Allister Sparks is one of those raving left-liberal journalists for whom nothing in South Africa will ever detract from the utopia of being ruled by the ANC and South African Communist Party. Together with his protégé, Helen Zille, current leader of South Africa’s ineffectual liberal opposition, he tirelessly calumnied Afrikaners until the hapless Mr. FW de Klerk finally capitulated to Communist Party chief Joe Slovo and his team in the early 1990s.
In 1987 Sparks made an even more sinister remark to one of his colleagues on a flight from Dakar to Johannesburg, overheard by Afrikaans journalist Chris Louw. He said: “It would have been better for South Africa if Britain had left all the Afrikaner women and children to die in the concentration camps in 1902.” It certainly evinces an extraordinary degree of anti-Afrikaans animus.
The irony is that Sparks, after being fired as a columnist from his beloved Independent Group of newspapers, has now been appointed as a columnist for the Naspers group where his cultural-marxist musings will be published in… Afrikaans. Naspers seems to have a policy now that Afrikaner columnists should no longer be allowed to publish in their media as they have not embraced the new ideology as wholeheartedly as they should. Only the extremist kind of Afrikaner “askari”, such as Mad Max du Preez, will be allowed to write in the Naspers media, with the rest of us condemned to Soviet-style censorship, at least in print.
Sparks himself is somewhat amazed that the very people whom he would like to see disappear from South Africa, preferably genocided by Britain or English-speaking blacks, should accord him the courtesy of preaching to them from the hallowed pages of South Africa’s largest media group. To Sparks and many others, Afrikaans remains “the language of apartheid”, which heightens the irony. I suppose Beeld editor Adriaan Basson will have a bottle of Dettol disinfectant handy to sprinkle over Sparks’s freshly translated copy.
Writing in English recently, Allister Sparks tried to explain his strange new bedfellows by saying:
There must surely be something symbolic about a former editor of the Rand Daily Mail becoming a columnist for newspapers of Naspers (formerly Nasionale Pers), especially Die Burger, a paper so intimately associated with its first editor, DF Malan, the founding father of apartheid SA.
For that is where this, my first column of 2015, will be appearing, as well as in its sister papers, Beeld and The Witness of Pietermaritzburg.
For those who do not know, Nasionale Pers and Die Burger alone bore the torch for the Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party in the 1930s under the legendary Dr. Geyer and the cartoonist D.C. Boonzaier. Not only did the hated “Nats” capitulate, but they have also embraced the ideology of their arch-enemies, the Sappe, that Afrikaners should dissolve into a common South Africanism and accept reverse discrimination and wall-to-wall English under black rule.
No less extraordinary is the fact that I, as an Afrikaner, am censored by the same Naspers who would not even publish a letter from me, let alone a column, probably because I am still not able to acquiesce in Sap-ism, even though I quite like Jan Smuts’s philosophy of holism. The editor of Beeld, Adriaan Basson, has even blocked me on Twitter!
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According to Allister Sparks, “the differences of the past were profound and passionate, but now all that is over, having ended where the demographics of our country always indicated it was bound to end”. I a way then, “demographics” (the black population growth over the last century) has made the much-desired Afrikaner genocide superfluous, although in various ways we are experiencing extreme violence and ethnic killings in South Africa.
However, I came across another intriguing statement by Mr. Sparks, quoted by Hermann Giliomee in his volume on Afrikaner history, The Afrikaners. In that quotation from The Mind of South Africa, Sparks claims that Afrikaners or white South Africans in general represent “the simplest and most backward fragment of Western civilization in modern times”.
I am quite prepared to accept that we are backward, given the fact that we have so little to show for our presence numbering 360 years on this continent, in terms of assets or influence. A few volumes of poetry, perhaps, and a farm novel or two before our authors became politically correct. But that’s it.
On the other hand, what is the cause of this backwardness? one is tempted to ask. Is it nature or nurture? Does it have something to do with our protracted exposure to the African sun that cooked our brains or is it more hereditary, genetic in origin? Or maybe our Calvinism, which also blighted countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland. Just look at how small those countries are: like us, the Dutch and the Swiss are real territorial losers!
Or is Mr. Sparks harking back to some late nineteenth-century British Herrenvolk idea, as formulated here and there by Rhodes and Milner? Were our forebears, the Dutch, the Germans and the French, simply not up to the high standards of the majestic island kingdom, Great Britain? It may sound sarcastic, but I am honestly just curious as to what – according to Mr. Sparks – the source of our South African backwardness could be.
South Africa’s multiracial and multicultural society is exploding into a never-ending Kulturkampf or American-style culture war. Anti-racists are the new racists, spreading intolerance and even violence ahead of them with a megaphone, figuratively speaking. During the court appearance of a wine farmer, Mr Johnny Burger, the crowd in the Cape had been swept up into a lynch mob threatening to kill him on the spot. Police had to use pepper spray and a stun grenade to disperse them. Shades of the Ku Klux Klan? Except here the Klansmen are anti-racists.
Anti-racist intolerance is growing in leaps and bounds. In another recent incident, it led to the unfortunate resignation from Pretoria University of one of our praag columnists after Dr Piet Croucamp from the University of Johannesburg had accused her of hate speech. As I have commented elsewhere in an Afrikaans column:
“The media group Naspers and a small group of academics acting in bad faith and attacking others in the name of race, mostly for personal reasons, represent a danger to freedom of speech in South Africa.”
This afternoon I got an email from a friend saying that Mr Burger’s case reminded him of the notorius “Black Circuit” of the early nineteenth century. At the time a 1000 Cape farmers had to appear before a roving court to answer to trumped-up charges of murder, rape and assault. In the end, no-one was convicted and it was found that colonial English missionaries had colluded with local Khoi-San tribesmen to falsely accuse farmers of heinous crimes.
Contrary to our law, Mr Burger, accused of assaulting a Coloured child, was presumed guilty until his innocence could be proven. Two days ago, the Cape Times newspaper wrote about the case of Flippie Engelbrecht, the child concerned: “Those who brought the case to court charged that after the assault Engelbrecht had lost his sight, had epileptic fits, and because of this had rolled into a fire and suffered terrible burns, losing his hands.” In yesterday’s Cape Times, headlined Questions surround Flippie’s assault, “new evidence” came to light in the form of medical records showing that Flippie Engelbrecht had reported a “swelling on the side of his face”, which may have been a tumour, causing his epileptic fits and other medical problems. The same medical records contradict some of the dates advanced by the victim. However, in the meantime the wine farmer had committed suicide after his life and his business had been ruined by hysterical anti-racists pursuing him in the media, both traditional and social, led by the radical, Afrikaner-hating ex-lawyer (who was struck off the record as an attorney after dubious business deals and bankruptcy), Carina Papenfus.
So here we have two incidences of whites being subjected to histrionic public campaigns by so-called “liberal” anti-racists whose objectives have more in common with the Spanish Inquisition than with advancing the precepts of liberalism. Freedom of speech and even academic freedom in South Africa have been casualties of these campaigns, not to mention the two white victims, one committing suicide and another resigning her post and leaving the country, presumably for fear of being further persecuted.
Our universities are no longer places of learning but over-politicised shrines to political correctness and obtuse hatreds that are seemingly ignited by throwing a switch.
Volumes have been written on the cultural, linguistic, racial, anthropological, ethnic, ideological and religious divisions of South African society and I do not wish to dwell on the obvious. What concerns me more, is the apparent descent of people with nominal university qualifications into this kind of racial street fighting. They wield race and the word “racist” like a Cape Flats gangster brandishes his knife. Not so long ago, twelve schools had to be closed in that area as a result of gang activity and Mrs Helen Zille, the premier of the Western Cape, was calling for the army to be brought in to stabilise Manenberg.
Yet, ostensibly, we have more to fear from the pseudo-intellectual gangsters than from the drug-dealing, turf-warring criminals of the Cape Flats. Their influence on public discourse is far more insidious and destructive of the last vestiges of civilisation that remain in South Africa. They are intolerant zealots such as are to be found throughout history, wherever religious wars or ethnic conflicts have ignited and blazed.
Except for the Sunday paper Rapport, no-one seems to take Papenfus seriously. She waged a slanderous email and Twitter campaign against the hapless winemaker, apparently threatening and cajoling his customers into ceasing to order from him, with the intention of ruining his business and his life. Ms. Papenfus is a kind of cyber thug that replicates the intimidation tactics of petty gangsters in the public sphere. After all, as any mafioso or racketeer knows, a small business may be ruined by hitting one or two of its weak spots. Although she must have studied at one time for a degree or diploma, she has no intellectual pretensions. Her creed is simple: harass the whites. And being white and Afrikaans herself, but an ANC member, it is a case of être plus royaliste que le roi.
Papenfus is dangerous, but easily understood. The other two zealots who pounced upon the soft-spoken Pretoria woman philosopher, occupy positions of institutional power. Croucamp is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg in political science and frequently appears on talk shows, both on radio and on television, wearing his trademark blue bandana. Schutte writes a column in the Mail & Guardian newspaper which is also avidly read by the “tenured radicals” at South Africa’s more than twenty universities.
Schutte was due to debate Croucamp’s victim on the topic: “‘Do white people have an obligation to withdraw from the public sphere?’ But as she stated in a subsequent column: “I am obviously not going to validate Louise Mabille’s hate speech by actually debating with her. Rather I will end by saying that she has presented a shining example of how whites should not participate in the public arena. It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it.”
From Rhodes University, we have already had an opinion by Dr Samantha Vice that all whites, i.e. everyone of European descent, should take some form of vow to remain silent in public. So white guilt leads to the ultimate form of self-censorship, public silence.
Elsewhere, Ms Gillian Schutte describes herself, somewhat pretentiously, as a “feminist-neopagan-post-structuralist-deconstructionist-socialist” and she apparently has a Master’s degree in creative writing from the University of the Witwatersrand.
The one thing we can already deduce is that the mob outside the Cape courtroom who wanted to lynch Mr Burger at least believed in some form of dialogue. They were screaming, hurling abuse and gesticulating. With police intervention and protection, one could still call it communication.
Croucamp and Schutte want to reduce us to silence, however. Theirs is the monologue of totalitarianism, of censorship, of “There is only one truth and it is mine”. They pontificate in the name of power, the corrupt power that is ruling, nay, pillaging, South Africa.
It is therefore ironic that Schutte should describe herself as a “post-structuralist-deconstructionist”. Does she even know what she is referring to? The very basis of any “deconstruction” is the existence of more than one meaning, even the uncertainty, indetermination and radical plurality of meanings. Just over ten years ago a small group of us Afrikaner thinkers had a private seminar with Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales on the boulevard de Raspail in Paris. I remember Derrida as a modest, soft-spoken, amiable figure who reminisced about his single visit to South Africa. He liked Potchefstroom and even told me that “Heidegger would have felt at home there”. Derrida was full of gentle irony, self-doubt and respect for others, even the Other, as he so often termed it in his more political writings.
Schutte, by contrast, is a third-world ideologue, possessed by a terrible certainty. She has more in common with Robert Mugabe or Idi Amin than Jacques Derrida. Like so many others strutting about our campuses today, she has no real culture but the fad of the moment. The more politically correct such fads are, the better. Her meretricious pseudo-intellectualism has all the charm of Winnie Mandela’s expensive sunglasses and jewellery, being the brash expression of a corrupt and power-hungry soul. Ideas are but slogans, brands, to market yourself to another kind of mob to the one that wanted to lynch the Cape winemaker.
I have often thought that South Africa today has much in common with Nero’s Rome. Our country has become murderous, corrupt and decadent. Innocence has died. Approximately a thousand children are raped every day, including babies, and nobody says a word. Or if they broach the subject, they are immediately reduced to silence, given the ritual knife for disembowelling themselves. Schutte’s smug satisfaction (“It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it”) may be deconstructed to reveal two things: Schadenfreude and a paradoxical expectation of honour in others.
There is no English word for Schadenfreude, hence the German loanword that is universally used. However, the Afrikaans (and Dutch) term leedvermaak expresses the same thing, with a few more connotations (“signifieds” for post-structuralists) thrown in. The other day I tweeted in Afrikaans, something to the effect that leedvermaak is the apotheosis of journalism in South Africa. Vermaak also means entertainment, hence the misery of others, their travails amid hysterical accusations, calumny and vilification provide entertainment. Anti-racist Blitzkrieg, either on the vineyards of the Cape or on the campus of Pretoria University, therefore feeds the sensationalist mainstream media machine, sated on the blood of murder victims.
Celebrity “businessman” Kenny Kunene
Due to the surfeit of murders in South Africa, people are becoming bored with news of another killing, no matter how ruthless and macabre. Celebrity murder, such as the Oscar Pistorius case, is still news, but not even serial killings elicit much attention. In a society as utterly cruel and corrupt as ours, we are in desperate need of frivolity, such as the camp antics of that incorrigible clown in drag, Pieter-Dirk Uys, or Kenny Kunene’s parties where guests eat sushi off the bodies of bikini-clad ladies.
South Africa is profoundly amoral. It lacks a moral or ethical code to define right and wrong. Someone like Baudrillard would say that this “lack”, in a psychoanalytical sense, creates a need for a kind of pseudo-ethics, a moral simulacrum.
This is where anti-racism comes in. Anti-racism is the simulacrum of our lost moral code. It is no coincidence that the objectionable sentence in Louise Mabille’s column contained references to both Calvinism and baby rape, the former marking the overtly Christian morality of the old South Africa and the latter epitomising the radical “freedom from all scruples” that characterises the new South Africa.
In this respect, Gillian Schutte, despite her evidently defective grasp of some basic philosophical and literary concepts, understands the “new amorality” well. In one of her “feminist” videos, a rape victim explains that the “cure” for the shame attached to having been raped, is to join the so-called “slutwalk”, ardently recommended by Ms. Schutte. By self-identifying as a slut, a woman is freed from the fear of rape and “forced sex” as it is euphemistically called. Miracle cures are to be found everywhere in South Africa, peddled by immigrant Nigerian pastors and indigenous witchdoctors alike. Not to forget the infamous “virgin cleansing myth” by which one may be cured of HIV-Aids by raping a virgin, including an infant, and which Louise Mabille alluded to in her column.
Gillian Schutte is also a champion of the word “cunt” which, according to her, should become part of our everyday discourse. As she puts it,
“When women finally reclaim and speak this word, its full potential will be released and women will repossess their collective cunt-power and rise up against misogyny and patriarchy with the absolute intent of ending it.”
Amid the universal amorality and Neronic decadence of South Africa, Schutte is clutching at ethical straws, more precisely: pubic hairs. Instead of simply affirming and enjoying the slutwalk, she opts for the simulacrum of the good, which has now turned out to be the “collective cunt-power” of women.
But there is no “good” anymore. South Africa is really living according to the famous maxim from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” As I intimated the other day, SA really stands for “Sadists’ Apocalypse”. Eighteenth-century French literature, specifically the writings of the Marquis de Sade, is all that we have to remotely begin to understand our baby rapists and farm murderers.
Apart from Gillian Schutte’s “cunt-power”, the other pseudo-morality that people desperately cling to is anti-racism. In our sadistic universe where nothing is wrong, some people imagine that racism is the one remaining sin. You may kill, rape, bribe, lie and steal, more or less with impunity, but uttering the word “Bantu” will earn you the opprobrium of polite society, that society which is now reappropriating the magical power of four-letter words.
The simulacrum of sin is transgression of anti-racist etiquette. That alone awakens some form of long-lost moral response which is delivered with predictable ecclesiastical ritual: denunciation, excommunication, prohibition, censorship. From the TV studio did Schutte, the high priestess of atavistic cunt-power and pagan ritual, deliver her sermon against what Orwell called thoughtcrime: “racist” thoughts and suspicions, including the mere mention of “baby rape”, which is a proven and documented phenomenon in this country.
Did Johnny Burger, the Cape winemaker, commit suicide to save his honour? In a country where “trial by media” and populist passions have come to influence courts and the judicial system, Burger probably correctly surmised that he would not receive a fair trial. His suicide reminds me of the death of the patrician Latin author Petronius who, having got wind of Nero’s henchmen being sent to kill him, preferred taking his own life while drinking wine and having musicians perform for him.
Thanks to Carina Papenfus’s hate campaign, no-one will ever drink Burger’s wine again.
Similarly to Burger, Louise Mabille fell upon her own sword and resigned. Understandably, there is despair and pessimism among the remaining class of thinking people in South Africa. We are outnumbered and outscreamed by those who are playing for the gallery.
However, notwithstanding samurai customs, there are other ways of saving one’s honour. On these shores, we have the example of the bittereinder, of someone fighting to the very, bitter end, against all odds.
Are we ready for that thankless struggle, knowing full well that we shall face calumny all the way? If reason be dead, can thought or the mind still withstand the mob, baying for our blood?
Minister of Women, Children and People with Disabilities Lulu Xingwana on Wednesday apologised for her comments about Afrikaner men.
“It has become clear to me that my comments may have offended some members of our community. I would, accordingly, like to retract these remarks and apologise unconditionally to them,” she said.
Xingwana told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that young Afrikaner men were raised to believe they owned women and children.
“Young Afrikaner men are brought up in the Calvinist religion believing that they own a woman, they own a child, they own everything and therefore they can take that life because they own it,” she said during the interview aired on Monday.
“We also have cultural differences as well in our own communities where we have women who are forced into marriage and we are dealing with all those issues.”
Xingwana was being interviewed following the arrest of paralympian Oscar Pistorius after the fatal shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on February 14.
“Through my comments, I sought to convey the message that, as a country we have emerged from a very violent past and that some tend to use cultural and religious beliefs to justify gender inequality and abuse,” she said.
Earlier, the Afrikanerbond said Xingwana had proven beyond doubt she was not fit to hold office in a constitutional democracy.
The Christian Democratic Party called for President Jacob Zuma to fire her.
“Many non-Afrikaners, black and white, are members of Calvinist churches and her latest statement could be considered as religious intolerance,” party spokesman Rev Theunis Botha said.
Minister of Women, Children and People with Disabilities Lulu Xingwana “abused her office” and does not reflect honour or dignity in her position, the Afrikanerbond said on Wednesday.
“This minister has proven beyond any doubt that she is not fit to hold office in a constitutional democracy,” Afrikanerbond secretary Jan Bosman claimed in a statement.
This comes after Xingwana told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that young Afrikaner men were brought up in a way where they believed they owned women and children.
“Young Afrikaner men are brought up in the Calvinist religion believing that they own a woman, they own a child, they own everything and therefore they can take that life because they own it,” she said.
“We also have cultural differences as well in our own communities where we have women who are forced into marriage and we are dealing with all those issues.”
Xingwana was interviewed on the arrest of paralympian Oscar Pistorius on February 14 in connection with the shooting of his law graduate girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
In the ABC report, that aired on Monday, the focus was on how Pistorius’ case highlighted gun violence in South Africa.
“I would ask him to tell the truth. I would ask him to respect women,” Xingwana said.
“I would ask him to get rid of all his guns. Because I believe if he did not have guns in his home, Reeva Steenkamp would be alive today.”
Bosman said Xingwana’s statements were an “extreme verbal attack on the integrity of Afrikaners”.
“It is unwarranted, uncalled for and without any substance. At the very least the minister owes Afrikaners, men, women and children, an apology without any reservations,” Bosman said.
“We can only deduce that she chose to attack Afrikaners to create a smokescreen for her total lack of any programme of action whilst [minister] and to deflect from the serious allegations of corruption and mismanagement in her department and her failure to provide a report with details about these allegations to parliament.”
Bosman said the statement by Xingwana was in direct conflict with the oath she took when she was sworn in as minister, that she had “abused her office” and did not reflect honour or dignity in her position.
The Afrikanerbond would take up the matter with the office of President Jacob Zuma for the president to “act against one of the most incompetent ministers in his cabinet”, Bosman added.
Meanwhile, Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum said on Tuesday it was considering bringing a complaint before the Equality Court against Xingwana.
“Xingwana’s remarks boil down to a blatant contravention of various sections of the Promotion of Equality and the Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act,” spokesman Ernst Roets said in a statement.
“She has discriminated on the basis of race, faith and gender. On top of that, she clearly lacks the necessary expertise to talk knowledgably on the topic.”
Roets said AfriForum had submitted the matter to its legal team.
“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.” So decreed MSNBC president Phil Griffin about Patrick J. Buchanan’s grand historical synthesis, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will American Survive to 2025?” Mr. Griffin was justifying the booting from the network of one of the last authentic conservatives in mainstream media.
If I were not already persona non grata within the mainstream, I would be worried.
In an exchange with this writer, Mr. Buchanan had mentioned that his “18,000-word chapter on ethnonationalism and tribalism and the surge of both throughout the Third World—as well as our own declining world—tracks pretty much with what” I had written in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” published in May of 2011.
Buchanan’s towering text concludes as follows: “We were one nation. We spoke the same language, learned the same history, celebrated the same heroes, observed the same holy days and holidays … were taught the same truths about right and wrong, good and evil, God and country. We were a people then. That America is gone. Many grieve her passing. Many rejoice. But we are not a people anymore.” (Page 424.)
America, as Mr. Buchanan observes, was eaten away by the acid of the 1960s revolution, “with its repudiation of Christian morality and embrace of secularism and egalitarian ideology.” South Africa was relatively unaffected by that revolution. It was a staunchly traditional Christian country. Stores closed on Sundays. Television came late to the place but so did pornography and the gay-rights movement. In South Africa, the influence of Christianity receded after the 1994 democratic transition.
Whereas “Americans are no longer a people,” by contrast, the Afrikaners, as illustrated in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” still linger as a people, clinging to what Barack Obama would indubitably deride as their Bibles, their guns and their bigotries.
Dubbed the white tribe of Africa, this organic nation has, however, ceased to exist as a nation-state, dissolved by democratic decree. The sundering of state sovereignty has, in turn, exposed Afrikaners to ethnic cleansing, a familiar feature of democracy a la Africa.
Despite the Afrikaner’s superior military prowess, they simply “surrendered without defeat.” Ferocious though it was, the South African Defence Force (SADF) ceded to the African National Congress and its representatives. “You, me and our men can take this country in an afternoon,” said former Chief of the SADF General Contand Viljoen, famously, to the reigning Chief, General George Meiring. He uttered this comment as President de Klerk prepared to cave into ANC demands, forgoing all checks and balances for South Africa’s Boer, British and Zulu minorities. Yet, the very same Afrikaner people, in the same spirit, went on to peacefully dismantle the six nuclear devices they had built at Pelindaba, west of the capital, Pretoria.
Why did the mighty SADF capitulate to Mandela’s ragtag ANC? Why did the tough descendants of the trek Boers, who have 350 years of history on the continent of Africa—as long as their American cousins have been in North America—give up their birthright for a mess of pottage?
Since it all makes so little sense, my conclusions are more philosophical than factual.
RECONCILING PIETISM WITH POWER
Some clues as to why WASP (white Protestant Anglo-Saxon) societies tend to wither from within are offered by W. de Klerk (no relation to the traitor president). In “The Puritans In Africa,” de Klerk devotes his authorial energies to fleshing out the archetypal Afrikaner with an almost forensic objectivity. The tragedy of the Afrikaner and the American—a function of a shared Calvinist-Puritan ancestry—is the struggle to reconcile Pietism with power:”
The basic dilemma of Western man is how to reconcile power with justice. … Those within the Calvinist-Puritan ethic, who secretly yearn for power, find it impossible to do so openly and unashamedly. … Naked power… is not possible for Western Christian man, especially of Calvinist-Puritan leanings. … For Puritan man, the quest for power—a quest very much alive—cannot be an open bid for supremacy,” but, rather, has to be “power acceptable in Christian terms”; it must be power driven by a devotion to a “great ideal.”
The Afrikaner’s “great ideal” was ineluctably tied to enduring as a biblically sanctified nation. However, if national endurance was to be accomplished, the exercise of power would be absolutely essential. Apartheid was the political superstructure within which the Volk sought safety for what they saw as their divinely ordained sovereignty. But the “exceedingly tough” Puritan mind was crippled by a correspondingly “tender conscience.” This “great ideal” had turned the Boers into something they detested.
The people who had fought imperial Britain in Africa’s first anti-colonial war were now lords and masters of their own satrapies: the African Bantustans. Soon, the biblically blessed country became an Ishmael, an outcast. Charges of racism were especially difficult to withstand and rationalize. Petty perhaps, but no less intolerable for these South-African Spartans was their banishment from sparring in international sports. Patriots that they are, Afrikaners resented being expected to feel ashamed of their country. Puritans that they were, the resentment soon turned inward.
As an abstraction, the ostensive grand ideal of separate but equal development failed to reconcile power with justice. True to type, the Puritans of Africa relinquished the former to achieve the latter.Upon the American mind, Puritanism has left a very different mark. While the Afrikaner’s “great ideal” turned him into an outcast, America’s messianic calling made it a crusader for democracy.
The U.S.’s asserted exceptionalism gave imprimatur to its expansionism. The American Puritanical toughness has manifested itself primarily in never-ending expeditions overseas. Its corresponding—and paradoxical—Puritanical “tenderness” has culminated in a national death-wish: mandating multiculturalism and mass immigration at home, while pursuing a monoculturalist Manifest Destiny abroad. These are two sides of the same coin.
Thus has the United States become “an empire of liberty,” and a contradiction-in-terms. Thus has the US been hoisted on its own petard, its “great ideal” harboring the seeds of its own destruction. That the pygmy from MSNBC prefers not to speak about this reality does nothing to change it.
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The irony is that Sparks, after being fired as a columnist from his beloved Independent Group of newspapers, has now been appointed as a columnist for the Naspers group where his cultural-marxist musings will be published in… Afrikaans. Naspers seems to have a policy now that Afrikaner columnists should no longer be allowed to publish in their media as they have not embraced the new ideology as wholeheartedly as they should. Only the extremist kind of Afrikaner “askari”, such as Mad Max du Preez, will be allowed to write in the Naspers media, with the rest of us condemned to Soviet-style censorship, at least in print.
