Illustrative image | Newly arrived Afrikaner 'refugees' in the US. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images) | Statue of Liberty silhouette and US flag. (Photo: iStock) | Asylum seekers. (Photo: iStock) 
Let’s just say it wasn’t your typical refugee exodus.
One of the dubious perks of 21st-century journalism is reporting on the profusion of migrant camps and settlements pocked across the world. According to the UN, almost 304 million humans are on the run from the horrors of a decaying planet — be it the unkindness of their neighbours, the caprice of their rulers, or the fury of the weather itself.
I’ve seen people inhabiting white tents in DRC, in CAR, in Syria, in South Sudan, in Ethiopia, in Afghanistan and, once or twice, here at home — in filthy church basements, where they hide from the violence of this country, the wounds on their flesh and in their minds suppurating slowly in front of the cameras.
One thing that all these disparate people have in common? A distinct lack of luggage.
On Sunday evening, at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International airport, a cluster of 50 or so Afrikaners (and their bags) were spirited on to an aircraft chartered by the United States government. These were the first in a tranche of local white, supposedly farmers granted refugee status by the Trump regime, who allege that this minority is targeted for persecution by the South African state.
Worse, the local government, insist the Americans, is a ghastly amalgam of DEI initiatives, intersectional politics, wokeness and anti-white racism. Bathing these Boers in the language of victimhood, Trump has fast-tracked their exodus through an executive order and welcomed them in. Others in need have been told not to bother. They are the anointed. The blessed.
And they are just the beginning.
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Make no mistake: South Africa is a violent place. The bloodshed comes suddenly, its viciousness often prompted by ancient rage and loathings. The aftermath, for those of us who have witnessed it, resembles nothing more than the floor of a butcher shop. It comes first for the vulnerable: children and women. Next, it comes for men, most often at each other’s hands. The statistics are widely available: a disproportionate number of the victims are black and poor. The rule is simple: The less you have, the more harm you will suffer.
Read more: Trump’s Afrikaner refugees — the search for white victims
This country is steeped in war-making. Its short modern history is little more than a tale of territorial scuffles, culminating in decades of racially defined land grabs. The government of the democratic dispensation, itself birthed in bloodshed, adopted the tenets of liberalisation so enthusiastically that it ceded the state’s monopoly of violence to millions of aspirants. The cops stand by while vigilante groups police the townships, or they scrape away the corpses of those killed by private security groups in wealthy neighbourhoods.
In South Africa, anyone can play a cop.
So it goes.
But what the state has not done is single out a minority group for violent persecution. To allege as much — to even suggest that the government has targeted white Afrikaners — is an unforgivable libel. The game is obvious: to invert the harms visited on black South Africans during apartheid, and to claim the mantle of righteous victimhood for themselves. In this narrative, the real victims of South African history are those families awaiting their chartered flight to the United States.
White Afrikaans South Africans.
To be sure, life is hard for everyone. It is demonstrably, statistically and economically less hard for whites in this country. That being said, we cannot know, at this point, what the faux refugee families have suffered. No doubt some among them have stories that would sear the soul.
But what we do know is that they are just a handful among 304 million who have packed up their belongings and looked for safety and opportunity elsewhere. No other group on Earth can claim such preferential treatment from the richest and most powerful country in human history. Their lobby groups whined on X, and six months later they were on a private plane to the US.
If this isn’t wildly extraordinary privilege, I don’t know what is.
Afrikaans culture is rich and beautiful and rambunctious. At its worst, however, it is shot through with a woe-is-me messianic streak that does no one any favours. Whether they know it or not, the people who boarded that chartered flight are props in a grand performance of white supremacy, conducted by the president of the United States and his henchfolk.
Read more: Scant sympathy for ‘plight’ of Afrikaner ‘refugees’ at SA’s premier farm show
Trump just accepted a free 747 jet from the Qatari royal family, and as his regime endeavours to mimic the worst of the Third World kleptocrats, he makes Mobutu Sese Seko seem modest by comparison. (He makes Jacob Zuma look like a priest.)
Fresh white refugees are nothing more than cogs in the distraction machine. The idiocies of US-style progressivism, with its hierarchies of victimhood, have been adopted by Trump’s Maga movement. White men now stand at the very tippy-top of the intersectional grievance chart. This would be embarrassing if it weren’t so hilarious. The white “refugees” who slunk on to that private plane and left a country where their rights were protected by a Constitution, are on their way to another violent place, steeped in racial hatreds. What really bothers their lobbyists is not that they have the same rights as their neighbours. It’s that they don’t have more rights.
Under Trump, they will have more rights. The Boers are moving to an America in which the president insists that it’s time to take back the country from hordes of dusky marauders and Mexican berry pickers. Blacks and other minorities were canned from government positions, and it’s now DEI for drunks with Nazi tattoos. In the background, Trump and his family strip-mine the state of everything that’s not nailed down, while making sure that they flood the zone with a constant stream of shit.
And don’t fool yourself — what Trump and his lackeys, several of whom are ex-South Africans, are trying to build is apartheid. That’s the aim. So it stands to reason that these Afrikaners will feel right at home.
Read more: Ramaphosa calls Afrikaans ‘refugee’ trek to US a ‘cowardly act’ at Nampo agricultural show
They’ve not moved through geography, but through time — backwards to the Valhalla they lost when apartheid hit the skids.
The louder they bitch, the closer they come to the promised land. But let’s not call them refugees. They’re background extras in Maga’s noisy scam. They’re tools. They’re the sum total of the colour of their skins. DM