At the Call of a False God

2,808 words

Several years ago I was introduced to a man whose head was covered in bandages. I asked him what happened. He explained to me that he had recently had surgery through the Veteran’s Administration to remove fragments from a Soviet-made red phosphorous mortar shell lodged in his skull. The man was too old to have served in Iraq and Afghanistan so I inquired as to where he got such a wound — I expected him to say Vietnam, but instead, he said Zaire. He’d been in the US Special Forces and was sent to central Africa as part of an anti-Communist operation to intercept weapons being sent to the African National Congress and other pro-Communist Africans then in conflict in apartheid era South Africa.

This American support for South Africa was the result of the politics of the Cold War and it turned out to be the last of the Cold War’s proxy wars. During the Angola Border War (1966–1989) South Africans and their black Native allies fought against Cubans, East Germans, Soviets, and their black Native allies in the borderlands of Angola and what was then South African-ruled Namibia. The war was notable in that the Communist Cubans fielded a large army thousands of miles from their homeland.

For American veterans of Iraq, the mine-resistant vehicles fielded by the US Army in that conflict were either based on, or modern upgrades to, the mine-resistant vehicles developed by the white South Africans during this conflict.

The South Africans waged and won a victorious campaign in the last conflict of the Cold War, but lost the wider war against Black Nationalism in Africa. The fall of white South Africa is likely often on the mind of many whites in the West especially in these trying times, where African Justice seems to prevail in America, and Europe’s stubborn and foolish rulers have allowed for an Islamic Invasion whose end result is easily predictable tragedy. Since the end of Apartheid, South African art and literature has developed a voice of its own, a voice that tells a cutting truth about the rising tide of color and the disaster of whites yielding power to non-whites.

One such artistic work is the Christopher-Lee dos Santos’ film At Thy Call. This is a movie which tells the tragedy of South Africa — and indeed for the whole white world — in a clear, chilling way. The movie is told by a flashback, and starts with a wounded African SWAPO soldier is surrounded by South African troops, the soldier is terrified and likely to be shot on the spot. The movie then has a jump cut so naturally, the audience is left with a tension. What will happen to the cowering, wounded Negro?

The jump cut takes the audience to the the training of the white South African soldiers. The characters are introduced while standing in platoon formation. The men have just graduated basic training and are now starting advanced infantry training. The trainers of these newly inducted men are Corporal Van Tonder (Flight Sergeant Frikkie Geyser) and Corporal Pienaar (Corporal D. Clark). Both Clark and Geyser were veterans of the SADF and their mannerisms give a realistic feel to that of an NCO addressing new troops. Here one sees one of the problems of white rule in Africa — and indeed, white rule everywhere. Typically, the most dangerous enemy a white will ever face is another white. The enemy, in this case is Nick Smith (Ryan Dittman), an English South African who is antagonistic to the Afrikaner leadership and Afrikaner soldiers in his platoon. We learn that Smith has spent some time in “the DB” or Disciplinary Barracks. He is slack in training and a drain on his young fellow trainee squad leader, Danie Joubert (H. O. Meyer).

The English, as a people, are normally excellent soldiers, but in the South African circumstance it is entirely possible that there would be some antagonism between the English and Afrikaners that won’t bring about the best in non-cooperative, marginal types. A look at internet message boards related to the South African Defense Force of the time implies that there was antagonism ranging from light, American-style ribbing between Northerners and Southerners to more serious conflicts. Some English SADF veterans seemed to have been thoroughly demoralized by the Afrikaners during their National Service.

Sometimes the smallest differences are the hardest to bridge. This Afrikaner and English antagonism grew out of the histories of the British and Dutch Empires. These great rivals were very similar in that they were a racially closely-related people from Northwest Europe who were commercial, Protestant, seafaring powers. They were also comfortable with large, complex financial institutions such as stock markets and central banks. The British gained the colony of South Africa from the Dutch after the Napoleonic Wars and immediately antagonized many of the native Afrikaners by freeing slaves without compensation for their owners unlike British emancipation compensation in the West Indies. This bad start led to a cycle of dysfunction between South Africa’s two white tribes.

During the Boer War (1899 to 1902) the British Army, often employing English South Africans from Natal and the Cape Colony had interred Afrikaner families in concentration camps where many died from disease. South Africa continued on in the British Empire for the better half of the 20th century, but left the Commonwealth in 1961, enraging many of the English — especially in Natal. The movie contains is a reference to the Battle of Cassinga, which took place in May 1978 so one can presume that the timeframe of the story is occurring sometime around 1980–1985. Therefore, the Afrikaners in the movie’s timeframe could have easily grown up hearing firsthand accounts from their elders of being captured and interred by the British, and the English could very easily remember the sting of leaving the Commonwealth.

The Afrikaners and English could have gotten along especially in the face of the black threat. After all, the Dutch of New York’s Hudson River Valley did blend into the larger American English culture in the face of the French and Indian threat during colonial times.[1] However, the English of South Africa were influenced by a vast religious movement — a heresy really — which has as of yet, no name.[2]

Today, the Communism that the South Africans so valiantly fought is gone, other than a few isolated holdouts. There is also no likelihood that Communism will ever again arise. However, the black liberation movement that the South Africans were also fighting in the 1980s has a religious aspect to it and continues to exist today. Whenever a group of blacks in the #BlackLivesMatter movement force a university official to resign after apologizing for some imagined racial slight, one sees this religious heresy on display. Despite the appearance of black strength, the real force for this religious mysticism is internalized in the soul of whites. As long as this religion continues, one will need to put up with African mischief throughout white civilization.

One example of this religion in action is the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1908–1980). He was famously anti-religious in a traditional sense, but his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth is filled with the language of venomous Abrahamic righteousness. A quote from Sartre with my comments follows:

. . . irrepressible [Third World, non-white] violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself.” [Is that being Born Again?] . . . to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time. . . [Is this smiting the sinners?] When [tribal divisions] remain — as in the Congo — it’s because they are kept up by the agents of colonialism. [Is this because of witchcraft?][3]

Sartre’s writings were the cutting edge of this large religious movement that has elevated blacks to be a sort of god. Indeed, much of the anti-white activity in South Africa was led by religious leaders. Trevor Huddleston (1913–1998) and Graham Charles Chadwick (1923–2007) were both Anglican priests who campaigned against South Africa and Apartheid. Of course, neither chose to say there after Apartheid ended. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s religious organizations across the white world worked against South Africa’s apartheid system and, ultimately against South Africa’s whites.[4][5]

Below are several images which clearly show the religious aspect to this white worship of blacks.

An example of how this sort of white religious support for black endeavors baffled many of the white rulers in Africa. In Portuguese Angola, the colonial authorities had neglected military development in the colony as it had been peaceful for centuries. After five centuries of light rule, the Portuguese government was shocked by the outbreak of vicious hostility in 1961. Portuguese, “Brigadier Martins Soares was candid about his country’s shortcomings and the effect these ultimately had in fostering revolt”:

We’d become accustomed to years of unopposed rule. We also presupposed that when the troubles came, those indigenes in our sphere of influence would rally with us and we’d counter the menace together. After all, we’d ruled effectively for god knows how many generations, though we didn’t take into account how the world had changed after World War II.[6]

The English in South Africa were completely influenced by the Zeitgeist of Negro Worship infecting the rest of the white world. During the Whites Only vote in 1992 where the South African administration of F. W. de Klerk asked South Africa’s whites if he should continue on with his reforms that would eventually lead to black rule, 96% of the English voted that he should continue, while only 46% of the Afrikaners voted yes.[7]

In her book about the end of white South Africa Ilana Mercer wrote of the Protestant failure of will to deal with the aforementioned race-unrealist religion that has taken hold of so many white seekers of moral justice. “The tragedy of the Afrikaner and the American — a function of a shared Calvinist-Puritan ancestry — is the struggle to reconcile Pietism with power: The basic dilemma of Western man is how to reconcile power with justice.”[8] In a later passage she writes that “. . . the ‘exceedingly tough’ Puritan mind was crippled by a correspondingly “tender conscience.”[9]

Thus, within the Corporal Pienaar’s 1980s era SADF infantry training platoon consisting of one malcontent English and many other worried Afrikaner conscripts, the religious-like support for blacks comes to a head when the Corporal attempts to explain, exactly why his men are being sent to the Angola border to fight.

“Many South African soldiers, have stood here proudly, where you now stand. Their pride and history, is in your blood and in your hands. You will be a part of that history.”

The corporal orders the men to hold out their arms.

“The color of your hands, it is your privilege, and that is what this war is about.”

When Corporal Pienaar orders a black worker standing submissively near the platoon to “Fuck off,” Nick Smith attacks the Corporal from the back of formation, knocking to the ground.

“Just back off Danie!” shouts Smith to his mate attempting to stop Smith’s attack, “he’s a human being too, just open your eyes.” Smith is subdued by the other members of the platoon. The black who Smith is defending does nothing to help Smith and remains as passive through the affair.

The fight is illustrative of the lack of the South African, and indeed all civilizationaly competent whites who must effectively manage, civilizationaly incompetent non-whites, especially black Africans, to provide for a moral defense of their power. Admittedly, it is beyond the job description of a non-commissioned officer to formulate a moral response for white defense of their rule. However, in America, university presidents under threat from black sit-ins and other disturbances, are perfectly seated to use the endowments under their control to do so.

Communism is gone, at least in part by the fact that anti-Communist intellectuals were able to shrink Communism’s appeal by pointing out the irrational religious aspects of the movement.[10]

Religious-style movements, especially ones such as Communism without “a god” at its center are ultimately weak ideologies, although for a time these ideologies can grip the minds of intelligent people and fill them with intense devotion. Religious-style movements suffer from the problem that they must put in a new “god” in the philosophical location which was formerly held by the Deity and that new “god” will eventually be shown to be a ridiculous fraud. In order to function, a religion must be able to allow for its adherents to continue on with their faith in things unseen, the future kingdom coming, as the members’ strive for individual piety. One cannot prove that God doesn’t exist, but eventually one can prove that the material prosperity promised by Communism is not existent, and the kingdom is not ever coming. Pious individual support for something like the Soviet System eventually proves to be demoralizing.

For now though, and certainly in 1980 South Africa, the worship of the African remains a solid religion. Private Danie Jobert is influenced by the new religion. Following the fight over the African between the Corporal Pienaar and Nick Smith movie narrative of the movie returns to minutes prior to the opening scene. Danie Jobert and his squad are conducting operations in the bush of Southwest Africa. The men are “clearing” an objective, looking for intelligence from the bodies of the fallen enemies. One enemy escapes, and ends up being wounded. Now the true poison of Nick Smith’s religious devotion to the Africans comes to damage the white South African Soldiers. The men surround the cowering, wounded Negro and Danie Jobert betrays his comrades by interfering with their ability to take him prisoner or shoot him. In his moral signaling Jobert ends up getting another soldier killed. The movie’s end is a damning indictment of the religion of African worship.

Notes

1. There nothing quite like a massacre in a Race War to help whites bury their internal differences. The Dutch and English in 1600s North America had an immediate Indian Threat that eventually made families such as the Roosevelts into exemplars of Anglo-Saxonism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenectady_massacre ^[6]

2. When I wrote the first draft of this article there was no name, but one appeared shortly thereafter – blackism. http://www.vdare.com/articles/jack-kerwick-on-barack-obama-and-the-ideology-of-blackism?content=the%20media,%20t ^[7]

3. One can read all of Sartre’s preface at the following link. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/1961/preface.htm ^[8]

4. http://www.resourcingchristianity.org/grant-product/in-good-faith-canadian-churches-against-apartheid ^[9]

5. http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-14/local/me-328_1_south-africa ^[10]

6. Al Venter, in his book Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa: Lisbon’s Three Wars in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea 1961–1974 quoted one anti-Portuguese fighter who, “admitted that most of his early support came from the American Committee on Africa and the Ford Foundation, largely as the result of the efforts of the late Eleanor Roosevelt and the former Under Secretary of State Mennen Williams.” (Kindle Location 2329).

7. Kemp, Arthur, The Lie of Apartheid and other True Stories form Southern Africa, Ostara Publications, 2012, Kindle Location 481.

8. Mercer, Ilana, Into the Cammibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, A Curva Peligrosa Book, Stairway Press, Seattle 2011, p. 207/

9. Ibid., p. 208.

10. A large plurality of philosophers, thinkers, and writers representing different school of thought agreed that Communism was a Christian Heresy. Historian Arnold Toynbee famously said so here, http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1952_reith2.pdf ^[11]. He was not alone, arch-Catholic Hilaire Belloc also mentioned the same in his book The Great Heresies http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=4745 ^[12]. Calvinist Philosopher Francis Schaeffer explicitly said Communism was so powerful because of its religious impulses in his movie How Should We Then Live, for the exact quote go to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2VJkJuheZA ^[13] (13:19). In 1988, after the Chernobyl disaster laid bare the crumbling foundation of the Soviet’s Communism Pat Buchanan wrote, “How do we explain this continuing suspension of disbelief, despite the manifest crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Col. Mengistu and Pol Pot? The answer, I think does not lie in a lack of knowledge about the Communist record, but, rather, in the presence of a form of religious belief.” http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0188_Why_communism_endure.html ^[14]