Kissing the Boers, Donald style Written by Andrew Donaldson

[Nat Quinn]

Tsar Alexander II, Emperor of Russia, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland, was quite the progressive. Among other reforms, he abolished serfdom, overhauled the judicial system, outlawed corporal punishment, ended some privileges of the nobility and promoted university education. Alas, for his troubles he was assassinated by anarchists on 13 March, 1881.

When his son, Alexander III ascended the throne, he immediately set about reversing his father’s policies, making it clear that his autocracy would not be limited. Worse still, his reign coincided with a dramatic increase in the persecution of Russia’s Jews. On a more helpful note, he did suggest a helpful principle regarding international diplomacy. “From henceforth,” he stated shortly after his coronation, “all matters of state will be discussed quietly between Ourselves and God.”

Fast-forward to the present, and that practice of polite diplomatic discourse seems to have been thrown under a bus by Trump, his recent broadsides on social media directed at Pretoria being obvious examples. On Friday, US president Donald Trump — whose narcissism is such that he may well be convinced that he is God — announced that Washington was stopping all federal funding to the country, tweeting:

“South Africa is being terrible, plus, to long time Farmers in the country. They are confiscating their LANDS and FARMS, and MUCH WORSE THAN THAT. A bad place to be right now, and we are stopping all Federal Funding. To go a step further, any Farmer (with family!) From South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately.”

This invitation — extended to boere of all races, presumably — followed an earlier executive order cutting US financial assistance to Pretoria, citing disapproval of its land reform policies and the genocide case it launched at the International Court of Justice against US ally Israel.

Speaking of genocide, Trump’s tweet was retweeted by one Robert Sepehr, who added, “While I am in full support of helping the Boers, settlers who established agricultural civilization in South Africa 400 years ago, it is not enough. America should use the CIA and military force to impose regime change in SA. Afrocentric Communism is conducting White genocide.”

Sepehr is a Los Angeles author and anthropologist who describes himself as a “harsh critic of the out-of-Africa theory”. (That Mrs Ples Australopithecus africanus stuff doesn’t wash with him.) Instead, he is an advocate of “alternative diffusionist arguments involving advanced antediluvian civilizations, occult secret societies, ancient mythology, alchemy and astrotheology”. What’s more, he boasts that, being an anthropologist, “I can tell racial the differences from a skull 20 feet away, so differences are more than just skin color (sic). Humanity is not one race but a hybrid species.”

This is a fairly unique talent, possibly even for antediluvian civilisations.

But we digress. In a response to Trump’s post, Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman, Vincent Magwenya, reportedly claimed that South Africa was “not going to partake in a counterproductive megaphone diplomacy”.

What’s more, and according to a TimesLIVE report, Magwenya insisted that Pretoria remained committed to building a mutually beneficial bilateral trade, political and diplomatic relationship with Washington. This relationship, he added, must be based on mutual respect and respect for South Africa’s independence and sovereignty.

Here’s the problem, though, one that Pretoria shares with Europe and other Western countries: Trump administration doesn’t do diplomacy. It simply doesn’t, not of any sort. Instead, it does “transactional” stuff — “transactional” being nothing other than a long-winded term for “making deals”. Statecraft is thus effectively reduced to the bickering of a bully at a flea market.

This much was evident with that disgraceful dressing down of Zelensky in the Oval Office. Is there anyone out there who witnessed this horror show and who still believes that the US remains a defender of democracy and a rules-based social order? That all is well with Pax Americana?

Well, yes. Ernst Roets for one. Solidarity’s former head of policy has stirred up a heap of trouble for himself with his appearance last week on The Tucker Carlson Show, a right-wing US podcast in which he claimed, among other things, that South African universities were teaching students that killing a white person is not a crime:

“There is an African term called ubuntu, which means brotherliness or humanity. It’s a Zulu term. The theory goes that white people are incapable of having ubuntu. The logical conclusion is that if you kill a white person, then you did not commit murder. This is not widely believed in South Africa, but it is taught at universities.”

Such comments attracted much derision from the commentariat. The Sunday Times, which declared Roets its Mampara of the Week, did point out that, when confronted on social media, he was not able to provide proof of such claims. Roets has since revealed that he has received death threats as a result of his comments on the podcast, specifically about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

“During the time that [Nelson Mandela] was in prison,” Carlson had prompted his guest, “his wife was effectively his spokesperson, Winnie Mandela — a woman of peace and decency, really a transcendent figure, a holy figure, and then it turned out that actually she was a murderer who had burned to death of supervised the murder of a bunch of different people. Tell us about that.”

“Yes,” Roets said, “and she famously said at a political rally ‘With our necklaces and our matches, we will liberate this country.’ Which, of course, is a reference to the necklace murders which were very popular in South Africa, and still happen in South Africa.

“That is, when you take a rubber tyre, you fill it with petrol or gasoline, you put it around someone’s neck so that it is bound around their arms and you set it on fire.  You stone that person while he is burning to death. That happened. There were, I think, five or 700 people killed like that during political violence in South Africa. She encouraged this. Initially she denied this, then it came out that it was recorded.”

Perhaps they didn’t ask him the same sort of questions, but Roets’s comments to CBS News on Trump’s executive order cutting off aid to South Africa for as long as land expropriation remained on the statute books seemed more measured.

“I think we, the Afrikaners, have been treated as a scapegoat and punching bag in this country for three decades, with political leaders chanting on stage at political rallies ‘Kill the Boer’, so we are very grateful for someone like President Trump to acknowledge the 144 race laws in South Africa,” Roets told the broadcaster.

He did however add that he, along with many other Afrikaner leaders, did not want to leave South Africa, and did not support blanket sanctions but suggested there instead be targeted sanctions against “specific leaders” who discriminated against Afrikaners with racist laws.

A small number of farmers were however expected to take up the Trump offer. But, as CBS News put it, “most say that while their rights and safety need to be protected, they want to stay on the land their families have farmed for, in many cases, generations.”

Kissing the ring

Is Pax Americana dead, as lifeless perhaps as Donald Trump’s marriage? Until very recently that would have appeared to be the case, and yet … following “crunch peace talks” between officials from Kyiv and Washington in Jeddah on Tuesday, it seems reports of the demise of the post-war social order were a wee bit premature.

According to a joint statement by the governments of Ukraine and the United States, Ukraine has accepted a US proposal of an immediate 30-day ceasefire proposal. The US will now inform the Kremlin that “Russian reciprocity is the key to achieving peace” and ending the war in Ukraine. What’s more, the US will immediately “lift the pause of intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine”.

On the face of it, this seems like a massive win for Volodymyr Zelensky. Prior to the suspension of military aid, the US was delivering some $2-billion worth of weapons a month to Kyiv. What’s more, American intelligence has proved invaluable in targeting Russian troop positions. What good, after all, is all that ordinance if you don’t know the location of the target?

More importantly, it is hoped that, by resupplying Kyiv’s arsenal, Vladimir Putin may be convinced that accepting the ceasefire proposal is in Russia’s best interests. It is however a slim hope, and some commentators have given the proposal little chance of succeeding.. Russian officials have already indicated the ceasefire agreement is “difficult to accept”. As one source told the Reuters news agency, “It is difficult for Putin to agree to this in its current form,” adding that “Putin has a strong position because Russia is advancing [in Ukraine].”

It’s worth noting that Zelensky was not present for the talks in Jeddah. Neither was Trump. But the US president’s interests were well represented, as both parties agreed to conclude “as soon as possible” an agreement to develop Ukraine’s “critical mineral resources”.

This, of course, was what Trump was after all along — a stake in the country’s natural resources. This, rather than a “military backstop”, would deter a Russian re-invasion. What better deterrent than American mining companies on the ground in Ukraine? Many commentators have given this for this sort of thinking short shrift.

Another worrying aspect of the proposed 30-day truce is that it is quite similar to the proposal hammered out at the summit of European leaders that UK prime minister Keir Starmer convened in London last weekend. Europe’s behind-the-scenes efforts in finding a solution to this grim war seemed to have been ignored. But no matter. It’s peace alone that counts. For now, American officials herald the deal as a breakthrough in achieving the Trump administration’s foreign policy goals.

And, as the joint statement puts it: “The Ukrainian delegation reiterated the Ukrainian people’s strong gratitude to President Trump, the US Congress, and the people of the United States for making possible meaningful progress toward peace.”

In other words, grovelling obeisance to the Donald is paramount. If, that is, you want to keep the pax.

Reality bites

As regular readers will attest, there is considerable opinion out there that I suffer from TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. I must disagree. TDS is not a syndrome, but rather a label to delegitimise and nullify valid comment on the president’s policies and behaviour by suggesting his critics suffer from a form of mental illness.

This often noisy exercise in projection is wholly dismissive, for example, of concerns that the man, as the conservative commentator Matthew Parris put it in The Times, is “a slob, a cheat, a lawbreaker, a bully, a careless liar, a cheap jingoist and a very dangerous politician [who] appeals to the dark side, the chaos in human nature”.

This was Parris, a former Tory MP, writing in January, at the time of Trump’s inauguration. Now, not quite two months later, it should be painfully clear to even the most ardent of this Kremlin asset’s supporters that all is not well with his administration.

This is not opinion. This is fact. Just follow the money: on Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 prominent companies listed on US stock exchanges fell by 890 points, more than two per cent. The Standard and Poor’s 500, which tracks the stocks of the US’s 500 largest listed companies, fell by 2.7 per cent. The Nasdaq Composite, which tracks tech sector stocks, fell by four per cent.

This, according to MarketWatch, a website providing analysis of stock market data, is the worst start to a presidential term since 2009, when the country was in the subprime mortgage crisis.

But, as the political historian Heather Cox Richardson points out, “Trump did not inherit an economy mired in crisis … he inherited what was, at the time, the strongest economy in the world. That booming economy is no more: Goldman is now predicting higher inflation and slower growth than it had previously forecast, while its forecast for Europe is now stronger than it had been.

“Trump has always been a dodgy salesman more than anything, telling supporters what they want to hear. He insisted that the strong economy under former president Joe Biden was, in fact, a disaster that only he could fix. In October, Trump told attendees at a rally: ‘We will begin a new era of soaring incomes. Skyrocketing wealth. Millions and millions of new jobs and a booming middle class. We are going to boom like we’ve never boomed before.’”

It was that kind of sales pitch that got Trump back into the White House, Richardson adds. “Now, though, he needs to make the sales pitch fit into a reality that it doesn’t match.”

Shares of Elon Musk’s Tesla, meanwhile, fell by more than 15 per cent on Monday and a further four per cent on Tuesday, after dropping almost 48 per cent since Trump’s inauguration. This has prompted the president to post on Truth Social:

“To Republicans, Conservatives, and all great Americans, Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for. They tried to do it to me at the 2024 Presidential Ballot Box, but how did that work out? In any event, I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American. Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???”

Why indeed? But another question: why buy a Tesla when you once decried electric cars as “lunacy”, when your big thing is fossil fuel, and your mantra is “Drill, baby, drill”? What kind of message is that?

Trump did go out and buy a Tesla, a red S Model. This, I fear, is not going to boost the company’s fortunes.

 

source:Kissing the Boers, Donald style – OPINION | Politicsweb

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