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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

DIE ONVERGEEFLIKE, SEKULÊRE SONDE VAN APARTHEID


Apartheid State - by Rev Christo Heiberg (Canada)

The other day a good friend referred in passing to modern Israel as an
"apartheid state".  That piqued my curiosity. I have heard this before.
Former president Jimmy Carter even wrote a book called "Palestine: Peace Not
Apartheid". So what is an apartheid state? I decided to do some googling.
Lo and behold there was much more to read than a busy reformed pastor can
afford to spend his time on. One thing is sure enough though: Labeling
Israel as an apartheid state amounts to political blasphemy of the worst
kind, for Israel's friends at least.  In fact, there hardly is a worse
stigma in the world today, than the stigma of apartheid.


I should know since I have carried that stigma for many years, having lived
there for close to forty years.  In fact I know very few Afrikaners who have
not carried the heavy burden of that stigma in one way or another.  The
world for some reason has decided this is it. This is the lowest level any
society could ever descend to, notwithstanding the fact that we basically
inherited the system of racial segregation from our colonial past.

This stigma that was South Africa was obvious in so many ways.  South Africa
was about the only country against which the old cold war enemies could ever
unite against, backed by the rest of the world. Not even present day North
Korea, Iran or Syria can boast that achievement 25 years after the cold war.
White South Africa was the only country against which text-book terrorism
was considered perfectly legitimate by the civilized West - and still is -
as long as the enemy was the "apartheid state". South Africa was the only
country that was ever banned from the Olympic Games for three decades. It
was the only country whose citizens were denied visas to most other
countries for a whole generation. It was also the only Western country that
had to fight a drawn-out war against Soviet backed guerillas amidst an oil
and arms embargo imposed by its "allies".  And so we can go on and on.

Just how odious this little Afrikaner nation has become and how unforgivable
her political transgressions were, is further illustrated by the following:
The second half of the twentieth century has seen many cases of national
apologies being made about war crimes and genocides to the descendants of
its victims, in an effort to heal the deep festering wounds of the past. One
sad exception is the refusal of the Turks to confess the brutal genocide of
a million Armenians just over a century ago. Around the same time though,
the mighty British Empire committed unspeakable atrocities on the prairies
of South Africa against the world's smallest white nation, because this tiny
nation happened to stumble upon a big pot of gold! Yet no British apology
has ever come forth for the forced starvation of 28 000 innocent women and
children in British concentration camps between 1900 and 1902, in spite of
the fact that all Britain blushed in shock and shame when it was revealed.
The only reason - I presume - for the absence of an apology is the fact that
the poor victims happened to be. Afrikaners! In fact the British
Commonwealth's nonchalant attitude toward this forgotten war crime is well
illustrated by the fact that a proud Canadian city could name itself after
the main perpetrator, Lord Horatio Kitchener!

The extent of the international demonizing of white South Africa is further
illustrated by the following statistics.  A study conducted in 1977 revealed
that the five primary news outlets in the United Sates, the New York Times,
Washington Post, CBS, NBC, and ABC - while running among them only a single
story on North Korea, seven on Cuba, and sixteen on Cambodia and its Khmer
Rouge - ran a monstrous 513 stories condemning South Africa during 1976!

So what is an "apartheid state" then?  Let us ask a fierce critic who knew
the old South Africa from the inside, Richard Goldstone, a former justice of
the South African constitutional court and currently on the payroll of the
United Nations. Under the heading "Israel and the Apartheid Slander"
Goldstone went on to say the following in the New York Times last November:
"While apartheid can have a broader meaning, its use is meant to evoke the
situation in pre-1994 South Africa. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander
against Israel, calculated to retard rather than to advance the peace
negotiations" (emphasis mine).

Goldstone continues: "I know all too well the cruelty of South Africa's
abhorrent apartheid system, under which human beings characterized as black
had no rights to vote, hold political office, use "white" toilets or
beaches, marry whites, live in whites-only areas or even be there without a
"pass".  Blacks critically injured were left to bleed to death if there was
no "black" ambulance to rush them to a "black" hospital.  "White" hospitals
were prohibited from saving their lives".

So that is the horror that is apartheid.  It's not my intent to defend
apartheid and its sad legacy of statutory racial discrimination here, but to
expose Goldstone and the world's grotesque hypocrisy. 
For the sake of
brevity, we'll focus on his last statement, that "blacks critically injured
(were) left to bleed to death" since there was supposedly "no black
ambulance to rush them to a black hospital".  I wonder just how many such
cases Judge Goldstone was honestly aware of?  I am almost certain such cases
were rare.  A close relative of mine, having entered the South African
medical world in 1979 - working in emergency units of public hospitals
across the country - cannot recall a single incident where life or limb was
ever saved or lost on the basis of the patient's skin.


What I do know is that there were more hospitals and ambulances operating in
South Africa serving our African population than in the whole of Africa at
the time.  The biggest hospital in the world was right there in Soweto with
3200 beds, 8 000 staff at its peak, 23 operation theatres and a host of
medical doctors, funded by white taxpayers money!  This is just one of the
countless apartheid stories that Goldstone prefers to omit and which many
ordinary Africans my age are longing back for today, not to mention clean
water, safe beaches, unplugged toilets, employment opportunities, much safer
neighborhoods, etc.  I also remember occasionally going with my dad to the
university where he taught for twenty years, built in one of the "homelands"
for our African people. It never occurred to me as I beheld the impressive
campus nestled away in such beautiful surroundings, or as I walked through
the state of the art auditorium and cafeteria, that it was all part of a
"cruel and abhorent system" aimed at oppression. But then what else can you
expect from a "brainwashed" Afrikaner kid?


The "cruel and abhorrent apartheid system" is further exonerated by the
following staggering truth. At the start of his BBC documentary series "The
War of the World", Harvard historian Niall Ferguson makes the telling
statement that the 20th Century was one long war of savagery motivated by
racism among other things.  What the Japanese did to the Koreans and the
Chinese, what the Turks did to the Armenians and the Greeks, what the
Russians did to the Slavs and Polish and other minorities, and later to the
poor fleeing Germans, what the Nazi's did to the Jews and the Polish and
many others, what the British did to Dresden and Hamburg and the Americans
to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what Mao did to his own people, and the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia, what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds, what the Hutu's did
to the Tutsi's and the Balkan peoples to each other, was in every instance
motivated by some form of racism!  The attacker viewing his enemy as an
inferior race, or as Ferguson alleges, "vermin"!  Whether Ferguson's thesis
is correct is the reader's to decide, but one obvious fact strikes you if
you are an Afrikaner: We did not make his list!  We truly feature nowhere in
six hours of 20th century sordid savagery!  And that while the "racist
abhorrent apartheid system" had all the means at its disposal - a pretty
mighty army - and while its people had every reason to feel "justified"
doing it, considering what happened to colonial Europeans throughout the
rest of Africa.


The "cruel and abhorrent apartheid system" is also exonerated by Nigel
Cawthorne's book on "History's Most Evil Despots and Dictators".  You will
find all sorts of ghosts from Akhenaten to Gaddafi in there, from nearly
every nation under the sun, and up to 40 tyrants belonging to the 20th
century alone.  But again, among nine 20th Century African tyrants not a
single Afrikaner name is found!  And that while they ruled South Africa for
almost 90 years!  Truly astonishing!


Is it not also revealing that Mr. Nelson Mandela, convicted for acts of
terorism, could emerge out of 27 years of imprisonment by this "cruel and
abhorrent apartheid system" well enough to lead his country with dignity for
five years. Survival beyond a few years in the notorious Chikurubi maximum
security prison in Zimbabwe - of a mere political opponent of Robert Mugabe
-  will be considered a sheer miracle.

All of this as I have said is no defense of apartheid but an indictment of
the world's unashamed hypocrisy that shows no sign of abating.
One white
farmer per week is being murdered in South Africa today (often in the
greatest brutality), making it the most dangerous job under heaven on the
planet since the end of apartheid. Western governments and its news media
for the most part deliberately turn a blind eye to the killing fields. A
Flemish lobby group in Brussels is doing its utmost to force this slowly
growing genocide of white South Africans onto the European Parliament's
radar asking a solemn question: "Hoeveel moeten er sterven voordat u de
stilte breekt?" (How many must die before you will break the silence?)


The stigma of my country clung to me for the best part of my life.  It does
so no more.  When one of my sons recently returned from a visit to the old
country sporting a T-shirt with a Boer-War warrior on his chest, I felt
extremely proud.  Twenty years ago I would have blushed.  However, what
saddens me most today is not the injustice of apartheid, nor even a looming
genocide, but how a God-fearing people of three centuries could forsake the
Fountain of living waters, only to hew for themselves cisterns that can
hold no water. That is the true tragedy of the Afrikaner and the deepest
loss of my country.

[Aangestuur deur STP]


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