Dr Hendrik Verwoerd
Apartheid, in Perspective, 2
By Ilana Mercer
Monomaniacal Westerners—they have one thing on their minds: it begins with an “R”—have come to think and speak of apartheid as a theory of white supremacy.
It was not.
The policy of “separate development,” as it was admittedly euphemized, was not a theory of racial supremacy, but a strategy for survival.
But first: to understand the fundamental way in which the Afrikaner and American creeds differed early on we must first examine the former’s ideas of what constitutes a nation and a state, respectively.
America, a rib from the British Adam, was built on liberal individualism; but Afrikaner culture was first and foremost grounded in the survival of the Volk.
This is not to say that Afrikaners were not fiercely individualistic; they were, even more so than early Americans.
For the Boers, however, the nation encompassed “the land, the culture, the terrain, the people.” The state, on the other hand, had no such prestige for the Boers, who regarded it as just “the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians.” Against this apparatus, above all, the Boer rebelled.
The 19th century found him still resisting majority rule, by which time Americans had thoroughly submitted to it. Although the Boer’s outlook remained passionately political, his preference was for parochial self-rule.
It might be said, then, that if the vagaries of the frontier bred in the Americans an atomistic individualism, those same vagaries bred in the Afrikaner a very different attitude, namely, a keen sense of the collective and the need to preserve it. “The worth of the nation is even higher than the worth of the individual,” exclaimed one Volk philosopher.
To the existential threat which they faced on the Dark Continent, Afrikaners therefore responded by circling the wagons metaphorically (much as they had done, literally, during the 1830s) and devising the corpus of racial laws known as apartheid.
“We shall fight for our existence and the world must know it. We are not fighting for money or possessions. We are fighting for the life of our people,” proclaimed Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (1958-1966).
Prime Minister D. F. Malan (1948-1954) had already used different words for the same sentiment, announcing his devotion to, “My God, my people, my country.”
Malan’s successor, Prime Minister Strijdom (1954-1958), believed unswervingly that if they were to survive as a group, the whites of South Africa would need to retain a position of guardianship, and that ultimately, white hegemony was indispensable for the good of all.
The Cape Town-Stellenbosch axis of the nationalist intelligentsia, which was the most influential lobby in Malan’s National Party (NP), almost without exception defended apartheid not as an expression of white superiority but on the grounds of its assumed capacity to reduce conflict by curtailing points of interracial contact.
The intellectuals who hailed from the University of Stellenbosch phrased the issue thus:
“The granting of political rights to the Bantu, of the kind which would satisfy their political aspirations, was altogether impossible in a mixed community, since such a step would endanger the … survival of the European population. If this danger was to be avoided, and at the same time the Europeans were not to violate their own conscience and moral standards, a policy of separate development would prove the only alternative.”
To that end, a “tortuous social structure” was erected to keep blacks from forming a political majority in South Africa proper. Africans were assigned to homelands in accordance with tribal affiliation, still a central organizing principle across Africa. These “black satrapies” were to function as “national and political homes for the different Bantu communities”; in the “Bantustans,” blacks were to exercise political rights.
Hermann Giliomee—author of the grand historical synthesis, “The Afrikaners: Biography of a People”—agrees that Afrikaner anxieties were overwhelmingly existential, rather than racial. Giliomee is adamant that the apartheid policy did not spring from “racist convictions or antiquated religious doctrines” (even if these convictions were at times present in specific Afrikaners themselves) but from an overriding need for security. For leading thinkers in the NP, such arguments almost completely missed the point because the security of the Afrikaners as a dominant minority, and not as a race per se, was what concerned them.
Giliomee, a liberal historian who opposed apartheid (as did this writer) contends that “apartheid was not uniquely abhorrent and had much in common with Western colonialism and American segregation.” Another of this historian’s assertions was that “attempts to depict the nationalist leaders as proto-fascists showed a poor understanding of both the Nazi and the Afrikaner nationalist movement.”
In retrospect, it is easy to see the merits of Giliomee’s argument for “the essential moderation of Afrikaner nationalism.” Anybody who lived among Afrikaners during the apartheid era can testify that crime and communism were foremost on their minds.
To rationalize the Kafkaesque laws of apartheid, Afrikaners spoke of the Swart Gevaar (which meant the “Black Threat”), and of the Rooi Gevaar (the “Red Threat”).
Afrikaners regularly admonished the American mindset for its incipient liberalism: “They demand majority rule, but look around you at the rest of Africa! Anglos simply don’t understand what’s at stake.”
Citations are from “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South-Africa” (2011) by Ilana Mercer, who has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube
Bob Woodward’s Yellow Journalism
Still from Citizen Kane
Bob Woodward’s Yellow Journalism
By Ilana Mercer
It takes no time at all. You listen to Bob Woodward’s halting speech. You read his lumpen prose, and you get right away what undergirds his Trump-phobic tome, Fear: Trump in the White House.
Naively, the president expected to fulfill his revolutionary campaign promises to the American voters, an assumption that threw Woodward and the D.C. elites for a loop.
If past is prologue, voters don’t—and should not—get their way. After all, the views of Trump voters on American power are polar opposites from those held by the permanent state.
What does “Boobus Americanus” know? Nothing!
Woodward and the New York Times’ anonymous anti-Trump whistleblower consider the president to be stark raving bonkers for not grasping that Rome on the Potomac moves to its own beat. It does not respond to voters, except to mollify them with “bread and circuses.”
Mostly reflexively, not always consciously, The Powers That Be seek to retain and enlarge their sphere of influence. Nothing, not even the venerated vote, is allowed to alter that “balance.”
This means that established fiefdoms and the “thinking” underlying them are to remain unchanged and unchallenged. Foreign affairs, war-making, the post-war economic order and globally guided crony capitalism are examples.
Against this command-and-control apparatus, 60 million Americans rebelled. They liked Trump’s America First ideas enough to elect their champion as president.
The president promised to upend “the post-1945 rules-based international order,” and the Deplorables applauded him for it.
Had Woodward and his publisher missed the 2016 Trump Revolution?
Apparently so.
Incredulous, Woodward grumbled to one Fox News host, who shares his “concerns”:“People need to wake up to what’s happening under Trump.”
Again, Woodward is hardly original in his endeavor. In the tradition of the Never Trump Resistance within and without the administration, he and those for whom he speaks have resolved to thwart and discredit the political plank on which Trump ran.
The washed-out journalist then blurted out this in disbelief: “Trump said the ‘World Trade Organization is the worst organization in the world.’”
Hyperbole? Maybe. The FBI under James Comey, Andrew McCabe and now Christopher Wray are easily worse than the WTO.
Like the New York Times’ anonymous, op-ed writer, purportedly a member of the Trump administration, Woodward is exposing the Trump White House for nothing more than its attempts to fulfill voter demands.
Withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement was one such goal.
These senile subversives would like you to believe the president is insane for expecting to move on promises made to American voters. If not to withdraw from international agreements that have compromised ordinary Americans, at least to rework them so they don’t further pauperize our workers.
Who can deny that successive U.S. administrations had ceded the sovereignty of citizens to various supranational systems through international treaty making?
That Deplorables wished to reclaim their sovereignty is nevertheless news to seasoned newsman Bob Woodward.
The Woodwards of the D.C. Swamp want multilateral trade agreements maintained. The smart set call it “sovereign multilateralism,” which is Orwellian terminology for a loss of citizen sovereignty through undemocratic, international treaties.
American workers don’t want their interests lost in this maze of multilateralism.
Thank goodness, gasps Woodward, that the globalist grandees with whom he stands so courageously, and who surround the president (likely directed by his ambitious daughter and the “Kushner-Cohn Democrats”), saved the day:
“[D]rafts of a proposal to get out of the Paris climate accord … were removed from the president’s desk,” Woodward says. “[There were] draft statements about withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement—which would have been a disaster—and [former economic adviser Gary] Cohn just took it off the desk.”
To repeat, this was promised on the campaign trail and in Trump position papers. We now know who stole those promises from the American people.
In fact, until Woodward’s revelation, one was under the impression that, in June of 2017, President Trump had extricated the U.S. from the Paris Accord!
The thing was nothing but a wealth grab from the constituents Trump vowed to protect, with no benefits to the environment, which we all cherish. Besides, the U.S. has strong in-house environmental protections, including emission controls.
Thanks to Woodward, we now know that the ditching of the Paris Accord never happened.
The outrage animating Woodward—he insinuates that he’s driven by truth, not politics—is shared by the aforementioned New York Times’ anonymous op-ed scribe.
This yellow-bellied purveyor of yellow journalism claims to be a “senior official in the Trump administration,” who “vowed to thwart parts of [the Trump voters’] agenda and temper the president’s “worst inclinations.” (All the good things listed above.)
We thank you, oh overlord who art in D.C.
In his piece of pomposity, this anti-Trump White House employee invoked scripted Republican policy for his screed, while congratulating himself for being a “first principles” guy or gal (or amalgam).
He, too, has cast as dangerous the Trump positions millions of American voters considered wise. To wit, diplomacy with “President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un” and a cessation of America’s hobby wars.
We Deplorables disagree with the New York Times’ unelected, “lodestar” for all things honorable and conservative.
Never Trumpers and Trump haters are on a quest to scuttle an agenda seconded by millions of American voters. To them, the positions emanating from the Trump White House are a crisis of crazy.
To these saboteurs of the president, “crazy” is, very plainly, keeping campaign promises.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011) & “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016) &. She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube.
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