revolution that you're living through, our media have, Ignored that and then gone beyond ignoring it to attack anyone who brings it up as a, quote, white supremacist.
For example, I was on your show a few years ago to talk about the farm murders and the extent to which we were attacked by American media as a result of that.
I had someone from CNN come see me in my office in Pretoria to interview me about farm attacks.
And the entire interview was about you.
So he would put things to me and say, did you know Tucker Carlson said the following?
Do you agree with this statement?
And did you know that Donald Trump said this?
And are you comfortable with this?
And so I paused him at one stage and I said, what are we doing?
I thought we had to talk about farm murders and what's happening in South Africa.
But the argument was that because Trump made that comment about farm murders in 2018, It has to be a non-existing issue because Trump is a liar and everything he says is false.
And the same with you.
Because you spoke about it, that means that the problem doesn't exist.
And we have to prove that it doesn't exist in order to get to you.
Because of a variety of things, because the attackers are poor, or because, remember, all the horrible things that white people have done in South Africa and outside of South Africa.
So there's always a justification.
And so another example, Just in 2018, again, after you spoke about this and after Trump spoke about this, the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, came to America and he spoke at an event in New York and he said there are no killings of farmers in South Africa.
And he just flat out denied the existence of the problem.
And he said this on an international platform.
He said it's not happening.
It's not true.
And the worst of it all was how the media knew this was wrong.
Especially mainstream media in South Africa.
They knew that it's not true.
And so they immediately rushed to his defense, writing articles like, this is what he actually meant to say.
And then they sort of justify what's happening.
And so we really do sometimes feel that our biggest battle is not primarily against what the government is doing, but against how the media is reporting.
Well, the explanation that is used in court cases, so by the way, this kill the boer chant was found in court not to be hate speech, according to South African law.
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So that's the part that bothers me.
I'll just say it.
I'm not surprised at all.
I watched what happened in Rhodesia when it became Zimbabwe in 1980, and something identical happened.
There was a lot of killing, and they drove it to the bottom rank of nations, the poorest country in the world.
And following exactly the same script, I always thought that would happen in South Africa.
I wanted to be wrong.
Turns out I wasn't.
What really bothers me is that the West has allowed this and cheered it on because I live in the West.
I live in the United States.
So, like, I don't want to think that my leaders are for killing people on the basis of race, but watching how they've stood by and applauded.
So during the 90s, it was, again, after the Cold War, and the world, and especially the West, was high on ideology and this idea that, you know, the world will become liberal and everyone's going to become like us, and everyone in the world is just an American waiting to be liberated, and we just need to go and liberate them from their own traditional beliefs and so forth.
And so it really is the case that America and many Western countries played a very significant role in creating the South Africa that we have today.
The West forced, through sanctions boycotts, the change of government.
That put the ANC in power.
So, absolutely.
In the same way the West has armed Ukrainians, they have an obligation to make sure, you know, to at least know what's happening and to be honest about it, not to hide their own responsibility for the crime.
Yeah, and so there's this false dichotomy in South Africa or with regard to South Africa that if you are against what's happening in South Africa now, that means you want...
The apartheid system.
So you have a choice.
And this one former judge recently said this, who's retired.
He said that we have a choice in South Africa between a moral system that is dysfunctional, which is the current system, or an immoral system that is a functional one, which is the former system.
And so the problem is if you criticize what's happening in South Africa now, you get accused of wanting to return to the apartheid system.
But the truth is you can reject both.
You can say we don't want the apartheid system and we don't want what's happening in South Africa at the moment.
We want to govern ourselves.
We want freedom.
But it seems that a lot of people are incapable of making that conclusion or leaving any room for saying that both these systems are wrong and we need a better system, a system that is much more decentralized, a system in which...
So can I, I think I'm hardly an expert on South Africa at all, but I am American.
So can I just give my overview of the different groups in South Africa?
And you correct me, but just so people following along, because I think it matters for reasons I'll explain.
South Africa, there are basically two big white populations in South Africa historically.
They're what were called the Boers, the Afrikaners, who were basically religious refugees, a mixture of Dutch and French Huguenots, Protestant Dutch, Protestant French, who moved to Southern Africa for reasons of religious liberty.
And then you had the English, who I think were, after the Boer War, in power.
Yes.
Who mostly were there for economic reasons and had, in many cases, passports back to Great Britain.
And then you had a couple of different African black groups, the largest of which I think to this day are the Zulus.
Yeah, so my great-great-great-grandfather, Nikolaus Rutz, who was the first Rutz who came to South Africa, came more or less the time when George Washington was a teenager.
So he was eight years older than George Washington.
So my family has been in Africa since, you could say, since George Washington, since the time of George Washington.
And so a few months later, his body was found with the treaty on which the Zulu king signed, giving them some land.
So they then initiated a punishment commando, a group of 300 to 400 men to counterattack.
The Zulus.
Which eventually led to the Battle of Blood River, one of the most significant battles in our history, where they found themselves completely surrounded.
They were about, let's say, 400. But 400 boars.
Yes.
Surrounded by 12,000 Zulus.
And so they had this wagon.
And my great-great-great-great-grandfather was in that lager, and he was the religious leader.
So he said to them, listen, we need to make a vow to God.
And so he wrote a vow, which they all made.
And the vow said that we're standing here in front of the God in heaven and earth to make a vow to him, that if he protects us in the battle that lies ahead, we will commemorate this day in the years to come as a day of thanksgiving and a Sabbath.
And we will also tell our children the story, and we will build a church, and we will make sure that the honor of the victory goes to God and not to us.
So they made this vow, and the battle took place, and the result was that not one of the Afrikaners were killed.
But broadly speaking, the Afrikaners are, compared to Europe and compared to some parts of America, still a very religious people.
And it also says something about why we are so attached to the country and why we don't want to leave.
We want to stay there because our ancestors have been there for hundreds of years and we fought and died for our space there and we've gotten used to it to a certain extent.
Yeah, well, who came from the north of Africa, yes, from where Cameroon is and so forth, who came down firstly towards the east of Africa and then along the Great Lakes, eventually ending in South Africa, yes.
I think what you said is really important because I think from the American or the Western perspective, there's this idea that the Afrikaners, the Boers, are worse.
They're the worst whites there, worse than the English.
So on my mother's side, I descend from the British.
My great-grandfather fought in the First World War for the British.
And so in many ways, culturally, we've become very close to the British because of the influence over the years.
And I don't think there's friction today between the Afrikaners and the British, but it certainly is the case.
I mean, the concentration camps were horrible today.
I recently read the Gulag Archipelago and Solzhenitsyn writes in there that the first concentration camps were invented by the Soviets, but that's actually wrong.
The first concentration camps that we know of, at least this type of concentration camps, were during the Anglo-Boer War, where about 30,000 women and children died.
But the great thing about the Anglo-Boer War was that it was in many ways a first for the world.
Some people call it the first international propaganda war because it was in a time when newspapers became popular.
So there was this propaganda war in Europe.
With regard to the Boers, or the Boer War, with a lot of people saying the Boers are Boerish.
That's where the word comes from.
Evidently, if someone told me that's where the word Boerish comes from, it's to be sort of, you know, very old style and, you know, not very sophisticated.
Yeah, rough around the edges.
And so there was a lot of propaganda like the Boers being compared to wild hogs and things like that.
But that's okay.
The word Boer was actually used for a long time as an insult, almost like Jew, like calling someone a Jew.
It's like, oh, you're a Boer, a typical Boer.
But, I mean, we're very proud of that word.
It's something that we take pride in.
In many ways, there's some debate about the difference between Boer and Africana, but it's broadly speaking synonymous.
But, I mean, we're very proud of our history in South Africa, and we've become a very sophisticated community.
An immense treasure chest of literature, of poetry, of philosophy, all of it in our own language that we did over the last, especially the last hundred years, which of course is under threat now.
And now it looks like you're, as you said, entering some kind of final stage where they've been expelled from a bunch of different African countries, as you know.
So, Jan Smuts, the famous Boer General who worked with Churchill, also famously said that South Africa is a country where the best never happens and the worst never happens.
And so, we sort of believe that and we hope that the worst outcome is an unrealistic outcome.
We do know that the most important thing that we need to do now is to be very well organized in terms of our own communities.
To be very well connected to each other.
There's this whole debate about the individual and the community in philosophy.
And we've realized that if you're just an individual, you are completely helpless.
If you're not part of a community, if you're not given meaning by the community of which you are a member, you're completely helpless against the Leviathan, the state.
So we need to be well organized.
We need to be armed.
We need to have well-functioning communities who look after each other, look after the poor, do all the things that the government's supposed to be doing, but also look after our safety.
So we drive patrols at night, we're involved with tens of thousands of volunteers, involved with patrols, looking after our own safety, and so forth.
But I think the bigger question here is the future of South Africa.
And this is a controversial thing to say, but...
It's so obvious that it's not sustainable.
It's not going to work.
And it's just getting worse.
So the only possible solution is not simply to say we need a different party in power because the underlying foundations is still problematic.
The only possible solution is to move toward a system with subsidiary authorities, which could imply something like a republic for the Africana people.
It could imply a kingdom for the Zulu people.
It could imply different...
There's a lot of types of authority depending on the community.
But South Africa is a country made up of a long list of minorities.
If you look at it from a racial perspective, you can say there's a black majority.
But the black majority also consists of a variety, as you mentioned, a variety of nations and tribes and so forth.
So there's a section in the South African constitution, section 235. That provides for self-determination for communities.
Now, there's some ambiguity in terms of how to interpret that section, but there is some constitutional provision for that.
And so during the 90s, the negotiations for New South Africa, the more conservative groups who were white and black, who were arguing for self-determination, were made fun of by...
The ruling party at the time, the National Party and the ANC, of course, and also some Westerners.
This is just backwards.
This idea of governing yourself is somehow an old, ancient thing that we should move away from.
And part of the problem, part of the reason why they were made fun of is the question is, how do you do that practically?
And the only way to practically do that is to have areas where people live concentrated, where people form a de facto majority.
And there are such areas, like, for example, when you talk about the Zulus and so forth, the Afrikaner people are pretty much dispersed, although there are some areas where we live more concentrated.
But there's, for example, there are some initiatives to get Afrikaners to move closer together.
And I think that's a solution that we need to really focus on, is getting the Afrikaners to move closer together.
I honestly think it's underpinned by an enormous sense of guilt within Western society or the Western world, not knowing how to make sense of the Second World War, and being influenced over decades and centuries by enlightened philosophy.
That talks about how you are the problem and how you should have a sense of guilt for who you are.
And the idea that community and identity is a bad thing.
Maybe, but the Chinese have an awful lot of power in Asia, and I never heard anybody say you should, like, you know, it's outrageous that, you know, China's 95% Han or something.
It's not even a thing.
It's something about what, well, as they say in our universities, whiteness is uniquely offensive.
It's uniquely, and I don't think that's a product of Enlightenment philosophy because, I mean, that was...
This is a new thing.
This is post-war.
The Second World War did this in some way that I don't fully understand.
So I thought and think that the lesson in the Second World War was that targeting people for violence and discrimination, but especially violence on the basis of their immutable genetic characteristics, was wrong.
I mean, I think even this conversation will be like, oh, that's a Nazi conversation.
It's like, no, no, no.
We're arguing, or I'll speak for myself, I'm arguing against what I thought the core idea was, or the core bad idea in the Second World War, which is that you should attack people, hurt people, because of how they were born.
Because it doesn't even, like, you don't even, I don't have especially high IQ, and it's super obvious to me that it doesn't make any sense.
So, like, what, really, I guess there's no answer, I don't know the answer, but there's something very deep going on here where the leaders of every country in the world all of a sudden decide this one ethnic group needs to be killed.
Don't take theology advice from me, but that's certainly my truest, deepest belief that this is immoral, you know, no matter who it's done to.
So one—I should have said this at the outset, but one of the reasons there's been this real change in people's willingness in the West to talk about what's happening in South Africa in an honest way— Not with the false pieties of Desmond Tutu was so great.
Whatever Desmond Tutu, you know, you think of Desmond Tutu, not much.
But we were required to talk about South Africa in a very specific way and to repeat certain cliches really at gunpoint.
And that's changed in the past couple of months, and it's really changed due to a South African...
Emma Gray called Elon Musk.
This is my perspective, you tell me yours, but he has made it possible through X, but also through statements he's made on X, to say the obvious, which is this is a crime against a beleaguered minority, and this is racism against human beings, and it's wrong.
Yes, so I don't know how much of what is in his biography by Isaacson is true, but it does seem from his biography that he's had...
Some bad experiences growing up in South Africa, which is unfortunate.
And we're still not sure quite how attached he still is to South Africa as a country, but looking at his ex and his comments, it's very clear that he's interested.
And the strange thing is, even though some people are very angry with him for speaking about South Africa, the only thing that he's really doing is he's picking up a mirror and he's saying, look at what's happening in South Africa.
I think, well, a lot of people, I think, I can speak for a lot of people in saying that we're really, really grateful for what Elon Musk is doing to shed light on what is happening in South Africa.
Right, but the first war was, you know, not even 15 years after the Boer War, so that was a pretty remarkable decision that he made.
I don't think most people are that in tune, but they know the big outlines, but of what happened post-94, and they know all about apartheid and all that, but it must be so weird to be living in this country where all this stuff is happening and nobody is saying anything about it.
And I have to say, the last few months has been quite a ride in terms of what we, you know, the executive order signed by President Trump and statements coming from the US. Tell us about that executive order, if you don't mind.
So the executive order is a very strong...
Reprimanding of what the South African government is doing.
It says that the South African government is, or as Trump said, is treating certain sections of society very badly.
And so it boils down to sanctions in an important way.
One part of it says that they will grant refugee status to Afrikaners if they want to go to the US. Which I don't think, in all fairness, we're really grateful for the public stance taken by the US. And in a certain sense, they haven't gone far enough.
But in a certain sense, I don't think the granting of refugee status is much of a solution.
Some people will take that up.
But that's why I told you the story of the Battle of Blood River and the vow.
We are culturally very, very attached to South Africa.
So I think what a better response from the US could be is to take a firm stance against what is happening in terms of what the South African government is doing.
But then to say, how can the US support minority groups in South Africa who are really working for some form of self-determination?
I think America...
Should recognize that it does have part in the problem in terms of what happened historically.
Yes, and therefore it's reasonable and I think it's fair and I'm hesitant to say this because I'm not an American, but I think it's reasonable to say that America has some form of a moral responsibility.
Not to fix South Africa, but at least to try to...
We've mobilized our State Department to defend, quote, trans rights in the Donbass, okay?
We've wade into every sectarian conflict in this world for the past 80 years.
Yeah, I think we can certainly say...
That a minority group targeted for genocide in a country we've been involved in really intimately for my entire life, that that group has a right not to be killed and to have some measure of self-determination.
It doesn't make any sense, and it's leading toward a really bad conclusion, obviously, as it has for every other group targeted in this way has really suffered, and there are a lot of them, okay?
It's not, you know, there are a lot of them.
And it never ends up well.
And I just don't know why we're playing along where you're not even allowed to say, oh, you haven't been.
I don't care anymore, obviously.
But, again, either every group has right to self-determination or no group does.
You can't have this system where, you know, some groups do or all groups do but one.
And so because there is no answer, the way that uniformity...
It's just through threats.
Like, shut up!
You're a bad person for saying that.
You're a Nazi.
It's like, no, no, no.
I hate the Nazis.
I'm going to speak for myself.
I hate the Nazis.
I hate the idea that people are attacked for something they can't control, like how they're born, their genetics.
I just don't believe in that.
I never will.
I'm a Christian.
I don't believe in it.
So you can call me whatever you want.
I'm actually making the opposite case.
And I haven't done anything to be ashamed of.
And if defending the right of people not to be murdered because of how they were born is a crime, then I'll plead to it.
But I actually think that the only thing that people currently in charge of most of the world, certainly of the West, are good at is seizing the moral high ground.
And they don't deserve it.
They haven't earned it.
They're rotten.
Their ideas are rotten.
And they don't deserve to lecture the rest of us about our moral inferiority while they're endorsing the murder of people for how they were born.
Yeah, it's built and it's a very shining house of cards and it's very proud of its accomplishments, but it's not sustainable.
So South Africa has been a victim of Western imperialism in many ways, ideologically currently, ideological imperialism, but also, and this is interesting, the ANC that's governing South Africa today was founded just after the unionization of South Africa in 1910. And they said that this was one of the major triggers that sparked us to start this movement.
And the unionization was after the Boer War, before the Union, South Africa was a variety of different republics and colonies governing themselves.
And unionization effectively meant that all of these different subsidiary authorities were combined into one big South Africa.
As we know it today, the borders of South Africa were actually drawn pretty much by the British in 1910. And the ANC were vehemently opposed.
So anyone who says, I want to kill you, you know, kill the boar, you're subhuman, those are not people who are going to say, yeah, yeah, go ahead and create your own independent state and not bother anybody because you're going to be way more successful and prosperous than they are, and they're going to hate you on the basis of envy, of course.
Well, I think the plan is to firstly to be well-organized communities, to have a very strong sense of community, a sense of pride in who we are, to remain Christian and have a strong faith, strong family ties and so forth.
That's where it starts.
And then other than that, the second step, you might say, the plan is to...
To just create certain realities on ground level.
So it's one thing to say, you know, we want more authority or more self-determination, but you have to, in a sense, create that so that what you have created can be recognized.
There's no point in saying, well, you guys can have your own place, but that place doesn't exist.
So I think what the Afrikaner people need to do is, to a large extent, build their own self-determination.
And I think that's what we intend to do.
But it would help a lot if we can get recognition for this pursuit as a legitimate pursuit.
So, there are many reasons why it's not working and why it won't work.
And, well, everything you can think of points to that direction.
One is just the data.
As I said, you can look at the levels of how crime is increasing, how unemployment is increasing, how government service delivery is increasingly failing, everything.
Honestly, how health is deteriorating, everything except tax collection.
That's one aspect of it.
Another aspect of it is just the extent to which people in South Africa are turning their back on politics.
There's this political vacuum in South Africa, and you can see it, for example, With the extent to which people have stopped voting, how voters' turnout has dropped significantly in elections.
Because they feel the political establishment is completely disconnected.
It doesn't resonate with them.
People vote for parties even though they don't really like them.
But they think this is, of all the parties, I don't like any of them, but this one is the least bad, so I'll vote for that one.
So there's a complete disconnect between the politicians or the political elite in South Africa, even the opposition parties and the people.
And so there's this political vacuum that has developed, and this vacuum is filled, as my friend Aaron Stansel in South Africa says, either by the good guys or the bad guys.
It's filled by the bad guys in terms of organized crime.
So we have these mafias and gangs coming to the fore with significant power to such an extent that the government is afraid of them.
But the vacuum can be filled by the good guys and that's well-organized communities who take control of what is important to them.
And that's what analysts and scenario analysts and so forth have been saying, that the future is one of deterioration where you will have communities who will be...
Much worse off than they are today because of the bad guys filling the void.
And you might have flourishing communities because of good guys filling the void.
And so that's another reason.
But I think the most important fundamental underlying reason why it's not sustainable is it's a political system that is detached from the reality in South Africa.
The reality is the distance from Cape Town, the south to the north of South Africa, is the distance from Rome to London.
There's this Indian community, there's what we call colored community in South Africa, and there are various different tribes, you could say, or cultural communities among black South Africans and among white South Africans.
So it's very diverse, different languages, different cultures.
And now we have this political system that just says you have individual rights.
And in some ways, the constitution, even though it was very much celebrated when it was adopted, it was called the best constitution in the world and the most liberal, most democratic, and so forth.
So they have been trying to change the South African Constitution, the property rights clause, to empower the government to expropriate private property without compensation.
It's flabbergasting to see the extent to which, again, academics and analysts and journalists are rushing to the defense of the South African government.
And so there's still an attempt to change the constitution.
And there's now a new bill in process.
It was just announced, I think, a week ago that they want to pass through parliament that says that 80% of that's what it boils down to, that 80% of land or property in South Africa must be owned by black people.
So because it says it must be racially representative.
And so I want to tell you a quick story about this, because it sort of highlights the ideology.
I was at a land summit in South Africa and a spokesperson for the Department of Land Reform spoke.
And it was very clear from his speech that the problem is white people owning land.
It was a racial thing.
It was very clear.
But it's colored with words like restitution and correcting historic injustices and so forth.
And so I asked him at this summit.
I said, so here's an example.
And what would the government's position be on this?
The example is a white guy owns a farm.
The government takes it from him to correct historic injustices.
And they give it to a black guy.
And it's a black farmer.
And maybe a year or two down the line, this black farmer decides he doesn't want to be a farmer anymore.
He wants to sell his land.
And the buyer is white.
And now there's a white farmer again.
What's the government's position on this?
And the spokesperson for the department says, in that case, the correction of the injustice has been reversed.
Well, I'm honestly, seriously, I'm more concerned if the question is about safety, about mob justice in South Africa than the actual government coming after you.
If you're a well-functioning, well-organized community, then the community, you can call people on the radio, you can get the community to take a stance.
So, especially in townships, someone is a rapist and the police doesn't show up, doesn't do anything, and then the local community just deals with him.
And if we had a well-functioning police service, maybe that would have helped.
But we don't.
So in South Africa, we can check the numbers.
I'm pretty sure the private security sphere in South Africa is almost as big as private security in America.
But America is much larger.
Private security in South Africa is more than double the police and the army combined.
If you add the police and the army up together and you multiply it by two, the amount of private security officers in South Africa or security guards is...
In terms of the farm murders, we've seen that statistically.
That in communities where areas or communities where people are well organized, where they have radios, where they drive patrols, where they are trained, there's a decrease in farm murders.
You can clearly see that.
Actually, in the last few years, the farm murder numbers have come down a bit.
And it's not because...
Because the incitement has gotten better.
It's not because the police is more efficient.
It's because local communities have become much more involved with their own safety.
And so that's certainly one of the most important building blocks of this solution.
Well, civil disobedience can be a wonderful thing.
And we've had some examples of successful civil disobedience campaigns in South Africa where...
The government had this, they call it an e-toll system.
It's like a big tax system on the highways that just, it's an electronic tax toll system.
But people just by the thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands just refused to comply, to get the tags and so forth.
And eventually they had to stop it because even though it was law.
People just didn't do it.
And the same with COVID. COVID was a good example.
We've had a bizarre COVID. Everyone has had a bizarre COVID. So we had these strange laws like you can't buy flip-flops during COVID. Those are deadly.
Yeah, and you cannot buy shorts.
You cannot buy cooked chicken.
We had these really, really bizarre COVID laws.
It's a crime to buy cooked chicken or to sell cooked chicken during COVID. And so people just said, well...
We don't care.
We're just going to do what we want.
And so there was a massive civil disobedience phenomenon in South Africa during the COVID lockdown.
And so I think people have learned, and the government couldn't do anything about it.
I think people have learned that you can actually do a lot if you just don't comply with these completely ridiculous, irrational laws.
There's no one thing that we can do to make sure that we're equipped to withstand that.
But if there is a silver bullet, it would be...
or the closest to it.
It would be what I mentioned earlier is well-organized communities.
Communities that have a sense of community, that recognize that you have a sense of responsibility, not just towards yourself and your own family, but towards your community.
And that you have some form of a communal identity that is under threat, that is being targeted.
And you have to protect yourself.
You have to fulfill a bunch of functions that the government is not fulfilling.
Even though you're paying them to do it, they're not doing it.
So you have to look after your own safety.
You need to have a gun.
You need to have a bulletproof vest.
You need to have, or if you don't, then at least a significant amount of people in your community must, especially those who are more interested in this type of thing.
You need to be well organized.
You need to be prepared if something bad happens in your community, if the mob comes, if they set the shopping mall on fire, or if they come for people's houses, that in a very short time frame, you can get a whole bunch of people mobilized.
To protect their community.
And with these riots in 2021, that was a good case study because some communities were completely unprepared and they were virtually destroyed.
And some communities were very well prepared.
And when the mobs arrived, there was a bunch of people with guns waiting for them.
The mob was approaching a town and the people were waiting for them on a bridge.
And then they got there, they just couldn't enter because the people had just cordoned off their own town, their own village or community, and they weren't able to enter.
So we've had some case studies of this.
South Africa is a fascinating case study for a lot of things.
Well, there's a story from Rwanda that I keep mentioning in the same time.
I think Linda Melvin wrote a book called Conspiracy to Murder, which is about, I think she lived in Rwanda and she's a journalist and she wrote about what happened.
And she writes about a meeting, it must have been a party in Washington between American diplomats and government officials from Rwanda in the run-up, I think, to the genocide.
And it was just a big celebration and everyone was happy because Rwanda was in the process of becoming a democracy.
And then afterwards, someone asked one of the Americans, but did you not know what was happening in Rwanda, that they were on the verge of committing genocide?
And he said, the American diplomat said, yes, we knew, but we were so excited about democracy and Rwanda becoming a democracy.
We didn't want to spoil the mood by confronting them.
So there's a town called Amanzamtoti, which is on the east coast of South Africa.
The main street was named Kingsway.
They changed it to Andrew Zondu Street.
Now, Andrew Zondu is really only known for one thing.
He was a member of the ANC Youth League, and I believe it was 1985. He planted a bomb in a shopping center, and he killed, I think, five people and injured 40. All of the people who were killed were women and children.
That's the only thing he did.
And he was a member of the ANC Youth League.
The ANC regards that event as something that they claim as an act of heroism.
So they named the main street after him.
And so there are people in that town who drive to work in a street named after the person who killed their children.
And now they would say that they need to do these name changes to make sure that they get rid of offensive names.
Offensive names are Afrikaans' names, names linked to South Africa's past.
And so I was at, again, a summit where this was discussed.
And I mentioned this.
I said, so you say that in Pretoria, Church Street is an offensive name and has to be changed.
In Amansam Toti, you change Kingsway to Andrew Zondu.
And I tell this story.
And I said, so...
Who decides if it's offensive or not?
And the guy said, oh, well, that's easy.
The majority decides.
But it's not even the majority.
It's just the government.
The government decides because they believe they are the majority.
So we have these extremely offensive things happening under the banner of...
I mean, in South Africa, everyone who's been to South Africa would say it's an incredibly beautiful country, and it truly is.
And it's a country that unfortunately has suffered so much under this current government and has suffered so much in the past.
One of our Afrikaans philosophers, a man named N.P.F. van Weycklo, wrote, I think, in the 1930s or something, that you love a people not so much for their accomplishments as for the hardships that they've had to endure.
Yeah, so do you think, I don't know what the resolution will be, and I'm certainly rooting for all South Africans of every color, but fervently, but...
I gotta think that being able to say certain obvious truths out loud helps.
So, it's somewhat philosophical, but I'll make it practical.
So, Odysseus is on his way back from the Trojan War.
And he has all these hardships and he's trying to get home.
And he gets told that the only way for him to get home is to face Scylla and Charybdis.
Scylla is this six-headed sea monster.
And Charybdis is a monstrous whirlpool that swallows ships whole.
And the only way for him to get home is he has to navigate through these two monsters.
Which he eventually does.
He decides it's better for him to sail his ship closer to Scylla, the sea monster, than the whirlpool.
And a whole lot of his people die, but he reaches his destination.
And so Aristotle writes about this in the Nicomachean Ethics, when he talks about the golden mean.
And he says any virtue is about finding the balance between having excess of it and having a deficiency of it.
And so this goes to courage.
Courage is a good example.
If you have excess courage...
You become reckless.
And if you have a deficiency, then you're a coward.
And so the point of having courage is finding the balance between cowardice and recklessness.
And what's great about the story of Odysseus is Odysseus discovers that he cannot simply go exactly in the middle between the two.
He has to be closer to the one threat than to the other.
Because if he goes too close to the whirlpool, these old ship gets swallowed up.
And so the point here, and Aristotle says this as well, it's not to find the exact middle point.
It's to find the appropriate balance between the two extremes.
And so the one extreme is recklessness and the other extreme is cowardice.
And I honestly think in the situation we are in, it's better to err on the side of being too bold than to err on the side of having not enough courage or trying to find some form of solution through appeasement.
And so we make mistakes in the process, and sometimes you say something wrong or you do something wrong, but I'm very much convinced that if we're on this course and we try to pursue what we are trying to pursue, rather err on the side of having too much boldness and too much courage and facing the consequences, than having to face the consequences of having a lack of courage.
I've got to say, in a lifetime of travel, if I could just generalize, Two most impressive groups I meet everywhere my whole life around the world, both groups living in exile in large numbers, are the South Africans and the Lebanese.
It's just an observation, but I've thought about it many times.
Last question.
Where can people who have made it this far into the interview and are interested in what's happening in your country and happening to your group – How can they follow it?
Communications coming, just telling us again how wrong we are.
This narrative is this zeitgeist in a certain sense.
It's really like a monster that you have to fight, that you're not allowed to speak certain truths, even though the truths are self-evident.
So I think one thing is if people just can help spread the message, help take some interest in South Africa, because what's happening in South Africa is also of interest to the rest of the world.
In terms of the problem and the solution, I think.
So that's one.
And then the other is there really are some institutions in South Africa who are really focused on building community-based solutions.
And I think if people can identify these institutions and support these institutions, it really would help.
And I think in terms of the US government, if the US government is willing to do something, as it seems that they are, I think the most important thing that they could do is a combination of pressuring the South African government away from these destructive policies, but also supporting communities, local communities, or minority communities, or nations, you should say, who are committed to finding some form of self-determination.
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