AFRIKANERS OF SOUTH AFRICA OFFERED UNWANTED REFUGEE STATUS BY DONALD TRUMP
Trump issues an Executive Order cancelling "donor aid" to South Africa and surprises many Afrikaners by declaring them "refugees" in need of US asylum
This write-up is a continuation of the main article published recently. I recommend reading that one first before returning to this sequel.
TRUMP THREATENS TO CUT DONOR AID TO SOUTH AFRICA
I will start by saying that I fully support Trump cutting “donor aid” to many foreign countries. Donor Aid is nothing, but a gigantic influence peddling operation used by western countries to gain a say in the affairs of recipient nations.
Now to the sequel…
We have come full circle with the baffling spectacle surrounding the “white genocide” mythology that has been floating around for at least 8 years in rightwing alternative media outlets in the United States. Trump finally acted on his social media threat and signed an official Executive Order withdrawing the influence-peddling tool often mischaracterized as “donor aid”.
While “donor aid” withdrawal won’t have any strong impact on South Africa with its large, well-developed, mixed economy, the imposition of any future US sanctions on South Africa might indeed have an effect.
The fear of Trump potentially escalating beyond donor aid cancellation to impose tariffs (or an embargo) on South African exports to USA is what has panicked the Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen. He correctly fears that such measures against South African exports would disproportionately impact the agricultural sector, which includes those same white farmers that a highly misinformed Trump wants to “help”.
Except for the pro-apartheid fanatics in their midst, many white South African farmers have come out to denounce the fake “white farmland expropriation” nonsense because they correctly understand that any potential sanctions imposed by Trump on South African exports would decimate the agricultural sector on which their livelihoods depend.
AgriSA, an organisation that represents thousands of white farmers in South Africa, has issued its own statement to the local media, denouncing the disinformation that motivated Trump’s actions. As I explained in my previous article, the new South African land law is similar to those all over the world, including the United States, where it is referred to as Eminent Domain.
In a way, Trump’s Executive Order is hilarious for its inclusion of all the tropes of the “white genocide” myth. The fact that Trump signed an order granting asylum only to Afrikaners— excluding other white ethnicities—is a testament to the ignorance that is rife in USA where rightwing media narratives create the impression that whites in South Africa are 100% farmers and 100% Afrikaners.
In reality, Afrikaners are 58% of the white population. The remaining 42% are mostly people of British descent— with small numbers of ethnic Italians and Portuguese. Only a very tiny fraction of the 4.7 million strong white population are rural farmers.
While the vast majority of farmers are definitely white, there are small numbers of non-white farmers (e.g. Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds) who own large commercial farms and face the same risk of murder or robbery at the hands of common criminals.
Most whites are urban dwellers disconnected from the semi-isolated rural farming scene. These white urbanites are fully integrated into the political, economic, social and cultural life of post-apartheid South Africa, where they function as judges, lawyers, accountants, engineers, politicians, government ministers, media personalities, film actors, musicians, police officers, military personnel, business owners, etc.
As I explained in my previous article, there are some racial tensions and unfair “affirmative action” policies happening in the country. But it is patently false that white South Africans are facing the prospect of being ethnically cleansed like 14.6 million ethnic Germans that were killed or expelled en masse from Eastern Europe by vengeful Czechs, Poles, Soviets, Yugoslavs, Romanians and Hungarians after the Second World War.
Many South Africans (black and white) are baffled by what is going on with the new Trump Administration and wrongly attribute what is going on there exclusively to South Africa’s court petition against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which should not be confused with the entirely separate International Criminal Court (ICC).
Yes, it is certain that the powerful Zionist lobby in USA influenced Trump because his Executive Order mentions South Africa’s “aggressive” role in the ICJ case against Israel, which is designated an “ally of USA”.
Nevertheless, limiting the motive for the issuance of the Executive Order to Trump’s unhappiness with South Africa’s ICJ case is akin to skimming at the surface of something murkier.
Since 2017, I have been consuming the output of rightwing alternative media outlets in the USA. These rightwing American publications regale their readers with stories of the runaway crime wave sweeping across South Africa, but not in the proper context.
These US publications do not report the reality that South Africans of all races suffer from the crime wave, which explains why the electoral fortunes of the ANC have been declining for years. Voters of all races are fed up with ANC corruption and failure to beat back the crime wave.
Many middle-class blacks disillusioned with ANC have increasingly turned to smaller opposition parties, including the white liberal-dominated Democratic Alliance. Even the apartheid-nostalgic white conservative Freedom Front Plus (FFP) party has seen a small influx of black members. A black FFP member actually won a city council election in 2022.
Instead of the nuanced reality I articulated above, US rightwing media fixate on a small segment of the white population— the rural farmers, especially those of Afrikaner heritage. Every incident of murder or robbery committed by common criminals against these farmers is grossly misrepresented to a conservative American audience as “white South African genocide” in preparation for “farmlands to be seized from them”.
Because it is almost impossible for Americans to separate their domestic Culture Wars from events happening in faraway foreign nations, we get several articles in rightwing press continually warning frightened American conservatives that if leftist Democrat Party seize full control of USA then “all white Americans will suffer the genocidal fate of white South Africans”. Completely crazy stuff, given that US Democratic Party is dominated by liberal white Americans.
But where does rightwing US media and racial bigots like former Duke University Professor Darren Beattie get their garbage “white genocide” information from? Well, it comes from the pro-apartheid AfriForum organization run by an Afrikaner propagandist named Carl Martin Kriel who lives and moves freely in South Africa without anybody attempting to snatch his private property or “genocide” him out of existence.
In fact, one can argue that Trump’s Executive Order is the culmination of almost a decade of Carl Kriel’s AfriForum manipulating racially sensitive conservative white Americans into thinking that “fellow whites” in South Africa are about to be “exterminated”. But Trump’s unexpected asylum offer is actually a blow against AfriForum’s real agenda.
Pro-apartheid AfriForum members—who aren’t oppressed at all—do not want to leave their sunny tropical African paradise to become struggling refugees in the United States. They do not want to leave their beautiful detached houses in gated communities in urban areas and their large rural mansions, serviced by an army of black servants, to go and hustle as miserable refugees in North America. What they really want is the elusive Volkstaat.
They want USA to intervene in force and dismember South Africa so that a new Afrikaans-speaking apartheid statelet can be created in the territory of the historic Cape Province, which was dissolved in 1994 and split into four parts to create new smaller provinces.
AfriForum already has a prototype of what a future racially exclusive apartheid state would look like. Carl Kriel and his followers look to Orania, the nearly racially exclusive white Afrikaner town established in 1991 inside what is now called Northern Cape Province. The provincial government of the Northern Cape is controlled by the ANC while the municipal authority of Orania town is operated exclusively by the apartheid-nostalgic Freedom Front Plus (FFP).
In the spirit of post-apartheid reconciliation, successive ANC governments have declined to interfere with this nearly racially exclusive enclave—Orania—which seems like a throwback to the “good old days of apartheid”. Although, it has to be said that many of its white residents state that the town exists to preserve Afrikaner culture. That is probably true, but apartheid nostalgics who fund AfriForum tend to see the almost racially exclusive Orania as the nucleus of a future apartheid polity.
And just like the American Zionist lobby that wants USA to fight for Israel, supporters of AfriForum were hoping that a right-leaning US government would fight for their beloved Volkstaat.
Instead, what the apartheid nostalgics got from the Trump Administration was a pathetic offer of “refugee status” that no Afrikaner living in South Africa really want. I cannot believe that these delusional pro-apartheid wackos ever thought that Trump will sail the ocean blue, travel thousands of miles, to come and use American power to dismember South Africa in order to create their beloved Volkstaat on African soil.
The secessionist madness is not limited to pro-apartheid Afrikaners of Dutch, German and French Huguenot ancestry, there are a handful of white South Africans of British descent who also dream of a Volkstaat of sorts. However, unlike the racially exclusive Afrikaners, the secessionist white South Africans of British descent are willing to consider the inclusion of other racial minorities (South African Indians and Coloureds) in their own watered-down version of the Volkstaat.
The leader of the fringe secessionist Referendum Party, Mr. Philip Craig, was probably not pleased with Trump’s nonsensical asylum offer that would not apply to him— even if he desired to move to USA— since he is of white British descent (rather than the Afrikaner heritage specified in the Executive Order).
Like many of his secessionist Afrikaner counterparts, what Phil Craig wants is for USA to support the dismemberment of South Africa in order to create a new white-dominated country on the territory of the defunct Cape Province. In the tweets below, he helpfully explains to Americans that the proposed new country would serve as a client state of the US Empire. He also laments that South Africa is “under the influence of Russia and China (BRICS)”.
It is not without cause that rabble rouser Julius Malema repeatedly accuse white opposition politicians in his country of being “tools of western imperialism and puppets of the United States”.
Unfortunately for people like Phil Craig and Carl Kriel, the days in which the US government deploys its military arsenal to dismember a country are over. The US Empire is overstretched. Therefore, no official currently in power in Washington DC is seriously thinking of carrying out a Yugoslavia-style dismemberment operation on South Africa.
When you spread fake stories about a non-existent “white genocide” in the hope of attracting US firepower to your secessionist cause, what you actually get is Donald Trump offering you plane tickets to move to USA to become a hustling refugee. And no, you are not going from being a hustling refugee to becoming the next Elon Musk, living it up on revenue coming from the US government-subsidized SpaceX.
Last I checked certain South African social media forums, some people were reporting that AfriForum has lost 15,000 paying members because its efforts has increased the potential risk of Trump imposing economic sanctions that are more likely to smash the livelihood of white farmers than they are to affect stalwarts of the ANC.
To conclude, here is video footage of AfriForum leader Carl Kriel at a press conference rejecting Donald Trump’s asylum offer. He doesn’t want to flee the country where “whites are being oppressed and genocided”.
Of course, he cites the scary prospect of future generations of Afrikaner kids assimilating into the Anglo-Saxon culture of the United States as his excuse for turning down Trump’s “lifeline”. But I think that is disingenuous.
With some effort, notional Afrikaner refugees in USA can replicate the cultural and linguistic isolation achieved by the German-speaking Amish communities of Pennsylvania. The Afrikaners in South Africa already have places like Orania to test the concept of isolated existence. So they can replicate the “Orania experience” in the United States. But then we already know why wealthy Carl Kriel won’t abandon acres upon acres of prime farmland that constitute his personal real estate in South Africa to go and hustle in USA as an anonymous landless refugee.
Observing the look of dismay on his face, it is obvious that it is dawning on the pro-apartheid activist that decades of lying to influential American conservatives have failed to pay off. The quest for Volkstaat would always be a pipe dream.
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POSTSCRIPT : Dear readers, in the future, I intend to publish a comprehensive article that delves into the history of South Africa and provides more insights into the country's current state of affairs. In the meantime, I recommend that you read my previous article discussing Zimbabwe, if you haven’t already read it.
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The genocide argument was always bizarre. Even most of us (Afrikaners) who leave, leave principally for economic reasons---I quit school to work the first time after grade 8...
After coming to North America, I had many Nigerian acquaintances whom I counted as friends, although their numbers dwindled when they realized that I was of working class background, and not the infamous white elite (I think that they thought that it meant all whites, vs the richest 20%)---mainly Redeemed CCOG members...
Leaving aside these 49 whites, there has been an exodus of whites out of South Africa since the 90s. It does not seem this has been good for the country. Ramaphosa lecturing people for leaving probably will not help, it does seem the South African government has to figure out a better approach than “you suck, please don’t leave”.