The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
Episode Date: April 14, 2025Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with South African filmmaker, author, and activist Dr. Ernst Roets. They discuss the genetic and cultural hyper-diversity of Africa, the early settlement patterns of S...outh Africa, the origin story of the Boers, how forgotten history breeds rhyming conflicts in the present, and the complex needle that must be threaded for shared prosperity. Dr. Ernst Roets is an Afrikaner activist, author and filmmaker from South Africa. He serves as Executive Director of the newly established Pioneer Initiative, which seeks to promote a more sustainable political dispensation for South Africa, based on the principles of decentralization and self-governance. Dr Roets is the leading expert on the topic of farm murders in South Africa. His book, Kill the Boer: Government Complicity in South Africa's Brutal Farm Murders is an international bestseller on Amazon. He is also the producer of several documentary films. He regularly appears in the media - both in South Africa and the international media - about issues relating to South Africa and he regularly speaks at international conferences, including CPAC and NatCon. He is a leading advocate for the protection of free speech and property rights in South Africa, and for farm murders to be regarded as a priority crime. This episode was filmed on March, 14th, 2025. | Links | For Dr. Ernst Roets: On X https://x.com/ernstroets?lang=en On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@ErnstRoets Read “Kill the Boer: Government Complicity in South Africa's Brutal Farm Murders” https://a.co/d/cMWyuMH
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I mentioned this story about the vow that was made in 1838.
And he went to negotiate with the Zulu king, King Dungan.
They signed a treaty and the king said,
we need to celebrate this, but leave your weapons outside.
And so during the celebration, the Zulu king chanted,
kill the wizards and they slaughtered them.
We need to retaliate, we need to attack back.
And so they had a commander of about three to 400 people.
They were completely surrounded by about 12,000.
A man named Sar-el-Saliha, he was the religious leader. And he said, we need to make a vow to God. of about three to four hundred people. They were completely surrounded by about 12,000.
A man named Saro Selia, he was the religious leader,
and he said, we need to make a vow to God.
Some people say that's the origin story of our people.
Let's flip to the modern time.
What was the relationship between the apartheid state per se
and this notion of separate homelands?
The argument was that South Africa should be thought of as Europe.
The single biggest problem in South Africa is the triangle of unemployment, poverty and inequality.
Ironically, they've gotten to a point where they can only think about inequality.
It looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality.
Okay, now your book is entitled, Kill the Boar. There's a reason for that.
Hello, everybody.
I've watched over a very long period of time, the political and economic situation in South Africa, both heat up and destabilize.
And that's taken somewhat of an accelerating turn
in the last few years.
And because of that,
I've become increasingly interested in delving more deeply
into the history of South Africa to understand the context and then also the political
situation on the ground in that country now.
And I came across the work of Dr. Ernst Roots
who wrote this book called Kill the Boar,
this book which was published in 2018.
Now he's also a filmmaker.
He made a film called Tainted Heroes,
which is about the apartheid era in 2016, and another
one called Disrupted Land.
And I hoped to talk to Dr. Roots about South Africa, about its history, and about, well,
about its current situation, and about hopes and concerns for the future.
And that's exactly what we did. And so the first thing I wanted to do
was to delve a little bit into the history
of the origin of South Africa,
because there's a narrative in the West
that the evil white Europeans came to a land
dominated by black Africans and colonized it
in their brutal and murderous fashion.
And while any colonized it in their brutal and murderous fashion. And well, any
territorial dispute has its bloody edge, let's say.
But the truth of the matter is that the settlement
of South Africa is a hell of a lot more complex than that.
And that the two primary racial groups
that exist there today,
weren't the original inhabitants of the land, whether they're black or white.
And so just knowing that is useful.
And we spent the first half really of the podcast
talking about the history of the settlement of South Africa.
The original people there were Bushmen
who aren't particularly related genetically to the Bantu,
the black people who live there now, who aren't particularly related genetically to the Bantu,
the black people who live there now, and obviously not to the Europeans.
So the situation with regards to ethnicity and race
in South Africa is a lot more complicated
than it appears on the surface.
And so, well, that's what we're trying to puzzle out
in this podcast.
So join me and my guest, Dr. Ernst Roots, for that discussion.
So this is likely to be an unsettling conversation.
So we might as well dive right in.
The first thing I think that people who are watching
and listening should know is a somewhat more detailed history
of the settlement patterns in South Africa,
because the presumption, first of all, what most people in the West know about South Africa,
you could put in a very small thimble with enough room left over for another thimble,
and that includes me. And so it's not like I studied that in high school, for example.
And so people know nothing about South Africa, like really nothing, and they certainly don't know anything
about its settlement patterns, and so I suppose people use
the analog of the European settlement of the Americas,
which is also a very complex story.
I mean, by the time the pilgrims got to the eastern coast
of the United States, there are estimates that 95% of the Native Americans
had already died from measles, smallpox, mumps, et cetera.
And so the settlement story is extremely complex,
but it's even more complex in South Africa,
and they're not the same.
So could you enlighten everyone who's watching
and listening about the settlement patterns,
the relationship between the land and the Europeans and the black Africans?
And let's just lay that out so we know where we stand first.
Well, let me firstly say thank you very much for speaking with me.
And I can say with great self-assurance that a lot of people in South Africa would be very
happy to hear that you are interested in what's happening in South Africa.
Interested in and terrified by.
Well hopefully we can flesh out a lot of that.
So you're absolutely right to say that the history of or the patterns of land ownership
and the history leading to this is complex.
And we can do an entire interview just about that because there were so many events that
happened in South Africa. Broadly speaking, the people who live in South Africa who are of European
descent, such as myself, arrived in 1652. That was the settlement when the Dutch East India Company
arrived in Cape Town, or what is today Cape Town, to start a refreshment station for ships traveling
around Africa to trade with the East. It was initially the Dutch and they were then joined
by Germans and French especially, but some other Europeans as well.
And we sometimes call them the proto-Afrikaners because the Afrikaner people became a people.
Obviously, it's not just one singular event
and then you are A people, but it happened over time
when we developed our own language and culture in Africa.
So that was about 400 years ago.
But what also happened in South Africa
in terms of the different black groups,
if you could use that term, who live in South Africa,
is we had the, and still have the,
what is called the Koi and the San.
A lot of people know it as the Bushmen.
That's how they're also known.
A lot of them prefer to be called the Bushmen.
People know them from the movie,
The Gods Must Be Crazy and so forth.
And they are the true indigenous people.
If you want to say who are the indigenous people
of South Africa, it's the Koi and the San.
They lived pretty much all over South Africa.
They've been there for tens of thousands of years.
They're a very ethnic and genetically separate group.
There's a lot of genetic and ethnic diversity in Africa,
more than in the rest of the world by a lot.
And the Bushmen, those people are very distinct.
In fact, I've read that genetically,
they're more akin to Asians than they are to black Africans.
I've heard that too.
Yeah, yeah. So I'm just laying that out not to make any genetic claim of any sort, just so everybody's clear about that,
but just to know that these things are extremely complicated and all so-called black people aren't the same by any stretch of the imagination, any more than, they're probably less similar
from a cultural and genetic perspective
than Europeans are to one another.
I think you're right.
Yeah, I think you can make that case pretty bluntly.
So there's a lot of diversity in Africa.
And I'm very happy that you recognize this
because a lot of people don't.
So- Because all those black people are the same.
Yeah, yeah, but there are also groups
like the South African government who would like people to believe that all black people are the same. Yeah, yeah, but there are also groups like the South African government
who would like people to believe
that all black people are the same,
because that's their way of organizing
as a collective on the basis of race.
Yeah, yeah, well that way you can make the racial story,
the racial oppression story, for example,
a lot simpler than it actually is.
Okay, so is there any estimates for the number of people,
of Bushman people that were there, say in the 1600s, like how densely populated
was South Africa and what part of Africa exactly
are we talking about?
Like Africa's a wallopingly big continent,
despite the Mercator projection.
And so, and the people who Americans think of as black,
they occupy mostly, they occupy Africa,
south of the Sahara desert,
but north of, fundamentally north of where South Africa is.
Like how far down, how far up were the Bushmen,
how far to the north were the Bushmen,
the predominant human population in the 1600s?
Well, that's a very important point. So they occupied, they were several thousands,
I don't know if they were 100,000,
I'm not sure we can check those numbers.
But they lived pretty much all over South Africa
and they lived more to the eastern part,
which is important because the eastern part
is much more fertile land, it's much more humid
and that's where the most productive farming land is and so forth. The western part is arid, it's much more humid and that's where the most productive farming land
is and so forth.
Right.
The western part is arid, it's more deserts and dry and so forth.
So they lived mostly in the east.
Yes, but they don't anymore and that's important because, so if you go to the eastern parts
like the Drakensberg, you would find the cave paintings of the Koi and the San, but they
don't live there anymore because they were pushed out by groups coming in from the north who it has become a controversial term, although I don't know what the appropriate
term then would be by the Bantu people.
So the word Bantu is a word that means people.
It just means people.
Like that's typical anthropologically.
Most tribes refer to themselves as the humans as opposed to everyone else who aren't the
humans. Exactly. So they've been known as the Bantu speaking groups, but today it's controversial to use that term.
Why is that?
Because it's a term that refers to black people. And I think some people have used the term
in the context of making derogatory remarks or something to that effect.
I see. I see. Okay.
So, but that's how they were known historically and that's the Zulus and the
Corsas and the different groups that we know in South Africa today. And they came down from the
north and pushed out the bushmen. Right, now also the Bushmen from what I understand, and like I
don't know lots about the Bushmen either, although what I do know about them is that they were
basically hunters and gatherers and trackers and that they were
very sophisticated at that.
Very nomadic.
They had those little lightweight bows and arrows and the poison darts and they're very
good at running down prey, right?
And they can live where no one else can live.
But also they weren't agriculturalists from my understanding and there were no places
where the Bushmen produced like cities or dense population centers.
Correct. And they are fairly small also, which is one of the reasons when the bigger tribes came in from the north,
and there was conflict between these groups, they were pushed out.
They were not able to take a stance against the Zulu people, who are typically a strong nation.
Right, and very, yes, yes, well armed comparatively speaking.
Very militaristic, yes. Right, right, the Bushmen have those little bows and arrows with their poison darts,
but those don't make very effective weapons of war, partly because the poison is long-acting.
Yes, exactly.
For all those people who think, by the way, that the Bushmen were like peaceful agrarian communists
and that there was no conflict amongst them, let's say, prior to the Bantu or the Europeans.
The most common, if I remember correctly, the most common pathway to death for a Bushman man is through murder.
So you can use those darts on other people quite effectively if there's a feud.
I also know that the Bushmen, because they lived in small tribal groups,
they didn't evolve a real judicial system
and often their disputes would turn murderous.
And so in some of these areas where the Bantus,
for example, came down,
the Bushmen would use the Bantu judicial system,
which was more advanced,
as a means of mediating their own disputes.
So I just want to bring that up to put to rest any suspicions that the Bushmen, for
example, were Rousseau noble savages and that everything was peaceful before civilization
came along.
It's like that's not how the world works even a little bit.
Okay, so in the 1650s, the Europeans came to the very southern tip of Africa, and that was primarily
a consequence of the trading routes because people had to sail around the horn.
Yes.
Right.
And they set up this settlement as a refreshment station, you said, for the sailors.
And that would be the European sailors who were starting to trade in the, well, in India
and so forth.
Exactly, yes.
And in Asia.
And also to service the ships, building ships, repairing ships and so forth. Exactly, yes. And in Asia. And also to service the ships, building ships, repairing ships and so forth, yes.
So they started then 1652.
Eventually they had what we call the Freiburgers
or the Freeburgers, which was that some of the,
they were employees of the Dutch East India Company.
Some of them were then released from their contracts
so that they could become farmers,
so that they could start developing an economy.
And so there were some clashes with, for example,
the Bushmen already there in the Cape
between the Europeans and the Bushmen,
but there was also examples of trading
and cooperation and so forth.
Right, so that's similar to what happened in North America.
Like there were lots of it.
There was a lots of allied,
there were lots of peaceful and productive interactions
between the natives and the Europeans.
And it also depended on which Europeans.
So the Cree in Canada were much more likely to ally
with the English, for example, than with the French.
And so these things were very common.
We had the same dynamics in South Africa
with the Afrikaner people and the English as well.
Yes.
And so, but just to get to that point,
it's unfortunate that thinking about history,
history tends to overestimate or overemphasize the conflict
and downplay the cooperation
because conflict is more newsworthy, you could say.
So when we think about history,
we think about war and conflict,
but we forget the cooperation part that's very important.
Right.
And so that was about the time when the Zulu people
were settling in what is today called Zulu Natal,
and that calls our people in the Eastern Cape closer to where the Afrikaners or the Proto-Afrikaners were.
So when did the Bantu start moving south? And why hadn't they done that before?
I'm not sure why they haven't done that before, but from what I know, there was conflict up north in Africa
and there was nomadic tribes and some groups thought.
So they were pushed down as a consequence
of inter-tribal warfare in their own lands.
Yes.
It's still surprising, isn't it,
that so much of Africa was essentially unsettled.
I mean, I know the Bushmen were there,
but there weren't very many of them.
And it's also a lifestyle that can't support
that huge a population, pre's a pre-agricultural
lifestyle. So, I mean, there weren't very many human beings a hundred thousand years ago. So,
okay, and so, all right, so the Europeans start settling in the southern, in the southern most part
of Africa. It's the Dutch East India Company. It's primarily for trade. The employees of that company get acclimated to Africa.
They realize that there's immense productive farmland there.
Like I read, for example, I know Uganda's farther north,
but Uganda has enough arable land to feed all of Africa with no problem.
And a water table that's 200 feet below the surface of the country
that's virtually everywhere in the country.
Right, so Africa's, God only knows how many people
Africa could support if it was well managed.
Yes, which is why we have some of the best farmers
in South Africa today.
Yeah.
So in terms of the history then,
one major event was with the Napoleonic Wars.
We sometimes joke as the Afrikaner people,
we say we skipped the enlightenment
because we have this joke, we say in Europe,
they were reading Jean Jacques Rousseau
while we were hunting elephants.
That was probably a better use of time
than Jean Jacques Rousseau anyways.
Yeah, so, but that's important because I think it,
in a way, shaped our culture in a particular way,
and which is why the Afrikaner people, at least,
are much more conservative, much more religious
than many of our friends in Europe.
Should I outline a little bit probably too,
the conflict between the Dutch, the Boers and the English.
Yes, I wanna get to that now.
Okay, so we've got the setup now.
So really what happened in South Africa
was that there was a relatively small population
of pre-agricultural tribesmen, the Bushmen,
who were very ethnically distinct from the, let's call
them, Central Africans for the time being. And that in around 1600, 1650, let's say
to 1750, there was an influx of Bantu-speaking people who were larger
from the north and there was an influx of Europeans.
It was a bit before, I think they came in before the Europeans came, but they were coming in from the north
in the same century, you could say.
Okay, in the same century, anyways.
And so the Bushmen were starting to feel pressure
from an invasion, so to speak, from the North
and also an influx from the South.
Yes.
Okay, so that's a more accurate,
and none of this was agricultural to begin with.
Yes.
Right, so now were the Bantu also interested
in agricultural settlement?
Yes, they were more, less nomadic than the Bushmen.
The Bushmen were more nomadic.
They moved around much more
and the Bantu groups also in a sense nomadic,
but they settled in like the Zulus built the Zulu kingdom
in KwaZulu-Natal in the eastern part of the country.
And they had more degrees of settlement.
Okay, so we're also seeing an anthropological struggle
in the broader sense between the archaic mode of human existence,
which was nomadic hunter-gatherer,
and the developing agricultural and settled communities.
Some of them were black in Africa and some of them were white.
And so now we've got at least a three-way conflict going on,
not counting the conflicts between, inside the groups.
Yes.
Okay, okay. three-way conflict going on, not counting the conflicts between, inside the groups. Yes.
Okay, okay.
And so by mid 1700s, what's the status
of the white settlements in South Africa?
It developed, it grew, and the borders shifted out
toward, especially toward the east.
Then the reason why I mentioned the Enlightenment
is because after the French Revolution,
the Napoleonic Wars took place.
Specify the timeframe.
1810.
Yep.
And that's when the British came to colonize the Cape,
partly as a result of the wars in Europe.
And so we had some battles with the British,
the Battle of Blauberg, the Battle of Meisenberg,
and eventually the Cape was colonized.
Right, so that's while the Brits are really expanding their empire.
And so now they come into what's now a European settlement in South Africa, and the battle
for dominion is between Europeans.
Now you see the same kind of thing in a sense play out in North America, right?
Because well, it was New Amsterdam before it was New York, and of course, much of the
United States was settled by Germany and a huge chunk,
well, that was eventually the Louisiana Purchase
was French and of course Quebec remained French.
And so who the colonizers were,
it's not like they were a monolithic group
and there was plenty of fighting between them.
So what motivated the English to show up
in South Africa per se in the 1800s?
You said it was in the aftermath of Napoleonic Wars,
but it was part of the colonial expansion, no doubt.
It's a trade issue as well, I presume.
I think it's all of that.
It was part of the British expanding the British empire,
the strategic importance of the Southern point
of the African continent, especially trade
that was before the-
Well, the richness of the land,
was gold discovered by that? No, not yet. Not yet, right. That was before the... Well, the richness of the land, there's gold, was gold discovered by them?
No, not yet.
Not yet, okay.
Yeah, and so they settled,
which led to the great event in our history
that many people say is the event that,
during which we became a people,
which was the Great Trek.
So some of the Afrikaner people
or the Dutch speaking peoples
in the Cape at the time,
felt that they cannot be governed by another nation.
They were very, very aggrieved by the idea
that someone came in from another continent and-
Took over.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they wanted to be free.
And so they eventually opted to move
into the interior of South Africa,
which was a very dangerous thing to do because people
didn't know what they would find in the interior. They sent in some, what they call the commission
track, they sent in some scouts and actually the scouts came back and said that they found some
people in certain areas, but largely speaking, they were vast open tracks of land. Because what's also
important, and this is again why the history of land ownership
is so complex.
That was shortly after the Mufekane genocide,
which was a genocide, some figures estimate
that about a million people were killed
when as a result of Zulu expansionism
and a conflict between the Zulu king and Mufekane
or Mselikati, who was the,
I think he was a soldier in the Zulu kingdom,
and he eventually had the Matabele or the Ndebele people.
And it was expansionist wars, and it spread out throughout the southern part of Africa,
and there was mass extermination campaigns.
So the scouts came back and they said in some places they found people's living, in some
places there was just no one, and in some places they just found bones, skeletons.
So there was evidence that there was good reason and possibility to get the hell away
from the English and move the British and to move farther north and into the central
parts of South Africa.
Yeah, towards where?
What sort of size geographical area are we talking about?
South Africa is about twice the size of Texas.
So it's a pretty big country. Compared to the U.S., it's small.
You could say it's the size of Western Europe if you take away Spain.
So it's a pretty big country.
Right, right, okay. So there was plenty of northward
geographical area to move towards.
Yes.
And how many boars, what year was the trek?
The 1830s.
1830s, and how many Boers participated in the trek?
I think about 2000, if I recall.
It was a fairly small group initially.
Right, and they used wagons and moved like that?
Wagons, yes, ox wagons.
So it's kind of like the settlement of the American West, in that way.
Very, very similar.
The Africana story is remarkably similar
to the American story.
Also, we had our wars with the British.
It's remarkably similar.
Our interactions with local communities,
the track towards the interior, it's a fascinating story.
Just how comparable it is.
Also, culturally speaking.
Right, so there was plenty of vacant land
in the Western US when the pioneers went westward.
There was occupied land as well.
There's still plenty of vacant land in the Western US, like plenty, although a lot of
it's desert.
And so, I suspect that, although I don't know this for sure, but I expect that there was
more habitation in North America than there was in South Africa at that time.
I guess I really don't know, because I don't know how extensive
the Bantu settlements might have been.
But you said that was also complicated by the fact
that there was a genocide
and that many, many people were wiped out.
Of course, the situation in North America
was complicated by the fact of the mass deaths
that were a consequence of the illnesses
that spread across North America,
like a plague, actually like three plagues.
And so, well, all that to just say
how complicated these things are.
Okay, so these 2000 people spread North
and then what was the consequence of that?
So they, again, going back to the issue of conflict
versus cooperation, there were many examples of cooperation
and treaties, dozens of treaties that were signed
with local tribes cooperating,
but there was also conflict.
And one of the most significant,
or the most well-known battle was the Battle of Blood River,
which was when the Fuertrackers, as they were known,
which essentially means pioneer,
also another similarity.
It means those who go out ahead.
They were known as the Furtrackers.
And so they had conflict with then the Belé people
of Mselikati, this soldier from the Zulu
who was part of this, you know.
So he was a rebel in the Bantu.
Yeah, yeah, he had conflict with the Zulu king.
And then they also had conflict with the Zulus.
And one of the battles, I should just mention this
in passing was the Battle of Fakhkop,
where the Fuertrakas were attacked by the Ndebele's
of Mselikatsi.
But it was an ambush, they didn't expect it.
And so it was men and women and children
who had to defend themselves.
And it's an important part of our story,
because the women were there in the field next to the men
with the Fuer four liars as they
called it these front loading rifles the very sort of primitive guns that they had at the time
and they had to defend themselves as they were attacked. The big...
Right and from what I understand too the victory of the Europeans over the Zulus, the Bantus let's
say was by no means a foregone conclusion,
that they were very formidable fighters.
And there was a difference in weaponry,
as you just pointed out,
but it wasn't like the Boers had machine guns.
Yeah, it took quite some time to reload the gun.
It took quite some time.
So sometimes you had to get people
to help you to reload the gun.
And also they had sheer numbers against them.
So I mentioned this story,
but maybe I should tell this to you as well,
the story about the vow that was made in 1838.
I mentioned this when I spoke with Tucker Carlson as well.
So the Vortrakers, they had a democratic election internally
and they elected this leader, Pietra Tief was his name.
He became sort of the leader of this track.
And he went to negotiate with the Zulu King, King Dungan,
who was the younger brother of Shaka, King Shaka.
He actually killed his brother and then he became the king.
And they negotiated for a piece of land
and the treaty was broadly speaking
that they would get a piece of land between the Tugela and the Uumzumvubu rivers for which they had to
get cattle back that was stolen from the Zulus by another tribe.
And so they brought the cattle back.
This retif was warned against this.
Some of the people said to him, listen, this is very dangerous and be careful.
And he said, no, we have to do this.
We need to get land and we need to buy land.
So they went to the Zulu King.
They gave the cattle back.
They signed a treaty.
The King made a cross on a piece of paper on the contract.
And he then said, the King said, we need to celebrate this.
And so he said, come to my camp tonight
and we'll have a celebration,
but leave your weapons outside."
And so during the celebration,
the Zulu king at one moment chanted,
Pula lani abatakati, which means kill the wizards.
And so they took the entire group to a nearby hill
and they slaughtered them.
And this Ratif who was the leader,
they had him stand and watch how his men were slaughtered,
including his son who was with them, and they killed him stand and watch how his men were slaughtered, including his son who was with them,
and they killed him last.
So then they went out to attack the lagers, the camps,
where the furtrakers were, especially women and children.
I believe the number is 185 women and children
who were killed during these surprise attacks at night.
The furtrakers people then said, or the Afrikaners said,
we need to retaliate, we need to attack back.
And so they had a commander of about three to 400 people
to go and attack the Zulus.
At one moment they found that they were completely
surrounded by about 12,000 Zulus.
Some people, some estimates say 20,000,
but I think 12,000 is the number that's most commonly used,
like all around them on the hills.
And they thought- How many of them? They were about 300 against 12,000, surrounded by 12,000 is the number that's most commonly used, like all around them on the hills. And they thought-
How many of them?
They were about 300 against 12,000, surrounded by 12,000.
And so they thought, well, we're gonna die, this is it.
That's kind of what you'd think already.
And then a man of, I'm very proud to descend from him,
a man named Saral Saliha, he was the religious leader.
And he said, we need to make a vow to God.
And so they wrote, they got together and they wrote a vow.
And the vow said that they make a vow to God,
that if he protects them in the battle that lies ahead,
that they would commemorate this day as a Sabbath,
even after, regardless of what day of the week it is,
that we would tell our children
to commemorate this day as well,
and that we will build a church
where he wants us to build a church and that the honor of the victory will go to Him
and not to us. And so that battle took place on the 16th of December, 1838. And the consequence of
the battle was that not one of the Furtrackers were killed, 3, 3000 Zulus were killed in the battle.
So it was a spectacular event.
And some people say that's the origin story of our people.
That's when we became a people.
And that's partly, this is so important to us, firstly, because we still celebrate 16th
of December.
We commemorate that as a Sabbath.
We go to church on the 16th of December.
We have cultural festivals and so forth.
Not because of the battle against the Zulus,
but because we were protected by God.
And so, but it says a lot about why we are so conservative,
why we love the land so much and the country
and why we are so religious still.
So after that, they went further north
and they settled and they established Pretoria,
which is the capital of South Africa today.
And many of the Northern towns and cities
eventually became developed.
Okay, now since then, let's skip ahead a little bit.
Since then, the Bantu people have multiplied
and the Europeans have multiplied.
I don't know to what, I don't know the population ratios or the absolute numbers,
so maybe you could fill me in on that. And I'm curious about where the bulk of the population
growth has come from. Like how much more European influx from Europe directly has there been to South
Africa? How much of it is multiplication of the African or stock?
And I'm curious about the same thing
with regards to the central Africans who came down
and also invaded the Bushman territory.
Well, it's certainly both.
So the population in South Africa grew quite rapidly
in the centuries that followed among the white communities
and also the black communities,
up to the point where now there are about 60 million people
in South Africa.
Okay, and what's the racial mix?
It's about the white section, which are the,
what you could say the white Anglos, the English speaking
and also the Africana people are just below 5 million.
The Africana's are about 2.7 million.
And the African or the black African population
has grown rapidly.
Interestingly enough, this is worth mentioning,
it's often said that the apartheid system was a genocide.
There's a lot to criticize,
and we should talk about that,
about just how bad it was and what went wrong.
But genocide is not the right term
because the black population in South Africa doubled, I think it was in the first two decades of the apartheid system and then
it doubled again after that. So there was a massive population growth among black South
Africans, especially in the last century.
Right. And so now you said 60 million people in South Africa as a whole and 5 million are
of European descent and 2.7 million of them
are Afrikaner, and the rest, and what about,
what about like Indians and Asians and so forth?
So they would be slightly less,
we can look up the exact numbers,
they are slightly fewer.
There's also what we call a colored community,
I think in some countries they say mixed race,
and quite significant, quite big as well,
bigger than the Afrikaner community.
They generally speak Afrikaans, the same language as us,
but they have their own culture
that they've developed over time.
They also live mostly more in the southern parts
of South Africa.
So just from a racial perspective,
South Africa is very diverse,
but as you mentioned initially,
races are not homogenous.
So if you consider the fact that within the different racial groups,
there are different cultures and communities, the diversity,
the complexity of South African society is really something that people should take note of.
And it's easy to simplify that by simply saying, oh, there are white people and black people,
and whites and blacks are in conflict.
That's so oversimplified
that it's a false narrative.
Right, right. Well, and a false narrative that can be usefully repurposed. Okay, so
now my suspicions are, and we'll get back to this as we proceed in our discussion, that
the history that you briefly outlined, which puts things in context quite nicely, would
be criticized by leftist and radical historians.
Okay, so what would be the counter story for,
well, it's like, the way that, like, I didn't,
I don't know a lot about South Africa,
but what I do know is in accordance
with what you just described.
I knew that the land was basically sparsely occupied
before the Europeans came and that most of the people
who live there now who aren't European came from Central Africa
and weren't there originally. And so it's actually a story of, well, a sparsely inhabited, hunter-gatherer society
that was mobile, being pressured from the South and from the North by two competing, you could say, two competing diverse racial groups
and that produced a population explosion
over the last 300 years,
the transformation of a hunter gatherer society
into an agricultural and industrial society.
That looks, that's roughly the story that you told.
Now, but that isn't the story that the typical Westerner
who isn't South African, if you guys are Westerners,
which I guess, sure.
Yes, we are Westerners.
Whatever that, yes.
And so that's not the story that is on everyone's,
like at the tip of everyone's tongue
and everyone being people who are absolutely 100% ignorant
about South African history,
like they are about their own history.
And so, but if we were giving the devil his due,
what's the strongest European colonial narrative?
I mean, I guess that would probably more involve even the English or the British.
So, unfortunately, that narrative is so oversimplified that it's almost farcical.
So, the one claim would be that Europe is the continent for white people
and Africa is the continent for black people.
So it doesn't matter that the groups who live in South Africa
came from the north of Africa, they still came from Africa.
That's kind of hard on the North Africans.
Yes, but, and so my answer to that is that implies that
if you apply that same argument to Europe,
then you should say black people in Europe are not welcome.
They should go back to Africa because the narrative in South Africa is whites must go back to Europe
because this is black people's continent.
Well, it also begs the question of which black people?
Yeah, exactly.
Like is it the San, the Bushmen or the Bantu, let's say.
And it's not like that's the only kind of black people that are in Africa.
And so the political slogan is that when the Dutch came,
they didn't bring any land on their ships.
So that's sort of the joke that,
oh, you came and you colonized.
And the narrative is that they wouldn't say
that South Africa was densely populated
because they know it wasn't,
but they would say that all of it belonged
to the black groups who were living in South Africa.
And so the arrival of the Europeans was essentially colonialism.
That's a particularly tricky argument when you're talking about people like the Bushmen,
because my suspicions are, from what I understand about them anthropologically,
first of all, they conceptualize themselves as belonging to the land rather than the reverse,
which is a much more typical attitude of hunter-gatherers, because they're nomadic. They don't own land.
There's no ownership notion.
And so not, I mean, what did the Bushmen own?
They definitely owned their bows and arrows, and the things they could carry with them,
which were very lightweight, and I don't believe they had domesticated animals.
I don't believe so.
Not originally. Later they had...
Yeah, yeah. But that was the same in the Americas.
Like the Indians, the Indians, I'm going to use that phrase
because it's not politically correct, let's say.
They didn't have horses till the Spaniards showed up.
Yeah, exactly.
So there were, now there were some domesticated animals
in South America, llamas, for example,
and it's not that easy to domesticate animals
as it turns out.
So I don't know what the Bushmen would have owned. Like, I'm not even sure, especially in South America, llamas for example, and it's not that easy to domesticate animals as it turns out.
So I don't know what the Bushmen would have owned.
Like I'm not even sure, especially ownership of land.
I think that's a conception that you develop once you become, you have herds
and you have agriculture before that and a permanent settlement.
Like how do you own land when you don't have a permanent settlement?
That's not your relationship to the land.
Yes, so the argument is if something like, if you have walked over a mountain once,
then that mountain belongs to your tribe, something along those lines.
Which is playing out in Australia, for example, right now, in a major way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And in Canada, for that matter.
But this is a classic example of what Huntington
would call the clash of civilizations.
It's just different perspectives on, for example,
the issue of property rights,
the notion of what does ownership mean,
different cultures, different communities,
but also different civilizations
have different perspectives on that.
And now we're sort of in this place now
where the Western perspective
has become the dominant perspective.
Right, and so it looks self-evident. Yes, yes, exactly. So we're sort of in this place now where the Western perspective has become the dominant perspective.
Right.
And so it looks self-evident.
Yes.
Yes, exactly.
But yeah, that was the fact of the matter is there were lots large tracts of land that
wasn't inhabited.
Well, and there's also a really complicated question here too, which is there was a very
small population in South Africa in consequence of the Bushman's lifestyle.
So then you ask yourself, well, is there any net good, absolutely speaking,
in generating a technological revolution that radically increases the carrying power of the land?
Because that's the question about agriculture, that's the question about domesticated animals,
is certainly the question about industrial civilization.
Right?
Yes.
And I guess the answer would be something like you'd hope that
if there were hunter-gatherers and then agricultural people came along
or industrial people came along, that in optimal circumstances
there would be a series of treaties and the treaties would hold and everybody could have their cake and eat it too.
There's going to be conflict because there's always conflict between, well, herders.
There's certainly conflict between hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, herders and industrialists.
So those conflicts are going to emerge.
You could imagine a series of treaties that would mediate that, I mean, complicated to establish and to maintain, especially given the unbelievably vast cultural differences. But I
guess that's what you'd hope for, for a non-warlike solution. And some of that did happen in North
America and in Africa. But I want to add... It's still happening. I'd like to add one thing is
weapons technology or warfare technology.
So, Neal Ferguson talks about the killer application.
There's one thing that has a massive consequence.
So many of these-
Like stirrups.
Yeah, well, like the tribes that came in
from the North had spears.
And the Bushmen weren't able to defend themselves
against spears.
Then the Zulu people, King Shaka,
developed or had a different approach
to using a spear as a weapon.
He made the stick or the staff much shorter
so that you don't throw away your spear
because he became concerned that you go to war
and then you throw away your weapon, and then what do you do?
So he said, we shouldn't throw away our weapons.
We should have big shields
so that when they throw spears at us, we should be able to defend weapons. We should have big shields so that when they throw spears
at us, we should be able to defend ourselves.
And then our spear is something that we can use to stab
and then we still have it.
And just that one thing had a massive consequence
in terms of Zulu dominance in South Africa.
Just that one thing.
Like the stirrups that allowed mounted armored Europeans to become knights,
right? And then to go to South America and wreak absolute havoc because they were basically the
equivalent of tanks. Yes, isn't it this space odyssey story with, I think this reference to
the ancient primates and the one group is able to pick up a stick, a bone.
And the fact that one group is able to do that
and the other isn't just means that-
That was a big deal.
The other group gets obliterated.
That and throwing.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So right, so these things,
from our perspective as industrialized people,
these look like trivial technological transformations,
but what's trivial is not obvious.
Yeah. So, you know, I read, for example, that when the Europeans went, especially into the Pacific,
especially the Pacific Islands, this happened to many certainly Stone Age people that they came
across, that they were prone to distribute steel axes like they were nothing. Well, these are people
who, if you were the big man
in the kingdom, you had a really nice stone axe
and those bloody Europeans came along
and were giving away steel axes like they were nothing.
Was a little on the demoralizing side, you might say.
It's the equivalent of the atomic bomb.
It's a game changer.
Exactly, yeah.
So, okay.
Absolutely.
Okay, okay, so you said that the antithetical history would be,
well, the black people owned the land.
And so, that's like all black people are the same people.
And they had a concept of ownership.
And ownership applied despite the fact that these were widely dispersed nomadic tribesmen.
Ownership applied to all the land, like over what district?
I mean, that's something that's sort of ambivalent.
You said when the Scouts went north,
they found huge tracts of land that were unoccupied.
I mean, even in European, say British, English,
British common law now,
if you leave a tract of land uninhabited,
if there's a tract of land that's uninhabited
and someone comes along and improves it
and builds a domicile, at some point,
they obtain rights over it.
Because there's a deep principle that
if you're not using the land, it doesn't belong to you.
Certainly not intrinsically and even under a contract,
because you can end up with and you know squatters
Rights can obviously be taken too far
But we should note that there is a principle that if you're not using it, you don't own it, right?
It's the the Dutch legal principle of race Nullius is is a piece of land or property that that doesn't belong to anyone because it's there's
No one there right and and so if so that's something if you something, so a res nullius is something that you can occupy.
But that's not the narrative.
That's not the mainstream narrative.
I think there are very few historians
who actually push this mainstream narrative.
I think most historians who are worth their salt
know that the history of land ownership
in South Africa is much more complex.
Well, then that begs the question.
And now we can, let's turn from the historical to the more political, and then we'll start talking about the current day in South Africa is much more complex. Well, then that begs the question. And now we can, let's turn from the historical
to the more political, and then we'll start talking
about the current day in South Africa.
Because I think we laid the groundwork quite nicely.
So the typical observer of South Africa
pretty much buys the land was inhabited by the black people
and then the white people came and stole it.
They buy that narrative.
Right, so given the complexities of the situation
and the fact that, as you just pointed out,
most historians worth their salt,
tell a story that's somewhat approximately akin
to the story you just described.
Why is it that that isn't the story
that's widespread in the West as such?
Why do you think that is?
That is a very good question,
and I think it deserves a long answer,
and I might not have the full answer.
Yeah, well, fair enough.
Because I think it ties in with a lot of the problems
that the West has in terms of this deep rooted sense
of guilt that Westerners have about their own history,
about their own past.
And this oikophobic, I think that's Roger Scruton's term
of sort of hating your own and having a deep sense
of remorse for your own history and feeling sorry for that.
I think it's rooted in that, is this down with us mentality that we are the bad guys and we need to feel sorry for that. I think it's rooted in that, is this down with us mentality,
that we are the bad guys and we need to feel sorry for them.
Do you see any of that in South Africa among the Bantu?
No, no.
Like literally none?
Is there any streams of black thought,
let's say in South Africa,
where there's guilt being manifested
for what happened to the Bushmen?
To be honest, I haven't seen that.
What I can say is Prince Mangosutu Bitelezi,
who was a very well-known Zulu politician,
anti-apartheid activist,
he once apologized to the Afrikaner people
for the massacre of Petritif that I mentioned earlier.
Okay, so that's one example of remorse
for expansionist overreach, let's say.
Yes, that's the idea.
Because I'm curious about why this would be particularly a European malaise, right?
Because it seems to be particularly a European malaise.
I mean, maybe that, does that have something to do with the intrinsic peacefulness of Christianity?
Maybe?
I mean, we don't have to wander down that rabbit hole, but it is an interesting thing to speculate about.
Like, why has this become,
this self-hating, become a Western obsession?
I think it's oversimplified,
but I think enlightenment philosophy has played some role.
Yeah, and you, okay, is that part of the reason
that you noted earlier that the enlightenment skipped? Yes. Okay, develop that a little bit reason that you noted earlier that the Enlightenment skipped? Yes.
Okay, develop that a little bit then.
So why I say Enlightenment philosophy, Peter Rolfe, I mean, there are many examples.
We mentioned Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Voltaire, for example, if you read his works, he places a lot of emphasis on, as many modern
philosophers do, sort of detachment from the community.
We have to cultivate your garden, which is a good thing,
but the Voltairean view of cultivating your garden is,
don't look at what's happening in the world out there,
just focus on your garden at your home, something like that.
But Voltaire also writes a lot about how other,
you could say civilizations are actually better
than the West, he writes a lot about the East, about...
So, okay, so that's interesting, you know.
That could be actually an indication of something
that I think was part of the reason
for the destruction of Rome.
You know, and Nietzsche wrote about this a fair bit.
So, well, so imagine you have a relatively
homogenous local community.
Let's call it Christendom.
Okay, well, there's a lot of fractionation inside Christendom, a lot of
factions fighting, but roughly speaking there's an overarching ethos which is Christian in its essence.
And even the warring parties agree on many things.
Okay, but now you expand and you expand and you encounter well the Chinese let's say and you encounter the
Indians the actual India Indians these sophisticated alternative societies the Buddhists the Muslims who have
Cultural traditions as sophisticated and rich as your own
Well, so Nietzsche's take on that was twofold. He said well first of all
You think you're right to begin with but part of all, you think you're right to begin with,
but part of the reason you think you're right
is because you don't know any other ideas.
It's like 14th century Christians
didn't believe Christian things.
They weren't like enlightenment rationalists
who adopted Christian superstition.
I mean, they looked at the universe
through a Christian lens.
There wasn't another viewpoint,
apart from a couple of secular people and some heretics.
It was like the world was Christian.
That's your frame of reference.
That's everything about it.
That's that, you know, you see, yeah.
There's no contrary philosophy.
Okay, now you expand.
Well, and you're also doing this with regards
to the enlightenment discoveries and scientific.
And now there's like eight competing viewpoints, each of which has the same depth, let's say.
And so at some point you have a terrible case of indigestion.
And then Nietzsche says something even more subtle than that.
He says, well, first of all, there's a monolithic worldview.
And so you're pretty secure about that because that's just the way things are.
Then you encounter these competing belief systems
and they're pretty compelling
and competing ethical systems as well.
And then it starts to become a question when it never was,
who's right?
Well, good luck sorting that out.
That's what wars are for, right?
It's really hard to sort that out.
But then Nietzsche says something even more interesting.
He said, well, you have belief system one,
then you encounter belief system two,
and you see there's a conflict
and it isn't obvious who's right.
Then you add belief system three in there
and you think, oh, oh, it's not just that there's a conflict
in belief systems, it's that the idea
that there's an absolute truth itself,
or even truth itself itself now becomes questionable.
That's when moral relativism makes its ugly appearance
and nihilism.
And so not only do you lose faith
in your initial unquestioned presuppositions,
but you lose faith in the idea of certainty itself.
And then you have no strength.
I mean, I think part of the reason the Romans
couldn't withstand the barbarians, let's say,
is because they died of indigestion.
Like there was no unity of purpose anymore
because they had bitten off more than they can chew.
And you could certainly, I think part of the reason the UK
is in a dreadful situation that's in now
is exactly because of that.
It's like when you go to India
and you're a little island and there's hardly any of you and you go to India and you're a little island
and there's hardly any of you and you go invade India, it's a real toss up who's invaded who.
Like you might have the upper hand for 50 years,
but when you're outnumbered by a factor of what is it?
A hundred at least, who's gonna win that contact
is by no means obvious.
Yes, so maybe a different way of putting this
as opposed to reference,
talking about enlightenment philosophy,
is to say the West has had to make this,
the West went through some form of a recognition
that the Western frame of reference
is not the frame of reference, but a frame of reference.
And I think a lot of people in the West,
we're not quite sure how to deal with that.
We still aren't.
Yeah, which leads to a lot of conflict.
And one way of dealing. And doubt.
Yeah, and one way of dealing with that
is to say that our way is right
and everyone else's way is wrong.
And we need to enforce our view on the rest of the world.
Yeah, yeah.
And then you get a kind of ethno-fascism
that can develop out of that.
Yes, and that doesn't work.
Yeah, well, that's got its problems that doesn't work. It only does so.
Yeah, well, that's got its problems, I'd say.
And another way of dealing it that is equally bad
is to say, well, we need to dissolve.
We have an identity crisis as a result of this.
And so maybe those guys are better than we are.
And I think the appropriate solution lies in the middle.
The golden mean is to say that,
that we have a particular frame of reference
and we see that in South Africa all the time,
that there's a Western frame of reference,
but people who aren't Westerners
don't have that frame of reference.
And one practical example in South Africa is property rights.
So we believe in individual ownership of property.
Yeah, because we also believe in individuals.
Yes, yeah.
But the Zulu culture is much more one
that emphasizes monarchy and communal ownership of land.
So the king owns the land.
And I don't think the correct way to deal with that
is for me to go to the Zulu people and say,
you guys are wrong, you need to change your culture.
You need to adopt our way of thinking.
And it's not that easy to navigate.
And I think that's why South Africa
is such an important case study for the world,
because we have these communities living on this piece of land.
And how do we deal with that?
Because people think about things like history,
as we mentioned, differently.
They think about things like property rights differently.
They think about ownership and so forth in different ways.
And the appropriate way to deal with that
is not to try to enforce your way of thinking onto the other,
but to try to find a way where there's mutual recognition and respect between different perspectives.
Yeah, but even that presumes that there's something like boundaries, right?
Like, so that you can each have your space, so to speak.
And so there's a metaphysic under that even, which is, well, there can be treaties,
and the treaties are made between sovereign, what, individuals or at least sovereign peoples,
like, and even that can be, as pointed out, say, in the massacre, there was a treaty there, well,
you know. Yeah, which to us was very important, but in their culture, it's not that, not that big a
deal. Yeah, yeah. And the signed document is almost irrelevant. Well, the fact that there's
eternal war
between different tribes is an indication
of the complexities of negotiating such things.
But it is the case as well that there's two streams
in human history and one stream is kill the foreigner
and the other stream is no, we've got our differences
but they have something to offer
and we have something to offer
and if we can get the trade arrangements right, we could both be better off.
Right.
And, you know, well, that's the battle.
It's like, can you get the trade arrangements right?
That's really hard.
And if you don't, well, then it's capitulation or mayhem.
Right.
So we're trying to figure out how to get the trade arrangements right.
And you guys are right on the cutting edge of that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now this book of yours, Kill the Boar, let's flip to the modern times.
Now, you know, I can remember in the 1980s going to McGill and at that time, apartheid
was a major issue and we should let everybody listening and watching know what the apartheid
state was exactly.
So we get that clear.
But there was immense pressure, especially from the more radical end
of the political belief spectrum
to divest any investment in South Africa,
to put pressure on the government,
to dispense with apartheid.
And I watched that and I thought,
well, apartheid is pretty brutal regime
and it has its marked catastrophic disadvantages,
but you bloody radicals,
you're messing with things you don't understand,
and you're virtue signaling like mad,
and you're not gonna have to bear the consequences
of your idiot interference.
Because I figured, and I still do,
that the most likely outcome for South Africa
is that because of the vast disparities in population size
and distribution of wealth,
is that the white South Africans
are gonna find themselves in serious trouble.
Now that already happened in Zimbabwe, right?
That already happened in Rhodesia.
And we haven't talked about the relationship
between those states and South Africa at all yet,
but we might.
But like the most likely pathway forward
is the one that requires the least intelligence
and effort, right?
Cause there's way more ways for things to deteriorate
than for them to improve.
Like there's like one way for them to improve it,
a million ways for them to go wrong.
And the wealth disparity in South Africa is a major,
major problem, like a massive problem.
And that has to do with land ownership as well.
And so, and so it seems to me that there's great danger,
at least in that as an outcome.
And now I've watched, especially in the last few years,
because let's say for the 35 years since the 1980s,
I don't remember exactly when the apartheid state
disintegrated, When was that?
1990 was when it ended.
So we're basically 35 years away from that.
And so things maintained a somewhat stable equilibrium until five years ago.
Is that about right?
Let me just say something about the dismantling of the apartheid system by the end of the system
Initially it started out as an attempt to deal with these
This complex dynamics that we've been discussing and the broad idea was let's give everyone homelands
we have a strong central government to keep everyone in check and then the different nations have their own homelands and
You know that sounds great. But in practice, it's not that it's not quite that applicable,
especially when you still have a strong central government that sort of manages everything.
But by the 80s, the Afrikaner people knew this is not working.
You know, we need to change.
We need and what's maybe what was the relationship between the apartheid state per se and this
notion of separate homelands?
Exactly. So there were nations or states set up like a federation essentially.
And they were racially or ethnically or both? Like how were the states configured?
Culturally. So the argument was that South Africa should be thought of as Europe,
which I don't think is a bad argument
because the point is it's a big piece of land
that's very diverse.
And how do we deal with that?
And the solution to Europe
is not have one big European government.
Yeah, well, we've seen where that goes.
Exactly.
So the solution must be some form of decentralization.
But the way to do that, they thought,
was to have one big centralized government that sort of manages the
Decentralization and and then of course there were all these laws that we implemented and it was also during the time of
The Cold War so they had the suppression of communism act which said that if you promote communism, it's a crime
And you're gonna be prosecuted. Yeah
Well this whole suppressing communism thing is a very complex rabbit hole as well.
Exactly.
The communists turn out to be quite a lot of trouble, especially in places where there's a lot of wealth disparity.
Yeah, the concerns about the threat of communism wasn't exaggerated, that's certain.
It's hard to exaggerate the threat of communism.
Yes.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Especially in parallel with wealth disparity, because it's a revolutionary ethos.
Exactly.
And one that results in nothing
but bloody brutal murder and mayhem, starvation.
Like as a solution to the problem of disparity of wealth,
it's not a good one.
Yeah.
So the point I wanna make is by the end
of the apartheid era,
the metaphor that was used was like riding on the back of a tiger
and having to get off.
You know you have to get off this tiger,
but the question is how do you get off without getting eaten?
That was the question that at least the Afrikaner people
were grappling with.
How do we end this in a way that is peaceful
and in a way that would not be-
And sustainable.
Yes, yes.
And it was, the transition I would say
was at least peaceful, fairly.
I think- Yeah, not bad.
The violence in townships, I think is underestimated,
but especially black on black violence in South Africa.
Tell people what the townships were and are.
So that's the, it's urbanized areas
that are very poor in South Africa,
where the majority of black people live.
And at the time, there was some very, very vicious rival warfare,
you could say, between competing political groups
who were competing for support of black people,
as if that's one whole.
And the ANC, who's currently governing, was not the biggest initially,
but they became the biggest because they were supported by the Soviet Union and the Chinese,
and they got weapons and so forth. Well, in terms of getting off a tiger,
things went not too bad. Like it could have been as apartheid fell apart, it could have been
like the fall of the Soviet Union. It could have been a lot worse. It's quite the miracle that it
wasn't just absolute bloody mayhem immediately.
And there were a lot of remarkable people
who took leadership at that point
to make sure that it did go well.
Quite miraculously well, all things considered.
Nelson Mandela, probably being the prime example
of someone who continually called for peaceful solutions.
And he was criticized for that within his own party.
But I think to use, you mentioned safe,
but also sustainable.
So the solution we got was a safe one,
but not sustainable.
Okay, well, walk through that.
Tell everybody what has unfolded
and what the current situation is.
Well, there's so much that has unfolded,
but one way to think of it is that
in terms of the way I put it is we have two problems. The one is the ship is headed in the
wrong direction. And what I mean by that is those in power openly say they want to implement socialist
solutions. They want to take property rights. They think the way to help to uplift the poor is to
attack the rich because that has happened. There are. Right well and we should let's rephrase that a bit there's different between there's a
difference between rich and productive right yes productive people have something for themselves
but they produce a lot for other people and from what i understand about well i think this is true
in zimbabwe rodigia and South Africa, it's like,
well, the South African farmers, they feed the country.
So if you do what was done in Zimbabwe and you confiscate the land, because the rich people own it, the oppressors,
you confiscate the land, well, then what happens?
Well, everyone starves to death.
That doesn't, then everyone's equal
because they're all six feet underground.
Exactly.
Yeah, so like the problem,
part of the problem we have in the West
is that language has been captured so completely by the left
that it's almost impossible to have a discussion like this
without using their terms.
Like most pro-free market people in the West talk about capitalism.
That's a really bad idea.
It's like, it's not capitalism.
It's free market.
And this, it's not the rich versus the poor exactly
in South Africa, as if the rich only have what they have
because they took it from the poor.
It's like, no, the South African farmers,
most of whom are white, actually know how to farm.
They're some of the best farmers in the world. So one way they did this, which is...
They were Dutch, a lot of them. And you look at what the Dutch do in Europe.
I think the Dutch are probably the best, I think productively the best farmers.
They are. That's their status in the European West. Right. So go Dutch farmers.
They're rich because they make stuff.
So one thing they did which is very smart and very strategic is the ANC when they took power,
they said the single biggest problem in South Africa
is a triangle.
It's a triangle of unemployment, poverty and inequality.
And so they lump those three things together.
And so the solution is to find,
or the quest is to find a solution for these three things
which is essentially the same thing.
But unfortunately, they don't seem to know
how to encourage production.
They don't know how to fix the unemployment problem
because they think the solution is socialism.
And so the way, ironically, they've gotten to a point
where they can only think about inequality.
And so they get Margaret Thatcher, that famous line saying,
you would rather have the poor be poorer
provided that the rich is less rich.
And it's that-
You know, there's actually an anthropological theory
about human beings that's relevant to that.
So, you know, we evolved in our genetically modern form 350,000 years ago.
Okay, so one question is,
well, what the hell were we doing for the 330,000 years, like before the Ice Age, say?
And the answer is, well, we were engaging in non-stop inter-tribal warfare,
and then within our own tribes, every time anybody got something that everyone else
didn't have immediately, we just killed them.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, we had to figure out how to, yeah.
We had to figure out how to let some people
have more than other people some of the time,
because the alternative solution is, like,
imagine a new product comes along, like a flat-screen TV.
Well, the first people to get the flat screen TV
are the billionaires.
But if you wait five years,
then everybody gets a flat screen TV.
Or an iPhone.
You have to wait.
And so, the socialist idea is something like,
well, if a new innovation comes along
that makes people wealthy,
it can't be implemented until every single person can have exactly the same amount all at once.
Well, so it looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality,
because things have to start somewhere.
Now, you know in the West that if you're rich,
what does it mean if you're really rich compared to just like middle class?
It means your house has exactly the same amenities, but
three times the square footage.
It's like, or your car is more luxurious while you're stuck in the same traffic.
Right.
The incremental difference is truly it's trivial between middle class and ultra
wealthy, you know, and I mean, people might say, well, you know, that's easy
for you to say, because you're rich.
It's like, if you're, well, you know, that's easy for you to say because you're rich. It's like, if you're middle-class, you're rich.
And if you're too stupid to realize that,
you know nothing about the world.
And so in South Africa,
but we know one of the things that promotes violence,
like this is absolutely crystal clear
from the anthropological, sociological,
and psychological literature,
extreme inequality breeds male violence, like mad, because low
status poor men have nothing to lose by engaging in mayhem.
Right?
You see this in gang warfare.
You see it, you know, so for example, if you look in the, in North America, this is true
across the world, places where everyone's poor, there isn't much violence.
And places where everyone's rich, there isn't much violence. And places where everyone's rich, there isn't much violence.
But places where some people are poor and some people are rich, look the hell out.
And South Africa's got that in spades.
And so the easiest solution for a politician, especially unscrupulous one, is to say,
well, you see those people over there in that house? They took it from you.
Yep, exactly.
That's what the bloody Bolsheviks said to the peasants.
And that worked very effectively.
It's like soon there were no people who were rich.
Right, none.
And then everyone was dead.
So, okay, so you guys have this problem in spades
and the communist influence,
it's stronger now than it was 40 years ago?
It, yes, but also not.
So that's the irony.
So that goes to the point about the ship I mentioned.
So the ship's headed in the wrong direction.
But even though the ship is heading in the wrong direction,
the ship is sinking.
And what I mean by that is-
That's a bad combination.
Yes, so the fact that the ship is sinking
has become a bigger problem
than the fact that it's headed in the wrong direction.
And when I say the ship is sinking,
I mean that we just have massive state failure
in South Africa.
So they want to implement all these very radical
policy ideas and they have become more radical
because they talk about a two-phase revolution.
Phase one is getting control of the levers of power
through democracy.
And phase two is once you have power,
you need to use the levers of power
to implement your socialist ideas,
which is where they are now.
So we have this plethora of new, very radical,
leftist policy ideas in South Africa.
But on the one hand,
they're not really able to implement this
because firstly of large scale corruption,
but just sheer incompetence
within the South African government.
So everything that the government is supposed to be doing in South Africa, with the exception
of tax collection, is collapsing.
Okay, tell us what that looks like.
Can we start with the stability of the power grid?
What's the difference between South Africa now as a modern industrialized state and South
Africa, say, 10 years ago? What are you seeing fraying? What does it look like in the
streets? And so we can literally take any example but let's take power as an
example. We started having rolling blackouts maybe a decade ago and it was
first it was you would have an hour without electricity because they're not
able to provide electricity for everyone because they didn't build power stations.
Well, providing electricity for everyone
turns out to be very difficult.
Yes.
You better stay on top of it.
So you have to build stations,
but you also have to maintain them.
Yeah, right.
And neither of these two are happening.
So we're about at, I think the last time I saw about
at half of the capacity we would have been
if the power stations were maintained.
So-
With a massive population increase.
Yes, exactly.
And so, yeah, so that's one part of the problem,
but then, so where we are now, initially,
it's the metaphor, let me say this,
because I think this is relevant.
So, Sir Orama-Pozo, who's the president of South Africa now,
was the chief negotiator for the ANC
during the negotiations for the-
African National Congress.
That's it, yes.
The ruling party.
And so one member of parliament
who was an opposition member of parliament
wrote in his memoirs that he was part of the negotiations
and he asked during this negotiations,
he asked Ramaphosa, who's, as I said,
the president at the moment,
what's your plan for dealing with the whites?
To which he said, well, that's easy.
You deal with them like boiling a frog alive.
You know that metaphor, putting the frog in the water
and just lifting the-
Hear that metaphor a lot nowadays in many places.
Yes, just lifting the temperature gradually
and then the frog doesn't jump out.
And so the problem with that is we really see that how we something gets worse we hear that we have for example one hour of
rolling blackouts and everyone complains and that's fine for a week or a month and then it's two hours
and then it becomes three hours. Well people can adapt like unbelievably well and the new normal
becomes normal so fast it's just be like I remember during COVID, it's like six months in,
it was like, oh, this is how life is.
And you just forget about what it was like before.
Part of that's a testament to human adaptability,
but it's also an indication of the fragility of our,
even our fundamental expectations.
Okay, so there's a level of collapse that is slow enough
so people won't rise up and yeah, yeah, yeah.
So now we have times where they are up to 12 hours a day
without electricity.
That's everywhere.
And what, people have their own diesel generators?
How do you deal with that?
Yeah, yeah, we put up solar powers.
So people adapt to that, those who can afford it,
you have solar power.
So the richer people still have power.
Exactly, ironically, making the gap between the rich and the poor bigger.
Well, look, as soon as your infrastructure starts to deteriorate,
the poor people, like people die from the bottom up, right?
Literally. Oh, yeah.
And so water is an example.
So we lose about 40, almost 50 percent of our water as a result of leakages.
Pipes not being maintained. And the funniest story was in one town, the town% of our water as a result of leakages, pipes not being maintained.
And the funniest story was in one town,
the town didn't have water.
And then the municipal manager said,
but remember these pipes were built
by the apartheid government, so we should blame the pipes.
So they're not maintaining the pipes,
but the fact that they were built
by the previous government means
that the pipes are the problem, but not maintaining them.
That's right.
Well, that's like failure as indication of our moral virtue.
That's what the degrowth people would be doing in the West too.
Yeah.
We're not economic failures.
We're aiming at degrowth and man, we're hitting the target.
Yeah.
And so we have that's a good example where, again,
people who are more wealthy can make a plan.
They dig boreholes or something.
Well, it's the definition of wealth.
Yes.
You're protected from entropy.
And the people who suffer the most
are poor black South Africans who live in townships,
who die from drinking water that is contaminated.
Right, yeah, when the water would be
even more crucial issue than power.
Exactly.
They're integral.
What else do you see?
Well, we have the transport system, for example.
Our railways have collapsed.
The port in Durban, in the eastern part of the country,
last I read was it was number, was it 405,
rated number 405 on a list of 405 ports.
So the worst one in the world, which is a big deal
because you need a well-functioning port
for the economy to function.
So that's an example.
For people not to die.
Again, once again, the transports,
I mentioned that the roads,
the fact that the roads aren't maintained.
And then we have these practical things like policing,
it's more than just practical.
So, and once again, an example of the more wealthy people
who are able to adapt to that.
So we're-
Hired private security.
Exactly.
So private security in South Africa is currently
double the size of the police and the army combined.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Yeah, because the police are, I mean, I was in an army-
So that's really a reversion to something
like it's quasi-feudal society at that point.
Yes, and then what happens again in poorer communities
is they resort to some form of mob justice
because the police aren't there.
There's a guy who rapes people in your community,
everyone knows who he is,
and the police doesn't do anything,
so the people deal with him themselves.
So you get vigilante justice in South Africa.
So that, and we can go down the list, the education system.
One poll found that 80% or survey,
80% of the schools in South Africa are dysfunctional.
I believe the top, I think the number is the top 200 schools
in South Africa, which are predominantly
the more wealthy schools,
have more distinctions for children who finish high school
than the next 6,000 schools combined.
So the education system, and so again, everything,
one economist is a very renowned economist in South Africa.
He sort of makes a joke, but it's not just a joke.
He says people ask him, where should you invest?
What should you do to make money?
And he says, it's easy.
You should look at what is the government supposed
to be doing and invest in something
that is in the private sphere that is doing that thing.
Whether it's electricity generation,
whether it's water, whether it's private security,
whether it's private education,
those are the areas that are-
So, okay, so your metaphor was not only is the ship
going in the wrong direction, so that's in-
In terms of policy.
We're going to do more stupid things faster,
but the additional complication is that all the evidence
is that the whole thing is fraying at the seams
and sinking, right?
And that that's the most, well, of course,
the most likely trajectory always is the disintegration
of a complex and sophisticated industrial society
because those bloody things are impossible to produce and very difficult to maintain.
And so now that one of the terrifying things that you know you brought up earlier is that
you know, where there goes South Africa, there goes the West.
It's just like delayed.
And you know, that's, that's partly why I'm interested in South Africa.
It's like, hmm, okay, let's not be thinking that couldn't happen here
because that is here for all intents and purposes.
It's just on the cutting edge of here.
Okay, now your book is entitled, Kill the Boar.
There's a reason for that.
So why don't we delve into that?
We've got about 20 minutes left, something like that, on this side of the podcast.
Let's switch to the, like, cutting edge, let's say,
of the revolutionary inclination in South Africa.
Because I've really noticed,
especially in the last two years,
like things have been heating up like Matt.
You know, I watch X a lot,
and I follow a lot of South Africans,
and I'm starting to see,
well, I'm starting to see some evidence
of the worst of possible outcomes
increasingly becoming likely.
And so you're obviously concerned about something approximating that.
So let's delve into this particular phrase and illustrate for people where that came
from and what it means.
Yeah, well, I'd love to talk about that.
And I would also love to hear your views on that because this is, I know you have a particular
interest in it.
People do what they say they'll do. That's my view. You want to know what Hitler was
going to do? Read Mein Kampf. You know, when you think people hide their motives, it's
like, no, most people aren't sophisticated enough to have two personalities, the well-developed
lie and the actual plan. People more or less do what they say they're going to do. And
so when they're chanting, kill the boar or singing about it,
that's even if none of the individuals
in that chanting mob would take the next step,
the spirit that infuses the mob,
the climate, it's already there.
Yeah.
So the counter argument would be that it's just a metaphor.
Yeah, right.
And you should respect. Bullshit. Yeah. No, seriously, that's not a metaphor. Yeah, right. Bullshit.
Yeah.
No, seriously, that's not a metaphor.
Well, come on.
There's metaphors.
And kill the X, that's not a metaphor.
That's not a cover for some benign revolutionary ideal.
No, it's like, it's the call to blood
of the psychopaths wielding the sword.
And maybe there's some good thinkers around the edge
who think, oh, they don't really mean it.
It's just a metaphor.
It's like, make no mistake about it.
The worst of them mean it.
It doesn't take very many people to mean things.
3% of the population, that's plenty.
It doesn't need to be the majority of the population.
Oh God, no.
Wasn't the majority of Russians weren't Bolsheviks.
Tiny percentage, three to 5% maybe.
So, you know, don't be thinking,
you don't need that many organized psychopaths
to wreak bloody blue murder.
That's for sure.
So there was a cartoon about this in South Africa.
It was two farm attackers.
They've just murdered a farmer and they were running out of the house and then the radio had
a news report which says kill the boer is just a metaphor and then the one
attacker turns to the other and asks what's a metaphor. And so that's
so the kill the boer is a chant and what happens and now again considering that
people say it's just a metaphor you you have these politicians, many of which are more to the left of the ruling party who are already
quite to the left.
So they have these political rallies.
The fringe of the fringe.
Yes.
And then they make these speeches.
Let's name a politician.
Who's the guy who's been pushing this?
Well, Julius Malema in particular is the guy, the leader of the economic freedom fighters.
Yeah, yeah. So they fight for economic freedom. He the leader of the economic freedom fighters. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So they fight for economic freedom.
He looks like he's lots of fun.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, now has he been pushing the metaphor camouflage?
He would say he's celebrating the struggle
against apartheid and that's why he chants this.
But then he would also conclude that,
he would also say that the struggle isn't over.
Right, the struggle is never over, not for the communists.
Well, it's over when they all die.
Yeah.
So he would make a speech,
and the speech would be along the lines of,
we need to slit the throat of whiteness.
He would say things like that.
He would say-
That's all conceptual, you know.
Yeah, and then he would make a, this is an exact quote.
He would say, all white people are criminals
and they should be treated as such.
He would say that during a speech,
and then he would get an applause.
That's standard Bolshevik nonsense.
And he says if you, and then they do the de-humanization thing.
They call them cockroaches and all of that.
Right, that's the utilization of disgust as a, so disgust is a very, very dangerous emotion.
Like people have this misapprehension that the German Nazis were afraid of the Jews.
It's not fear, it's disgust.
The thing about fear, fear freezes you
and if you're afraid of something, you also respect it.
If it's disgust, you wanna eradicate it.
You burn it, you eliminate it, right?
It's a disease like mold.
There's no quarter given.
So any appeal to disgust.
Oh, they would say it's fulff. They would say the white fulff. Yeah, so it's no quarter given. So any appeal to disgust. Or they would say it's false.
They would say the white false.
Yeah, so it's the disgust.
Yeah, blood purity, all those metaphors,
they're all disgust, not fear.
Yeah, and so anybody who's making an appeal to disgust,
boy, you better be thinking there's murder on their mind.
Yep, so they would do that.
They would talk about economic inequality
and the road, they would suggest that the road to your wealth
is to go and attack those people over there. And then they would suggest that the road to your wealth is to go and
attack those people over there.
And then they would say things like, again, this is a direct quote, if you see a beautiful
piece of land, go and take it, it's yours.
So they would make these claims.
Only the thieves own it now.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
The people who own it are criminals.
Yeah, that's exactly what the bloody Bolsheviks did with the kulaks in the Ukraine before
they starved six million people to death.
Exactly the same place.
Well, and you can see why it's effective.
You talk to people and you say,
well, look at how miserable your life is.
It's like, yeah, it's pretty damn miserable.
Look at those people over there.
They have everything.
Why do they have everything and you don't have anything?
Well, it's because they're evil people
and they took it from you. Well, it kind of looks like that. It's gonna take it back. You don't have anything. Well, it's because they're evil people and they took it from you.
Well, it kind of looks like that.
It's just that you don't know any better.
Yeah, the moral thing to do is to kill the cockroaches.
Right, well, then you think,
well, where does our food come from?
It's like, well, you know, we'll deal with that.
Exactly, that's what they will do.
We'll deal with that later when the Edenic landscape
that we're promising makes itself manifest,
which of course never happens, right?
But you can see why it's so effective.
And so this same guy, he would, again, during a speech,
and he was asked about this in court.
Yeah, yeah, because it became a free speech case,
didn't it?
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he said, we are not calling for the slaughter
of white people, at least for now.
That's the line he used.
And so in court-
Well then, everyone's relieved by that. Yeah, at least for now. That's the line he used. And so in court- Well then everyone's relieved by that.
Yeah, at least for now happy.
So there was a court case against this song, this chant,
and he was asked to explain this.
And he said, I can't guarantee the future.
So the lawyer asked him,
if you say I'm not calling for the slaughter
of white people at least for now,
do you foresee a future where you might call for the slaughter of white people? And least for now. Do you foresee a future where you might call
for the slaughter of white people?
And he said, yes, I do, I foresee that.
But that would be their fault.
It would be the fault of white people.
Yes, of course.
For not getting to the program.
Yeah, definitely.
And so they would make these speeches,
and then once the speech is finished.
Well, the Jews in Nazi Germany,
they brought it on themselves.
Yeah, it's their fault.
Oh no, that's the standard claim.
Of course it is.
Of course that's the claim.
Yep.
You know, that's the claim that, that's analogous to the claim is, well, they're conspiring
against us, we better act before they do.
You know, that's a, that's a genuine precursor to genocide.
Like when that kind of rhetoric starts, that's what happened in Rwanda.
It's like those people, they're preparing to attack you.
You better get ready.
Then you add the disgust and you add the economic inequality and you heighten that with some ethnic tension and, you know, and then, and you give people the excuse to go.
Plus, they're so angry.
And you can see why.
People who are like young and absolutely poverty-stricken with no hope, they're so angry.
And if they have the opportunity to turn that anger
into vengeance, even for a day,
especially the worst of them, it's like, oh my God.
Oh, may have breaks loose.
And then there's nothing for anyone.
Well, oh, well, that's tomorrow.
You know, yeah, yeah, brutal.
So they would then burst into this chant
and it's not even a song, it's just a chant.
Kill the boy, kill the farmer.
And there are different variations. They often they would make this Boer, kill the farmer. And there are different variations.
They often they would make these.
Yeah, kill the farmer there.
That's a slogan aimed at death.
Yeah.
Kill the farmer.
Okay.
Well, what are we going to eat?
Each other.
That doesn't matter.
Yeah.
Well, that's what happened in Ukraine
because they descended into cannibalism.
Venezuela as well.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Right.
You know what?
I think this may be still true,
but at one point in the not too distant past,
so I mean in the last decade,
it was illegal for doctors to list starvation
as the cause of death.
That's how the communists dealt with hunger.
It's illegal to die of starvation.
Oh, problem solved.
Problem solved, yeah.
Problem solved, yeah, yeah.
It's, yeah, it's bizarre.
But you know what's really, really shameful is,
so I and many others have been campaigning against this
for quite some time.
And I can honestly say,
I'm not aware of a single cause in South Africa
for which you get more viciously attacked
by people in the media, the government and so forth.
In South Africa?
In South Africa.
And in the rest of the world?
And largely in the rest of the,
no, I mean, I'm talking about a South African cause
for which you get attacked more than campaigning for the farm killings to stop
and for the hate speech to stop.
So explain that.
It would be... you would be accused of fear-mongering.
Right.
And so we had the Stem Rooi Gevaar, the red danger was the fear about the communists
and now the accusation is swart gevaar.
So you are depicting black people as dangerous
when it's a minority, it is a minority
who's doing these things,
but you get viciously attacked for-
Picking resentful communists as dangerous,
like they are, right, right.
So I think there's a reason why.
I think there's because some form of a hierarchy
of recognition in terms of who should be recognized
for the hardships that they face.
And when it comes to recognizing hardships in South Africa.
Oppression Olympics.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And this is sort of an inconvenient reality
when you go to the area of oppression Olympics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So people is sort of an inconvenient reality when you go to the area of oppression Olympics.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So people don't want that
to be part of the conversation.
Yeah, it's like the suffering of the Jews, you know?
That's a rough one because the radicals
who play the oppression Olympics game
won't let the Jews play because they're successful, right?
So you don't get to play,
you don't get to be in the oppression Olympics,
even if you have reason to be terrified out of your skulls, say...
Because it's inconvenient to us.
Yeah, well, it's a counter, it goes against the narrative in a terrible way. The victimization narrative.
Exactly.
Right, so yeah, that's definitely playing out in South Africa, there's no doubt about that. Yeah, yeah, because the rule is, the fundamental rule of that narrative is,
if you're poor and dispossessed, you're moral and oppressed. And you know, some people who are poor
and dispossessed are moral and oppressed, and some aren't. And look out for the ones that aren't,
because some of them are vicious, psychopathic, murderous criminals, and you don't need that many
of them. And they're generally about three to four percent of the population.
So heaven help you when they organize. And people are so naive about that.
You see that especially on the left. It's well, you saw this again in
the Soviet Union because the rule was, well, if you're a criminal
then you're part of the victim class, which is why the bloody Russians let the
criminals run the gulag camps. You're a socially friendly element.
Well, why are you a criminal?
Well, it's because you were oppressed by the landowner.
It's like, no, I'm a murderous thug.
No such thing.
Just victim.
So the criminal is a victim.
The criminal.
And the worse the criminal, the more the evidence for the victimization.
And it's partly because, like like to give the devil is due,
a lot of the radical progressive leftists,
especially the sheltered middle-class type,
they're very agreeable by temperament.
They're empathic, they're maternal.
They have no idea.
There's no space in their worldview
for the sort of person you don't want to have
hiding under your bed at three in the morning
when you come home from a party.
It's like those people don't exist.
They're just victims. It's like, you wait till you run across one.
You'll change your tune. But if you're protected enough, you never have to deal with that reality.
You know, because you're Jean-Jacques Rousseau and everybody's a noble savage.
It's like, well, most people are peaceful, even if provoked.
Some people aren't. Right? And you better be able to draw the distinction
between those kinds of people
because otherwise you're at the mercy of the worst of them.
Right, and this is a lesson that's very hard
for people to learn.
Well, you guys are gonna be facing this at no time flat
while you all are already.
Can I say something about that,
about sort of the road ahead?
Because that's probably the most important part.
So President Trump has started speaking out about what's happening in South Africa,
for which we are very grateful,
which has led to quite a backlash from the South African government.
And their response is, it's not happening.
That's the official...
Right, yes, yes, yes.
It doesn't exist.
There are no farm murders in South Africa.
Fear-mongering.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I do think one of the issues that's on the table now
is refugee status.
Yes.
For the Afrikaner, especially the farmers,
to flee to the US or to get some form of protection
from the US.
And I know some people are interested in that,
but what I should also say,
and that's why I'm so grateful that we spoke
about the history part at first,
is our concern is
that if we just leave the country, our culture dissolves and our communal identity dissolves
and we become Americans or whatever.
And so-
Well, plus the entire country descends into like lawlessness, chaos, and everyone dies.
Right?
Because if all the white South African farmers leave, that's 100% what will happen, right?
Well, and you can look at the rest of Africa as an example.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Zimbabwe and so forth.
So we need to find some form of a,
what I would call dispensational solution.
The solution is not simply to say
we need a different president,
or we need a different party to take over Parliament because there's fundamental structural problems with a
political system. It's like trying to repaint the the skirtings when
there's a problem with the foundation of the house. And the reason why I say
that is because the country is very big, it's very diverse, it has a very strong
central government and also the country is quite poor.
And poor countries tend to have more socialistic governments
that are not necessarily.
That's because they wanna be poorer still.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they're not necessarily interested
in economic investments.
It's just about blame shifting and scapegoating.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
So, and I think, and this is our message also
to people in America is it's great
if there are people who want
to flee or get out to help them, that they should get help.
But we must also look towards some form
of a solution for the problem.
Well, we've got five minutes left on this side.
One of the things I would, so for everybody watching
and listening, most of you know that we do another half
an hour behind the daily wire paywall.
And I think I'm going to concentrate mostly
on what South Africa, what the Boers, let's say,
the Boers who were concerned about this,
what they would want to see from the West,
politically and sociologically.
So I'd like to do that on this side.
We're only gonna be able to do about five minutes here,
but you can come and join us on the daily wire side
for an additional half an hour
if this is a topic of particular interest.
That's what we'll talk about there.
Okay, so let's at least lay out the outlines of that.
Like, what do you see?
What can the West, the rest of the West offer
under these circumstances to everyone in South Africa?
Because it's a catastrophe,
this is an impending catastrophe for everyone.
Like it might be the white farmers
that are first on the chopping block
and that's highly likely,
but as soon as they're gone, everyone else dies.
So this is not good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there could be many different solutions,
but I think what we are quite certain about
is the direction that we need to head in,
and that could lead to different outcomes.
But the direction, the way I see it,
is it's some form of a combination
between decentralization of political power,
so that those in power have much less power.
So that turns South Africa into something more like Europe,
let's say, where there are a multitude of nations.
Yeah, it could be a federation,
it could be some form of cultural autonomy,
it could be territorial autonomy, it could take different forms. It could be a federation, it could be some form of cultural autonomy, it could be territorial autonomy,
it could take different forms.
It could be Balkanization.
So decentralization and the other aspect
is sort of the bottom up approach is self-governance.
Because people, and that's not just for the Afrikaners
or the white Anglos,
South Africa is a,
people call it a community of communities.
There are so many different nations and tribes and so forth.
And they don't get to make decisions about their own affairs
because the central government decides.
And the central government regards things like
cultural identity and so forth as backwards tribal thinking.
Well, you see the same thing playing out
with the European Union at the moment.
It's very similar. It's very similar same thing playing out with the European Union at the moment. It's very similar.
It's very similar to the European dynamics
with the European Union.
You know, the problem is,
is that as the size of government mounts,
the proclivity for society to become tyrant
and slaves magnifies, right?
You need those intermediary structures,
which are something like, well, families, towns, cities, states,
you know, maybe separate countries in some sort of federation with serious limitations
on the top-down power, right?
That's a subsidiary structure, the classic alternative to tyranny and slavery.
And there's a big problem in South Africa with traditional leaders or let's say the King of the Zulus,
for example, not being recognized by the government
for his role that he's playing.
And so the government, the way we talk about it
is the difference between natural identity
and artificial identity.
They have this slogan that says,
for the nation to prosper, the tribe must die.
And so, but the nation for us is something else
in the way a lot of Westerners think about the nation
because the nation in our context is an artificial thing.
It's a construct.
It's putting all these people together, lumping.
It's like saying, you are all just Europeans now.
And so Europe is the nation
and the nations or the countries-
Yeah, well that enlightenment emphasis
on the atomized individual leaves no place
for the town, the city, the family, the state.
We haven't sorted that out well in the West at all.
Yeah, I think the West has gone too far.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We missed the idea of subsidiarity.
We don't know what to do with the complexities
of structured social identity, right?
We figure the autonomous individual
is the only unit of analysis.
And that's true under very limited conditions, right?
One of the conditions might be something like
first approximation to cultural homogeneity
and a Judeo-Christian metaphysic, right?
And so where that doesn't apply,
you don't have atomized sovereign individuals.
Yep.
And when it gets to the point where the community dissolves
and the atomized individual
finds himself against the Leviathan,
there's nothing you can do.
You can't do anything against it.
You can pray.
You can pray, that's the only thing you can do.
So the only solution is, again,
what we call natural community or natural identity,
as opposed to these artificial communities we see today,
is for communities to be well organized
in the context of their communities,
to have community institutions.
That's very Tocquevillean.
Alexis de Tocqueville, when he wrote Democracy in America,
he said, well, this is what is going to make America great
in the 1830s is.
Well, and America's got that right
with its 51 state or 50 state experiments.
Yes.
Right, because they're always,
Americans are always doing something intelligent somewhere,
no matter how many stupid things
they're doing other places, right?
Well, they keep renewing because of that.
Yeah.
It's a miracle to see.
Okay, we should stop on this side.
And so everyone, join us on the daily wire side.
We're going to talk more about solutions.
We're gonna talk about, well, what the boars, for example,
in South Africa need to see from the West.
And while the pathway forward, while really,
what are we trying to avoid in South Africa?
Mass murder and starvation, which is by far
the most likely outcome as far as I can see at the moment.
So join us on the Daily Wire side to continue the discussion.
And thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale today for facilitating that and the Daily Wire for making this distribution of this podcast widely possible.