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The Old Volksraad Mense™ and their curious bromance with Trump amid fears of genocide

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
26 Feb 2025
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The Old Volksraad Mense™ have found allies in the Trump gauleiters and their opposition to diversity and inclusivity and globalism, and in the European right and a media that is in a panic about dark-skinned people taking over Europe.

Where or how does one start to understand and explain the band of people, white South Africans, who are tapping into the rightist surge in the world, apparently emboldened by Donald Trump, and who are getting audiences and support from what have traditionally been the most odious of people?

Let’s face it, Trump was never a likeable fellow, and he has surrounded himself with a veritable squad of gauleiters (in a post-Nazi sense) as an overbearing, arrogant bunch… While we’re being honest, they’re not all Afrikaners. We have come to learn that at least one of them is a former speechwriter for Tony Leon and reportedly a BFF of Helen Zille. I would like to draw links between South Africa’s position on the state of Israel at the ICC, but that could be career-ending.

I want to put forward a long view. The view which suggests that the Atlantic Community, what we more broadly refer to as the Wenao in general (Western Europe, North America and Oceania) have gradually been losing their exclusivity and became more colourful, in a manner of speaking.

Such a view may help us get an understanding of the panics of a “Great Replacement Theory”, of a “white genocide” in South Africa, and threats to Judeo-Christian values which supposedly “made the West great”. All of these have in common opposition to globalism, multiculturalism, inclusivity and diversity.

In South Africa in particular, some people still believe that looking at the suffering of others (because of your own past) is injustice and somehow a form of genocide. This gives rise to resistance to rolling back injustices of the past, such as the taking of land from indigenous people. Some folk still cannot get it into their heads that a great injustice was done, and that regstellende aksie is necessary — without resorting to the politics of revenge.

For what it’s worth, it is factually correct that the United States has a well-documented history of taking the land of indigenous people, which probably explains why they will not mention the G-word. I found it quite surprising that one of the media institutions that serve the US intellectual class had the intellectual integrity to admit that “native Americans were slaughtered in the name of ‘civilisation’”.

Looking deeper into history


It is, then, back in the US where we can start, given especially my aversion to discontinuous thinking and against imagining there is something special or unique about any particular set of circumstances.

It’s virtually impossible to pin the global rise and emboldening of the right to a specific date. The “wealth” generated by the liberal capitalist revolutions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher is not a bad place to start; that was when many people became very wealthy, pari passu with the growth of poverty and inequality — especially in the US.

By the time Reagan departed, inequality was considered to be a “normal” feature of liberal society; after all, liberal competition had winners and losers.

As if it had not been proud during earlier epochs, the US was so confident and proud of its achievements under Reagan (especially following the collapse of Soviet Communism in a maddening roll reminiscent of Song X) that it held on to Alan Greenspan, the chairperson of that country’s Federal Reserve for nigh on two decades (four presidents) from August 1987 to January 2006.

He would later admit that his ideological interventions contributed to the 2007/8 crisis. But Greenspan was never brought before justice, probably because “the market told him so” — a capitalist reworking of the Christian ditty, “Jesus loves me so, for the Bible tells me so”. Who dares question Jesus or the market?

Anyway, Europeans are not in the habit of apologising for policies and practices that they exported to Africa and Asia, and even expect tokens of appreciation for “taking civilisation to the rest of the world”.

If to them colonialism was not so bad, then apartheid was a picnic; that is if you take seriously the protestations of the minority within the minority — notably the two sides of the old Volksraad.

I should point then, to a series of events that would lead to the current high that is being enjoyed by the right in the world — that full bosom in which Kallie Kriel, Ernst Roets, Anthea Jeffery, Helen Zille and Tony Leon, John Steenhuisen, Pieter Groenewald and others (the two sides of The Old Volksraad™) find succour and comfort.

When the Soviet Union collapsed (between 1989 and 1991) there was a sense that all those countries, those pesky dark-skinned people, had all the time been wrong for choosing the rest over the West. Forget that most countries in the global South sought non-alignment. The West (read, the US) had been right all along.

Trump as an ally of the Old Volksraad Mense™


Then, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the ANC was unbanned and Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and skielik, the world’s greatest terrorist was a free man. Then the ANC won the first democratic election in 1994. The sales of canned foodstuff increased.

That was not quite the last straw for The Old Volksraad Mense™. The country to which they looked for “constructive engagement” was violently attacked by a group of dark-skinned non-Christians on 11 September 2001. If memory serves me correctly, The Old Volksraad Mense™ fell in line behind the US.

Although Iraq had nothing to do with the attack, Tony Leon, leader of the smiling faces in the old Volksraad, called on South Africa to distance itself from the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. 

On the other side of the old Volksraad aisle, the New National Party’s foreign affairs spokesperson Boy Geldenhuys agreed with die agbare lid van Houghton, Tony Leon: “South Africa should at all cost not be seen to support Saddam Hussein,” said Geldenhuys.

They had heard only the view of the Atlantic Community expressed by the white men of Europe at the Azores Summit of 16 March 2003.

If, by the way, you read Tony Leon’s Wikipedia entry, he is made out to be a saint and his family a long-standing anti-apartheid force. Then again there is no one who ever supported apartheid, nor served in its racist judicial system, all of which amounted to a crime against humanity. It’s worth restating that the abuse of rights “flourished because judges supported apartheid”.

There was never much difference in the whiteness of The Old Volksraad Mense™. One represented apartheid with a gun, the other represented apartheid with a smile, both blindly supported the US and neither has accepted that the war on the people of Iraq was based on lies.

Well, as far as I can recall, The Old Volksraad Mense™ never did apologise for supporting the lies that led to more than 400,000 deaths. I can’t imagine Tony Leon apologising for Arab deaths.

Anyway, before that, on 20 August 1998, US Tomahawk cruise missiles struck and destroyed al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory in Khartoum. All that was necessary was to say something about terrorism… Within months, on 24 March 1999, the US led the aerial bombing of the former Yugoslavia. For the record, it has been reported that the US now wanted to “obliterate” Iran. We can be sure that The Old Volksraad Mense™ would be right behind the US.

All these conflicts sent refugees from the former East Bloc, Iraq, Afghanistan (and later Syria) to Europe. Having already intervened politically in about 25 countries across Latin America — from Chile to Cuba — and after diabolical political economic decisions, the US came under intense pressure from migrant workers and asylum seekers.

Overall, the Atlantic Community became a bit more colourful — but they didn’t seem to mind Polish asylum seekers. It was just those dark-skinned others — and especially Muslims — who were such a threat to what made the West great, as Ben Shapiro reminded us.

Enter the right-wing political parties led by (right-wing) white people who looked kindly at “persecuted white people in South Africa”. It is this system of sentiment that The Old Volksraad Mense™ tapped into, in that bosom that they found succour.

Fears about replacement


These right-wing parties of Europe found a great ally in Trump, and on both sides of the Atlantic there were fears about replacement and lies about white genocide.

We have a situation now where The Old Volksraad Mense™ have found allies in the Trump gauleiters and their opposition to diversity and inclusivity and globalism. They have also found allies in the European right and a media that is already in a panic about dark-skinned people taking over Europe with reports about Europeans being afraid of “outsiders” and inchoate anxiety about the “outsiders”.

And we have not (yet) touched the economic challenges that little Europe faces in a world it can no longer control. To understand white fears among The Old Volksraad Mense™ consider this passage from the Financial Times: “The European experience for about 500 years was hegemony. Europeans first colonised Africa and the Americas, then India, before helping inflict China’s ‘century of humiliation’ [emphasis added]. For almost all this time, the only threats we faced were from other Europeans (counting Russia as European). And while Europeans emigrated to every other continent, until the 1950s hardly anyone had the temerity to immigrate to Europe. That seemed to us the natural order.”

For the minority within the minority in South Africa, the “natural order” has been overturned. Europeans are no longer emigrating to other continents. The people of other continents are emigrating to Europe. Well, some are finding out that Europe’s not all it’s cracked up to be, and the Europeans are wondering why Africans, in particular, prefer other parts of the world.

Meanwhile in the US, Trump sits on a pebbled beach playing a game of chess with the devil... and no one escapes death. DM

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