The Big Oomie checks in – Trump tweet expropriates the expropriation debate

It’s been a banner week for South Africa’s primary driver of GDP growth, by which I mean racism. Some days ago, in the very founding place of democracy and grilled calamari, a sauce-maker named Adam Catzavelos, smeared with Coppertone 50 and smugness, recorded some thoughts concerning the racial demographics of his Greek vacation resort. (He phrased his observations in somewhat more forceful terms.)

In the racism genre, beaches play an outsized roll. They are literally white – I’m referring here to the sand, while excluding volcanic aberrations like Santorini – and I suppose they represent untrammelled purity and an atavistic attachment to the middle class seaside chillaxing that was a hallmark of apartheid-era downtime. Catzavelos’s fellow member of the racist utterance pantheon, Penny Sparrow, also referenced beaches in her now legendary Facebook communiqué. They keep coming, these inadvertent South African celebrities, their perturbations fuelling an entire cottage industry of commentary, academic work, TV specials, courtroom tussles and outsized social media data spending.

Without them, the economy would tank.

While South Africa was processing the Catzavelos contretemps, another of our old chestnuts was dusted off for global consumption: the ungodly spectre of white genocide. (To be specific, white genocide in this case does not refer to whites perpetrating genocide, but rather the opposite – genocide committed against whites. It’s fucking complicated, fam.) Straight from the Washington DC swamp came the following Tweeted missive, delivered by none other than the Shagger-In-Chief, Donald J. Trump:

I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018

Strangely, some mistruths may have escaped the usually dependable scrim of fact checkers and legal readers who ensure the quality of POTUS’s microblogged declarations. The South African government is, of course, not seizing land from white farmers, although now 53 million tiki-torch wielding nutjobs think they are. (Thank God Home Affairs fucked up the tourism industry, right?) And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo couldn’t undertake a close study of a Denny’s breakfast menu, given he’s not the close studying type.

But much like the correlation between racism and beaches, it’s difficult to know what it is about early mornings that so inflames the passions of authoritarian fascists. Trump’s daily Twitter stream famously starts in the very early hours, and one theory is that his early ablutions cause him significant discomfort. (Trump Tower cheeseburgers are not health food.) That said, there are reasons why he may have zeroed in on unhappy Mzansi and the threats faced by its local white folk. Tucker Carson, along with Breitbart News and other far-right neo-Nazi rags, have made it their business to make South Africa their business. In a recent ranticle on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox News’ flagship current affairs programme, the titular presenter explained:

“In South Africa, the Parliament has begun amending the Constitution to allow land that is owned by white South Africans to be taken by the government without compensation. The motion was brought by Julius Malema, a longtime gadfly and violent nutcase, who clarified that he does not support killing the entire white population … right now!”

In the alt-right imaginarium, “elites” across the world are fixated on wishy-washy do-good liberalism, to the enormous and unfair benefit of black people, Asians, homosexuals, and the organic pet food industry. White nationalist hardmen thus get a pass for seriously screwing with American democracy; anything that smacks of affirmative action is an affront to our goddamned rights, motherfucker!

As it happens, Trump’s musings are the result of a sort of co-ordinated campaign, one that is so threadbare and daft that it could only find purchase in 21st century America. In 2017, the Suidlander local white-rights group undertook a tour of the United States. They preached the narrative of white genocide to responsive thought leaders like David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, and Richard Spencer, one of the alt-right’s luminaries. The tour didn’t raise as much cash as was hoped, but it caused a minor media storm that, clearly, has found some purchase in Washington DC. As Suidlander spokesperson Simon Roche told the Mail & Guardian, “there are some old oomies in the US who know who the Suidlanders are and what the Suidlanders represent.”

One of them may be the Big Oomie himself.

More significant, however, are the contributions made by everyone’s favourite Afrikaner Ayn Rand reading club, AfriForum, and the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), whose CEO, Frans Cronje, recently undertook a speaking tour of the United States. It seems Trump’s Tweet was prompted by a presentation Cronje gave at the Cato Institute, which highlighted his concerns with the whole land expropriation without compensation thing. Cronje no doubt had the grey-haired Catonians tut-tutting into their prune juice cocktails, thinking: “Next they’ll come for their Range Rovers! And it will be Venezabwe all over again!”

“When the government put this expropriation without compensation business into motion and made the promises and created the expectations, a line was crossed,” Cronje told News24.

“Once those lines are crossed there is no going back. It is completely irrelevant whether there is one case or 1,000. The line has been crossed and the precedent set and if that momentum is not halted we risk the trickle becoming a flood.”

No one could ever accuse Cronje of nuance. But when it comes to land theft and genocide, there’s no time for subtleties. And concerning the genocide business, those raging libtard race traitors at AgriSA have released figures regarding farm murders. In the past two decades, there have been 1,723 killings on farms and a further 21,567 farm attacks.

Those are horrific numbers, no question, and some of those incidents beggar belief in their brutality. But there are some important caveats to keep in mind. First, AgriSA did not specify racial statistics. Second, this speaks to a country in which terrible violent crime rates are a feature of both rural and urban conglomerations. The exploitation of this dismal situation reeks of the conspiracy-minded kak that dominates American alt-right “discourse”.

To be clear: one farm murder is one too many. But for white genocide public relations specialists, no number of farm murders are enough.

All of this being said, a fact-finding mission from Secretary of State Pompeo is certainly to be welcomed. The economy is in the shitter, and a long train of Secret Service-protected black Suburbans in rural Mpumalanga would provide a necessary GDP boost. Imagine Sec. Pompeo standing in the flight path of an SADF helicopter gunship as it strafes Boers off a Monsanto-branded soybean field, his arms extended in Christ-like submission to the forces of evil. Imagine drone strikes on the expropriators of nguni cattle. Imagine 40,000 American troops landing in Durban to safeguard South Africa’s maligned beaches, handed soft-serve ice-cream cones by AfriForum interns as they run through the surf.

Trump, of course, is mired in another of his convenient controversies, the specifics of which can be whittled down to the following: the man is surrounded by inept Mafia goons, one of whom helped him disburse almost $300,000 in hush money to two pneumatic girls-about-town. Which makes Big Oomie the most profligate (and dumbest) john in human history. But his Republican enablers got their massive tax cut and their regulations reset. Meanwhile, he gets to Tweet to his base, using troubled little sideshows like South Africa as his medium.

Another name in the racist pantheon; another Tweet aimed not at reality, but at the fantasies of the mythical Base. Just when you think you’re ditching the vestiges of colonialism, you realise you’re just another minion slaving away in Global Trumpland. And Adam Catzavelos serves as the ambassador. DM