I was made aware that Guyon Espiner had interviewed Arno Nel about an Auckland protest he’d helped to organise about South African land seizures and the supposed widespread murder of white farmers. So I gave it a listen. In short, Espiner gave Arno Nel a free run to peddle utter bullshit.
This post is a rushed attempt to counter the crap that Nel and others are running with. And I have to say, (though it wont be popular) there are a lot of people who engage with this blog who deserve to get it in the neck for stupidly aiding and abetting the rise of this nonsense. Let’s go back a few weeks.
Remember Lauren Southern? She has a documentary called Farmlands that pushes the idea that white farmers in South Africa are being slaughtered. In the head long rush to brand her a fascist and stop her from speaking, there was no conversation or debate about the veracity of those claims (which she would have surely talked about) and neither was there any questioning of where those claims originated.
So, very quickly.
There is a group in South Africa called The Suidlanders. They are a Protestant, ‘prepper’ group who (at least in part) follow the ranting prophesies of a dead guy called Siener van Rensburg and who believe in a coming race war.
The South African paper, the Mail and Guardian did a piece way back in March that covered the emergence of the line about white South African farm murders. To quote –
Simon Roche, the spokesperson for the Suidlanders, said the promulgation of the message of South Africa’s “white genocide” to Europe and Australia could be directly attributed to his group’s protracted tour of the US last year.
And then, from Vice and also from March of this year .
On the back of a wildly successful tour, Suidlanders reached out to Southern and Hopkins. “With Lauren, we didn’t pay for her ticket,” says Roche. “But we said: you come out here, and we will show you everything; we’ll cook for you, we’ll give you an experience you can’t buy.”) Southern stayed at his house. He took her hunting, put a few sosaties on the braai for her. She swallowed the entire narrative. “It actually looked like she wasn’t going to come at one point. She said she was unsure about the facts of our case. But then she changed her mind.”
And off the back of all this crap, we have (from the same Mail and Guardian piece from March, as above) –
Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp publication The Daily Telegraph that he was considering fast-tracking visas for white South African farmers, who he said needed to flee “horrific circumstances” for a “civilised country”. He said the farmers “deserve special attention” because of land seizures and violence.
Then, just last week, there was Donald Trump asking the US Sec of State to –
closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.
And yesterday, protests in Auckland and pap interviews on Radio New Zealand today.
So this is quite a “result” that has been obtained by those who merely bayed at Southern and Molyneux for being fascists, and tried to shut them down without informing themselves about what Southern and Molyneux were actually saying and not countering or engaging with any of the ideas they sought to promulgate; allowing the narrative to become (for them) a favourable one about free speech.
I’d like to think that the next time some idiot with vile ideas seeks the limelight, that if they are to be given it and elevated in any way, then the attention afforded them will be a lot more intelligent than was the case with Southern and Molyneux.
One final thing that’s worth mentioning. The other night, off the back of a lengthy sub-thread exchange with McFlock) I google searched Lauren Southern across various mainstream news outlets (The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, Stuff etc). There were numerous hits from all the publications I looked at. However, when I googled the same publications for Suidlander, I came up blank, bar one hit from The Guardian from the 24th of August.
At least that piece explains in part, or attempts to explain in part, how it may be that the whole South African farm murder line is being reported on without any explanation being given on its origins. But given that the links I’ve provided are for news pieces from as far back as March, I don’t think any journalist has any excuse whatsoever for not providing context for these stories about white genocide in South Africa.
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