TOM EATON | ‘The Caucasity of Hope’ for sociopaths, brought to you ‘in a concentrated manner’

The Washington Memorandum has a very grand name, but this short document, which should be called “The Caucasity of Hope”, is essentially little more than a cardboard sign being held up outside the White House by AfriForum and Solidarity that says: “DO THE WHITE THING — GIVE GENEROUSLY”.

Still, I have some questions.

To be clear, I support the right of the memorandum’s authors to write whatever they want. If they feel moved to get the band back together and go on a second White Grievance tour like the one they took to the US in 2018, then so be it — and anyone who wants them censored is expressing a sentiment far more in line with Donald Trump’s administration than Cyril Ramaphosa’s.

In fact, if they hadn’t written it and put it on the internet, I wouldn’t have been able to read it, read it again and then ask: was this written by a human adult, or did they just ask ChatGPT to watch 200 hours of SAUK news from the 1980s and then tell it to write five pages of sparkling Afrikaner exceptionalism?

I mean, consider the bit where the memorandum claims that the Solidarity Movement has gone to Washington DC “in the interests of its members, the Afrikaners specifically, but also in the interests of South Africa and all South Africans in general”.

Where it gets confusing is where the memorandum claims that SA’s support for Russia, and its willingness to abandon Taiwan to the tender embraces of China, are somehow out of sync with the Trumpian plan

Now, given that Afriforum’s Kallie Kriel said in 2018 that he reckons apartheid wasn’t a crime against humanity because not enough black people died for it to qualify, I’m not sure he should be representing any interests except those of sociopaths and morons. I mean, if Kriel represents “all South Africans in general”, then we’re well screwed.

Then there’s the deeply confusing geopolitics, like the paragraph where the memorandum confirms that it “shares the Trump administration’s concerns about the South African government’s foreign policy, especially with regard to Israel, China, Iran, Russia, Rwanda and Taiwan”.

It is true that SA and the US have very different views of Iran, Rwanda and Israel. SA is a friend of Iran and is currently shooting at Rwandan-backed troops armed by the US. As for Israel, well, there’s strong disagreement there, too: SA wants international law to apply to Israel, while the president of the US is publicly advocating for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. (Aside: could a local journalist please ask AfriForum and Solidarity what they think of Trump’s plan for “Trump Gaza”? Just so their views on ethnic cleansing are on the public record.)

Where it gets confusing, however, is where the memorandum claims that SA’s support for Russia, and its willingness to abandon Taiwan to the tender embraces of China, are somehow out of sync with the Trumpian plan: the US and Russia haven’t been this close in decades, and Trump — a man who will speak endlessly on any topic, whether he knows anything about it or not — is resolutely refusing to say what his policy on Taiwan is.

Things get even more baffling a moment later, when the memorandum thanks Trump, among other things, for paying attention to “the treatment of Afrikaners as second-class citizens based on our ancestry, culture and race”.

I like to keep abreast of current affairs but I must admit, dear reader, that this one caught me completely by surprise. I had literally no idea that Afrikaners are currently not allowed to vote or buy or own land in 90% of the country, or that they have to carry a pass at all times to allow them to move freely within the republic, or that many of them have had their communities bulldozed and been forced to relocate to areas further away from economic centres. Seriously, how has this not been front-page news for years?

Thankfully, however, the whole thing starts making sense on the third page, as the memorandum thanks Trump for his offer of taking in Afrikaners as refugees but quickly makes it clear that “the majority of Afrikaners will still remain in South Africa” because they aspire to a “free, safe and prosperous life and cultural autonomy at the southern tip of Africa”.

To allow these aspirations to be met, the memorandum then presents a number of “recommendations”, that is, requests to the Trump administration. Some are familiar, like the request that the US pressures SA — presumably via sanctions that will drive even more millions of poor South Africans into deeper poverty — to revise the Bela Act and the Expropriation Act. Another is the request that farm murders be declared “priority crimes”.

What leaps off the page, however, is the “recommendation” that is listed ahead of both those I just mentioned, and which therefore seems to be viewed as more urgent than either. It is, bizarrely, that US “aid be provided to an Afrikaner development fund to assist with community infrastructure protecting Afrikaners. This includes safety structures, social structures, job structures, training structures and infrastructure to settle Afrikaners in a concentrated manner.”

If, as seems to be the case, this is about Afrikaners who have chosen to remain in SA, then what exactly are we talking about here? A US-funded Blankestan? A mega-Orania with a Trump casino and a Paula White megachurch?

I don’t know, but I must say it all sounds a bit radical leftist to me. I mean, I thought that if you were a member of group being persecuted because of your culture and your race, and you got special money from a government, just because of your culture and your race, that was DEI — and isn’t that what’s destroying the West right now?

I’ll listen on the podcast.