'Kill The Boer'? Murder White South Africans?

Relax, says New York Times, the Marxist-Leninist black militants don't really mean it

Stadium filled in South Africa with Marxist blacks calling for murder of whites

Behold, we have hit Peak New York Times!

The paper of record tells us that a stadium full of hardcore black nationalist Marxist-Leninists, singing a song calling for the murder of white farmers, is not really about calling for the murder of white farmers. Even though Julius Malema, the hardline Marxist-Leninist who heads the Economic Freedom Fighters party, and who led a stadium full of the faithful in singing the murderous song, has called for violence against whites many times — the Times wants us to believe that it’s not what it seems like.

Take a look at this Pravda-like passage from the Times:

A video clip of that moment shot across the internet and was seized upon by some Americans on the far right, who said that it was a call to violence. That notion really took off when Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire who left the country as a teenager, chimed in.

“They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” Mr. Musk, who is white, wrote on Monday on Twitter, the platform he now controls.

In recent years, people on the right in South Africa and the United States, including former President Donald J. Trump, have seized on attacks on white farmers to make the false claim that there have been mass killings.

Mr. Malema leads the Economic Freedom Fighters, a party that advocates taking white-owned land to give to Black South Africans. That has made his embrace of the chant all the more disturbing to some whites.

Despite the words, the song should not be taken as a literal call to violence, according to Mr. Malema and veterans and historians of the anti-apartheid struggle. It has been around for decades, one of many battle cries of the anti-apartheid movement that remain a defining feature of the country’s political culture.

Got it? Only far right people could possibly think that the leader of South Africa’s third largest political party leading a stadium full of militant supporters in a chant calling for murdering white people is, you know, problematic. Elon Musk could not get away with pointing out the genocidal nature of this chant if he didn’t own Twitter. There have not been mass killings of white farmers. And the song “has been around for decades.”

The song has been around for decades, true, but not in the sense the Times means. It is not a relic of the period of struggle between 1948, when apartheid was implemented, and its formal end in 1992. It emerged in 1993, one year after white South Africans voted to end apartheid, and one year before Nelson Mandela was elected president. In other words, the song was written when apartheid was officially on the way out.

And the claim that there have not been “mass killings” is cold comfort to white farmers, who have had to live with this for some time:

In South Africa, whites are about eight percent of the country’s 60 million population. Blacks are 81 percent, with the rest divided between mixed-race “Coloureds,” and Indians. For more information about what’s happening to white South African farmers, watch this Australian broadcasting report. And for a broader look at the ongoing collapse of post-apartheid South Africa, read this essay by Helen Andrews.

In the spirit of Walter Duranty, the Times Moscow correspondent who was secretly spinning the news Stalin’s way, the paper lies to protect a liberal narrative. Keep in mind that the Times has no truck with any contextualization that seeks to take the sting out of displaying the Confederate flag:

But see, that’s a white people thing, displaying a flag with historical associations. It’s okay when black people, especially black foreigners, explicitly call for the murder of whites in a song that has historical associations. The liberal mind at work.

Bear this in mind when you read today’s column by David Brooks of the Times, who is totally onside with the Never Trump movement, but who dares to suggest to his readers that Never Trump elites might actually be the baddies.

Excerpts from Brooks:

In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.

I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.

So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

Brooks cites examples of how members of the professional class have changed economic, social, and cultural structures to favor themselves, at the expense of tens of millions of other Americans. More:

Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them.

To remind you: I believe that Trump’s impeachment over his January 6 behavior was justified. I am skeptical of these new charges against him. They might be valid, but that will have to be demonstrated. Though I am a member of David Brooks’s class, I have zero trust in establishment institutions. None.

Remember, they told us that Trump was a Manchurian candidate in Russia’s pocket. It was a lie, and the media talked itself into believing this lie, according to the Columbia Journalism Review’s postmortem. The ruling class told us that children were not being subjected to chemical and surgical sex changes — but that was a lie, as we know thanks in large part to Christopher Rufo publicizing leaks. The ruling class told us lies about Covid. The ruling class knew Hunter Biden’s laptop was real, but the FBI appears to have lied about it to social media giants in an effort to help the Biden campaign; fifty or so former top intelligence officials signed a letter testifying that the laptop was Russian disinformation. It was all a lie.

Now that it is emerging that the crackhead Hunter Biden’s business derring-do actually did have to do with his father as vice-president, and looks for all the world like influence peddling, we are told by the ruling class that actually, yeah, okay, the Vice President was on the phone then, but he didn’t talk business.

We could go on and on with the lies these people tell to advance their class interests, and their hypocrisies (e.g. white male Jason Aldean is History’s Greatest Monster for his anti-crime “Try That In A Small Town,” we must celebrate the gritty authenticity of incomparably more violent, grisly songs by black rappers). (Oh, and what about that Nashville trans shooter manifesto — anybody heard anything about that lately?). Though I think Trump is a bum, it is hard to get too worked up over the idea that he might beat this corrupt system.

A friend who is also of the David Brooks class e-mailed last night to offer an explanation as to why the candidate he and I prefer, Ron DeSantis, despite loads of evidence that he would be more effective at advancing Trumpist policy goals, is dead in the water:

Here's my theory: DeSantis has not made irrevocable commitments that fully alienate the establishment, and therefore the Trumpian base is afraid that once in office he will reveal his true colors and tack back to respectable politics, like every Republican politician in their lifetime before him.  Trump is the guy who has walked into the party, punched the host in the face and pissed all over the carpet.  There's no going back for him, and everybody knows it.

Renaud Camus

I’m thinking about all this the day after finishing the manuscript of a forthcoming book: an English translation of essays by the French controversialist Renaud Camus. It will be the first time his work has appeared in a book like this in English. The only thing I knew about Camus was that he is the author of the concept, and the phrase, “The Great Replacement.” It’s a theory that says the native French ethnic stock are being intentionally replaced by immigrants, and that French elites, for a variety of self-serving reasons, are implementing this.

The theory has been seized by unambiguously nasty white racists, including some mass shooters. I have always regarded it with hostility, based solely on that fact. Then last weekend, I began reading Camus, and was shocked to find that his concept is not only more subtle than has been reported, but that he also has loads of examples and analysis to back it up (mind you, he is talking about France, not the rest of the world).

I won’t talk about it in detail until the book comes out, but what struck me as all too familiar is how in France, as Camus tells it, the establishment (media, government, etc) have made noticing that migration is causing a world of serious problems both immoral and in some cases, illegal. Camus discusses how, in the controlled official discourse, French people who would like to keep the country they grew up in are demonized as far-right racists. It becomes impossible for ordinary people to talk about what they see with their own eyes, because the power-holders — the kind of people David Brooks is talking about — demonize them mercilessly, and even come at them with “antiracist” laws to try to shut them down.

Camus makes the point that virtually the only people who dare to say what many, many others see and hear, are actual racists, who are so low on the social hierarchy that they have nothing to lose. And Camus points out that all this is happening in a broader global-capitalist, “hyperdemocratic” process of “deculturation.”

I finished the book embarrassed that I had once again assumed that the newspapers had been telling the whole truth about Camus and “The Great Replacement,” and that it was nothing more than a right-wing racist conspiracy theory. It’s not true. It’s not true at all, as English-speaking readers will be able to read for themselves when the book comes out in October.

Camus, an openly gay secularist, has routinely condemned far-right groups who have seized on the Great Replacement idea to justify racist violence. He said himself, in one of the essays in the volume, that he could never vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen, an unreconstructed racist and anti-Semite — even though Le Pen understood that the immigration policies of France were wicked. In fact, Camus identifies a phenomenon he calls “the second career of Adolf Hitler,” in which the example of supreme Nazi evil is invoked not to clarify thinking, but to stop it, and to stop any critical discussion of left-wing ideas and policies.

Personally, I sympathize greatly with countries around the world who resent and resist colonization, cultural and otherwise, because the people in those places regard colonization as a threat to their existence as a distinct people. Often this is quite true. Why is it, though, that we are all trained to regard with sympathy Others who resist colonization in defense of their own histories, cultures, and traditions — but are expected to suppress our own understandable desires to defend and preserve what is our own?

Anyway, as promised, we’ll discuss Camus’s ideas in detail later. I bring him up here in light of David Brooks’s column, as an example of how the ruling class — leftists, left-liberals, and right-liberals — control the discourse and much else to serve their own interests and beliefs. Why shouldn’t a people of any country be able to discuss whether or not it is wise or desirable to import large numbers of people from alien cultures into their own? Have there been many peoples in history that have chosen policies that, intentionally or not, would dissolve them as a distinct people? Shouldn’t we talk about this, as there is nothing more important to a people — any people! — than its existence?

Beyond immigration, the American reader of this forthcoming volume will quickly see that while Camus’s essays have to do with events in France and Europe, his themes are all too familiar. It’s the kind of thing that David Brooks talks about today. Camus says there is an entire industry now whose purpose is to convince people that they are not seeing what they see, and not hearing what they hear. The Times story about “Kill The Boer” is only one example.

Here, below, is the Marxist-Leninist black nationalist party singing “Kill The Boer” the other day. Imagine that you are a white farmer, a member of a small minority group in a country that is over 80 percent black. And you see a stadium full of people chanting for the murder of you and your family. How are you supposed to feel about that? The New York Times says you are a far-right idiot to notice. Are you willing to trust your life, and the life of your family, and your neighbors, to The New York Times?

That’s not the South Africa we were all taught to expect, is it?

One imagines that to be a white person in South Africa, watching this, is to be more or less in the position of a member of the black minority in the apartheid-era South, watching a Klan rally. I am not aware that that evil organization filled stadiums with Klansmen, though, and sang songs in praise of lynching. If they had done, the Times would have recognized that for what it was: straight evil.

But now? Wellsir, it’s like Lenin taught us: “Who, whom?” That is, the morality of an act depends on who is doing it to whom. If it advances the revolution, no problem. This, it appears, is pretty much how the Times and the Washington Post run their newspapers.

Last point: here in Europe, Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, is flayed alive in the European press for being a far-right bigot, because he does not want to open his country’s borders to migrants. Orban’s view is quite popular here in Hungary, even among many who won’t vote for him. Why? Because the Hungarians are only 10 million strong. They are a unique people. Nobody else has a language like theirs. If they are defeated or dissolved, it’s over for them. They look around the rest of Europe, and see that countries like France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Spain, which have taken in vast numbers of Third World migrants, have also accepted deep and intractable problems with them. He doesn’t want that for his country. Few Hungarians do. For that, Europe (and America) has to demonize them.

It’s wrong. It’s very, very wrong. When you understand that what the ruling class does to Deplorable-Americans, they also do on the geopolitical stage to Hungary, you begin to realize that the world is not what the mainstream media and other ruling class organs tell us it is. And then you start to pull at the string, wondering what other lies they have told us, and why… .

Say, if you haven’t bookmarked my page at The European Conservative, where I publish regularly, please do. I’ll have a long interview there with an actual Boer, about the situation in his homeland, coming up very soon.