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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Yep.
So unfortunately, that narrative is so oversimplified that it's almost farcical. So the one claim would be that Europe is the continent for white people and Africa is the continent for black people. So it doesn't matter that the groups who live in South Africa came from the North of Africa, they still came from Africa. That's kind of hard on the North Africans. Yes.
And so my answer to that is that implies that if you apply that same argument to Europe, then you should say black people in Europe are not welcome. They should go back to Africa. Because the narrative in South Africa is whites must go back to Europe because this is black people's continent.
And so the political slogan is that when the Dutch came, they didn't bring any land on their ships. So that's sort of the joke that, oh, you came and you colonized. And the narrative is that they wouldn't say that South Africa was densely populated because they know it wasn't, but they would say that all of it belonged to the black groups who were living in South Africa.
And so the arrival of the Europeans was essentially colonialism.
Not originally, later they had.
Yeah, so the argument is if something like, if you have walked over a mountain once, then that mountain belongs to your tribe, something along those lines. Which is playing out in Australia, for example, right now in a major way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But this is a classic example of what Huntington would call the clash of civilizations. It's just different perspectives on, for example, the issue of property rights, the notion of what does ownership mean, different cultures, different communities, but also different civilizations have different perspectives on that.
And now we're sort of in this place now where the Western perspective has become the dominant perspective.
Yes, yes, exactly. But yeah, the fact of the matter is there were large tracts of land that wasn't inhabited.
I'd like to add one thing is weapons technology or warfare technology. So Neil Ferguson talks about the killer application. There's one thing that has a massive consequence. So many of these- Like stirrups. Yeah, well, like the tribes that came in from the North had spears. And the Bushmen weren't able to defend themselves against spears.
Then the Zulu people, King Shaka developed or had a different approach to using the spear as a weapon. He made the stick or the staff end much shorter so that you don't throw away your spear because he became concerned that you go to war and then you throw away your weapon and then what do you do? And so he said, we shouldn't throw away our weapons.
We should have big shields so that when they throw spears at us, we should be able to defend ourselves. And then our spear is something that we can use to stab and then we still have it. And just that one thing had a massive consequence in terms of Zulu dominance in South Africa.
Yes. Isn't it the space odyssey story with, I think there's reference to the ancient primates and the one group is able to pick up a stick, a bone. And the fact that one group is able to do that and the other isn't just means- That was a big deal. The other group gets obliterated.
Yes.
It's the equivalent of the atomic bomb. It's a game changer. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Right. It's the Dutch legal principle of res nullius is a piece of land or property that doesn't belong to anyone because there's no one there. Right. And so a res nullius is something that you can occupy. But that's not the narrative. That's not the mainstream narrative. I think there are very few historians who actually push this mainstream narrative.
I think most historians who are worth their salt now that the history of land ownership in South Africa is much more complex?
That is a very good question, and I think it deserves a long answer, and I might not have the full answer. Because I think it ties in with a lot of the problems that the West has in terms of this deep-rooted sense of guilt that Westerners have about their own history, about their own past.
And this oikophobic, I think that's Roger Scruton's term, of sort of hating your own and having a deep sense of remorse for your own history and feeling sorry for that. I think it's rooted in that. It's this down-with-us mentality that we are the bad guys and we need to feel sorry for ourselves.
Showing 101–120 of 479 · page 6 of 24
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