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.
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Appearances
I mean, the concentration camps were horrible. I recently read the Gulag Archipelago and Solzhenitsyn writes in there that the first concentration camps were... were invented by the Soviets, but that's actually wrong. The first concentration camps that we know of, at least this type of concentration camps, were during the Anglo-Boer War, where about 30,000 women and children died.
But there was a lot of... The great thing about the Anglo-Boer War was that it was in many ways a first... for the world. It was, some people call it the first international propaganda war because it was in a time when newspapers became popular. So there was this propaganda war in Europe with regard to the Boers or the Boer War with a lot of people saying the Boers are Boerish.
That's where the word comes from. Evidently, if someone told me that's where the word Boerish comes from, it's to be sort of, you know, very old style and not very sophisticated. Rough, yeah. Yeah, rough around the edges. And so there was a lot of propaganda like the Boers being compared to wild hogs and things like that. But that's okay.
The word Boer was actually used for a long time as an insult, almost like Jew, like calling someone a Jew. It's like, oh, you're a Boer, a typical Boer. But I mean, we're very proud of that word. It's something that we take pride in. Yeah. It's in many ways, there's some debate about the difference between Boer and Afrikaner, but it's broadly speaking synonymous.
But I mean, we're very proud of our history in South Africa, and we've become a very sophisticated community with an immense treasure chest of literature, of poetry, of philosophy, all of it in our own language that we did over the last, especially the last hundred years, which of course is under threat now.
No, it descends from Dutch. Yes. And so if you spend some time as an Afrikaans person with some Dutch friends, eventually you start to follow, but it's not Dutch anymore. There's been influences by other languages and so forth. So there are people who speak it all over the world, but that's only because people who have left from, so many people have left from South Africa.
Some estimates say it's about a million people, white people who have left South Africa over the last few decades. Yeah.
So it's more or less about 5 million who are left. The Afrikaner community is about 2.7 million. And the total population is about 60, just over 60 million.
So Jan Smuts, the famous Boer general who worked with Churchill also famously said that South Africa is a country where the best never happens and the worst never happens. And so we sort of believe that and we hope that the worst outcome is an unrealistic outcome. We do know that the most important thing that we need to do now is to be very well organized in terms of our own communities.
to be very well connected to each other. You know, there's this whole debate about the individual and the community in philosophy. And we've realized that if you're just an individual, you are completely helpless. If you're not part of a community, if you're not given meaning by the community of which you are a member, you're completely helpless against the Leviathan, the state.
So we need to be well-organized. We need to be armed. We need to have well-functioning communities who look after each other, look after the poor, do all the things that the government's supposed to be doing, but also look after our safety. So we drive patrols at night. We're involved with... Tens of thousands of volunteers involved with patrols looking after our own safety and so forth.
But I think the bigger question here is the future of South Africa. And this is a controversial thing to say, but it's so obvious that it's not sustainable. It's not going to work and it's just getting worse. So the only possible solution is not simply to say we need a different party in power because the underlying foundations is problematic.
The only possible solution is to move toward a system with subsidiary authorities, which could imply something like a republic for the Afrikaner people. It could imply a kingdom for the Zulu people. It could imply different types of authority depending on the community. But South Africa is a country made up of a long list of minorities.
Unless, if you look at it from a racial perspective, you can say there's a black minority, a black majority. But the black majority also consists of a variety, as you mentioned, a variety of nations and tribes and so forth. Plus massive immigration into your country. Yeah, yeah. It's a very serious problem. Yeah, we virtually don't have borders in South Africa.
Yeah, xenophobic violence. Every now and then there's this upsurge in violence against foreigners. So they get accused. What typically happens is people come in from the north or the north of South Africa, like Malawi, Zimbabwe and so forth, Zambia and so forth. And then they work and they accept jobs for lower wages. And a lot of them work really hard.
So that leads to friction because there's very high unemployment in South Africa already. And so it leads to friction among the local communities. And then every now and then we have this upsurge in very, very brutal xenophobic violence. So yes, the border is virtually non-existent, the border to the north of South Africa.
Well, it's interesting that you know this. Yes. So there's a section in the South African Constitution, Section 235, that provides for self-determination for communities. Now, there's some ambiguity in terms of how to interpret that section, but there is some constitutional provision for that.
And so during the 90s, the negotiations for a new South Africa, the more conservative groups who were white and black, who were arguing for self-determination were made fun of by the ruling party at the time, the National Party and the ANC, of course, and also some Westerners. This is just backwards. This idea of governing yourself is somehow an old ancient thing that we should move away from.
And part of the problem, part of the reason why they were made fun of is the question is, how do you do that practically? And the only way to practically do that is to have areas where people live concentrated, where people form a de facto majority.
And there are such areas like, for example, when you talk about the Zulus and so forth, the Afrikaner people are pretty much dispersed, although there are some areas where we live more concentrated. Right. But there's, for example, there are some initiatives to get Afrikaners to move closer together.
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