TOM EATON | Roets and Lamola trade barbs over apartheid analogies - TimesLIVE

This week it was reported that a family of four South African “refugees” has been barred from returning to the US after they suffered a health scare and decided to fly back to this country to make use of our excellent and affordable medical system.

The news was met with astonishment, some jokes and a fair bit of anger, but I present it here without comment or spin, partly because it speaks so eloquently for itself, and partly because we’re about to hear so much more about the so-called refugees and their imaginary persecution by the state that I feel it’s important to cling to the bigger picture.

Not that the bigger picture is much more sensible, mind you, as we saw this week from former AfriForum deputy Ernst Roets and justice minister Ronald Lamola.

Speaking in Washington at the weekend, Lamola decried the refugee programme as ‘Apartheid 2.0’, pointing out that the only people being allowed into the US as refugees are white Afrikaners and that this constituted legislated racism.

Roets was having none of it, perhaps worrying that referring to Apartheid 2.0 might get people remembering Apartheid 1.0 and undermine his victimhood hustle, and he hastily hopped onto X to declare that “South Africa is currently an apartheid state”.

Of course, both men are wrong. Trump’s policy might be racist, but if anything it is less Apartheid 2.0 than simply the latest iteration of American legislative racism that pre-dates not only the apartheid regime but the Union of South Africa, too. We don’t need to describe as apartheid something that is as American as motherhood, apple pie, scientific racism, Jim Crow, and only abandoning slavery at the point of a Yankee bayonet.

As for Roets, well, one must hold lightly the words of man whose income depends on making dramatic claims. Even so, to describe this country as currently being “an apartheid state” required an almost Trumpian contempt for facts and the intelligence of his audience.

After all, Roets can own property or live wherever he wants inside this country. He can have sex or marry anyone who agrees to do either with him, regardless of their race or sex. He can criticise the government in the strongest terms and not be banned, or detained without trial for 90 days, or worse. He does not have to carry a pass book.

To be fair, though, that’s not really what he meant. What he meant was that the state was complicit in attacking farmers and — wait, is that right? Because that doesn’t sound like apartheid at all. Let me just check my notes … Yes, that’s exactly what Roets told Tucker Carlson on Fox News in 2018 — that Roets’ new book was “about government complicity in the scourge of farm attacks and farm murders that we’ve seen in South Africa”. Weird.

Anyway. The point is there’s been more heat than light, and it’s all going to get substantially hotter on Friday as Roets and the New York Young Republicans Club plant 3,000 white crosses in the grass of the National Mall in Washington DC, each cross representing someone murdered in an attack on a farm since 1990.

Roets has been criticised for what seems like highly selective activism, his 3,000 crosses apparently wilfully ignoring the fact that black urban South Africans bear the overwhelming brunt of violent crime.

But while erecting 700,000 crosses representing all murders since 1990 might make a far more honest statement about the violence in our society, it wouldn’t play to the people for whose benefit this is being staged: white nationalist Republicans, desperately worried about the looming midterms.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Trump is one of the worried ones. He has, after all, achieved his goal of using the presidency to become a multibillionaire, and there is some whispered speculation that he might resign before the end of his term so that he can secure pardons for him and his inner circle from President JD Vance.

Many of his junior colleagues, however, still want long and lucrative careers. And as they face a November drubbing, whether because they continue to protect paedophiles or wage a war on behalf of Israel that is bankrupting US farmers, many will be grateful for the Ernst Roets White Fright circus rolling into town, with its enormous, striking installation and carefully hedged accounts of black socialists oppressing white Christians. Context-free horror stories from far away, reminding the base what the endgame looks like if it ever leaves the laager and thinks about voting blue …