Reverse racism real and deadly in South Africa
HORRIFIC stories of torture, rape and murder committed on white South African farmers should be all the evidence we need that reverse racism is indeed real, writes Caroline Marcus.
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ANYONE who still denies reverse racism is real needs to look at what’s happening in South Africa.
White farmers are being tortured, gang-raped and slaughtered in their own homes in terrifying numbers.
The situation has become so bleak, being a farmer in South Africa is now the world’s most dangerous job.
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There are no official figures — thanks to a highly corrupt local government and police force, which have refused to release statistics since 2007 — but the Transvaal Agricultural Union that represents the country’s commercial farmers puts the murder rate at 138 per 100,000.
Compare that to United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime statistics for the average homicide rates for Australia (1.3) and the notoriously violent South Africa more widely (31), and it starts to sink in how deadly it is to be white landowner there right now.
Farm tortures have been part of South African reality for the better part of 30 years, coinciding with the end of apartheid, but the situation has become far more grim over time.
Last year, there were a record 404 farm attacks, four times the number a decade ago, according to civil rights group AfriForum.
Matters are only tipped to get worse, after the ruling African National Congress joined with the socialist party Economic Freedom Fighters two weeks ago to pass a motion to seize land from white farmers without compensation.
The EFF’s leader Julius Malema, a radical convicted of hate speech in 2011 for repeatedly singing the banned apartheid-era song Shoot the Boer (an Afrikaans word for farmer), has ramped up his anti-white rhetoric.
In the past week, he’s spoken of “cutting the throat of whiteness” and said of plans to remove a local mayor for the crime of being white, “we (are) going for your white man, we are going to cut the throat.”
Even before Malema’s racist rants, you only needed to Google “South African farmers” to be confronted with the most stomach-churning images of white men and women tortured in their homes with clothing irons, power drills and blowtorches.
On the weekend, News Corp journalist Paul Toohey told the harrowing story of 86-year-old Piet Els, a personal friend of late president and anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, and a white man known as someone black people could go to for help.
None of that mattered.
In late January, four black men broke into Els’ home, using a clothes iron to burn him all over his body until his skin peeled off.
He remains in intensive care.
Then there’s Johann and Mariandra Heunis, whose small chicken farm outside Pretoria was the target of a farm attack in September 2016.
Their young daughter desperately pleaded with the assailants to take her piggy bank, and leave her dad and heavily pregnant mum alone.
They ignored her, shooting Johann five times in front of his children.
No doubt, memories of South Africa’s all-too-recent, shameful apartheid that have contributed to the world turning its back on the country’s white minority.
But despite such atrocities, the global outcry hasn’t come.
There are no viral hashtags, no glamorous Hollywood stars wearing a special pin, no marches through Sydney’s CBD.
Liberal Democratic Senator David Leyonhjelm asked Australians to picture our farmers being butchered like this.
“Just imagine if 400 of them were being murdered each year — the entire country would be galvanised into action,” Leyonhjelm tweeted. “But because it’s white farmers in black South Africa, I doubt much will be done.”
He’s right, of course.
No doubt, memories of South Africa’s all-too-recent, shameful apartheid that have contributed to the world turning its back on the country’s white minority.
But in the process, innocent victims are becoming collateral damage, paying the dearest of prices for the sins of their forefathers.
The massacres also don’t fit in neatly with the narrative that white people can’t be the victims of racism, perpetuated by proponents of identity politics everywhere.
The truth is, there are versions of this anti-white, vengeance theme swirling in movements around the western world, from Black Lives Matter in the US to Invasion Day protests back home.
Who can forget indigenous activist Tarneen Onus-Williams’ rallying cry of “f*** Australia, hope it burns to the ground” to thousands of protesters on Australia Day?
She was backed up by her group Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance who issued a statement promising “not to rest until we burn this entire rotten settler colony called Australia … to the f***ing ground, until every corrupt and illegal institution of white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist settler colonial power forced upon us is no more.”
Of course, Australia is a very different place from South Africa and we’ve proved we’re a highly successful and tolerant multicultural society, where such extreme views are in the very small minority.
Unfortunately for the South African farmers, they’re largely stuck; they can’t sell up because groups like Black Land First threatens those who dare buy their farms and they — somehow — don’t meet the criteria for refugees.
One exception was an elderly white farmer, whose wife and three others were burned to death in 1999.
He was granted special permission to live in Queensland, but his lawyer told Toohey he feared a “backlash” if it became known our government had helped the man.
You only have to look at Zimbabwe, where white farmers were chased out of the country under despot Robert Mugabe, to see how badly this story could end.
Caroline Marcus is a journalist with Sky News.
@carolinemarcus