Ernst Roets
speaker
479 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Ernst Roets’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So he would put things to me and say, did you know Tucker Carlson said the following? Do you agree with this statement? And did you know that Donald Trump said this? And are you comfortable with this? And so I paused him at one stage and I said, what are we doing? I thought we had to talk about farm murders and what's happening in South Africa.
But the only, so the argument was that because Trump made that comment about farm murders in 2018, It has to be a non-existing issue because Trump is a liar and everything he says is false. And the same with you, because you spoke about it, that means that the problem doesn't exist. And we have to prove that it doesn't exist in order to get to you.
Yeah, it's no, you're not getting killed, and if you are, you deserve it. Right. Because of a variety of things, because the attackers are poor, or because remember all the horrible things that white people have done in South Africa and outside of South Africa. So there's always a justification. And so another example...
Just in 2018, again, after you spoke about this and after Trump spoke about this, the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, came to America and he spoke at an event in New York. And he said there are no killings of farmers in South Africa. And he just flat out denied the existence of the problem. And he said this on an international platform. He said it's not happening. It's not true.
And the worst of it all was how the media knew this was wrong, especially mainstream media in South Africa. They knew that it's not true. And so they immediately rushed to his defense, writing articles like, this is what he actually meant to say. And then they sort of justify what's happening.
And so we really do sometimes feel that our biggest battle is not primarily against what the government is doing, but against how the media is reporting.
Well, the explanation that is used in court cases, so by the way, this kill the boer chant was found in court not to be hate speech, according to South African law. It's not hate speech.
Well, maybe that's it.
So the arguments that that is used or are used to defend this type of rhetoric would always be something like you need to see it in context. You need to remember the apartheid system. You need to remember what these people went through. They deserve to be killed. You need to remember that. Yeah, that's well. So the argument is that they're actually commemorating the historic struggle.
And that's why they are still chanting this.
Yeah, but the motive is also explained in the words. So they're trying to defend the words. It's a famous story of Chamberlain and Churchill. You know, when Chamberlain came back from meeting Hitler and he said, no, well, I met him and, you know, I think we're going to find peace. And then Churchill said, no, well, I read what he said and I believed him.
And so you can just read what they're saying. If you read the policy documents of the ruling party, they say they want to convert South Africa into a communist society. They want to have a revolution in South Africa. And if you listen to the more radical parties to the left of them, they openly chant about killing white people. So they say these things out loud.
And now they are obviously more to the fringe. You find the more extreme rhetoric in South Africa, but... But it's very alarming and how people just rush to their defense all the time.
And this brings us back to the 90s. So during the 90s, it was again after the Cold War and the world and especially the West was high on ideology and this idea that, you know, the world will become liberal and everyone's going to become like us. And everyone in the world is just an American waiting to be liberated.
And we just need to go and liberate them from their own traditional beliefs and so forth. And so it really is the case that America and many Western countries played a very significant role in creating the South Africa that we have today.
And so we don't want other people to fix our problems on our behalf. We want to solve our own problems. But you can certainly make the case that the West has a moral responsibility towards the people in South Africa. Of course.
Yeah, and so there's this false dichotomy in South Africa or with regard to South Africa that if you are against what's happening in South Africa now, that means you want the apartheid system. So you have a choice. And this one former judge recently said this, who's retired. He said that we have a choice in South Africa between…
a moral system that is dysfunctional which is the current system or an immoral system that is a functional one which is the former system and so the problem is if you criticize what's happening in south africa now you get accused of wanting to return to the apartheid system but the truth is you can reject both you can say we don't want the apartheid system and we don't want what's happening in south africa at the moment we we want to govern ourselves we want freedom
But it seems that a lot of people are incapable of making that conclusion or leaving any room for saying that both these systems are wrong and we need a better system, a system that is much more decentralized, a system in which the various nations who live in South Africa, because South Africa is very big, it's almost as big as Europe, the various nations living in South Africa should just govern themselves.
And that's not what's happening in South Africa. And I think it's a worthy cause to pursue.
Showing 261–280 of 479 · page 14 of 24
← Previous
Next →