You have to be OK with the stench of thinly-veiled racism to be a Trump fan, and there is no shortage of those in South Africa.

When Donald tweeted about “the large-scale killing of farmers” back in August, many local farmers lapped up his empty words and decided that this would somehow be the one cause he intended to follow through on.

Spoiler alert – it won’t be.

Still, why was Donald paying attention to a country he’s certainly got no interest in, tucked away just below Nambia?

Here’s CNN:

South Africa has become a twisted meme for the far right online. A favorite for extreme right-wingers like Katie Hopkins, a British provocateur, and Laura Southern, a Canadian alternative media personality, who have developed a substantial following…

Spend a little time, though, in this alternative media universe, and the name of one South African will keep cropping up: Simon Roche.

Roche is ubiquitous, doing interviews with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and ultra-right media like Red Ice, or appealing directly to his followers on social media from an overstuffed leather couch.

“Hello I’m Simon Roche. We represent the white people of South Africa, who are presently being told that they can expect to see a genocide against them,” says Roche in a fundraising post. The video has more than 800,000 views.

If you pop onto YouTube, his videos are everywhere. I would say you might be able to stomach about two minutes of this, but here we go:

Yup, it sure is hard being a white person in South Africa, benefitting from the legacy of apartheid whilst the majority of this country battles against nearly insurmountable odds.

But sure, let’s hear more about Simon:

He is the public face and a leader of the Suidlanders, roughly translated from Afrikaans as Southerners or South Landers. The Suidlanders believe South Africa is heading toward a brutal race war where whites will be targeted by blacks.

Their members come from across the country, and from a cross-section of society. They are farmers, business people, and suburbanites, organized into more than 30 districts across the country. What unites them is their race — they are exclusively white — and their genuine belief in their founder’s doomsday prophecy.

The Suidlanders are planning for the evacuation of their members to rural South African refugee camps they will set up…

The Suidlanders cast themselves as victims and they push that myth far beyond South Africa’s shores.

“The online strategy and propaganda of the Suidlanders uses the same tactics as terrorist groups for recruiting members,” says an official of a South African intelligence agency who is not authorized to talk publicly.

The Suidlanders claim their membership is now more than 130,000 strong. That figure is most likely inflated, says our source, but something impossible to verify since they do not keep membership lists.

Given that this country suffers from one of the worst murder rates in the world, and our own police commissioner recently compared the country to a war zone, you can forgive people for being a little paranoid about crime.

The Suidlanders, however, have gone full tin foil hat bonkers:

The Suidlanders prepare themselves with survival and weapons training. Their leaders are setting up radio repeaters on farms for when the cell network fails.

It will fail, Jan Fourie — a district leader of the Suidlanders — tells members, because the war is imminent — and they will be the victims.

“You need to be prepared for the bomb throwers,” says Fourie, referring to black South Africans. “If you want to just tag along with us, then you are a traitor. I started giving these lessons to my daughter when she was 7 years old. When she was 16 she came to me and said she was getting nightmares. But we need to be prepared.”

I think we know why your daughter was getting nightmares, pal.

It’s the exact same rhetoric Trump uses when he speaks about the migrant caravans coming towards America, or the immigrants from other countries seeking asylum.

They’re not white, which makes them dangerous and easy to dehumanise.

We have to talk about farm murders, too:

…about two-and-a-half hours north of Johannesburg, private citizens have erected a striking monument. Hundreds of white crosses – each with a name, date and age — form a giant cross on the slope. The date on each cross is the day each person was murdered.

Large white letters fixed to the mountainside spell out “Plaasmoorde” or “Farm Murders.”

The monument has two aims: show how many white farmers have been murdered and give names to the victims — who often barely get a mention in the local press.

“A systematic process of ethnic cleansing is a looming threat in South Africa,” says Ernst Roets, the deputy chief executive of AfriForum, a lobbying group…

The biggest problem with AfriForum’s claims about possible ethnic cleansing and farm murders is that they are not true, says Gareth Newham of the Institute of Security Studies (ISS), a South African research group.

“There is no evidence to support that. There is no evidence that a group of people are killing farmers for political purposes. There is no evidence that they are doing it because they are listening to political leaders. It is happening because of crime,” says Newham.

Newham and the ISS independently track farm murders — as well as all other serious crimes. Farmers’ unions like AgriSA also keep stats on farm murders. Both say that farm murders peaked in 2001, at around 130 killings per year. Currently, farm murders are less than half that number.

There were 62 murders on farms in the 2017-18 financial year, according to official police statistics, or around 0.3% of the 20,336 murders in South Africa during the same period.

“There is no epidemic of farm murders in South Africa. There is an epidemic of murders,” Newham says.

Sadly, that is the truth. In South Africa, crime is indiscriminate, and more people are killed in taxi violence, in gang violence, and by vigilante mobs than in farm murders, and rises in farm murders are in line with the overall increases in murder rates.

That’s not to downplay the brutal nature of many farm murders, though, with some of the victims suffering extreme violence and torture, but talk of a genocide and ethnic cleansing is just not backed up by statistics.

You can read CNN’s full story on the Suidlanders here, and if you want a real shock to the system, you can visit the Suidlanders website here.

[source:cnn]