Won’t someone think of the poor genocidaires?
Public coverage of Malema's hatespeech trial
It is fortunate that for now, the media and the politicians do not represent the people. If the conduct of the media the past few days has showed anything, it is that few members of the South African media landscape believe calling for genocide is morally wrong. It is now a controversial position in South Africa to say that whites in general, and Afrikaners in particular, deserve to live, in any other context than a nod-and-a-wink denial of exoteric semantic content.
This last week or so, we have all been at least casually following the prosecution of Julius Malema for hate speech, for singing, with his zombified followers, songs that call for the death of Afrikaners through the metonymic persona of the Boer, the farmer (whose deaths from armed attacks exceed the homicide risk of all groups in South Africa except for two Coloured districts in the Cape Flats, which are under siege by ANC-protected gangs).
While media commentators celebrated Malema for allegedly embarrassing Afriforum council Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer’s Columbo routine managed to draw out Malema’s stupidity, his childishness, and his cowardice, for all to see. Even when the council showed that his followers understood the song to be a call for genocide, even when words of the political chant were daubed in blood by murderers on the walls, even when actual murderers of white farmers openly admitted that the song motivated them, Malema still denied being capable of perceiving any connection. He could not admit even to the content of the very words he was shown to be singing.
And yet, Oppenheimer managed to get Malema to admit:
1) that he intended to use mass violence to remove all white people from the land (the EFF is a militant revolutionary force aimed at depriving every white person of all property)
2) that he believes genocide is an acceptable policy option (he would not rule out slaughtering all white people),
3) and that he knows that his songs cause people to commit violent acts (claiming to have stopped singing the song with its original lyrics because it might encourage people to kill black farmers. Of course, this only happened after being ordered to shut up by the courts).
This is enough to prove that Malema’s use of the song,” Shoot the Boer” is a witting injunction to racial homicide. Oppenheimer, by any reasonable standard, has won his case.
But Malema is not alone in his defiance. Not one journalist admitted this, nor considered the EFF’s program to be a problem. Every black politician in the entire country considers him a good man who speaks truth to dead powers. Not one journalist wrote as if Malema had showed any character flaws. He was praised like a conquering hero, by virtually every public figure with a platform on social media.
The closest any dialogue has come to a rebuke of Malema, is to accuse him of being as low and reprehensible as Afriforum, a group to which not a single morally objectionable deed or utterance has every been attributed, except for asserting that Afrikaners deserve to live, and see their culture preserved. This reveals that there is not one good man or woman among South African journalists. Not one person for whom it can be said that they are possessed of basic decency, or even passing contact with reality.
Even white journalists, witnessing a man openly assert that he has a right to decide whether or not to slaughter them en masse, celebrate the man for holding his ground against attempts to extract a modicum of humanity from his demonic mouth.
Every article, even un-editorialised reports, gave Malema the first and last word on every point. His shortcomings and evasions are omitted. His arguments are tidied up so as to appear more coherent, and his opponent’s points and questions are edited so as to appear more lopsided and impoverished. Every headline which quotes a party, is quoting a defensive argument of Malema’s, and none of his damning utterances. No concerned parties are quoted without offering Malema a recontextualised rebuttal. His childish insults against the opposing council were treated as entertainment.
Why is that? There are two cultural factors at play here. First, black nationalism.
Very few black public figures in this country think this genocidal rhetoric is worth objecting to. However, as the letters to the editor at The Sowetan show, the ordinary black man finds Malema and his ideology repulsive. The Sowetan, a working-class black paper, was incidentally one of the first to denounce Malema, while the Gates and Soros funded Anglo-Liberal media (Mail & Guardian; Daily Maverick) were still treating him as merely exciting and edgy. This is largely because the black working class’s opinions on white people are far less important that the white middle class, who must be kept from turning on the black supremacist government at all costs, so as to preserve the tax base.
But among the black ruling class, who have either passed through the ANC or through radical leftist Western universities, it is widely understood that white people do not deserve rights. As one MP said during the last round of EWC legislation, it is a disgrace that we are even allowed to vote. We should thank our lucky stars that our political class is so lazy, stupid, corrupt and parasitic. Even black “liberals” like Phumzile van Damme slavered at the sight of Malema’s sarcastic evasions. Every other black commentator either stayed silent, yawned, or cackled at Malema’s irreverent performance. There is no substance here, any more than one would find browsing Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh’s lobotomised interview channel.
Genocide is just another topic for debate, whereas any insulting remarks by whites are on the order of a mortal sin, for which no forgiveness can be countenanced. Even asking to be treated with the most basic dignity is above our station.
Second, English Liberalism.
As Cecil Rhodes always used to argue, the British should be the owners of South Africa, since they are finer custodians of the Africans than the disgusting Boers are, whose death in concentration camps is a memory still regarded as irritating to Anglos. They believe Africans are children easily steered by their benign wisdom, and that there’s no way they would do anything truly evil, because their wisdom will always be there to light the way. This sort may not be perfectly happy with Malema’s line, but they will defend it so long as they get to flagellate a few rock spiders.
I have written much about the Naumannites. These, who believe that they can become African in some sense (but without embracing any deep elements of traditional culture, just some outer decoration), will bend over backwards to endorse the most radical and psychopathic black politics available. The motive is simple – even a racist could accept and praise a sensible black man. But only a true anti-racist would defend an ugly, mentally retarded, bloodthirsty atavist. And so they must seek out the worst of black society to advertise their benevolence. The violent tendencies of the African child are just innocent cries for mother’s love.
The archetype of this species was illustrated by the grotesquely shallow academic parasite Professor Gunner, dressed in a cartoonish amalgam of western hippy dress and African shwe-shwe fabric, who was called to testify as an expert witness in African political song. She showed herself to be incapable of answering basic questions about her very area of expertise any time the question touched on the explicit meaning of Malema’s favourite political slogan, and denied basic modens ponens inferences based on premises she herself had asserted, in order to avoid stating anything negative about Malema.
Professional male wetnurse Piet Croucamp, after admitting to not following the case, ploughed forth undeterred by reality in asserting that Afriforum must learn to understand the poor little darlings and their desperate need to call for white blood. His defence of Malema is that the man was unerringly wise, and that white people are exactly as Malema portrayed us. I think his kopdoek is on too tight.
Mind you, Pierre de Vos quoted him approvingly, but then this is a man responsible for co-drafting the constitution, who argued that letting off white men accused of crimes against black (despite the only evidence against them being known lies) was a miscarriage of justice. Here, he quotes approvingly from Croucamp’s article:
Chris Roper (who earned the nickname Groper for his manner of approaching female colleagues, and has managed to avoid being ostracised by virtue of his adamantine hatred of Afrikaners, which shows great progressive credentials) argued in his article that Malema is harmless because his genocidal rhetoric is just a recruitment tool, but that Afriforum is harmful because treating this as dangerous or offensive is to commit the crime of calling swart gevaar – incontrovertible proof of racism.
The theory in this group, is that Afriforum can have no principled reason to abject to calls of genocide. The theory is that all of this is a shallow moneymaking scheme by both parties, that deeply held values and ethnic grudges form no part of the behaviour or the proceedings. Chris Roper, and Nickolaus Bauer all took this line. Pierre de Vos has taken this stance before on previous cases. Stephen Grootes took the false equivalence argument, that the EFF and AfriForum are the same kind of people.
What these people agree on, is that all this is cynical opportunism that can be solved by another hefty dose of AA, BEE, and socialism.
But all these men, while they may be forced to say it isn’t exactly desirable, will insist that there is nothing to be concerned about in encouraging genocide in song form. This sort of mental gymnastics is made easier by the fact that Roper and his colleagues completely avoid taking into account the specific context of Malema’s transgression.
The reason this case was opened was not that Malema has been calling for our death in song – he had been doing that for some time. The reason he was charged, is that in 2020, following the brutal, slow, gratuitous and torturous murder of 21 year old Brendin Horner, from all appearances by a small crew of stock thieves with close connections to local police, Malema called his supporters to descend on the court and chant the genocidal slogan in the presence of the kid’s family.
The justified and just rage of the Afrikaner community resulted in the closest thing Afrikaners have come to rioting in decades, and there were fears of an outbreak of violence that might spark a race war. Horner got no justice, because the police (friends of the accused) lost the evidence, and his killers walked free. AfriForum is extracting what little justice they can from this case. And while it will necessarily cause a lot of heat, the courts are the only lawful way of imposing any sort of firm consequences to genocidal rhetoric.
But commentators (e.g., Grootes) have taken relish in arguing that AfriForum’s case has given a free platform to Malema; a backfire effect. Ghaleb Cachalia, though he also used the backfire argument, was the only commentator who took Malema seriously, and directly compared him to Mussolini and Hitler (he also put Trump in this box, an embarrassingly stupid thing to say, but credit where credit is due).
But it is perfectly ordinary for Malema’s noxious views to be promoted by each and every journalist in South Africa, even without Afriforum’s input. Until Malema switched from Pan-African open-borderism to South-African-black nationalism, he was celebrated as a spicy but constructive contribution to the noble Afro-Saxon struggle to erase those racist Afrikaners whether with sugar or machetes.
The truth is that only one of the four racial groups in the country has the material potential for committing genocide, and that is the black population. Their political leaders and representatives have not taken a stand against Malema, his ideas or his rhetoric, because they are endemic to the Charterist movement as a whole, and Malema is its true representative, untouched by the compromises of 1994.
This trial is going to be a test of our institutions. Until now, to call for genocide as a black person carried no serious repercussions. To call for the genocide of black people as a white person would bring down such an unholy shitstorm that betting odds on one’s life expectancy would be short indeed. I will not deviate from character by offering too much optimism even if the case is won – after all, the Nazis were prosecuted for hate speech under the first such laws ever written, and wore their prosecutions as badges of honour.
But for the sake of calming everybody’s nerves though, it is important to remember that a successful genocide is not logistically possible in South Africa. Our military are losers. Our government can’t manage the most basic logistics. And when the radicals really did try to enact a race war, as happened in the June riots last year, unorganised middle-class minority neighbourhoods fought them back with personal firearms and barricades in two weeks, without any assistance from the police or military.
But let us not forget that genocide is not the only bad outcome possible from living with an overwhelming majority of economically unstable and practically disenfranchised people whose leaders despise you. Zimbabweans may be nice people, but their government didn’t reflect that for a moment.
If Scumbag Malema & Co don't go down know that that judge is captured, for sure.
Pauli Van Wyk is suggesting Malema nor AfriForum are tearing South Africans apart.