Daily Maverick
Dailymaverick logo

South Africa

South Africa

Apartheid’s Stratcom agents viewed influential US Trump ally Edwin Feulner ‘as source of advice’

Apartheid’s Stratcom agents viewed influential US Trump ally Edwin Feulner ‘as source of advice’
A 1985 article on Robert Slimp and his views on South Africa as it appeared in a University of South Carolina publication.
Caryn Dolley
By Caryn Dolley
13 Feb 2025
Facebook
0
Stratcom steered the apartheid regime’s propaganda war against democracy. A former cop tied to it alleged that its agents were in contact with US figures, one who appears influential in Donald Trump’s administration. Trump, meanwhile, is now accused of pushing propaganda against South Africa.

A founder of a US think-tank that last year called for the cutting of aid to South Africa – and that played a role in “conservative policy victories” after Donald Trump became president – was viewed as someone who could give high-level advice to apartheid’s disinformation agents.

https://youtu.be/akIMaeOzWtM

Former South African policeman Paul Erasmus, who died in 2021, previously named Edwin Feulner as among the US figures who local Stratcom operatives had allegedly been “in touch” with. 

paul erasmus Former Security Branch operative Paul Erasmus. (Photo: Paul Botes / M&G)



Stratcom was a vast state-driven disinformation network geared to uphold this country’s racist apartheid regime and target those fighting for democracy.

Feulner, 83, is a founder of The Heritage Foundation, a think-tank described on its website as “America’s powerhouse of conservative ideas” which Trump’s administration appears to strongly draw from.

They were once photographed together at a dinner that Trump hosted.

Erasmus, in a book published in 2021 which was not legally challenged, identified Feulner as among the figures who Stratcom agents in South Africa had viewed as sources of advice on how to curtail ANC support.

He did not accuse Feulner of any criminality or elaborate on alleged interactions with him.

International relations


On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (10, 11 and 12 February 2025), Daily Maverick sent queries about Erasmus’ Stratcom allegations to email addresses listed for, among others, Feulner, The Heritage Foundation and two members of its board of trustees.

On Wednesday, Ellen Keenan, The Heritage Foundation’s assistant director of media and public relations, replied to Daily Maverick’s request for a response from Feulner saying: “We’re not available to comment on this request.”

She was asked to forward the query directly to Feulner.

Emails sent to two addresses listed for him did not bounce back but were not responded to.

An email to an address at The Heritage Foundation for a woman previously listed as Feulner’s assistant was responded to with an automated alert saying she no longer worked there.

An alternate address, incorporating Feulner’s surname, was provided for her and was also not responded to by the time of publication.

The reference to Feulner and other US figures in relation to Stratcom, whether disputed or not, now still provides some deeper contextual clues about issues surrounding Trump and South Africa.

Daily Maverick has established that representatives of minority civil rights organisation AfriForum visited The Heritage Foundation in the US a few years ago.

That was apparently to discuss issues including land expropriation and the killing of farmers in South Africa.

Read more: No matter what Elon Musk tweets about farm murders, two wrongs don’t make a white genocide

While farmer killings, like all other murders, are a problem in this country, certain perceptions on the issue spread the “white genocide” narrative.

According to the South African Police Service’s crime statistics covering July to September 2024, two farmers were killed and there were 94 murders on farms, smallholdings, plots and agricultural lands, which simply reflects locations.

Over those same three months, 221 gang-related murders, which usually happen in suburbs where mostly non-white residents live, were recorded.



Topics involving the portrayal of white people as being specifically targeted – as victims – are now among those fuelling Trump’s actions against the South African government. 

The basis beneath his bullish stance has been a long time in the making.

Trump (and Musk) vs SA government


What ostensibly sparked the recent Trump fallout was President Cyril Ramaphosa signing the Expropriation Bill into law towards the end of January.

This saw AfriForum, days later, announcing that it would “approach international role players and inform them about the risks”.

Trump subsequently entered the fray and steamrolled ahead with accusations that South Africa was confiscating land and violating human rights.

Ramaphosa categorically denied this.

US-based Trump ally Elon Musk, who was born in apartheid South Africa, added his voice to the saga, asking Ramaphosa on X: “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”

Read more: Ramaphosa fires back at Trump’s executive order, rejects claims of ‘race-based discrimination’ in SA

Trump doubled down – signing off on a 7 February executive order that said the Expropriation Act would “enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.

The US, the executive order said, was therefore promoting “the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination”.

It also stated: “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice”.

And finally, the US executive order said it was cutting off aid to this country.

‘Misinformation and propaganda’


South Africa’s Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation, in response to the executive order, said: “It is of great concern that the foundational premise of this order lacks factual accuracy and fails to recognise South Africa’s profound and painful history of colonialism and apartheid.

“We are concerned by what seems to be a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation.”

The ministry’s statement suggested a Stratcom-like campaign against South Africa emanating from the US.

Read more: ‘SA is violating rights, treating certain people badly’ – Trump’s words inadvertently echo fundamentals of apartheid

In other words, it created the impression that Trump was employing apartheid-era tactics on democratic South Africa where he effectively claims a reverse-style apartheid is happening, with white people being targeted.

This is where the situation extends into the past and involves former apartheid policeman Paul Erasmus.

‘We wanted to annihilate’


His 2021 book is Confessions of a Stratcom Hitman.

In it, Erasmus shared details about Stratcom, which he described as the National Party’s version of State Capture.

Erasmus explained: “We in Stratcom wanted to annihilate; our intentions were much darker and went far beyond getting the odd positive story into the papers to prop up [then president FW] De Klerk. 

“We were trained to permanently neutralise – ideas or people or institutions – on behalf of the government of the day, using unlimited state resources to do so.”

Read more: Atrocious crimes: Apartheid hitman’s brutal confessions serve as a warning for South Africans

In terms of the US, it initially supported apartheid before standing against it.

There are even long-running suspicions that the US’s Central Intelligence Agency played a role in Nelson Mandela’s 1962 arrest that led to him spending nearly 30 years in prison before becoming democratic South Africa’s first president.

Sections of Erasmus’ book referenced the US – and figures based there – who he alleged Stratcom agents were in contact with.

‘One of the most powerful conservatives’


Erasmus wrote that among the Americans “with whom Stratcom was in touch was Dr Edwin Feulner, one of Washington’s most powerful conservatives and, among other things, an adviser on domestic policy to President Ronald Reagan”.

Feulner, who Erasmus did not appear to have contacted for the book, had international connections.

In a 2004 speech, Feulner said that from 1982 to 1994 (which is the year South Africa became a democracy) he served “as a member – and for nine years as the Chairman – of the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy”.

Feulner said he had “been involved in the details and the programs of America’s talented international communicators”.



He was president of The Heritage Foundation between 1977 and 2013 (pre-1994 this would have coincided with apartheid South Africa) and again briefly occupied the position in 2017, the year Trump was first inaugurated as US president.

There is a photograph from that year of Feulner at a dinner that Trump hosted at the White House.

President Donald J Trump hosts a dinner on 25 September 2017 in the Blue Room at the White House in Washington, DC, with grassroots leaders: Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America; Tim Phillips, president of the Americans for Prosperity; Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Leonard Leo, executive vice-president of the Federalist Society; Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition; Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B Anthony List; Edwin Feulner, founder and acting president of The Heritage Foundation; Tim Goeglein, vice-president of external relations, Focus on the Family; and Bob McEwen, former congressman and executive director of the Council for National Policy. (Official White House photos by Shealah Craighead)



A section of The Heritage Foundation’s website, detailing Feulner’s history, boasts: “After … Trump’s inauguration, there were a number of conservative policy victories, most notably tax reform, and The Heritage Foundation played a role in all of them.”

The foundation organised Project 2025, effectively a plan “to rescue the [US] from the grip of the radical Left”, which the Trump administration now seems to draw from.

Read more: Trump’s administration seems chaotic, but he’s drawing directly from the Project 2025 playbook

At the very least, Trump’s administration appears to amplify The Heritage Foundation’s views.

This is emphasised through issues that the foundation had already flagged in the middle of last year and which have since emerged as key themes in Trump’s 7 February executive order against South Africa.

In May last year, The Heritage Foundation ran an article calling for the US to cut aid to South Africa “until the country aligns with American values” – the February executive order said the US would not provide aid to this country as things stand.

The article published last year on The Heritage Foundation website also said it viewed South Africa’s stance against Israel as problematic – much in line with what the February executive order states.

Exported farm murder narrative


Farm murders in South Africa also crop up in this arena. 

In May 2018, Ernst Roets, who was previously at AfriForum and who now heads the Afrikaner Foundation, said “we” had “a very constructive meeting” with The Heritage Foundation. (Based on his X account, he was previously there in 2015 and later again met with foundation representatives in 2020.)

His 2018 post continued: “We discussed expropriation in South Africa, as well as #farmmurders.”

Accompanying the post was a photograph of Roets at a building, bearing the words “The Heritage Foundation”, with AfriForum’s Kallie Kriel.

roets kriel Ernst Roets (left) and Kallie Kriel visited The Heritage Centre in the US in May 2018 and discussed issues, including the murder of farmers. (Photo: Ernst Roets on X )





On that day in 2018, Kriel had also posted on X that they had spent about two hours with a senior delegation from the foundation and discussed issues including expropriation without compensation and farm killings.

A photograph also accompanied that post.



Barely three months after Roets and Kriel posted about the 2018 US visit, Trump stated on X that he asked the Secretary of State to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers”.

This implies that while in the US, Roets and Kriel may have had the ears of those in Trump’s inner circle feeding him information – or even disinformation.



On Thursday, 13 February 2025, Roets confirmed to Daily Maverick that “it is true” he had been to the US several times, including to Washington (which is where The Heritage Foundation is headquartered) to “raise awareness” about issues.

The visits involved chatting to various people, some of whom may be close to Trump.

‘Scapegoating’ and a ‘crisis’

Kriel on Thursday 13 February 2025 said it was “normal for us to engage with foundations locally and internationally”.

But he thought it was “ludicrous” to hypothesise that Trump would only now act on, or use, a visit from seven years ago that related to constitutional matters at that stage, and not the Expropriation Act.

“I think this effort to try and now find a scapegoat is … simply an effort by the ANC to evade their own responsibility,” Kriel said. 

Trump initially went public on 3 February with accusations that South Africa was confiscating land and abusing human rights.

In response, the ANC issued a statement saying Trump was “echoing AfriForum’s false claims of ‘land confiscation’ ” which was “a direct result of the lobby group’s ongoing efforts to mislead the global community and protect apartheid-era land ownership patterns.”

Kriel on Thursday told Daily Maverick: “Instead of scapegoating, I think it’s time that President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC take full responsibility for this crisis.”

Rewind again to the 2018 saga.

That year, the South African government had reacted to Trump’s words about “farm seizures” and “the large scale killing of farmers”.

The Department of International Relations and Cooperation had responded that Trump’s post was “based on false information and lobbying by certain South African lobby groups that seek to derail and frustrate the land redistribution programme.”

That is essentially what the department is now also saying about “false information” and Trump’s February executive order against South Africa.

The author with Stratcom info

Back to Paul Erasmus.

In his book, he identified another US-based figure he said Stratcom wanted to use – Leo Raditsa, a professor and author who died in 2001.

Raditsa wrote the book Prisoners of a Dream: The South African Mirage, published in 1989.

An excerpt about it explained: “No theme is more politically emotive than South Africa, and in none does ignorance play a greater part.

“This ignorance is in part fortuitous and in part deliberately fortified by systematic disinformation.”

That is ironic, given Erasmus’s take on Raditsa.

He had described Raditsa as “just the sort of person Stratcom needed to foster a kind of last-minute hysteria around looming communist rule in South Africa by bloodthirsty terrorists”.

(Coincidentally, a 1986 report on The Heritage Foundation’s website referred to a document that “reveals the close links between the ANC and the communists and the way in which the communists exploit the ANC to manipulate Western opinion”.)

According to Erasmus, Raditsa visited South Africa in the late 1980s and later in what was then known as Natal where he met, among others, Inkatha Freedom Party founder Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

“After meeting with Buthelezi and senior Inkatha members, Raditsa left South Africa armed with a mass of Stratcom material,” Erasmus wrote in his book.

He said he then put Raditsa in contact with “other friends” in the US.

The chaplain and the white farmers


This included “Reverend Colonel Robert Slimp”, who died in 2021.

An online obituary said he became “a career chaplain in the US Army” and that during the 1970s and 1980s, he had a side job as a journalist, writing about places including South Africa.

stratcom slimp Robert Slimp (Photo: shivesfuneralhome.com / photo upscaled and enhanced with AI)



Indeed, a November 1985 article from a University of South Carolina publication, referred to Slimp as a reporter who had been to South Africa.

It said Slimp did not believe in or support apartheid.

But the publication said he believed “white people are intimidated by the violence of the blacks”.

slimp article A 1985 article on Robert Slimp and his views on South Africa in a University of South Carolina publication.



As for Erasmus, he alleged in his book that Slimp was a member of the Council of Concerned Citizens (although he may have meant the Council of Conservative Citizens), which he said “as recently as February 2012, was featured in the Free South Africa Project, a right-wing American campaign to throw a spotlight on the murders of white South African farmers”.

The Free South Africa Project that Erasmus referred to seemed to support the idea of white people in South Africa being specifically targeted.

In 2015, the New York-based Anti-Defamation League, an organisation geared towards fighting anti-Semitism and bias, described it as “an effort by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists to bring attention to the alleged ‘genocide’ of white South African farmers”.

Past and present


This all means that the skewed issue of farmer killings has been simmering away for more than a decade beneath Trump’s recent statements on this country and the aligned stance of some South African organisations.

Themes surrounding this are what Trump is now using against South Africa.

Those themes largely revolve around land and the treatment of white people – and have the potential to further stoke racial tensions in this country which has a past steeped in the irrefutable ill-treatment of black people and their forced removal from land.

Of Feulner, Raditsa and Slimp, Erasmus alleged in his book: “Men like [them] weren’t workshopping ideas.

“They were already well positioned to serve Stratcom the kind of high-level advice that we needed to temper growing international affection for the ANC as the first ruling party of a democratic South Africa.”

The South African government, in recently indicating Trump was promoting “what seems to be a campaign of misinformation and propaganda” against this country, has effectively pushed him towards the ranks of Stratcom. DM

If you wish to comment on this issue, please send an email to [email protected]

Categories:

Tags: