This corona virus pandemic of hysteria spans the globe, but since I’m American I want to examine the phenomenon in my own country, this phenomenon that Dr. William Pierce called “the lemming factor” in human affairs – the overpowering compulsion to look around and then think and act the way most other people are thinking and acting. I’ll cite three examples in my own lifetime that I was witness to.
Let’s start off with an amusing one. On the evening of February 9, 1964, a Sunday, my parents took me, my brother and two sisters to my Uncle Pete’s home for dinner. I looked forward to it because my aunt was a good cook and I liked hanging out with my cousins. After dinner, as the adults went on chatting at the table, we kids crowded around the television set to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. Unbeknownst to me, this was The Beatles’ first visit to America. As they began the first of three songs they performed that night, the whole place was filled with the screams and shrieks of young women in the audience. I thought to myself, “What the heck is going on here? This is absolutely insane!” I had never seen human beings act like this before. I’m sure most American teenagers knew of the Beatles and knew they would be on TV that night, but I was only ten and I’d never heard of them. The very next day and in the days that followed, all the girls in my fifth grade class had picked John, Paul, George or Ringo as their personal heartthrob, and wrote their names on pieces of paper or in their notebooks, adorning them with little hearts or other cute drawings. The Beatles were all the rage back then. Wherever they went, in England or America, they were followed by mobs of crazed young females who had to be held back with great effort by policemen. I remember one iconic photograph of a woman in San Francisco, about 20, tears streaming down her face, clutching a few blades of grass that Ringo had just stepped on. It was just crazy.
Two years after The Beatles’ American debut, in junior high school with a much larger student body, most of the boys wore the same boots the “Fab Four” had made stylish, either black leather or black suede. I wanted a pair myself, this being the one time I remember following the crowd rather than heading in the opposite direction. But my mother, who was not the kind to spoil us by buying everything we asked for, said no and that was the end of it. So I missed out on being cool at age twelve. Not to be outdone by the boys, most of the girls started wearing white boots right after Nancy Sinatra came out with her hit song “These Boots are Made for Walking” in 1966. One other fad stays in my mind from my junior high days: kids walking the halls slurping gigantic lollipops. Each slurper had seen other slurpers, it kept catching on, and before you knew it a hundred kids were running to the candy store in town to buy their own lollipop the diameter of a salad plate to show everyone else that they were “with it.” What I’ve just written about was as senseless as it was harmless, but looking back, it was an unforgettable lesson in human behavior.
Now let’s turn to a more serious episode: President Richard Nixon’s cover-up of the attempted burglary on June 17, 1972 of the Democratic National Committee’s office at the Watergate hotel complex, which led to his resignation on August 9, 1974, and which has gone down in lore as the greatest scandal in the history of the presidency. I was 15 when Nixon became president, and not quite 21 when he resigned, so I remember that time well. I was ignorant and had no interest in politics back then. I never had any strong feelings about Nixon when he was president, and I still don’t, even though I’ve learned a great deal over the years. Richard Nixon was basically a nothing, a mediocre, ambitious little man, an average politician who exemplified the bankruptcy of conservatism, much like Ronald Reagan after him, and whose nickname “Tricky Dicky” was not undeserved. He was also a war criminal, though it must be said that the Vietnam War was dropped in his lap by a much worse war criminal, the beast Lyndon Johnson, his predecessor in the White House. Also, it was less Nixon and more the sinister Henry Kissinger who directed the relentless bombing of Cambodia and North Vietnamese civilians.
The basic facts of the Watergate affair are widely known. A handful of Republican Party cohorts, acting on their own, tried to the break into the DNC office to steal information. They failed. Nothing was taken and nobody was hurt. Nixon knew nothing about it at the time, and when he learned about it, he became angry but tried to cover it up. He thought it was petty nonsense and that it would quickly go away. It was petty nonsense but it did not go away. I bring up Watergate only because, after the corona virus hullabaloo, no other event in my life was characterized by such a total saturation of the airwaves and newspaper and magazine pages. On the scale of twentieth century presidential crimes, it was about as serious as jaywalking. If ever there was such a thing as making a mountain out of a molehill, this was it. But for various vindictive reasons, nearly the entire press corps hated Nixon’s guts and they went for his throat. It was well over a year that, on a daily basis, and I do mean day after day after day, the newshounds were coming out with yet another scare story, reacting to every little thing Nixon said or did, as if he was going to declare martial law and throw all his enemies and critics into concentration camps. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but not by much. And of course then they had the endless congressional hearings, with all the elected whores playing it up in front of the TV cameras. I reached the point where I couldn’t take any more of it. I thought, “Leave the guy alone, for Chrissake. What did he do that was so terrible?” But they never left him alone. And all the suckers and Nixon haters fed off it. For most of the year before Nixon stepped down, I was attending college and you can imagine what the attitude was like among all the trendy students and faculty in that leftist morgue. Actually, there’s a parallel with the two years of harassment of Donald Trump over the ridiculous allegations that he had colluded with the Russians to swing the 2016 election (not that I had any sympathy for Trump). But there are differences as well. Trump’s impeachment trial was strictly political theater, and any fool could have seen that nothing would come of it. And even though the journalistic rank and vile despised Trump, the big boys in the shadows, some of them anyway, wanted Trump to stay in office. But all the media masters, every last one of them, wanted Nixon’s neck – and they got it. I must say, after seeing him undergo the humiliation of being the first and still the only U.S. president ever to resign, and listening to his resignation speech, I felt sorry for the guy, and although most of the country could not let go of their hostility, many felt as I did, especially after seeing a photograph of Nixon and his daughter Julie embracing, after he told her he had decided to leave office. The photo touched an emotion everyone can relate to – a young woman comforting her father in the saddest and loneliest moment of his life. And there was no denying that Nixon was a devoted family man – always close to his wife and two daughters. Also, I was relieved a month later when his successor, Vice President Gerald Ford, another nothing, granted him a full pardon, thus sparing him a possible prison sentence, which was the fate of several who were swept up in the Watergate probe. But even this angered many of Nixon’s rabid detractors, who took to their microphones and editorial pages to criticize Ford’s humane gesture. I don’t remember who it was, but some stand-up TV comedian declared, “President Ford said Nixon has gone through enough suffering. I say he hasn’t suffered enough.” The audience cheered. But soon enough, everyone forgot about Richard Nixon, and he faded into obscurity, only to re-emerge on TV in later years and try to reinvent himself as a wise, elder statesman full of insights. I saw him being interviewed once, saying all the politically correct things to please his former tormentors. Such a sad piece of flotsam. But I never thought of him as evil. In fact, after 28 years of Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barry Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden, he’s starting to look like George Washington.
Recently I read a book titled Abuse of Power, “edited with an introduction and commentary by Stanley I. Kutler.” The book consists of more than 600 pages of transcripts of the legendary White House tapes Nixon made of his phone conversations and discussions with aides and friends – not the few tapes released in April 1974 but the many that Nixon resisted turning over right up to his death in 1994, fearing they would tarnish his historical image. Kutler was able to procure them from the Nixon Estate in 1996, after years of legal wrangling. The transcripts are interesting. They reveal how presidents and their confidants really talk among themselves, as opposed to their polished deliveries at televised news conferences. It’s all very human, and the tapes exposed Nixon as a rather shabby fellow who had occasional fits of potty mouth, and was not above considering mean tactics like siccing the IRS on those who were out to get him, or bugging their offices, as in fact other presidents had done. But they also reveal a good side to a man who really did care about his country, who was loyal to his friends, and was livid that some of them who had done nothing wrong were being dragged by the media into the Watergate mess. Most of all, it revealed a president who was overwhelmed and exasperated at the raging injustice of the whole thing, and who stood helpless as the media continued to tighten the noose. There were no shocking conversations. There was no talk of framing innocent people, much less harming or killing anyone. Kutler lists a heap of credentials as a university professor, author, history encyclopedia editor, and advisor for a BBC documentary on Watergate – a real Establishment type. He obviously didn’t like Nixon because he’s obviously Jewish and Nixon had made some nasty remarks about Jews (“You can’t trust the bastards”) recorded on tape, even though realpolitik compelled him to appoint some Jews to administrative posts, Kissinger being the most important. On the inside of the book’s dust cover we read that “….in July 1973, Nixon’s White House and its recordings quickly became the most infamous in American history,” and “….never has an American President offered such a revealing record of his darkest self.” Get the hell out of here, Kutler. For starters, what about former Arkansas governor and serial rapist Bill Clinton’s cover-up, with the help of the media, of the 1993 Waco slaughter, in which 76 innocent men, women and children were burned alive? What about Franklin Roosevelt’s tireless behind the scenes plotting to get America into World War Two, even while assuring everyone that he wanted peace, or his and Churchill’s secret agreement with history’s greatest mass murderer, Joseph Stalin, at the Yalta Conference of 1945, which laid the groundwork for all eastern Europe succumbing to the slavery of Soviet communism? Did that make it into your four-volume Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American History? I doubt it. Now let’s leave this sorry subject behind and turn to one that’s even more sorry.
* * *
My third example of mass insanity, hysteria, stupidity and conformity – and here we can add an element of terror – is South Africa, and specifically, one man who is a giant of our times – oh, what a giant: Nelson Mandela. The worldwide hostility against South Africa revved up in 1948, with a change of government that saw the Dutch-descended Afrikaaners, or Boers, take over from the previous British-dominated administration. The demographic situation in South Africa has long been very complex, so I’ll try to break it down, taking note that things have changed in recent years, and these numbers might be inaccurate. The white sector, comprising about 14%, is largely either of British or Dutch ancestry, and on the whole they don’t like each other and live apart, the grievances of the latter going back to the Boer War of 1899-1902, during which many of their ancestors were victims of British atrocities. The Boers are more the rural, religious folk, the Brits more the city dwellers. It’s analogous to our own situation, though less so now than when I was young, of southern white rednecks scorned by rootless, cosmopolitan northern whites. Among the more urban whites is a small but influential Jewish community, as everywhere else involved in finance, big business, the news and entertainment media, and subversion. Then, depending on how you define “major,” there are five major black tribes, plus smaller tribes, the largest being the Zulus, followed by the Xhosas, Mandela’s tribe. While some urban blacks have been detribalized, as everywhere else in black Africa tribal identity is paramount, political parties are organized on tribal lines, and there is plenty of tribal antagonism, these hatreds going back to the beginning of time and having exploded often enough into full-scale massacres. So even though blacks comprise about 75% of the total population, it’s pure deception to speak of a black majority, which implies a racial unity that does not exist. On top of this, those of various mixed races, called Coloureds, make up about 8%, and there’s a smaller community of Asian Indians, largely merchants. That’s a rough picture of the composition of South Africa as it stood in the 1950s, when the National Party went ahead with the system called apartheid, and I believe it was about the same in 1988, when I spent five weeks there with my ex-wife seeing much of the country by car.
If you were old enough in the 1980s, you surely remember the endless, wrenching television news coverage of what was supposedly taking place in South Africa, of images that convinced viewers that the country was going up in racial flames, of international outcries and demonstrations against the unspeakable horrors of apartheid, of demands that the so-called political prisoner Nelson Mandela be released, of the illegal protests by trendy politicians and celebrities outside the South African embassy in Washington, getting themselves arrested as the TV cameras rolled, knowing damn well they wouldn’t spend a minute in jail, of everything else imaginable that would make you believe that South Africa’s “white minority government” was the dirtiest stain on the planet. Go to the New York Times index, found in many public libraries, and have a look at the incredible volume of news stories for any year in the 1980s. Actually, the venom started much earlier than that. I have a book published in 1955, Inside Africa, written by a Chicago-based journalist named John Gunther, who spent a year traveling around much of the continent. Chapter 24 is about South Africa. In the opening paragraph, he tells us of the then prime minister, Johannes Strijdom, who had succeeded the first P.M., Daniel Malan, describing him as “even more of a fanatic than Malan, colder, bolder, younger, and more passionately inflexible.”
Then in the second paragraph he writes: “South Africans are not Nazis, but the Strijdom government is grounded in part at least on three of the most unpleasant of human characteristics – fear, bigotry, and intolerance. It is based without qualification on the principle of unmitigated white supremacy (i.e., suppression of four-fifths of the people of the country) and it is in some respects the ugliest government I have ever encountered in the free world.” And then, three pages further on: “No dilemma is more cruel than that faced by the Union of South Africa. The situation is one of the most tragic, difficult, and dangerous in the world, and the problems involved appear to be insoluble….South Africa is not only a country gripped by crisis, but one tormented by the most paralyzing kind of fear.”
Poor, hallucinating, wishful thinking liberal idiots. And let me tell you, the “conservative” mindset these days isn’t much better.
Prior to my visit to South Africa – we spent another month traveling around Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe on the same trip – I had traveled at ground level through twelve countries south of the Sahara, including the Congo, one of the world’s most dangerous countries. I had read about 40 books on all aspects of the Dark Continent, some of them racially oriented, and I had read hundreds of articles, mainly from periodicals I subscribed to along with other “hate” literature – literature hated by people who hate truth. I knew Africa. Therefore I knew, before we arrived in South Africa (we had to fly on Lufthansa from New York to Frankfurt, then take a connecting flight to Johannesburg, because South African Airways was barred from the U.S.), that the country would be peaceful, and that it would be nothing at all like what was constantly jumping out of newspaper pages and exploding on the TV screen, Few viewers had any inkling that these scenes were nothing more than occasional disturbances in black townships where whites seldom go, such as have taken place in America countless times. I even read that some of this footage was ten years old, but was being presented as a current event. This kind of trick is typical of the vile media.
Of course, wherever there are lots of Negroes, it pays to be on guard at all times, but we had no problems. At the same time, I sensed we were moving in an historical vacuum, an eerie “calm before the storm” atmosphere. Mandela was still in prison and whites were still in charge, but President P. W. Botha had begun to buckle under outside pressure and implement reforms to appease what is called “world opinion,” yet nobody seemed to know where these reforms would lead. I didn’t see a single foreign tourist in the country. The TV scenes of chaos in the streets were enough to scare off visitors, and of course it was oh so righteous to boycott a country run by white racists – even though this hurt ordinary blacks more than anyone else, and for this reason we were told to keep a low profile as Americans. These awful whites even deprived the black majority of the most basic of political rights, the right to vote. We should never forget how fortunate we are to have that right – the right to vote for Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum every four years. It’s such a sacred right, in fact, that nearly half of all eligible American voters, disgusted with everything, never exercise it.
It’s true, of course, that South African society was structured on race, with whites clearly having the upper hand. It’s also true that the black man in Africa – where from time immemorial the rule of the tribal or village chief was absolute – never had any idea what voting or any other political activity was until it was pumped into his head by skilled agitators. As I said, I know Africa. I’ve seen the dire poverty, the filth, the sick and hungry, the instability, and the lack of infrastructure. If you’re an African native, and you have a job, three square meals a day, clean running water, electricity, a roof over your head, access to advanced medical care, and law and order, you’re living like a king – and South Africa’s black population under white rule had all these things and knew they were lucky to have them. Under white rule, a hundred million black Africans from all over the continent would have moved there in a heartbeat if it were possible. In fact, the white South African government installed a lethal electric fence along the border with Mozambique in 1975 to prevent blacks from streaming into the horrible land of apartheid when, after ten years of sporadic civil war, that country was “liberated” from its old colonial power Portugal, and all hell broke loose.
Before leaving home, I had read that 90% of the black population was content with the apartheid system, and either politically indifferent or strongly in favor of it. I had about a dozen “political chats” with South African whites, half with Boers and half with Brits. Generally speaking, they really did have different attitudes. The Boers agreed with the figure of 90%, adding that they, the blacks, had no interest in Nelson Mandela and couldn’t have cared less if he spent the rest of his life in prison. This didn’t surprise me. There was really only one thing that surprised me during my trip, or I should say it stunned me – and that was hearing the Brits I spoke with, brainwashed as they were by their own treasonous press, which had always been tolerated by the government – saying things like the blacks in their country had long been mistreated, and that the time had come to share political power with them. They talked just like liberal morons back home, even though they lived in the world’s most primordial continent where at every animal level, including the human one, the strong and clever live and the weak and stupid die. They seemed oblivious to the collapse of civilization in neighboring Mozambique and nearby Angola, soon after the Portuguese cut loose their two former colonies. Just over the border, their British-descended kinfolk were being dispossessed and murdered piecemeal by supporters of black racist hatchetman Robert Mugabe, who typically started out with lots of sweet talk about racial reconciliation. They had to be totally unaware of the Mau Mau terror in Kenya in the 1950s, and the explosion of savagery in the Congo in July 1960, within days of independence from Belgium, which saw tens of thousands of panic-stricken whites fleeing in all directions, during which Sabena, the Belgian national airline, canceled all scheduled flights and diverted its entire fleet to the Congo to help evacuate them.
Nelson Mandela, the most famous prisoner of all time thanks to a decade of global media screeching, was set free by President F. W. DeKlerk on February 11, 1990, after being locked up for 26 years. Who was Nelson Mandela? He was a communist revolutionary who had been sentenced to life in prison in 1964 not for fighting against racial injustice, real or imagined, but for planning to blow up a white police station, which would have caused great loss of life. He was charged with sabotage, which carried the death penalty, and found guilty. There was no question of his guilt. In an impassioned address to the court at the end of his trial, not only did he admit to the plot, but with apparent sincerity he defended it as an act for the greater good of the country. While on the one hand I can admire someone, even a communist, who risks his life for a cause he believes in, on the other hand the only sensible way to deal with hardcore communists is to kill them before they start killing people by the thousands or millions. Che Guevera, so romanticized in posters and t-shirts, was one commie who in 1967 in Bolivia got what he deserved. Mandela certainly deserved to hang, and many observers at the time thought that he would, and expressed surprise that the presiding judge at the Rivonia Trial, Quantus deWet, gave him life instead. We now know that was a huge mistake.
Soon after his release Mandela was touring the world. On June 20, 1990 he landed in New York, accompanied by his wife Winnie. To say he was given a tumultuous welcome would be the understatement of the year. You would’ve thought it was the second coming of Christ. One of the local tabloid rags – I think it was the Daily News, which caters to the barely literate around here – screamed CRY FREEDOM! in enormous block headlines. Saint Nelson was given a ticker tape parade down Broadway to the deafening cheers of hundreds of thousands crushed on the sidewalks, hoping to get a glimpse of The Divine One. New York’s black deputy mayor Bill Lynch, who planned the event, wept with joy. Twenty-four motorcycle cops rode alongside the 40-car motorcade, basking in the jubilation, not having a clue that Mandela had conspired to murder their colleagues 8000 miles away. A street near the UN building was renamed Nelson and Winnie Mandela Way. The next day, to show New York what a regular guy he was, during a celebration at a packed Yankee Stadium, Mandela, wearing a Yankee cap and jacket, announced, “You now know who I am. I am a Yankee!” The place went wild.
Actually, the media mind-benders knew for a long time what both Nelson and Winnie Mandela were all about, but they kept it secret. Winnie was a real piece of work – behind her facade a truly bloodthirsty she-wolf who years earlier American presstitutes had dubbed “The Mother of the Nation.” In 1986 she had told a black mob in Johannesburg, “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we will liberate this country.” What’s a necklace, you ask? A necklace is a gasoline-soaked automobile tire placed over the head of an unfortunate victim after the hands have been tied behind the back, then set aflame. It was used on about 500 blacks thought to be collaborating with the white government. In 1985, in the township of Duduza, a Dutch camera crew filmed the necklacing of a young woman named Maki Skosana, wrongly suspected of being a police informant. It was on You Tube for years but was taken down, as part of that corporation’s censorship crusade that kicked into high gear in 2019, but it can still be found on some sites. I saw it. It’s pretty horrible. As the woman burns and writhes in agony on the ground, black savages, including women, take turns kicking and stomping on her and pelting her with rocks. A shout of “Viva Mandela!” is heard. That’s African reality for you, and potential Afro-American reality, a preview of which we saw in the George Floyd riots. It’s the same genes. I’ll bet that Nelson approved of such necklacings, though he never said so publicly. Winnie was so out of control with her mouth, her infidelity, and getting mixed up with kidnapping, murder and financial crimes, that Nelson later divorced her. Yes, Winnie Mandela was the mother of the nation. And we’re in the midst of a global viral pandemic.
Well, after the global wave of adulation subsided a bit, and after Mandela picked up his hilarious Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, which he shared with the traitor DeKlerk, he got down to the business of running a country, and it wasn’t long before he bared his Marxist yellow fangs. I won’t bother filling in all the details. Any sane person with a knowledge of Africa knew what was going to happen. Actually, it started happening shortly before Mandela took office in 1994, with running gun battles between his Marxist and Xhosa-dominated African National Congress and the Zulus’ Inkatha Freedom Party. Since then, the news media silence about what has been happening in South Africa under black rule has been as deafening as the endless artificial ruckus they bellowed to the world under white rule. (If you have an hour to spare, and think I’m exaggerating about how our news is censored, watch the documentary film killingfieldsmovie.com.) When they mention the descent into chaos at all, they blame it on “the legacy of apartheid.” Of course. And when the Negroes burned down the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, and much of Detroit in 1967, and rioted in more than a hundred American cities in the late sixties – check it out on You Tube before they yank it – that must’ve been the legacy of slavery. You’ll only find the truth about current conditions in South Africa on the internet, and it’s not always easy to sift fact from understatement from exaggeration. Two things seem certain. South Africa is now a very dangerous country – a world leader in every category of violent crime: rape, murder, armed robbery and carjacking. The situation in the outlying farm districts is dire, a literal war zone. Some 4000 white farmers and family members have been murdered, many hideously tortured to death, by black gangs fueled by the raw racial hatred spewed by Mandela’s successors. Under white rule, violent black on white crime was almost unheard of, and when it did happen, upon conviction in a court of law, the culprit soon found himself at the end of a rope. Today the black police look the other way. In much of the rest of the country there seems to be daily tension and plenty of street crime, but life goes on in a semi-civilized state with whites now second-class citizens and they, along with millions of ordinary blacks, pining for the good old days of apartheid. DeKlerk’s wife, by the way, whom he left for another woman, was murdered in her secured residence in 2001. Now that there’s so much peace and love in the rainbow nation ushered in by the godlike Mandela, as the media myth goes, around 15 million tourists a year, the same type who avoided the country like the plague during the apartheid era, visit the country. They didn’t go when it was safe, but they go now when it’s dangerous. We truly live in a world gone mad. From what I can gather, group tours are fairly safe, both because there’s safety in numbers and tour guides know where to go and not to go. But independent travel is another matter. Crime victims have told their stories on the popular Trip Advisor forum, and others mention precautions to take, always skating around the essential issue of primitive Negro behavior. I like to hear about things firsthand, and I did a few years ago when I ran into an American couple in the quaint city of Sheki in Azerbaijan, seasoned travelers with whom I had a pleasant outdoor dinner at a local restaurant. They had recently returned from a trip to South Africa which they did not enjoy. There was a heavy feeling everywhere they went, they said, and they were always on alert. In several places, they told me, a sign reading “High Crime Area” was posted – something I have never seen anywhere in the world. Nothing bad happened to them, but they were happy to get to the airport safely at the end of their trip and would never go back.
* * *
In the 1980s, I wrote a few travel pieces for the racist magazine Instauration, edited by the late Wilmot Robertson, who gave me the address in South Africa of another contributor, Anthony Jacob, who wrote a regular column for the magazine – “Report from the White Tip” I think it was called. I wrote to him before leaving home, and he invited me to drop in at his apartment in Cape Town. He also was the author of a very well-written, very caustic, and very prophetic book entitled White Man, Think Again!, published in 1965, an era when one African country after another was achieving independence from the colonial powers, mainly France and Great Britain. The book was a political tour of the countries in the southern half of the continent, many of which Jacob, of English birth, had visited, having also lived in various parts of Europe and served in the British army in Burma and India during World War Two. Tony struck me as a lonely, bitter old man, demoralized by the blindness and stupidity of so many South African whites, whom he said had “heads made out of newspaper.” He had no use for the black man, and he made no bones about it, neither in his book nor in our conversation. I had met other white men who lived without family in Africa a long time and felt the same way, but I never did. I found the great majority of African natives, especially in the rural areas, to be well-disposed towards whites, and I still have an affection for them. Never having been agitated by violent rap music, or the subversive influence of television and newspapers, or race-hustling scum like Al Sharpton, or taught the lie of innate racial equality, their exposure to white people being limited to altruistic missionaries or volunteers from the Peace Corps or the British equivalent, Voluntary Service Overseas, most are quite fond of white folks whom they regard as superior to themselves, and eager to reciprocate in their simple way. I get a warm feeling when I reminisce about the kindness accorded to me by natives who owned little more than the ragged clothes on their backs. The people of Cameroon in particular were just wonderful. On the other hand I have no illusions about Africa. I know that you have be careful in the big cities, that there are pockets of racial hatred here and there, and I know that thousands of whites (and God knows how many blacks) who were in the wrong place at the wrong time met their end at the edge of a machete blade, the African weapon of choice. Books like Congo Mercenary by Mike Hoare and The Fabric of Terror by Bernardo Texeira leave no doubt in my mind as to the depths African savagery can reach. And I did have a few scary moments during my cumulative total of five months and seventeen countries in black Africa. But 95% of the time I felt quite safe, and while petty theft is a constant concern, the only two things that really scare me about Africa are malaria and reckless drivers. I simply don’t share Tony Jacob’s blanket contempt for the entire black race (though he did make an exception for two brave anti-communist leaders, Moise Tshombe and Jonas Savimbi).
Nevertheless, he was a very perceptive man who, in the early 1960s, when white rule and apartheid were at their peak, understood exactly what was happening in Africa and in the seats of power in the rest of the world, especially London and Washington, and he understood that the whites of South Africa would survive and thrive only as long as her leaders resisted all outside pressure and followed their own course. Tragically, events have proved him absolutely correct. As was evident from his book and from our chat, he had the highest regard for Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, who served as prime minister from 1958 to the sad day in 1966 when a half-breed, disguised as a messenger and almost certainly directed by shadowy financiers, walked into Parliament, pulled out a knife, and stabbed him in the chest and neck. “He was incorruptible,” Tony said wistfully. None of Verwoerd’s successors came close to his genius and integrity, and with John Vorster, who assumed leadership after Verweord’s assassination, the surrender began little by little, culminating 28 years later with Mandela’s political triumph. Four chapters of the thirteen in White Man, Think Again! deal wholly or in part with South Africa. Much of this discussion is a recapitulation of the philosophy of Verwoerd who, while not the original architect of the apartheid system, did the most to expand and apply it. Even so, few people have ever heard of him. There’s still a 47-second You Tube clip from 1961 of Verwoerd explaining what apartheid is all about, and in less than a minute he projected such dignity and intelligence that the media bosses had no choice but never to mention him during the pandemonium of the 1980s and to vanish him ever after.
Hendrik Verwoerd knew that the international campaign against apartheid had nothing to do with the uplifting of the black man and everything to with the destruction of the white man. He spoke of a worldwide “negrophile psychosis,” always confident of his position in a world gone mad, and a Western world committing race suicide. He knew that all good people of all races favor strong authoritarian rule when it’s in their interests, that is, rule by the naturally aristocratic; that all people despise weak, indecisive rule; and that in no race is this more true than in the elemental black race. Knowing the black mind, he knew that caving in to the demands of their troublemakers would not win their appreciation, but instead would show weakness and lead to more irrational demands. Stern authority, tempered by kindness, was the key to winning the respect of the African native.
Verwoerd’s approach was exactly the same as that of the German medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, who spent most of his life tending to the sick at a remote jungle hospital in what was then French Equatorial Africa, today the nation of Gabon. No man ever did more with his own hands to alleviate the suffering of Africans, with their frequent ailments and tropical diseases. His book On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, published in 1922, is one of my favorites. It contains, however, quite a few passages that are blatantly racist by today’s standards, and were he alive today, Schweitzer would be crucified by the media.
What is not generally understood in the West is that most African natives, in the framework of their social mores, are solidly conservative in the best old sense of that word, not in the shallow, profiteering sense exemplified by creatures like Sean Hannity and the late Rush Limbaugh. In the early 1960s, with the cancer of international communism spreading, many natives, following their tribal chiefs, were fiercely anti-communist, their chiefs secure in the knowledge that the avowedly anti-communist white government was looking out for their best interests and knew exactly what they were doing. Furthermore, they had seen the anarchy in other African countries where Marxist politicians had risen to power and wanted no part of it. Although I don’t know how most natives felt about him when he was alive – and I certainly don’t take any mainstream commentary seriously – I can say with a fair degree of certainty that many black South Africans looked up to Verwoerd as a Great White Father. South Africa under Hendrik Verwoerd was a powerhouse, a model of prosperity and stability on a continent where so many other countries were unraveling. It was, after all, a country governed in harmony with the laws of Nature, not with the fantasies of liberalism or Marxism, or the racial rancor of Third World upstarts in the UN General Assembly. And this is what drove all of them crazy: South Africa was living proof that everything they professed to believe was a Big Lie.
Ultimately, I think Verwoerd was working towards total and permanent geographical separation of South Africa’s many incompatible groups – an impossible diversity that the vicissitudes of history had visited on a relatively small country with its back to the sea. This was the only means of ensuring the survival of his own people, while incidentally allowing others to do the same. He had mapped out separate enclaves, the much maligned homelands, for the various black tribes. He chided his own people for their dependence on cheap black labor. I don’t believe he ever spoke his feelings to his black citizens, but if he had, it would’ve gone something like this: “We whites are a more highly developed and civilized race than you are, and so we can never let you rule over us, nor will we ever tolerate lawless behavior on your part. It’s best that we all live separately in a spirit of mutual goodwill. We respect your identity, and encourage you to maintain your best tribal institutions and traditions. We wish to remain good neighbors, and if you need our assistance in any way, we will be happy to help you.”
If the white people of the world ever recover their collective sanity, Hendrik Verwoerd will shine forever in their pantheon of heroes. I’ve probably written more than I should here about South Africa, but there are many lessons to be learned from the recent tragedy of that once great nation. Foremost is that the deadliest virus on the face of the earth is the global news media network.
(Note: This chapter was completed three weeks before the death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis, and the destructive nationwide riots that ensued and spread to many areas of the world, instigated by the media.)