Look. I get it. An autonomous blankestan for Afrikaner nationalists in South Africa isn’t going to be cheap. Just the mural of Ernst Roets walking barefoot over the Drakensberg is going to cost a bomb.
Which is why a part of me can see the merits of Roets hosting a delegation of American racists this week: if you’re going to milk someone to fund your secessionist dreams, make sure they’re earning hard currency.
Of course, Roets hasn’t been quite so obvious about the volkstaat as some of his former colleagues in the AfriSol movement, who have been fairly transparent about their dream of establishing an enclave where white people can finally shake off the oppressive yoke of modernity and go and live as God intended them to live: as forward-looking citizens of the mid-1930s, capable of doing anything they put their mind to, except, obviously, atheism and living with black people.
If Roets had anything to do with drafting AfriSol’s Washington Memorandum, for example, in which the organisation asked the Trump administration for money to build “security structures, social structures, job structures, training structures and infrastructure to settle Afrikaners in vulnerable places in a concentrated manner”, there’s plenty of plausible deniability. Roets resigned from AfriSol shortly before the memorandum dropped, starting something called Lex Libertas, which is either a lobby group or a bald supervillain.
Since then, Roets has played his reactionary cards fairly close to his chest, advocating for Afrikaner self-determination on cultural grounds while whispering sweet, Brexity nothings about the failures of the ANC-run, centralised state, all without ever actually pointing to a map of the Northern Cape with “Ons Vir Jou” scrawled across it.
Roets resigned from AfriSol shortly before the memorandum dropped, starting something called Lex Libertas, which is either a lobby group or a bald supervillain.
But this week, as Lex Libertas hosted a visit from the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC), Roets reminded us that if culture is involved at all in these sorts of discussions, it is first and foremost the culture of white supremacy.
Of course, that should have been fairly obvious the moment Roets asked the NYYRC to pull in along with its former vice-president, Vish Burra, recently fired from One America News after posting a video depicting Jews as cockroaches.
This, after all, is the same august group that has hosted white nationalists and whose former chairs both featured in a leaked WhatsApp chat last year, one describing rape as “epic”, while the other said that everyone who didn’t vote for him in a particular election was “going to the gas chamber”.
Still, if anyone was still in any doubt about the culture Roets drones on about, it was surely dispelled once and for all when he chose to put Lex Libertas’ name — and by extension his own — to a “joint media statement” with the NYYRC titled A warning to the West.
After an opening paragraph announcing that the NYRRC was coming to South Africa for “more than a week” (because that’s roughly how long it takes to listen to one of Roets’s odes to victimhood), it got properly stuck in:
“The NYYRC has expressed concern that South Africa’s decline since 1994 is a warning to all Western nations as to what is in store for the white population once they become a political minority — the end of civil rights, redistributive injustice, and a perpetual anarcho-tyranny.”
And there it was. Not even a dog-whistle euphemism about heritage or Western European culture or self-determination. Just straight to the red meat: white people being replaced by the Swart Gevaar, and states collapsing into “perpetual anarcho-tyranny”, not because their governments are corrupt or tyrannical or violent, but because they’re run by black people.
They really do make themselves transparent, don’t they?
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