Donald Trump’s big South African lie, repeated on Friday with the claim that our government is “killing white people” and specifically Afrikaners, is still being welcomed or amplified by a startling number of whites in this country, a strange state of affairs when many of them clearly know that they’re lying too.
I’ve encountered some of these people over the last few weeks, ever since I wrote a Facebook post last month, as plainly and fairly as I could, in which I attempted to explain to any Americans who might stumble across it that there was, in fact, no genocide happening here.
For better and for worse, the post took off with over half a million people reading it, mostly in South Africa; and though most approved of it (social media is, after all, an echo chamber) some of the almost 2,000 comments under the line nevertheless introduced me to a fairly good sample of those South Africans who are either still celebrating Trump’s claims or sharing them in tacit approval.
I expected the anger, as well as the lunge towards absurd ad hominems: by pointing out that Trump was lying for profit, and that black people face a greater risk of violent crime than whites, I was, wrote one respondent, confirming my reputation as a well-known ANC shill who regularly espouses communist views.
Another raged that I was a ‘hanskakie’, an antique slur describing those treacherous Afrikaners who collaborated with the British in the Boer War. (Because remember, kids, it’s entirely okay for white people to still be triggered by stuff from 1900, but black people really need to get over everything since 1948.)
The fact that poor black South Africans face far worse than white Afrikaners, and yet can’t apply for the same refugee status in the US, simply didn’t penetrate.
I was even invited to come with my family to spend a night on a rural smallholding (in the frontier province of the Western Cape, no less) where we would be butchered and taught a valuable lesson about how hard land-owning whites have it.
Most, however, reacted without insult and from a place of confusion, pain and, it must be said, a profound failure of logic, insisting that by contesting Trump’s lie and the victimhood hustle of AfriForum I was somehow trying to deny that white farmers were sometimes the victims of violent crime: just wait til it’s your family, they said, naming white victims or demanding that I watch propaganda produced by British right winger Katie Hopkins.
The fact that poor black South Africans face far worse than white Afrikaners, and yet can’t apply for the same refugee status in the US, simply didn’t penetrate.
I also expected the extent to which outrage clouded people’s ability to read for meaning: having reached the end of a piece in which I confirm that South Africa has more violent crime than most countries, a few reprimanded me for refusing to admit that South Africa has more violent crime than most countries.
What I didn’t expect, however, was how quickly many of those thanking Trump for his stance disintegrated under the slightest scrutiny, revealing that they know Trump is lying and that the South African government isn’t targeting white people for extermination, but are content to promote the lie to see the ANC shamed on the international stage.
The true believers I can understand: fear, and especially exposure to violence, can make anyone convince themselves of anything.
But there is an extraordinary moral cowardice at work among people who are willing to provide aid and comfort to American white nationalism, a project that holds the majority of their compatriots and their continent in vile contempt, just for the cheap thrill of seeing the ANC dragged through the streets.
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