When Men Stop Believing In God (Left Behind Is A Lie V, One.)

In Natal, apartheid is a deadly cancer in our midst, setting house against house, and eating away at the precious ties that bound us together. This strife among ourselves wastes our energy and destroys our unity. My message to those of you involved in this battle of brother against brother is this: take your guns, your knives, and your pangas, and throw them into the sea! Close down the death factories. End this war now! ~Nelson Mandela, speech at a peace rally, February 25th, 1990

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Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on a race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength of the world. That is the American way. ~Ronald Reagan

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Peace is not the product of terror or fear.
Peace is not the silence of cemeteries.
Peace is not the silent result of violent repression.
Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all.
Peace is dynamism.
Peace is generosity.
It is right and it is duty. ~Saint Oscar Romero.

I saw this last night.

Apparently, Elon and Trump are trying to roll out the red carpet for Afrikaners and other South African white people because of efforts to expropriate some of their land. This is very typical of Republicans to piously welcome people who don't want to come here, while telling those who do "Fuck you, I've got mine."

I first heard about this being in the works awhile ago (I mean, fuck, the US far-right has been banging on about this shit for at least a decade) and I said they wouldn't come.

This is the fruit of more "Government by Conspiracy Theory" like I said.

Why should they? South Africa is, among other things in terms of Law and how the State treats people, very much at least trying to be a civilized, first-world nation. Certainly, things like healthcare, LGBT rights, and wealthy assholes running amok are not the issues over there that they are here. As regards many of the things conservatives claim to care about, South Africa is a very Christian country. (I've known both Black and White South Africans, this flies either way.) It's also a very gun-happy country, and from what I hear, one in which Republicans would still fit in...if they were the people they say that they are.

Political corruption is a pretty big thing despite constant efforts to crack down on it. Corporate fuckery, likewise, despite pretty robust attempts at regulation, etc. Of course, that's still not the world guys like Elon Musk want to live in...

Because racial equality, or something. Because they're trying to have a decent country.

Since this news dropped a couple days ago, I've been seeing the occasional comment on Blue Sky or Threads by South Africans and people who've been over there lately and the general attitude seems to be a mirror image of the typical US "Conservative" attitude of "If this flag offends you, we'll help you pack!" 

I gather than the average South African of any race hates Trump just as much as most people in the rest of the world (and over half of America) does. Certainly, the main Afrikaner political groups have all rejected Trump's offer.

Even if they didn't, if every Afrikaner in the world came to America (there's maybe 3.5 million of them) it wouldn't be enough to change the demographics of the US in the far-right's favor and that's really what this is about. (Most Afrikaners nowadays aren't far-right.)

As I understand it, and from what I've observed of the couple of them that I've met, Afrikaners are a pretty traditional people and they see themselves as having roots in the land their ancestors fought for. In all honesty, their story and the ones that lots of American conservatives tell themselves are pretty similar, right down to Wagon Trains of Voortrekkers shooting it out with Zulu warriors in a scenario only a shade darker and with slightly different weapons than you'd see in many an old Western movie. 

Speaking of those days, the crew of the Confederate raider CSS Alabama (Itself a British-built warship) based the ship out of the eastern coast of the Cape region and specifically, a place called Saldahna Bay. They reprovisioned the ship at Cape Town. The affinity between the crew and the locals was mutual enough that there's still a traditional Afrikaans song (Dar Kom Die Alibama) about the CSS Alabama and many memorials to the ship and her crew in-country including at the South African Navy's main base at Simonstown. 

The Alabama raided and sunk Union merchantmen and whaling ships all around the world before being sunk off Cherbourg, France, by the USS Kearsarge in an hour-long engagement.

There's legit points of kinship, right or wrong, but that's not what Elon and Trump are playing on. They'd rather go with conspiracy nonsense and edge-case racism. Elon, at least, should know better.

He doesn't.

I learned the history of the CSS Alabama and the Boers (as the Afrikaners were then called) long ago, because I'm a lifelong student of US Civil War history. Tradition and historical memory can be very important, right or wrong, it can be a grounding against a lot of shit. Granted, yes, it can also perpetuate a lot of shit.

I get that. I'm trying kind of hard not to make a value judgment here, but I bring up these histories and their similarities for a damn reason. 

It's harder to be a crowd-following sheep following the conspiracy theories and fads and narratives of the moment if you still care about something that happened in 1863 even though the narrative doesn't benefit you. The difference is that unlike the Confederate States of America, there's no "Lost Cause" narrative for Apartheid outside of Elon Musk's head.

Another difference is that the modern Afrikaners very much hold to their traditional beliefs, see themselves as native to South Africa and are committed both to keeping their land and working within the democratic framework of the country they have and still wish to make better to do it. They don't want to trade the society they have...which getting it and maintaining it have been hard-won struggles...for the unreliable patronage of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

These are people who were well ahead of the curve on things like renewable energy and dealing with climate change years ago, because where they live (and want to stay) they do not have the privilege to ignore Climate Change or to act as if profits are the most important thing.

But it's more than just that.

Change and survive or remain hidebound and reactionary and die is a game these people have played before. This isn't these people's first rodeo. They fought like hell against the Communist-inflected, Cuban- and Soviet-backed regime in Angola during their long Border War. They were also facing a (not entirely nonviolent, and remember Mandela didn't start out peaceful either, he only got that way later) domestic insurgency at the time. Fun fact: By the end of the war the South African Army was mostly Black, too, because that's who they could get to fight. 

It was either Apartheid died or the Afrikaners did.

I still remember where I was when I heard that Reagan's veto of sanctions against South Africa had been overridden by Congress. My Mom and I were in her car, in traffic near the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and I was on my way to school. It wasn't my fight in particular (although like most Americans at the time I was against Apartheid) but it still felt important and like a great victory.

After that, It was either the South Africans stopped fighting the Black front-line states, or they were gonna lose. 

It was Apartheid that made supporting South Africa unsustainable for most Americans. South African people chose change, equality, freedom and peace. Have there been injustices and killings since, yes, and those who did them were prosecuted. You can get charged with shit over there that ain't even a crime in America. 

The thing is, when some Black dude kills an old-school Apartheid scumbag...the South African government still throws the book at the fucker because it's still murder. Kill the guy and then pull down his pants (for whatever random stupid reason) they'll add years to your sentence for injuring the guy's dignity, even if he was an actual White Supremacist back in the day! And they treat it like what it is, a crime, they don't try and make an outrage-fest or a religious cause out of every damn thing like a lot of Americans do.

In my experience, most people from other countries don't try and turn their politics into a religion like Republicans have increasingly done for the last 30 years.

And what did they do all that for, if they were just gonna turn around and throw everything they said they believed away for *Checks Notes* Donald Trump??

Whether Republicans simply forgot who they were (or at least said they were) or they were lying the whole time, they've basically given up any positive values that would attract most people to their cause.

Eventually, you have to stand for something.

Power or cultural or racial or religious "Supremacy" ain't it. That eventually just means nobody really believes the shit that comes out of their own mouths.

That's what wrecked the Soviet Union, which increasingly looks less Communist in retrospect and more an exercise in Russian imperialism that changed from an authoritarian Tsarist aristocracy to an authoritarian Communist elite.

The shit people said was just to fool the feeble-minded.

And the reason I think America is going down is, way the fuck too many of us have become the same way.

Thing I have to wonder is, why do Elon and Trump think anybody else would want to sign on to that??

Why would anybody, least of all an American, think anybody would give up a nation that fought hard to be free for one that's fighting so hard not to be??

America is like, a few more weeks of this Bird Flu shit or another outbreak of Measles or Tuberculosis (not to mention the fruit of our current political misadventures) away from being one of those nasty Third World hellholes one sees on the news...but for White people. 

And how the fuck have we forgotten ourselves so damned badly that we've allowed ourselves to become this fucking narcissistic mess??

This is what happens when Men stop believing in God.

That's why that Left Behind bullshit they taught you in Sunday School or The End Times Prophecy Movement is a lie.

While I'm on the subject of stuff like religion and White South Africans, since the end of Apartheid and all the changes in their country, a fuck-ton of Afrikaners in particular have abandoned the old Dutch Reformed church and joined the same Pentecostal churches favored by their Black neighbors, and whether I think that theology is right or wrong, they practice it right alongside the people they once oppressed. 

I can live with that.

They've managed to do so without committing the same Trumpist Blasphemies that Paula White just did. You can be like the Afrikaners and not Trump.

Yes, it can be done, think about that for a minute, Christians.

It doesn't have to be this way. 

Think about who the fuckers are that want it to be, then maybe you should consider why.

People like Elon and Trump know they're going to hell. They want you to go there with them, because it proves their ego to themselves.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And if you don't stand for something, you might just fall for anything.

Слава Україна!

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran

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When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco