Along a highway on a grassy hill, thousands of white crosses — each one representing an individual victim of brutal farm murders, or plaasmoorde in Afrikaans — are a stark reminder of the reality facing European-descent farmers in the new South Africa. One of the iron crosses was planted last year in memory of two-year-old Willemien Potgieter, who was executed on a farm and left in a pool of her own blood. Her parents were murdered, too — the father hacked to death with a machete. Before leaving, the half-dozen killers tied a note to the gate: “We killed them. We’re coming back.”
The Potgieter family massacre is just one of the tens of thousands of farm attacks to have plagued South Africa since 1994. Like little Willemien’s cross, many of those now-iconic emblems represent innocent children, even babies, who have been savagely murdered, oftentimes after being tortured in ways so gruesome, horrifying, and barbaric, that mere words could never adequately describe it. The death toll is still rising.
Like countless South Africans, Andre Vandenberg has lost multiple relatives to violence in the so-called “Rainbow Nation.” In separate incidents, according to Vandenberg, a motorcycle exporter and former military man who now lives in the United States, two of his female cousins were brutally and repeatedly raped in front of their husbands. One of the women was pregnant with the couple’s first child. All five victims were murdered. After sodomizing and killing the husbands, in both cases, the ruthless attackers raped Vandenberg’s cousins again.
Enduring the horror for hours, one of the women was eventually shot. The other had a tire filled with gasoline put around her neck and set ablaze — the agonizing punishment known as “necklacing,” which was once commonly meted out to black opponents of the predominantly black African National Congress (ANC) now ruling South Africa in an unholy alliance with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and an umbrella group for labor unions. Nelson Mandela’s wife, Winnie, was known for publicly supporting the barbaric act. Nobody was ever arrested in connection with those two farm attacks.
Before Vandenberg lost his cousins, his father was killed by a truck driver in a suspicious accident. The drunken suspect, apparently a respected figure within the ANC, was arrested at the scene. However, under pressure from the ANC, the killer was released on $100 bail. Again with help from the ANC, Vandenberg said, the driver fled and was never prosecuted for the killing. No explanation was ever given by authorities, despite repeated appeals for answers.
After being deported back to South Africa from the United States over an alleged failure to report a change of address, Vandenberg’s brother was killed, too. Within a year of his arrival, he was brutally murdered. Witnesses watched the murder unfold and told police, but as has become typical, nobody was ever prosecuted. A male cousin of Vandenberg’s, meanwhile, was shot in the chest while being robbed. And as is often the case, the murder was labeled an “accident” by authorities.
“It’s racial crime,” insisted Vandenberg, an Afrikaner descendant of Dutch settlers, in an interview with The New American. “The ANC people are using genocide — they’re pro-genocide. Long term, they want all the property that belongs to the whites.” The black-led ANC-communist regime is “twice as racist” as the former white-led apartheid government ever was, he added. And along with its supporters, the South African government is willing to do “anything” to accomplish its goals.
When top ANC government leaders, including South African President Jacob Zuma, chant about exterminating whites, “some people think they’re just singing songs,” Vandenberg said, becoming visibly uncomfortable at the thought of it. “But I think they’re very serious about that. That’s why we have all the farm murders…. What they do, their followers will follow.”
In its defense, the ANC regime points out that crime affects all South Africans; and it is true, the country has one of the highest murder rates in the world — blacks, whites, people of Asian origin, and others are all terrorized by it. But respected independent experts who have investigated allegations of anti-white genocide in the Rainbow Nation have concluded that the government is not being honest about the wave of genocidal murders. The ANC’s national spokesman declined repeated requests for comment.
Genocide
Following a fact-finding mission to South Africa in July, Dr. Gregory Stanton, head of the non-profit group Genocide Watch, announced his conclusions: There is an orchestrated genocidal campaign targeting whites, and white farmers in particular. The respected organization released a report about its investigation shortly afterward. On a scale the group developed to identify the phases of genocide, South Africa has been moved to stage six: the preparation and planning phase. Step seven is extermination. The eighth and final stage: denial after the fact.
Among the startling discoveries, long known to South Africans and analysts monitoring the powder keg, was evidence pointing to the ANC regime itself. “There is thus strong circumstantial evidence of government support for the campaign of forced displacement and atrocities against White farmers and their families,” Genocide Watch leaders said in their report, entitled Why Are Afrikaner Farmers Being Murdered in South Africa? “There is direct evidence of SA [South African] government incitement to genocide.”
According to experts and estimates compiled by citizens who track the killing spree, at least 3,000 white farmers in South Africa, known as Boers (from the Dutch word for “farmer”), have been brutally massacred over the last decade. Some estimates put the figures even higher, but it is hard to know because the ANC government has purposely made it impossible to determine the true extent. With the total number of commercial farmers in South Africa estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, analysts say as many as 10 percent have already been exterminated. Even more have come under attack.
It is worse than murder, though. Many of the victims, including children and even infants, are raped or savagely tortured or both before being executed or left for dead. Sometimes boiling water is poured down their throats. Other attacks involve burning victims with hot irons or slicing them up with machetes. In more than a few cases, the targets have been tied to their own cars and dragged along dirt roads for miles.
The South African government, dominated by the communist-backed ANC, has responded to the surging wave of racist murders by denying the phenomenon, implausibly claiming that many of the attacks are simply “regular” crimes. Despite fierce criticism, authorities also stopped tracking statistics that would provide a more accurate picture of what is truly going on.
In many cases, the murders are simply classified as “burglaries” or even “accidents” and ignored, so the true murder figures are certainly much higher than officials admit. The police, meanwhile, are often involved in the murders or at least the coverups, multiple sources report. A white South African exile living in the United States told The New American that when victims are able to defend themselves or apprehend the would-be perpetrators, many of the attackers are found to be affiliated with the ruling ANC or its youth wing.
Experts are not buying the government’s coverup. “The farm murders, we have become convinced, are not accidental,” said Dr. Stanton of Genocide Watch during his fact-finding mission to South Africa. It was very clear that the massacres were not common crimes, he added — especially because of the absolute barbarity used against the victims. “We don’t know exactly who is planning them yet, but what we are calling for is an international investigation.”
Indeed, most unbiased analysts concede that the thousands of brutal killings and tens of thousands of attacks are part of a broader pattern. And according to Dr. Stanton, who was also involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and has decades of experience examining genocide and communist terror, the trend points toward a troubled future for the nation.
“Things of this sort are what I have seen before in other genocides,” he said of the murdered white farmers, pointing to several examples, including a victim’s body that was left with an open Bible on top and other murder victims who were tortured, disemboweled, raped, or worse. “This is what has happened in Burundi; it’s what happened in Rwanda. It has happened in many other places in the world.”
Speaking in Pretoria at an event organized by the anti-communist Transvaal Agricultural Union, Dr. Stanton also lashed out at the effort to dehumanize whites in South Africa by portraying them as “settlers.” The label is meant to paint Afrikaner white farmers — descendants of Northern Europeans who arrived centuries ago, some as far back as the 1600s — as people who do not belong there.
“High-ranking ANC government officials who continuously refer to Whites as ‘settlers’ and ‘colonialists of a special type’ are using racial epithets in a campaign of state-sponsored dehumanization of the White population as a whole,” Genocide Watch said in its latest report. “They sanction gang-organized hate crimes against Whites, with the goal of terrorizing Whites through fear of genocidal annihilation.”
It is the same process that happened prior to the infamous genocide against Christian Armenians in Turkey, Stanton explained. The dehumanization phenomenon also occurred against the Jewish people in Germany under the National Socialist (Nazi) regime of mass-murderer Adolf Hitler, well before the Nazi tyrant began implementing his monstrous “final solution.”
Unfortunately, South Africa might be next in line. “Whenever you have that kind of dehumanization … you have the beginning of that downward spiral into genocide,” Stanton noted, adding that the situation in South Africa had already moved well beyond that stage. The next phase before extermination, which began years ago in South Africa, is organizing to actually carry it out.
“We are worried that there are organized groups that are in fact doing that planning,” Stanton continued during his speech. “It became clear to us that the [ANC] Youth League was this kind of organization — it was planning this kind of genocidal massacre and also the forced displacement of whites from South Africa.”
Genocide Watch first raised its alert level for South Africa from stage five to stage six when then-ANC Youth League boss Julius Malema began openly singing a racist song aimed at inciting murder against white South African farmers: “Shoot the Boer” and “Kill the Boer” were some of the lyrics. Described by the anti-genocide group as a “racist Marxist-Leninist,” Malema has also been quoted as saying that “all whites are criminals” and threatening to steal white farmers’ land by force. He said the farm murders would stop when Africans of European descent surrendered their land.
After the calls to genocide made international headlines, the South African judiciary ruled that the song advocating murder of whites was unlawful hate speech. Genocide Watch moved South Africa back down to stage five. Incredibly, however, the president of South Africa, ANC’s Jacob Zuma, began singing the song early this year, too.
“We are going to shoot them with the machine gun; they are going to run; you are a Boer [white farmer]; shoot the Boer,” the South African president sang at an ANC rally in Bloemfontein in January, an incident that was caught on film and posted online. Since then, the number of murdered white South African farmers has been growing each month, according to reports. Other senior government officials, meanwhile, have openly called for “war.” South Africa is now back at stage six.
“This is the kind of talk that of course is not only pre-genocidal, it also comes before crimes against humanity,” Dr. Stanton said, urging everyone to remember that they are all members of the human race. “Those who would be deniers, and who would try to ignore the warning signs in this country, I think are ignoring the facts.”
There is also increasing “polarization,” where the target population — white farmers in this case, and even moderates of all races — are portrayed as an “enemy,” Stanton explained about the march to genocide. And that phenomenon is ever-more apparent in South Africa today, with the situation starting to spiral out of control.
Meanwhile, the South African government is stepping up efforts to disarm the struggling white farmers — stripping them of their final line of defense against genocidal attacks. As has consistently been the case throughout history, of course, disarmament is always a necessary precursor to totalitarianism and the eventual mass slaughter of target groups. In fact, arms in the hands of citizens are often the final barrier to complete enslavement and even extermination.
“The government has disbanded the commando units of white farmers that once protected their farms, and has passed laws to confiscate the farmers’ weapons,” Genocide Watch noted on its website in an update about South Africa posted in July. “Disarmament of a targeted group is one of the surest early warning signs of future genocidal killings.”
Even mere possession of an “unregistered” or “unlicensed” weapon — licenses have become extraordinarily difficult to obtain, if not impossible — can result in jail time. And in South Africa, especially for whites, prison is a virtual death sentence, with widespread rape and HIV infections being the norm.
Those who do surrender their guns may find themselves defenseless in the face genocidal terror — again, a potential death sentence. South African exiles who spoke with TNA said that many of the guns confiscated from whites by officials have later been found at the gruesome murder scenes of white farmers.
The United Nations defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.” The term also includes actions other than simply wholesale slaughter, though. According to the UN, among the crimes that can constitute genocide are causing serious harm to members of a specific minority group; deliberately inflicting conditions on the minority aimed at bringing about its destruction in whole or in part; seeking to prevent births among the targeted population; and forcibly transferring minority children to others.
South African Sonia Hruska, a former Mandela administration consultant who served as a coordinator in policy implementation from 1994 to 2001 before moving to the United States, told The New American that many or even most of those conditions have already been met — and any single one can technically constitute genocide if it is part of a systematic attempt to destroy a particular group. “Acknowledge it. Don’t deny it,” she said. Other activists and exiles agree. Meanwhile, Hruska and other experts say that the government is encouraging the problem, actively discriminating against whites, and in many cases even facilitating the ongoing atrocities.
“Forced displacement from their farms has inflicted on the Afrikaner ethnic group conditions of life calculated to bring about its complete or partial physical destruction, an act of genocide also prohibited by the Genocide Convention,” Genocide Watch said in its most recent report. “In our analysis, the current ANC leadership also publicly uses incitement to genocide with the long-term goal of forcibly driving out or annihilating the White population from South Africa.”
Of course, not all South Africans — especially city dwellers — are convinced that there is an ongoing genocide in their country, or even that one may be coming. The vast majority of blacks and whites would simply like to live in peace with each other.
However, virtually everyone who is paying attention agrees that without solutions, the precarious situation in the Rainbow Nation will continue to deteriorate, going from bad to worse, sooner rather than later.
Communist Threat: Land, Mines
Behind the genocide lurks another issue that is inseparable from it — the ongoing communist effort to completely enslave South Africa under totalitarian rule. In fact, aside from white supremacists, who have seized on the problems in the Rainbow Nation to spread hate against blacks, most activists believe the stirring up of racial tensions is not an end in itself. Instead, it is a means to the ultimate end of foisting socialism on the nation while eliminating all potential resistance.
The issue of land distribution, which has become one of the key drivers of the downward spiral, is among the greatest concerns. The white minority in South Africa still owns much of the land despite ANC promises to redistribute it to blacks. But the redistribution that has occurred — as in neighboring Zimbabwe — has largely resulted in failure, with redistributed farms often failing quickly while producing little to no food.
Despite the atrocious track record so far, extremists, including elements of the ANC-dominated government, are now hoping to expropriate land from white farmers more quickly, with some factions even arguing that it should be done with no compensation at all. And the communist agenda here, as in virtually everywhere else where forcible land redistribution has been adopted, has even broader goals than just enriching cronies.
“Whatever system of land tenure is adopted in South Africa, the communists — in the long run — have in mind to take away all private property. That should never be forgotten,” Stanton warned, noting that he has lived in communist-run countries before. “Every place you go where communists have taken over, they take away private ownership because private ownership gives people the power — the economic power — to oppose their government. Once you have taken that away, there is no basis on which you can have the economic power to oppose the government.”
Of course, this would not be the first time a similar tragedy has happened in southern Africa. When Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe seized power in Zimbabwe (formerly known as Rhodesia, once one of the richest countries on the continent — “the breadbasket of Africa”), he began a ruthless war against the white population and his political opponents of all colors.
The country promptly spiraled into chaos and mass starvation under the Mugabe regime when the tyrant “redistributed” the farms and wealth to his cronies, who of course knew nothing about farming. The regime butchered tens of thousands of victims, and estimates suggest that millions have died as a direct result of Mugabe’s Marxist policies. Many fled to South Africa.
Whites who refused to leave their property during the “redistribution” were often tortured and killed by the regime or its death squads. With Mugabe still in charge, the tragic plight of Zimbabwe continues to worsen today. But the mass-murdering despot is still held in high regard by many senior officials in the ANC.
“As a group, Afrikaner farmers stand in the way of the South African Communist Party’s goal to implement their Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist New Democratic Revolution and specifically the confiscation of all rural land belonging to White Afrikaner farmers,” Genocide Watch officials noted in their most recent report.
Beyond land, there is also the mining sector, which is crucial to keeping the rapidly deteriorating South African economy afloat. With the recent labor unrest and miner strikes focusing international attention on the “Rainbow Nation,” there are still more questions than answers. What has become clear, though, is that at least certain factions within South Africa’s ruling elite are seeking to exploit the crisis to advance the cause of nationalization.
Politicians and aspiring powerbrokers seized on the escalating crisis — multiple gold and platinum mines were idled because of the ongoing strikes — to whip up hysteria for political purposes, analysts said. In mid-September, over a thousand soldiers were deployed to support an embattled police force, as the ruling ANC regime and its communist partners sought to blame business for the tensions.
The ruling alliance consisting of the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the Conference of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) implausibly claimed after an inquiry that mining companies were to blame for the chaos: “It is therefore our considered view that employers have an interest in fanning this conflict to reverse the gains achieved by workers over a long period of time.”
According to the ruling alliance, the mining businesses were deliberately stirring up union rivalries to suppress wages and benefits. However, credible analysts largely rejected the allegations as preposterous; the firms in question have already lost huge amounts of money as many of their mines remained shut down because of the strikes. Stock prices plunged, too.
Meanwhile, multiple communist agitators within and outside the ANC renewed their calls to nationalize the mines. The move, however, was hardly a surprise. Consider that even before seizing power, state ownership of the sector was established ANC policy. “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable,” Nelson Mandela said in a 1990 statement from prison.
They are still at it today. Marxist agitator and former ANC Youth League boss Malema, famous for corruption, inciting genocide against white South Africans, and demanding that the regime nationalize virtually the entire economy, inserted himself at the center of the growing labor unrest. He called for, among other schemes, nationwide strikes and the nationalization of the whole mining industry.
After Malema was expelled from the ANC earlier this year, the suspiciously wealthy communist racist — he lives far beyond his means and was recently charged with corruption — has started to attack South African ANC President Zuma, a polygamist and fellow open communist who also regularly sings the infamous hate song calling for the extermination of whites. After strikers were killed by police last month, Malema, apparently upset that Zuma had not sunk South Africa into total communist tyranny quickly enough, said, “How can he call on people to mourn those he has killed? He must step down.”
Observers, even those within South Africa’s ruling alliance, however, suggested the unrest was actually being carefully orchestrated by power-hungry elements within the communist-backed ANC itself. Even top officials within the alliance are suspicious about what is going on. According to COSATU President Sdumo Dlamini, for example, Malema supporters within the ANC were hoping to plunge South Africa into deeper chaos to solidify their power. “We also understand that there have been certain individuals behind him who are funding this for their own political ambitions,” Dlamini said. “Julius Malema may be the point person running at the front, but we know that there are big guns behind him.” And big money, too.
Dlamini said COSATU was “very angry” that unsuspecting mine workers were being used as pawns by opportunists, sometimes even being killed in the process. “This is a systematic, orchestrated, long-time plan that is unfolding now,” he added. “The ANC as the ruling party shouldn’t be afraid to be bold, condemn and expose…. The ANC must continue to identify and deal with those who fund this chaos.”
Communists, of course, have historically been known to create the superficial impression of internal division to further their agenda while collaborating together behind the scenes — the use of strategic disinformation, as defectors have called it. Obviously, there are occasions when would-be communist despots fight among themselves as well. It remains unclear what, if anything, may be going on outside of the limelight between the ANC, the SACP, and other totalitarian forces working to crush individual liberty and all resistance within South Africa.
Other analysts attributed the expanding labor unrest to widely different causes, ranging from anger over the ANC regime’s lawless corruption to genuine grievances about dangerous working conditions and low pay at the mines. Tribal tensions have also been cited as playing a role, though just how significant is difficult to determine.
Numerous observers have attributed the violent tensions to rivalries between the ANC-linked National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which is the largest member of COSATU, and its increasingly influential rival known as the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). Some experts said the crackdown on protests was an effort to quash the AMCU before it further splintered workers’ support for the ruling ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance.
Critics have accused the AMCU, which touts itself as anti-communist and has long criticized the established powerbrokers for corruption, of fomenting the unrest. The South African Communist Party even called for AMCU leaders to be arrested after the incident, and among the ruling communist establishment, fears about the renegade union are reportedly growing.
The chaos has been ongoing since early this year, but it exploded and entered into the international headlines in August after dozens of striking miners were killed in what has since been dubbed the “Marikana massacre.” Police, who were reportedly fired upon by armed demonstrators, returned fire, killing more than 30 people.
Top government officials — many of whom have personal stakes in the situation including shares in the mining firms — have vowed to crack down on the strikes. Proud communist revolutionary Jeff Radebe, the “Justice Minister” in the ANC regime, said at a September 14 press conference that authorities were intervening because the mining industry is crucial to South Africa’s crumbling economy. “The South African government has noted and is deeply concerned by the amount of violence, threats and intimidation that is currently taking place in our country,” he told reporters, warning that anyone taking part in “illegal gatherings” would be “dealt with” very swiftly. “Our government will not tolerate these acts any further.”
Critics of the harsh response warned that raids and use of force against miners would likely contribute to further unrest. Perhaps that is the desired outcome, with anarchy helping to pave the way for police-state measures. While the crisis was growing, however, Marxist genocidal forces seized the opportunity to unleash an even larger bloodbath.
A newly formed U.S.-based group of human rights activists and South African exiles known as Friends 4 Humanity, founded to raise awareness about the genocide of the South African minority, told The New American at the time that the number of racist attacks and murders against Afrikaner farmers had surged dramatically amid the labor unrest. There were at least 30 documented attacks in the first two weeks of September — many resulting in multiple murders.
“Since the beginning of 2012 we have noticed that murders increased to approximately one every second day, with some victims as young as six months,” said Sonia Hruska, the former Mandela consultant who is also a founding member of the new organization. “However, since the start of the mining unrest it has now escalated to as much as at least one attack a day with multiple fatal victims.”
Impeding the Plan
The New American magazine warned readers almost two decades ago that the ANC leaders of the anti-apartheid movement and their foreign backers, despite the establishment media’s bogus claims, were deliberately plotting to condemn that nation to communism. The signs were all over the place — literally. For example, Nelson Mandela made a public appearance in front of a giant hammer and sickle with SACP chief Joe Slovo. Now, after almost 20 years of patient waiting, that conquest appears to be nearing its final phases as anti-communist whites are slaughtered to make way for a collectivist “utopia” ruled by the ANC and the SACP. Troublesome blacks were exterminated by the ANC and its allies before 1994.
Among South Africans and foreigners concerned about the ongoing problems and a looming calamity, however, there is a wide range of thoughts about what should happen.
Dr. Stanton of Genocide Watch promised the Afrikaners that he would visit the U.S. Embassy and bring the issue to the attention of world leaders. However, he also urged them not to give up their guns and to continue resisting the communist “ideology” espoused by so many of the political and party leaders that now dominate the nation’s coercive government apparatus.
So far, efforts to garner the attention of the “international community” appear to have been largely unproductive. The Dutch Parliament, though, narrowly defeated a recent bill calling for the government of the Netherlands to investigate and help combat racist violence directed at Afrikaners in South Africa by offering expertise and judiciary support while helping to preserve threatened basic rights, such as freedom of the press. Despite failing to pass, the effort was taken as a sign that world opinion may be changing, albeit slowly.
Activists are also calling on European governments and the United States to immediately begin accepting especially vulnerable white refugees from South Africa as a high priority. There are less than five million whites left in the country, about 10 percent of South Africans, down from almost a quarter of the population decades ago.
Analysts say that giving them asylum may prove tough politically — partly because it could expose the myths of Nelson Mandela and his communist ANC being “heroic” so-called freedom fighters.
Even if it were possible, millions of white South Africans would refuse to leave the land of their forefathers anyway, at least at this point, knowing that if they left, the Afrikaner culture and language may disappear forever. “Up to a million people have already emigrated, almost as many as left Lebanon during the civil war. However, mass emigration would mean the demise of our nation, together with our unique language, history, literature and culture,” Pro-Afrikaans Action Group (PRAAG) chief Dan Roodt told The New American. “You must also remember that to most of the Western countries, we represent unwanted immigrants, despite being educated, law-abiding and Christian. Despite being persecuted, very few actually get political asylum as the mass media still portray South Africa as a model democracy.”
Like a significant subset of the Afrikaner minority, Roodt wants his people to have their own autonomous homeland in Southern Africa, a proposal that the ANC regime rejects out of hand. “Many of us want to stay and fight and turn the tables on this anachronistic left-wing, racist regime,” explained the controversial Afrikaner advocate.
Other South Africans hope the international community will intervene to protect persecuted minority groups — either militarily if the downward spiral continues, or at least through sanctions and diplomatic pressure. More than a few sources who spoke to The New American said foreign action is a necessity: They view South Africa as a sort of “canary in the coal mine.” The Rainbow Nation might be the first to go, but Western civilization, they say, will not be far behind.
Unsurprisingly, the establishment press has barely reported a word about the looming potential catastrophe in South Africa. However, there is hope: Activists say that if Americans get involved, even just helping to raise awareness, a bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions may well be averted.
It will certainly not be easy to roll back the blood-red tide of communism and genocide in South Africa. The roots have been firmly planted, nurtured by Western governments and communist tyrants for decades. But for South Africans of all colors, and for humanity itself, activists insist that the battle must go on. It will.
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