{"id":500,"date":"2007-06-01T07:30:48","date_gmt":"2007-06-01T07:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/afrikaansenuus.co.za\/?p=500"},"modified":"2007-06-01T07:30:48","modified_gmt":"2007-06-01T07:30:48","slug":"similarities-between-sa-and-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/?p=500","title":{"rendered":"Similarities between SA and Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"
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De Klerk is an abject figure who will be judged by historians for having missed the opportunity to bring peace and stability to South Africa by insisting on the permanence of Afrikaners and other racial minorities in South Africa. As we know, the ANC and Mbeki define Afrikaners as "settlers" and as "a foreign ruling class" who "failed to depart" (viz. Mbeki’s Oliver Tambo memorial lecture of 11 August 2000). As a result, the Mbeki regime has been turning a blind eye to the death squads operating against Afrikaner farmers and suburbanites with unspeakable atrocities being committed against our people on a daily basis.<\/p>\n

Far be it from me to defend the hated Mr. FW de Klerk who must bear at least some responsibility for the current state of affairs. However, it strikes me as highly presumptuous of you to pontificate morally on De Klerk’s role when your country, Great Britain, has been engaged in a century-old policy to, as lord Milner put it in 1900, "eradicate the last vestiges of Afrikanerism from South Africa".<\/p>\n

Much of the genocidal behaviour of the British military from 1899-1902 has been shielded from us by historical censorship and the need for so-called "reconciliation between Boer and Briton". Recent internet debates in South Africa have illuminated the systematic rape of Boer women and girls by British soldiers and the so-called "armed Blacks" who fought on the British side, even apart from the concentration-camp policy which was universally condemned by European public opinion at the time.<\/p>\n

The events from 100 years ago are relevant because we are reliving them today. Once again, we are suffering vicious violence in the form of rape and murder. Today I heard of an elderly gentleman in Pretoria who was bled to death by having his hands cut off. This incident did not even make it into the newspapers. Not so long ago a woman was tortured to death by having boiling water poured onto her for hours. She died after several days of excruciating agony in hospital.<\/p>\n

A month or two ago, the Afrikaans singer Steve Hofmeyr and I met the father of Danielle Esterhuizen, a beautiful girl of five who was executed on her mother’s lap while visiting her father who had gone fishing with a friend next to a dam on December 20, 2006 in Randfontein. He broke down and cried, "I will never touch a fishing rod again."<\/p>\n

Despite the horrors that we are living through in South Africa and which surpass anything we have ever experienced, except perhaps during 1899-1902, you presume from within your British ivory towers to call us a "multi-racial, democratic state", as if South Africa under ANC rule were some sort of Scandinavian exemplar of social justice and harmony.<\/p>\n

South Africa today is profoundly corrupt and dysfunctional, a Zimbabwe in the making. I can still remember how the British newspapers lauded Mr. Robert Mugabe in 1980, just like Mandela was fêted in 1994. Our ruling ANC has declared Zimbabwe a democracy and its most recent elections "free and fair". Being such admirers of that organisation, I suppose you share its views on Zimbabwean "democracy"?<\/p>\n

The Anglican church and the Swedish government played a much larger role than Nelson Mandela in bringing the hapless National Party government to a fall. In fact, on 27 April 2004 the Swedish ambassador to South Africa said as much on the local radio station RSG. Desmond Tutu has also stated that "if you could say that anybody single-handedly made apartheid a world issue then that person was Trevor Huddleston."<\/p>\n

Was Trevor Huddleston, who was apparently charged but not found guilty of pederasty, not a bigger hero than Nelson Mandela? After all, without Trevor and his money-laundering scheme for washing the Swedish millions into South Africa, funding the "resistance" you refer to, there would never have been a Nelson. Or at least he would have remained a nobody, just like the many African opposition figures languishing in gaols all over the continent and which no-one has ever heard of and about whom the world does not care.<\/p>\n

Today one of your newspapers stated the following: "The (British) attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, is facing accusations that he told the Army its soldiers were not bound by the Human Rights Act when arresting, detaining and interrogating Iraqi prisoners."<\/p>\n

Many people in South Africa are starting to see the similarities between South Africa and Iraq. Both countries were blessed with outside interference from the Anglo-American empire who brought them "democracy", with a complete disregard for the ethnic, linguistic, racial, cultural and religious complexities on the ground. They call it "one man, one vote". Or "regime change". Or "majority rule", which means that whichever group has won the war of the cradle will win the war of the ballot box and will afterwards use its power to ethnically cleanse its rivals from the nation state which it now monopolises.<\/p>\n

"Democracy" is a principle that has a charming simplicity about it. The British soldier torturing his "sand nigger" in Iraq readily understands that he is acting according to a higher principle, just like the British academic understands that mere white Afrikaner children being liquidated by post-apartheid freedom fighters have no moral standing whatsoever. Like Iraquis, they are the "victims of democracy" about whom it is best to maintain a very moral silence.<\/p>\n

We would gladly extradite Mr. De Klerk to you to get the treatment from your soldiers who are not bound by the Human Rights Act, because he deserves it. But spare us your posturing about who should or should not write in The Guardian<\/em>. It strikes me as somewhat disingenuous.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

beyond polus \u043e\u0442\u0431\u0435\u043b\u0438\u0432\u0430\u043d\u0438\u0435<\/a>topcargo \u043e\u0442\u0437\u044b\u0432<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\"Image\"Dear Professors and Doctors Jo Beall, Elleke Boehmer, Sara Rich Dorman, Alan Lester, Shula Marks, Deborah Potts, Lyn Schumaker and Dennis Walder,<\/p>\n

My attention was drawn to your letter published in The Guardian on 25 April 2007 under the heading De Klerk’s delusions of grandeur<\/a> in which you object to the choice of ex-president De Klerk in prefacing a speech by Nelson Mandela that was evidently reprinted in that newspaper.<\/p>\n

De Klerk enjoys no standing in South Africa and is rather despised by his own people, the Afrikaners, for having betrayed them. He and especially his chief negotiator, Roelf Meyer, who had switched sides halfway through the negotiations in the early nineties, completely failed to secure any form of meaningful settlement in the conflict then opposing the African National Congress and its allies to the South African state. The result has been South Africa’s predictable slide into ethnic conflict and extreme violence which have been downplayed by the international media but can be ignored no longer.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[21109,154,21098,613],"class_list":["post-500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c57-columnists","tag-c52-columnists","tag-dan-roodt","tag-s19-english","tag-similarities-between-sa-and-iraq"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}