History has moved on

I’ve been following this whole Jewish money, influence issue with some interest and, I’ll confess, not a little alarm.

Specifically, the fact that many respondents to Sentletse Diakanyo’s piece were absolutely unfazed by the fact that one of his key sources has a (justified) reputation as a neo-Nazi. In debates both on Thought Leader and elsewhere, I’ve noticed how those who think that Diakanyo is onto something have defended his citation of Mark Weber and the Institute for Historical Review as justifiable on the grounds that what Weber writes is true. The fact that Weber is nuttier than a jar of Black Cat Crunchy is beside the point.

So, I thought to myself, if it’s acceptable to canvass the opinion of a rabid right-winger on the subject of Jewish influence on American politics (as opposed to say, a more neutral source), then why not revisit some of the luminaries I quoted in my first book on South African insults?

Sources such as the dean of Bloemfontein, the very Reverend CC Tugman, who said in 1949: “The Bantu is not lacking in intelligence. What he lacks chiefly is ambition.” A year later, MC de Wet of the National Party offered the following insight: “They are by nature a cheerful race, if you make their souls happy they are a dancing, singing, happy race.”

Or how about Betsie Verwoerd? In 1973, she stated that she had raised her children without the help of black nannies and their “characteristic odour”. “If white children of working mothers were cared for by blacks,” she wrote. “It is natural that the white child would develop an attachment for his black ‘mother’. Even the characteristic smell which is normally repulsive to a white person will become associated in the child’s mind with the person with which he spends most of his time. Can this later repel him when he is grown-up?”

Around about the same time, a book with the intriguing title of Agter Die Mielies appeared. Its author, Bertus de Beer, explained that black and white South Africans found one another smelly. Black people likened the smell of whites to a sheep, while the smell of a black man was very much like “damp summer biltong which is unsuitable for human consumption”.

In My Traitor’s Heart, Rian Malan described the contents of a police training manual he encountered, also in the 1970s. Indians, explained the book, were an “unhygienic health menace”. Jews were sly and liable to be guilty of “fraud, embezzlement and swindling”. Portuguese and Greeks “were hot-blooded and prone to crimes of passion”. Blacks were “primitive” and needed firm but kindly guidance.

At the time, a lot of people nodded and accepted all of this as gospel. It’s easy to laugh at Betsie and Bertus. History has moved on; apartheid has been defined as a crime against humanity. Finish and klaar. But who’s to say, objectively, they were wrong? Everyone’s entitled to their opinion based on the facts to hand. Maybe Bertus conducted focus groups and canvassed the views of hundreds of people before reaching his astounding conclusions.

Of course, the fact that those sources operated within a profoundly racist worldview would tend to discount their opinions on racial characteristics now. It’s a bit like getting Eugene Terre’blanche to write an essay on the inherent criminality of blacks based on the fact that more blacks than whites are in prison in South Africa. (And, for that matter, disproportionately represented in American prisons.) You’d question his conclusions because you know they are skewed by a deeply biased frame of reference. You might read him in horrified fascination, but you’d hardly take his views seriously.

If you wouldn’t unquestioningly accept the assertions about Africans of somebody you knew to be a racist, who thought that apartheid actually made damn good sense at the time — then why would you swallow — and defend — arguments about Jews that come from the poisonous pen of somebody who believes that the Holocaust was a frightful exaggeration and not really as bad as some people like to make out?