Trump Very Worried About Oppression Of (White) South Africans Now
Oh look, it's another racist conspiracy theory!
Last Friday, Mr. Executive Order made with another one: “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,” which revoked all aid and decreed that “the United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” And he huffed on his platform, “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY. The United States won’t stand for it, we will act. Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”
Can you even believe he is totally lying and pushing a false right-wing-oppression narrative (again)? The South African government has not confiscated any land under this new law. There are no fleeing refugees. The Expropriation Act says nothing about race (underline that three times). Here is what it says:
It may be just and equitable for nil compensation to be paid where land is expropriated in the public interest, having regard to all relevant circumstances, including but not limited to:
(a) where the land is not being used and the owner’s main purpose is not to develop the land or use it to generate income, but to benefit from appreciation of its market value;
(b) where an organ of state holds land that it is not using for its core functions and is not reasonably likely to require the land for its future activities in that regard, and the organ of state acquired the land for no consideration;
(c) notwithstanding registration of ownership in terms of the Deeds Registries Act, 1937 (Act No. 47 of 1937), where an owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise control over it despite being reasonably capable of doing so;
(d) where the market value of the land is equivalent to, or less than, the present value of direct state investment or subsidy in the acquisition and beneficial capital improvement of the land.
So, nothing in there about displacing white Afrikaners at all. Unlike the displacement apartheid-era South Africa inflicted upon Black people quite racially and violently for decades.
White people do own about 72 percent of land in South Africa, which is not a coincidence. The 1913 Native Land Act restricted Black natives (who were 70 percent of the population) from owning or leasing land in South Africa at all, and forced them often violently into “native reserves,” which were seven percent of all land. Here’s a map.
And then in 1954 the Native Resettlement Act let the government remove native members of any “aboriginal race or tribe” from any area in or near the magisterial district of Johannesburg, even people who were leasing or sharecropping land, with no compensation at all. And the Group Areas Acts assigned residential areas by racial group. Hundreds of thousands of Black tenant farmers were forcibly evicted, which created an impoverished pool of cheap labor for the white farmers who got their land. And the government poured money into assistance programs for white farmers, too. All of this was still going on into the 1990s, we’re not talking about some age-of-exploration land-grabbing.
South African apartheid was extra even compared to the Jim Crow of the Southern US. It divided the population into four races: White, Indian, Coloured (mixed race) and native Africans. Native Africans could not vote, or participate in politics in any way, which is why Nelson Mandela got put in prison for decades. Native Africans could be arrested for having sex with white people (which is why Trevor Noah’s memoir is called Born a Crime) and they had to carry a passport to move around inside of their own country. When protestors burned their passports they were massacred.
After the official end of apartheid and under the leadership of Mandela, the government began a process to buy whites out of the farms the former government had “appropriated” for them, and then lease the land to people in the other racial categories, starting with the descendants of the people who were pushed off of the land. That is not confiscation. And it was not very successful, as only about five percent of the landowners were willing to sell.
So in 2018, the National Assembly passed a motion to amend the constitution to allow land to be taken without compensation under the circumstances above, and five years later, here they are. That’s democracy! And still, even if the government does take land for nothing, it will have to prove in court that a seizure was fits the criteria of the law.
Trump is also pissed that South Africa has sued Israel in the International Court of Justice, alleging that Israel had committed and was committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Secretary of State Lil’ Marco Rubio has huffed that he will not attend the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Johannesburg on February 20 to 21 because South Africa is “doing very bad things,” and everyone is surely heartbroken.
Also, Elon Musk is feeling personally oppressed because he is unable to get a license in the country for his Starlink satellite internet service, on account of how he refuses to have his company meet affirmative action criteria. He’s also been going around falsely claiming that white farmers are the victims of “genocide,” another ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theory that seems to have originated with Stormfront and a fringe Afrikaans group called AfriForum; there is no evidence that white farmers in South Africa are more likely to be murdered than anyone else. Musk left SA in 1989 when apartheid was still the law, and apparently is still mentally stuck there (and cruising far-right forums) while the rest of the world has moved on.
As much as Trump might like to have what he imagines to be planes full of little white Elon clones who love him getting shipped in, groups representing Afrikaners have said no thanks, we’re not oppressed and doing just fine to his stupid offer.
And the South African government was like, um, 😕 don’t you have other people to worry about?
It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship.
Isn’t it! Trump is even fucking over veterans from Afghanistan who helped the US fight the Taliban, that’s how full of crap he is.
Trump and Musk with their lies and cruelty, so Boer-ing.
[The Guardian / Washington Post archive link / International Crisis Group / Bloomberg]
OT, but I just got news that Mr Cakes and I have been accepted onto Stage One of the adoption journey with our new agency. The next step in a Teams meeting with our social worker to discuss next steps (they'll be at least 3 days of training, new medical assessments, social worker visits, school references to get for Cakes Jr, etc, so it's a long process). That meeting is on Wednesday evening.
As you were.
This one’s all Elno. No way Mad Lord Yam came up with this on his own, and while Stephen Miller is dead set on a white ethnostate he doesn’t want it to be anything but a white *American* ethnostate.