In this episode, we talk to political activist and constitutional law scholar Ernst Rieser about the situation in South Africa and the persecution of white Afrikaners in the United States. We discuss the challenges faced by white farmers and white settler-colonialists.
00:06:12.660And then we have South Africa is a violent country in general,
00:06:15.080and we have a variety of problems when it comes to violent crime.
00:06:18.900One of these problems is a very particular and a very unique problem,
00:06:23.600which is the targeting of farmers through what we call farm attacks or farm murders.
00:06:28.980And it's not just farmers being attacked and killed,
00:06:31.060but being tortured and in the most grotesque ways you can imagine.
00:06:36.020But then on top of that, what we have is politicians, very influential politicians,
00:06:41.880openly chanting chants such as kill the boer, kill the farmer,
00:06:46.260talking about how minority communities have to be exterminated and so forth.
00:06:51.980And then we have the president defending them.
00:06:54.120We have the justice system defending them,
00:06:56.160with the court, for example, recently ruling that there's nothing wrong with chanting
00:07:00.440kill the boer, kill the farmer at a political rally.
00:07:04.040And then we can go further than that when we talk about persecution.
00:07:06.560We can give examples of, for example, the former president publicly saying that everything that
00:07:13.220is wrong with South Africa and that is wrong in South Africa should be blamed on white people,
00:07:18.220publicly saying that a democracy works like this.
00:07:21.180If you are part of the minority, you should have fewer rights than the majority.
00:07:25.960The current president going on to an international platform in New York City,
00:07:30.580saying that there are no farm killings in South Africa, there's no land grabs,
00:07:34.080and so forth. They're just blatantly lying. And then publicly talking about how property has to
00:07:39.000be confiscated from white people and given, as he says, to our people. So we have the president
00:07:45.200of the country using the term our people to refer to a very particular section of society. And these
00:07:50.880are just a few examples, if we can elaborate on the extent to which minorities are being targeted.
00:07:55.980Well, I've read a lot of stories about these farm killings.
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00:08:42.660The press in the United States, particularly right now, the Associated Press, when they ran a story
00:08:47.480saying what you need to know about these refugees, they said South Africa says there currently isn't
00:08:52.720a persecution of white people. And many of these outlets are saying that the farm killings are
00:08:59.920unrelated to land expropriation. So have there been any instances where white farmers were killed
00:09:06.880specifically because of their land? Or how does that work? What's going on there?
00:09:13.140So firstly, the farm killings, the problem with that is it happens so often, these attacks and
00:09:20.540the killing. So one way to measure it is if you, I actually wrote a book about this. It's called
00:09:26.300Kill the Boer. It's available on Amazon with more than a thousand source references. So it took me
00:09:31.520three years to really study this phenomenon. And one way to look at the numbers is to look at police,
00:09:37.920official police statistics. And over a period of two decades, that's about 20 years,
00:09:43.100according to the police data in South Africa, there were on average two farm attacks every day in South
00:09:50.220Africa, during which two people were murdered every week. And so that's, that's, that's the extent of
00:09:56.440the crisis. And now the thing is, as I said, it happens so often, that surely there would be cases that
00:10:03.520would be what some people describe as robbery gone wrong, someone goes into steal a television, and then
00:10:08.600they get caught by the farmers, they thought maybe the house was empty, there's a, there's an outburst,
00:10:14.360there's some form of a scuffle, and someone gets killed. And then the, these commentators are always
00:10:19.820very eager to point to such cases and say, well, this was robbery gone wrong. So there's no evidence
00:10:25.920of political motivation, when the fact is that there are many cases when there are, in fact, evidence of
00:10:32.440political motivation. During these attacks, we see this, for example, with farm attacks, where the
00:10:38.280attackers chant political slogans, while attacking their victims, while torturing them, in some cases,
00:10:45.620we've had the worst case, was an elderly couple, and not an elderly woman and her daughter, who was
00:10:52.960also an elderly lady. Both of them were, were severely tortured on a farm. And the attackers took the blood
00:10:59.740of the victims and wrote the slogan, kill the boer on the wall of the farmhouse with the blood of the
00:11:06.220victims. And so we have people literally writing kill the boer with the blood of the victims. And then we
00:11:12.820have politicians chanting kill the boer at political rallies. And then we have the constitutional court in
00:11:18.680South Africa saying, well, they don't see anything wrong with chanting kill the boer. So it's very, very
00:11:24.220alarming. We have attackers using the names of politicians during these attacks, saying, like,
00:11:29.820Julius Malema is the one guy who keeps chanting kill the boer, one of the many, at political rallies.
00:11:35.980And so we have had cases of the attackers chanting things like viva Malema, die white man as they attack
00:11:41.880farmers. And so for us, for someone like me, within the Afrikaner community, having grown up in an
00:11:49.040agricultural community, knowing many farmers, knowing people who have been murdered, knowing people who have
00:11:54.220attacked and who survive, to read these kind of reports that are published in places like America
00:11:59.500by the media, but also in South Africa, trying to pretend that this is a non-issue, people should
00:12:05.300not be focusing on this. It's really bizarre. And we live in the era of, you know, offensive Olympics.
00:12:11.140Everyone tries to be the most offended by, just imagine how offensive this is. If a member of your
00:12:17.100family, your father or your child or your mother or someone who's close to you was murdered during one of
00:12:22.000these attacks. And then you read in the New York Times, for example, that this is a non-issue.
00:12:27.440There's no political issue here. People should not be talking about this. What could be more offensive
00:12:32.320than that? And so I'm very grateful for the rise of alternative media and podcasts such as yourself
00:12:38.080that are shedding light on this very serious crisis.
00:12:42.880Have you considered seeking refugee status or fleeing the country?
00:12:46.660No. And this is a very important point that we have a very rich history, the Afrikaner people in
00:12:54.260this country. We arrived, the settlement, the first settlement that eventually led to the, what you could
00:13:00.660say, origins of the Afrikaner people was in 1652. My great, great, great, great grandfather, the first
00:13:08.420roots of whom I descend, who came to South Africa, lived about the same age as George Washington. He was older than
00:13:15.940George Washington. I believe he was about a teenager when George Washington was born.
00:13:21.780And so we've been in this country. You could say my personal family has been in this country since
00:13:26.820the founding of America. And we have a very rich history. We've had many existential crises because
00:13:32.820we're a small nation and small nations often face existential crises. And we face one now. And there are
00:13:39.140people who want to leave the country. And we believe if it's possible for them to go, it's good if they have the
00:13:44.340opportunity to go. But we need to find a solution for the communities in South Africa who have been here for
00:13:50.100hundreds of years and who want a sustainable future here in the southern tip of the African continent.
00:13:56.340I'm going to assume on this next question that I'm not nearly informed enough to have this opinion,
00:14:02.980just to be honest. But from what I've read and from what I know, again, being limited,
00:14:10.420it seems like crime began to skyrocket in South Africa after the end of apartheid. And not just crime,
00:14:17.060but very serious crimes like infant rape and things like that. And so, you know, my view of things is
00:14:23.460you had a problem, obviously, with apartheid. But the end of apartheid has resulted in just
00:14:29.780different kinds of problems with, now you're mentioning, is already race, you know, many,
00:14:34.580many different race-based laws in the books targeting different groups, targeting white
00:14:39.540people predominantly. It seems like the way that apartheid ended was probably the wrong way to go
00:14:45.540about it, though it wasn't a good system. Maybe I'm wrong. But just to put it simply,
00:14:52.180when I look at the history of the, you know, South Africa as a leading industrialized nation,
00:14:57.300and then you start to read about the explosion of crime after the end of apartheid, it seems like
00:15:01.940however it was dismantled just resulted in the problem being worse. You still have racial tensions,
00:15:07.140racial animosity. It's not gone away. Yeah, I'm very happy that you frame it as such. So there was a
00:15:13.780a press conference in the year 1990, just after the legislation such as the Suppression of Communism
00:15:22.500Act and so forth, which was in some ways the backbone of the apartheid system, was rescinded.
00:15:27.460And the ANC, of course, has always been a movement. The ANC is the ruling party in South Africa.
00:15:33.540They've always been a movement committed to the promotion of communism and socialism.
00:15:37.620And so as a result of this legislation being repealed, and the negotiations starting for a
00:15:45.380new South Africa, as they called it, the new South Africa, the president of South Africa at the time,
00:15:50.020F.W. de Klerk, was asked at a press conference, how will you know if you made the right decision?
00:15:55.140And he responded with, we will see what happens with the violence. If the violence increases,
00:15:59.940it would have been the wrong decision. If it decreases, it would have been the right decision.
00:16:04.420Now, I wholeheartedly agree with you that the apartheid system should have ended. And even though
00:16:11.540you would find a lot of people in South Africa referring to certain aspects of society having
00:16:16.100been better under the previous system, such as service delivery, fewer crime levels and so forth,
00:16:22.340almost everyone agrees that we should have gone past that, that that system didn't work,
00:16:26.420and we needed to move beyond that. But it is the case. What is very interesting, the ANC,
00:16:32.580the governing party in South Africa, has been committed to a violent revolution for some time,
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00:16:58.020Paramilitary movements back in the 1980s and so forth, in an organization called Mkantui Sizwe,
00:17:03.940which was the military wing of the ANC. And a little known fact is that this military movement,
00:17:10.580the military wing of the ANC that had an explicit policy of targeting farmers in the 1980s and 70s,
00:17:17.700they were, the legislation that declared them in a legal organization was repealed in 1990.
00:17:24.500And they were then, they came back because they were in exile all over Africa. They came back to South
00:17:28.420Africa in 1990. And that's when the farm murders started. You can trace it back to when did these
00:17:34.740attacks start. And it was, it started in 1990. And so, yes, the system should have ended, the previous
00:17:41.460system. But we have this bizarre false dichotomy in South Africa that you can either choose between
00:17:47.540one of two options. You can either have apartheid, or you can have what we have in South Africa at the
00:17:52.900moment, because people apparently don't have the political imagination to think of anything other
00:17:58.820than these two. And the truth of the matter is, we should have had a more decentralized system
00:18:03.620from the 1990s, but we didn't get that. And that's something that we need to pursue now.
00:18:08.660Man, it is very interesting to see the difference between how colonization ended up in South Africa
00:18:16.260versus, say, New Zealand, the United States. You know, my view largely right now is,
00:18:24.980the system of segregation that you guys had, there was already racial tension and racial animosity.
00:18:30.740It's not gone anywhere. But I view it largely as an emotional reaction. The system was bad. But having
00:18:40.260a large population of individuals with a high crime rate, low education rates, immediately just,
00:18:47.300you know, immediately ending apartheid resulted in now what we're seeing as higher crime rates.
00:18:52.580It's just, it's persistent. So it wasn't, it doesn't appear to have been an actual solution to the
00:18:57.300problem, which is now resulting in white Afrikaners applying for refugee status in the United States.
00:19:02.980Now, one of the things we've heard on CNN, a former Obama-Harris staffer, she is a black woman,
00:19:11.140and she said that these white Afrikaners should just go back to Germany or Holland.
00:19:16.900And it's a bit ironic considering, you know, I think it's a dangerous logical position she'd be
00:19:22.340taking considering many white nationalists in the United States would tell her as a black woman
00:19:26.820to go back to Africa. What do you think about that argument that the Boers, you know, just decolonize,
00:19:33.700go back home? Why can't they go to Germany or Holland?
00:19:37.540Well, firstly, that just smacks of ethnic cleansing. This idea that the solution to this
00:19:43.860territory is to get rid of a certain section of society, just get out of here. And so the term
00:19:50.260genocide has been used a few times with regard to South Africa. I don't think that that's the appropriate
00:19:56.180term to describe what is happening. And we should be cautious of using a very particular
00:20:02.100legal terminology that could get you entangled in a legal debate about what is the application
00:20:08.020of the definition and so forth. But I do think that we should, without necessarily saying that
00:20:14.020what is happening in South Africa is ethnic cleansing, it certainly is a threat to ethnic cleansing.
00:20:21.060And what I mean, and the difference, of course, genocide is just killing people and
00:20:24.340getting just murdering them in large numbers. Ethnic cleansing is a bit broader. It's killing
00:20:29.620people, but it's also targeting them through legislation. It's saying things like go back to
00:20:36.020Europe, go back to Holland or go back to the Netherlands, even though we've been here for centuries.
00:20:42.100We've been in Africa since before the Enlightenment. And now suddenly the solution is just to cleanse the
00:20:47.540country of our existence or of our presence. It's a really, really dangerous thing to say.
00:20:55.540And now if you consider things like calling on people to leave, pushing them out through racial
00:21:01.700discriminatory laws, murdering them, chanting songs about murdering them, publicly saying that they
00:21:07.620should have fewer rights, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how this is not ethnic cleansing.
00:21:12.820And it should be called out and we should take a stance against this. And our friends abroad in
00:21:20.340America and in Europe and in other countries should be much more outspoken against what is currently
00:21:24.820happening in South Africa. There was a similar phenomenon in other African nations, which I'm
00:21:30.180sure you're familiar with, where white farmers were chased out of the country. And it resulted in,
00:21:35.780let's just say, a short supply of food and then a celebration upon their return. Do you think there,
00:21:40.980is there a concern for South Africa that if these farmers keep getting killed and attacked this
00:21:45.540way, food production could be at risk?
00:21:46.980Oh, absolutely. So I grew up in the north of South Africa, in what is now called the Lompopo
00:21:52.740province in an agricultural community, very close to Zimbabwe. And as a child, that's the reason
00:22:00.740actually why I'm speaking with you right now. I became an activist because I grew up seeing the farm
00:22:06.500attacks happening around me as a child and seeing on the news what's happening just a few hundred
00:22:12.180kilometers away across the border in Zimbabwe. And just on my wall here, I have a framed $100 trillion
00:22:20.020note. It's a Zimbabwean dollar from, I think, 2003. And I believe it still is the world record of highest inflation ever. Just how that country, and it's really a tragedy what happened in Zimbabwe or Rhodesia, as it was called before then. Just how that country was completely destroyed
00:22:42.020completely destroyed by land reform by the Zimbabwean government in a very aggressive way, targeting the property belonging to commercial farmers for racial reasons, chasing them out of the countries, doing the things that politicians in South Africa are threatening with at the moment.
00:23:00.580And yes, we really do have some of the best farmers in the world. The commercial farmers in South Africa are extremely productive, are very good at farming. We export food. We're a significant foundation to the economy, even though the economy is very large and agriculture is a small part of the economy. A significant section of the South African economy is dependent on agriculture or linked to agriculture. And it's very sad and tragic and dangerous.
00:23:30.580To see just the extent to see just the extent to which these commercial farmers are being targeted, are being villainized. Politicians chanting about murdering them when they are murdered, the president pretends that it's not happening and so forth. So yes, we are concerned about that. I do think we're a bit better equipped than the people of Zimbabwe were, in the sense that we have a much more well organized civil society in South Africa, which they didn't have in Zimbabwe.
00:23:58.580And so I think we are, we have well organized communities who are armed, who are driving patrols in their own communities who can defend themselves.
00:24:06.580And I think, I'm not so convinced that a Zimbabwe type scenario would play out in South Africa, although that's possible. I am concerned that we will just have continued deterioration over time, up to the point where South Africa becomes a next Zimbabwe, but without having had the very significant crash that Zimbabwe had in the early 2000s.
00:24:27.580I've heard that many people have big fences around their properties. They hire private security on call for the crime. And I've also heard that in some houses, people actually have gates guarding certain rooms in case someone breaks in. Is that true?
00:24:43.580Yeah, that's absolutely the case. So where I live, I live in a, in a, what we call a security estate or a security complex. It's, it's very difficult to get in.
00:24:53.380Um, and a lot of people aren't able to do that, uh, who, and, and so it's, it's...
00:24:59.380It's common. Uh, it's, it's standard for houses to have big walls around them with electric fences on top of the walls. And then, uh, some form of a, you know, beams and alarm system in the garden, the front.
00:25:29.360lawn. So that if you walk, uh, in the garden, there's an alarm that is triggered that immediately connects to an armed response. And then on top of that, having, uh, these, uh, uh, security gates at the front door.
00:25:43.360And between rooms. So you often find you'll come to, especially in farms, like in every farm, you will say, you will see the security gates, for example, between the kitchen and the hallway that leads up to the, to the sleeping areas where people sleep.
00:25:57.160And then they would, they would put on the electric fence at night. They would put on the alarm that activates when someone somehow passes the electric fence that is on top of a wall.
00:26:05.400They would lock the front gate and then they would lock the gates inside the house. It's, it's, it's a very common thing to see in South Africa.
00:26:11.800You know, I, I, I had met a couple that was from South Africa about, uh, seven years ago and they were in South Korea and they told me crime.
00:26:21.500What, what they said was crime's really not that bad. People think it's really, really bad, but I've only been carjacked, I think five times.
00:26:31.100And, you know, as, as someone who grew up in Chicago on the South side where crime is pretty bad, I was like, I've never been carjacked and I'm from like a really bad neighborhood.
00:26:39.280I wonder if, you know, the South Africans, uh, have just largely adapted to the expectation of crime. It seems normal.
00:26:48.180Yes, you're absolutely right. It, it has to a large extent become normalized. It's very, very difficult to find someone in South Africa that wasn't the victim of some form of violent crime, like being mugged, being, uh, carjacked or, or something like that.
00:27:06.360Um, I personally, um, with my kids a few, two years ago, I was in, my entire family was in an armed robbery in a restaurant. We were, it was my son's birthday.
00:27:15.640We went out to have ice cream. And as we were got up to pay, there was armed robbers starting to shoot people in the restaurant and, um, we had to duck, dive beyond, um, below the tables, um, next to a dead body.
00:27:29.580Um, that, I mean, that's, and, and there are people who have had, um, much worse experiences and there are people who have not had that bad experience, um, in South Africa, but we have become,
00:27:41.080um, it has become normalized. We do have, you could say islands of, of safety, like the security estates.
00:27:49.140There are certain neighborhoods that are quite safe, very comparable to, to European cities. Um, I live in Pretoria, the capital city.
00:27:56.840I mean, I drive around every day, but you do know that there are certain areas that you have to avoid. There are certain streets that you have to avoid, and you don't want to be driving around, around at night, especially in some areas where you would be almost guaranteed to be a victim of crime.
00:28:10.600But broadly speaking, it's certainly a problem.
00:28:13.080Well, my, my, my last question for you is, uh, what can people in the United States do? A different country.
00:28:18.720Yeah. I'm happy that you asked that. So, uh, we, we, we have just started this new initiative. I mean, I've been involved in, in, in this for, for decades, but we're starting a new initiative now that we are calling the pioneer initiative.
00:28:31.200It's sort of a preliminary organization that will take on a more final form in the coming days. Um, and I really want to encourage people watching this if they, if they support the idea that South Africa needs systemic reform to, to support the pioneer.
00:28:48.700And so what we mean when we say systemic reform is the problems that we experience in South Africa today are not simply a result of the fact that the wrong person is the president of the country or the wrong party won the election.
00:29:02.380It's because, and because of underlying systemic problems with the political system that is detached from reality.
00:29:08.580So we need a political system that is more realistic, that is more in tune with reality.
00:29:13.480And the reality in South Africa is that it's a very diverse country with a variety of communities that see things differently in many ways.
00:29:20.860And it's not necessarily because one is right and one is wrong, but because of different cultures, different languages, traditions, and so forth.
00:29:27.380And so what South Africa needs is a decentralized political system with higher levels of self-governance for the different communities living in South Africa,
00:29:35.200as opposed to this very strong, uh, centralized socialist government.
00:29:39.840And that's what we, what we're going to promote, what we are promoting with the pioneer initiative.
00:29:43.760And, and if people want to support that, we would, we would really welcome that.
00:29:47.620Right on. Ernst, where can people find you?
00:29:49.880So we're on social media, all the big platforms are under my name, Ernst Rutz.
00:29:53.960Um, um, um, but then also the pioneer initiative is easy to find.
00:29:58.400I'm sure if people just Google pioneer initiative, they'll find it.
00:30:01.780But other than that, if they want to go to the URL directly, it's pioneer initiative.org.za.
00:30:08.020ZA is the abbreviation for, for South Africa.
00:30:11.120Right on. Well, thank you so much for the insight.
00:30:12.560Thanks for hanging out and, uh, letting us know what was going on.
00:30:14.860Thank you very much. Also for speaking about this. I appreciate it.
00:30:17.600Yeah, absolutely. Take care. Thank you.