A Light in the Black, or just a Fear of the Dark?
Ivo Vegter has managed to rile up conservatives, liberals and reactionaries alike this past week. If the article had not already attracted so much attention, the appropriate response would be to dismiss it out of hand - who is an atheist to propose what shape of expression believers give their divine revelation? Throughout this whole rancorous debate on the future of Christianity in South Africa, a certain impotent refrain plays overture to each and every article – “of course each is entitled to air their opinion”. Bullshit. As Max Stirner eloquently argued, freedom of speech that is granted to you by the state or society is a spook – the only freedom that matters is that which is claimed by imminent action. If you want to speak, speak. Ask permission only if you believe others have the right to grant it. Anything else is supplicant waffle.
In his latest defence, he and Gabriel Crouse deviate into abstract discussion of mathematics, so afraid are they to stray near the gravitational centre of their social context. No wonder the disjointed intensity of this past week's editorial cacophany. But it is plain to see that the reason for everyone's insecurity is real - we are in the midst of a cultural revolution called decolonisation, which has a single aim for society - the destruction and replacement of every social tenet and historical memory of white society by those outside of it, the imposition of a race-based socialist economy and the institutionalisation of intergenerational guilt by an unaccountable elite. The only thing that matters now, is whether to feed or starve the beast.
There are only three things in any meaningful communication – what is there, what ought to be done, and who gets to decide. Ivo Vegter has been duplicitous on the first count, vague on the second, and silent on the third. He timidly hides behind "wanting to draw attention to" certain negatives, which have now been overplayed to the point of numb exhaustion, so repeated, they have left a deafness in the ear. Ivo bravely shows his appeasement credentials with his diagnosis that Christianity is poisoned and oppressive, based on auxiliary dogmas long since jettisoned by the church. A take so fresh it's only 230 years out of date. His solution is the redesign of the Christian religion by enlightened unbelievers, according to "reason", as if his values were self-invented, as opposed to handed down to him by parents, peers, media and institutions like everyone else. By what instruments does he propose to implement these inspired alterations?
We have been taught by modernity and formal education to see like a state, and to propose action and morality as if we run the country - the undefined "we", always followed by a "must", which structures every modern essay - advice to rulers. These people who have no interest in our wellbeing whatsoever, if the past couple of decades are entered into evidence. Of course, Ivo does not say who will be there to tell the theologians and schoolmasters what to instruct their wards with, but leaves that to the faceless power he justifies with his disdainful scrutiny. I assume he wishes to empower the same decentralised managerial-elite mob who foists undiluted blood libel on the population in the name of decolonisation in every other sphere of life. Ivo is not proposing a reform of the ZCC or the pentacostal fervour of the African churches, he wants an enlightened elite to dismantle the religious communities of the minorities.
Let us put aside the charge of blasphemy. Blasphemy is a crime of the hypocritical believer, not the heathen infidel. And Ivo is most certainly an infidel – he worships a faceless god who has aimed its volleys at Christendom for centuries, and sat astride the globe unopposed since 1945 – the “Enlightenment” – that great mass of gnostic materialist despotism that brought us all the world’s greatest genocides and tyrannies, the worst excesses of scientific racism and despoilment of antiquity (at least until modern-revisionist jihadi Islamism joined the field), and now brings us a global enlightened despotism in the form of the Great Reset – the greatest vertical transfer of wealth and consolidation of corporate power in human history, under a universal totalitarian policy of social control in the name of protecting us from the health hazard of a virus less lethal than several which have passed into amnesia over the past couple generations.
He can call himself a “liberal”, but Ivo would be trading off the ambiguity of that word – at once referring to the culture of tolerance and limitation of state control bequeathed by the glorious heritage of Christendom on the one hand, and the wild utopian nihilistic atomisation and self-interested abandon of Jacobine libertinism on the other, where those who attempt to inculcate sound moral values into the next generation are scorned in favour of those who promote unrestrained vice and mental illness on the children of others. He casually talks of Christianity as a religion of subjugation, without the slightest mention of the poison fruits of the rationalist Illuminism he espouses, from the bloody platforms of the Jacobins to the jungles of Cambodia and the muddy mass graves of Ukraine.
He also is completely ignorant of the extent of the current conversation he has waded into – Christianity absolutely is the target of decolonisation - just ask pastor Xola Skosana and his racially segregated congregation, or the armies of pagan revivalists and materialist zealots that populate our universities and political parties. Everywhere you go, you encounter the clichéed words of Kenyatta, that the Bible was no more than a means of shutting Africans' eyes to theft. This disapprobative sanctimony is seldom to any moral gain, and is more often little more than an indulgent articulation of resentment, fuelled by an archaeology of outrage. I was a supporter of RhodesMustFall, albeit briefly. I was once a communist. I believed decolonisation had merit. But when not a single one of my fellow students, nor my lecturers, nor the journalists, stood up to denounce the open, flagrant and unambiguous use of genocidal rhetoric by the student revolutionaries and their professorial champions, I realised the pretence of reasonableness and good intent was nothing more than a veil, the feinting cloak of a daggered matador to entice and cut down the last white bulls.
And what a flurry of actionless and impotent words we have seen from the South African minority elite. Each and every response to Ivo has been a fearful and anxious whine, a whimper of insult or offense. Maybe a plaintive note about the fallacies of white guilt and majoritarian hegemony if we’re lucky. Ivo is really just a drop in the bucket as far as cultural appeasement of the march of “progress” goes, but it is all the more intolerable for the sheer stupidity it embodies in the face of an obvious existentially threatening enemy.
Never mind Ivo, I attack his putative critics, my foolish past self included - where was the pushback at the turn of the 3rd dispensation, when an atheistic socialist order took the reigns of our national teleology and rode roughshod over every sound and civilised Christian value, over every standard, over every moral principle it pretended to uphold in the name of "unity"? Criticism of the prevailing political order while upholding its moral order is like ordering hot ice cream or a tower of soup. Moral nihilism, kleptocracy, violent suppression of dissent (unseen by the cloistered middle classes), abandonment of the poor to the wolves of organised crime in symbiosis with the ruling party - these are the downstream colours of the blood and gunsmoke of the People's War and Soviet patrimonialism, now blended with the millenarian Fabian elitism of UN liberal technocracy.
For the past generation, we have witnessed a dramatic and mendacious transformation of our education system by a violent, criminal and homicidal political movement, which has waited for a moment of total institutional saturation to enact what it calls the 2nd phase of the National Democratic Revolution – the removal from ordinary citizens the most basic rights required to secure a future for their children – property, and security. Minorities are not considered any more than tolerated guests, and genocidal rhetoric is tolerated, if not encouraged, everywhere, up to and including the highest pinnacles of the ivory tower and Luthuli House - the EFF threaten civilians and trumpet support for murderers with impunity, with no criticism. And while the supplicant intelligentsia have drawn inelegant comparisons of wealth across the racial boundaries using outdated statistics, only liar or an idiot could claim that what is being offered by this violent racist kleptocracy to the black poor is a fraction as good as that which economic freedom and moral government could.
The party and the intelligentsia have heaped an uninterrupted avalanche of shame upon minorities and upon religion, characterising us without nuance by our worst examples, tolerating no defence for any reason, no matter the rhetorical excesses or afactualities. The doctrines which rightly melted under this criticism are now the fringest of the fringe, denounced by every element of the Church hierarchy and Christian community. Hamitic hypothesis? I give not an aggravated pelvic thrust for dead dogma - I care for the living, who must live under the weight of the beast Ivo is feeding -decolonisation. We sweat and fret over dusty archaisms while chthonic blood warriors alive today trumpet the fanfare for the eradication of minorities to the smiling encouragement of our ruling classes.
UNESCO-compliant mores of sex-positivity, the suppression of monogamous mores and sexual propriety, an explosion of wild hedonism and libertine excess which saturates the land in the stench of decay, lax treatment of crime, a materialist argument in defence of every moral failure, which can of course only be solved by material redistribution. 60% of all people in South Africa have engaged in “transactional relationships” – an academic euphemism for prostitution. 60% of the children of our nation do not know who their father is. All that would have been necessary to curb the holocaust of AIDS would be the enforcement of certain virtues shared by all people of the book, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim. Education teaches hatred of the past and hatred of moral restraint, but nothing else, and that at about the highest per capita cost in the developing world.
We fear to advocate for moral solutions because we are told it would be tyrannical; an imposition and restriction of our freedoms. What freedoms are these? To engage in empty and nihilistic hedonic indulgences? This solipsistic life of onanism and wire-headed atomisation so celebrated by the liberal elite is not freedom nor enlightenment, and now that we have given up every single right liberalism promised us, in the name of risk management for a virus which has barely surpassed the number of flu deaths of the previous year, never mind tuberculosis, AIDS or regular homicide, any objection to Christian dogma on the basis of “liberty” is an insulting farce of an argument.
Just as unconvincing is Hermann Pretorius's argument that liberalism will protect Christianity. Liberty is no more than the ability to act in accordance with ones values unmolested, and today the people most at liberty in South Africa are those who are evil, those who are venal, and those who are cowardly. As it ever was in this accursed colonial chimera of nations, I suppose. Nobody learned anything from apartheid, they just produced a detailed description of the culture that ran the system, and demanded every one of its features be inverted - a project in rhythmic lockstep with the advance of the Progressive Western consensus that drugs are cool, the past is lame and stupid, white people suck, property is theft, monogamy is for repressed perma-virgins, and hard work is for losers.
Of course, black people never hear criticism of the state of their culture. Never. Not ever. Not once, unless in the form of an attack on a Western pollution of it. And to hell with this silence. Africa may once have had a delicate balance of sexual mores (of course, with its dark side, like all matters in this fallen world) that was soundly traded for Christianity, just as our ancestors did under the yoke of the Roman Empire, and as much of Africa does still in the millions today, of their own volition. But then, in imitation of the parasitic leftists of the West, South Africans have wildly abandoned virtue for the selfish gluttony and entitlement of postmodern feminist sexuality, moral relativism and gnostic materialism. And we pale natives cheer them on to assuage the resentful perspectives of revolutionary elites who hate us and wish only our downfall.
We rail against our ancestors for “civilising the native with Christianity”, but what was that process? Europeans, like any other conquering force with a comparable asymmetry of force, never needed religious excuses to dominate cattle-herders with pointy sticks - such is the purview of any wealthy and powerful nation of adventurers. The Arabs just took them at musketpoint, as they still do in the Sahel today, by the millions. The Chinese just throw monopoly money around and call them stupid. But this is the realm of merchants and states. What did Christianity do? What were Livingstone and de Brazza doing in the jungle? Freeing Africans from slavery, that’s what. What did the British Empire do for us when it acted in the name of Christian virtue? It freed every nation on the planet from slavery, at the cost of billions of pounds, and hundreds of thousands of English bodies, as Africans and Arabs threw wave after wave of servants at the bayonets to defend their rights to rape and enslave their fellow man. And then out of regret and economic overextension, the Empire retreated, and let the continent fall back into slavery and depredation, guided by UN-managed kleptocrats and foreign vulture capitalists empowered by their Rational Enlightenment.
But while our academics will dig through the past to find the sins of our ancestors, they accept China into their midst - a global empire of real existing slavery, that harvests organs from live prisoners of conscience, captured by the million from ethnic minorities resisting segregation and political domination. We decry colonialism from a dead empire and celebrate colonisation by another, which has none of the human compunction of a Christian nation, and commits evils of such magnitude in every century going back to the dawn of their civilisation, that only three European powers have ever come close to achieving such a scale of horror since the fall of the Roman Empire – Hitler, Leopold II and Stalin.
I will apologise no more. And neither should you. Cultural decolonisation is a homicidal and narcissistic movement of pro-socialist propaganda, and always has been. There is nothing to rescue in it. If we are doing cultural revival, great. If we are practicing historical revisionism, I celebrate that – after all, how much remains to be discovered that was passed over by the ideological movements of the past three generation? But the decolonisation movement has only one aim – the suppression of any narrative of history, any fact, any social value, which might portray the descendant of any European settler in any positive light except to celebrate their hatred of their own kind. There are no exceptions to this, and anyone offering a defence of this movement is at best a useful idiot or a cowardly moral windsock.
And right now, we are staring down the barrel of a gun, offering our menacing adversary ameliorative instruction on how to more delicately destroy the fabric of our society, in the hopes that the lapdogs of the elite classes will be passed over by the red angels of death in their feast of destruction and “justice” – that is, collective punishment for the crimes of the dead, enacted in effigy upon the living. And all we hear is how we need to fix ourselves, in the hopes that we may earn reprieve from the red-hot hatred bearing down on us from all sides. As a young white girl (several, in fact) told me once, "maybe we deserve it".
No, we do not.
Every response to Ivo has been a handwringing effort of sweaty concern over the future of our religion, our God-given truths - a pleading for the right to do as we know we ought to. Always a defence, not on behalf of Christ and his Holy Word, not for the families and future of minorities white and brown, but on behalf of some intangible and (as far as I can see, dead) climate of tolerance in whose transformation others might suffer collateral damage if Ivo’s Jacobin antichristianity were to be realised. I defend virtue now for its own sake. What “good religion” is Ivo proposing? More of the same libertine nihilism and starry-eyed elitism that has guided us into this pit of poison snakes, where the guilt-ridden decolonisation instincts of hand-wringing progressives withhold criticism of African male feelings of entitlement to sex and the commodification of women, universal silence on the historical practice of slavery and oppression by African societies that make white colonial practices pale into piddling insignificance. Gender-based violence? Who is chopping up and burning women who refuse to have sex with them? Church-going Afrikaners, or deracinated atheistic urban black youths divested of tradition and spiritual guidance by enlightened modernity?
To hell with reform, to hell with moderation. We shall live our lives as we see fit, by the God-given virtues we know to be true, regardless of what any creature says, and we shall pass these virtue on to our children in flagrant rejection of the flatulent and obese order of corruption that pretends to authority today. If Ivo or any other liberal offers a single word of compromise in the face of the NDR, they will have to wait upon God for redemption. I fear no accusation of “cancel culture”, I fear no accusation of authoritarianism. Authority is good. Without authority, there is mere power, and Ivo is bending to a raw and festering political body politic that demands a space of moral relativism to exercise its unscrupulous might. Authority is power for the sake of virtue, and virtue comes not from abstract reason, which can do no more than describe or criticise, it comes from tradition and revelation; it comes from the ineffable pool of Holy energies which flow through the faithful, and their will to do good. So let religion be organised, let it be disorganised. But let it be strong, and let it be intolerant of conniving interventions on the name of fashion.
Pick your gods carefully, because whether by the sword or by sickness, you will be dying for them. And when that moment comes to Ivo and others like him, may find they have died, not for the light of reason, but for the lure of a grinning angler fish.