My name is Jonas Nilsson from The Boer Project¹ and this is my reply to the piece delivered by Marianne Thamm in the Daily Maverick on 29 January.²

Beyond the open slander against me as a person by calling me a “Neo-Nazi”, the article also questioned my motives for the journalistic work I have commenced in South Africa within the Boer Project for Palaestra Media. I quote: “To leverage the country’s fraught racial history for their own global aims.”

It’s nothing else but hogwash.

The article correctly states that I’m the author of Anarcho-Fascism Nature Reborn, and in the same breath calls me a Neo-Nazi. I have no idea where she came up with such a ridiculous label to put on me.

I’m a right-wing libertarian, I want a small state and a society built on voluntary interactions. That is my political vision.

I hold a degree in political science from the Swedish Defence University. My exam paper examined the correlation between the ideas within fascism and anarcho-capitalism. It was an A-graded exam paper.³ And I labelled that collusion as an expression of “Anarcho-Fascism”. My published book Anarcho-Fascism Nature Reborn was inspired by that exam paper. It has nothing to do with “Neo-Nazism” as implied in the article.

This might come as a shock to many in the editorial room of Daily Maverick, as a political scientist you can examine political ideas and political thought without political labels being attached to the examiner himself.

It’s a display of abstract thinking that follows the scientific method.

The article also questioned my possibility to live and work in South Africa, and what or who finances The Boer Project. It’s no secret and stated very clearly on boerproject.com that The Boer Project is a crowd-funded project. The viewers themselves finance it.

The reason why I do this work is fundamentally because the mainstream media in Sweden does not highlight certain aspects of the domestic struggle within South Africa. One speculative reason could be because of the strong Swedish support to the birth of the Rainbow Nation. That Swedish mainstream is committed to that engagement so it is hard for them to give fair coverage of the challenges ahead.

The present-day apparatus from the mainstream is to silence those stories that could counter the beneficial ideas of the Rainbow Nation. The stories are being ignored and they hope the problem will be solved anyway.

I don’t believe so. I think we need to highlight challenges. Bring them up into the discourse, talk about them and through an increased level of awareness understand what people are facing in order to help them in the best possible way.

I think it is impossible for us to do that if these issues, no matter of how controversial, are being ignored.

We need to let people have their say. And that is what I’m doing with my platform. I make documentaries and have interviews with people whose stories are about to be silenced to death by the mainstream media.

I give those stories life. Because no one else does. I don’t exist to further some conspiratorial “global aim” as stated in the article; I exist because mainstream journalists don’t give these issues the coverage it deserves. DM

Jonas Nilsson, The Boer Project