People, myself included, love to use historical analogies to describe the current hellscape we are living through. The most popular comparison of the rise of Trumplandia is to that of Nazi Germany in the ’30s. I confess to having fallen into the habit myself, and you can find plenty of examples of me doing so in the post category: Party Like its 1932.
Deep down, however, there is a different historical analogy that I think makes a more accurate comparison. Welcome to South Africa after 1948.
I’m not saying some of the Nazi comparisons are not without some merit – certainly Trump has behaved like a hateful demagogue – as did Hitler. And his usage of phrases such as ” Quarrels in faraway lands among people of whom we know nothing” is a word for word Neville Chamberlain presenting the Munich accord, agreeing to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Certainly, it is astonishing for a US President to make that statement at West Point.
But I’ve thought about it a lot over the last three years of hellish decline, and I keep coming back to South Africa and the history of Apartheid and the National Party that swept into office in 1948. When I was in Romania some ten years ago, one of the things I did while ogling beautiful women by the pool and drinking Carlsbergs was to read a detailed history of Apartheid and also one on South Africa since the 1700s.
The simple fact of the matter is, the election of 2016 is more like 1948 in South Africa than it is Weimar Germany. For starters, there has not been a Reichstag fire (yet), and Trump – while passing some horrendous legislation such as the Tax Cut for billionaires and the deficit spending that makes George W. Bush look like Ebeneezer Scrooge, he has not gone full Nazi. He might in the future, but for now, they seem content, through the stranglehold Mitch McConnell has on the Senate, and the spinelessness of the GOP senators who support him – to exercise what could be called a minority government. I say minority because it is – never in any of Trump’s time squatting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – has Trump enjoyed the support of the majority of the American people.
Just like South Africa.
What is also very much like South Africa, is the attempt by Trump and his lackey’s to put in place an infrastructure to enable this minority government to impose its will upon those it judges not to be “real Americans”. Now in South Africa that was about distinction by color of skin. In Trump supporters, it may well also be that way, but not entirely; witness Ben Carson, Tim Scott, and Clarence Thomas. In 21st century Trumpandia the new system of belief is about “true conservatism” and the “non-whites” or slegs nie blankes as shown on the bus above, are anyone who does not accept Trump as sent from above to “Make America Great Again”. For what its worth, the Afrikaners had their own slogans too – particularly in the 1980’s.
The Prime Minister enters the hall under a canopy of orange, white and blue paper flags, held aloft by outstretched arms. A carnation is pinned to his lapel, and a tiny smile plays around the corners of his mouth – the same tiny smile that can be detected on 15 posters staring down from the walls and the platform toward which he is now advancing. ”NOU, MEER AS OOIT,” says the Afrikaans slogan on several of them. An English version of the same poster provides the translation, and it is positively Nixonian. ”NOW, MORE THAN EVER,” it says.
The crowd is clapping to the rhythm of a patriotic song with an Afrikaans lyric that might be taken, a year after Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, to have a double meaning: ”Do you hear the mighty roaring …/The song of a people’s awakening/ That makes people shiver and shake?” But this is Rustenburg, a mining and farming community in the western Transvaal whose social philosophy has yet to admit the idea of change. In Rustenburg it remains clear that the ”people’s awakening” is the business of Afrikaners, not blacks. The mostly elderly audience has come for the balm of the old slogans, the old promises that the white man’s divinely sanctioned gains in this land will never be relinquished. And they are there, the old slogans, embroidered in blue letters on orange banners under the names of the Prime Ministers who uttered them: SOUTH AFRICA FIRST … THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES … CREATE YOUR OWN FUTURE … CONTINUE YOUR MIS-SION.
Just like Trump is doing with packing the courts with the devil’s disciples of the Federalist Society, South Africa’s National Party worked hard to get true believers in all of the important posts. Historically, the Afrikaners had a lot in common with the post Civil War South, the policies of the Boer republics were also racially exclusive; for instance, the Transvaal‘s constitution barred black African and Colored participation in church and state. ( Jim Crow by another name).
Consider this little tidbit too. The Afrikaners came from a Calvinist religious history – making them obliquely similar to the evangelical teabaggers that have blighted America for the last 12 years. Furthermore, Afrikaners have a very strong attachment to their “history” and like the “Lost Cause” narrative from after the Civil War, the Afrikaners revere the “Vortrekkers”. These were the folks who moved inland in South Africa during the period 1835-1846. ( This should ring a bell for a few folks from the backward-looking land of Texas).
The Great Trek was a landmark in an era of expansionism and bloodshed, of land seizure and labour coercion. Taking the form of a mass migration into the interior of southern Africa, this was a search by dissatisfied Dutch-speaking colonists for a promised land where they would be ‘free and independent people’ in a ‘free and independent state’.
The men, women and children who set out from the eastern frontier towns of Grahamstown, Uitenhage and Graaff-Reinet represented only a fraction of the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the colony, and yet their determination and courage has become the single most important element in the folk memory of Afrikaner nationalism. However, far from being the peaceful and God-fearing process which many would like to believe it was, the Great Trek caused a tremendous social upheaval in the interior of southern Africa, rupturing the lives of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people. But this time the reports that reached the chiefs of the Sotho clans on the northern bank were more alarming: the white men were coming in their hundreds.
Threatened by the ‘liberalism’ of the new colonial administration, insecure about conflict on the eastern frontier and ‘squeezed out’ by their own burgeoning population, the Voortrekkers hoped to restore economic, cultural and political unity independent of British power. The only way they saw open to them was to leave the colony. In the decade following 1835, thousands migrated into the interior, organised in a number of trek parties under various leaders. Many of the Voortrekkers were trekboers (semi-nomadic pastoral farmers) and their mode of life made it relatively easy for them to pack their worldly possessions in ox-wagons and leave the colony forever.
from South African History Online
See what I mean about similarities?
Even down to their own version of Stone Mountain, the Voortrekker Memorial.
I can go on much, much longer and in great detail. This would make a good paper in an academic setting or a magazine article. This being a blog post, I will keep it short and and ask you to remember a few things:
- As Apartheid went on, the government of South Africa had to resort to more and more authoritarian measures to maintain control and keep the “system” running – especially in light of the United Nations boycott.
- The supporters of Apartheid were socially conservative. Abortion was banned, Sunday blue laws were enforced, homosexuality was illegal – all the things our tea swilling, Galtian overlords want for the US of A.
- Disenfranchisement was a critical part of maintaining control. Whites were the only ones who could vote, and efforts to expand the franchise to Asians were rolled back in 1969. Substitute “GOP voter suppression” as we saw in Georgia last week, and teabaggers are on the same page as Hendrik Verwoerd.
- Finally, both Afrikaners and American extremists long for a return of Rhodesia, using the disaster of Zimbabwe as their “proof” that their white nationalist ideas have merit.
I’ve made some people really angry by calling Trump-supporting folk, “the Afrikaners of the 21st century“. They hate the comparison. I stand by the comparison because the more research I do the more it seems appropriate.
One other point also, for the anti-Trump folks hoping this nightmare ends in November, remember our Trump-loving Afrikaners in America are “committed to the cause” – even if Trump loses. In that regard, Trump is the symptom of a bigger disease afflicting America right now. It took almost 50 years to get rid of Apartheid – it may take that long in the US. Never forget that.
3 comments
Comments are closed.