As I have said before, South Africa as a whole is not painting the prettiest picture internationally at the moment (don’t worry, though, Cape Town was just voted the third best city to eat in this week), and don’t start blaming it on Black vs White or White vs Black – it seems to be that everyone is against everyone at this point. And, as if The Statue Issue wasn’t bad enough, the world sees this as the retaliation:

The far-right Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) is training thousands of youths in military-style bootcamps northwest of Johannesburg to fight for a separate white state. By day, they are pushed to their physical limits with assault courses and self-defence lessons, all the while being told of the danger from ‘the millions of blacks trying to kill you’.

Wonderful. Just what we need.

Dion Bernard, a 15-year-old boy, and more than 2 000 other white South African boys have been attending these bootcamps for the past two years, run by one Colonel Franz Jooste, leader of the Kommandokorps.

In an interview with Journeyman.TV, Jooste speaks of how “South Africa is bleeding. And this is why we have to train our people to be prepared. There’s millions and millions of blacks around you, smothering you… and killing you. So you have to implement certain systems to survive and that’s why we say the only system we can go now for is not apartheid. That’s second prize. First prize is freedom.”

The trainees have gone so far as to burn the post-1994 South African flag whilst holding up the old one.

‘No one will force us to stand under this flag,’ they say. ‘We Afrikaners want our freedom. We want our own country.’

These levels of ignorance really don’t do anyone any favours. There are ways to move forward and work towards a better future – this, dear friends, is certainly not one of them.

[Source: The Daily Mail]