Not so long ago, mere mention of the deliberate murder of whites in South Africa—country folk and commercial farmers, in particular—was called “racist.” “Raaacist!” the media collective brayed when candidate Trump retweeted a related “white genocide” hashtag.

It’s still “racist” to suggest that the butchering of these whites, almost daily, in ways that beggar belief, is racially motivated. Positively scandalous is it to describe the ultimate goal of a killing spree, now in its third decade, thus: the ethnic cleansing of white, farming South Africa from land the community has cultivated since the 1600s.

Be thankful for small mercies: At least the international media monopoly is finally reporting facts, such as that just the other day Andre and Lydia Saaiman, aged 70, were hacked to death in Port Elizabeth. (Imagine being chopped up until you expire.)

Or, that the elderly Bokkie Potgieter was dealt a similar fate as he tended his small, KwaZulu-Natal holding. Potgeiter was butchered during the October “Black Monday” protest, which was a nation-wide demonstration to end the carnage. Internationally reported as well were the facts of Sue Howarth’s death. The 64-year-old pharmaceutical executive was tortured for hours with … a blowtorch.

This black-on-white murder spree has been ongoing since a dominant-party political dispensation (mobocracy) was “negotiated in my homeland for South Africans. (Learn about “The American Architects of The South-African Catastrophe.“) But while the criminal evidence is at last out in the open, the motive for these hate crimes is only mumbled about for fear of offending the offenders.

In South Africa we find a criminal class, born into freedom after 1994, that burns with white-hot hatred for whites.

Why?

The South African state’s stout indifference to the plight of whites does not exist in a void. Witness the steady, anti-white venom the dominant-party cobra-head, the ANC, spits out. “The de facto situation is that whites are under criminal siege explicitly because of their race,” writes a South African historian, cited in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011).

“The black criminal collective consciousness understands whites are now historical fair game.”

The physical, existential vulnerability of white South Africans flows from a confluence of historical antecedents that have placed them in a uniquely precarious position. “The white minority surrendered political dominance in return for non-racial constitutional safeguards.” By forswearing control over the state apparatus, whites ceded mastery over their destiny, vesting their existential survival in a political dispensation: a liberal democracy.

In a needlessly optimistic assumption, whites imagined blacks too would be bound by the same political abstractions, and would relinquish race in favor of a constitutional design as an organizing principle in the society they now controlled.

Having “surrendered without defeat,” for a tepid peace, Europeans are, moreover, particularly and uniquely vulnerable within this political dispensation because of their history on the continent. Remedial historical revisionism notwithstanding, South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not the product of the people currently dismantling it. Rather, it was the creation of British and Dutch settlers and their descendants.

For what they’ve achieved and acquired—and for the original sins of apartheid in South Africa; slavery in America—whites are the objects of envy and racial enmity.

The observations of liberal, African-American journalist Keith Richburg are particularly pertinent here. Richburg believes that on the Dark Continent, tribal allegiance trumps political persuasion and envy carries the day. He cites the fate of the Tutsi—an alien, Nilotic African people, who formed a minority in Rwanda and Burundi—among the Hutu who are a Bantu people.

The Hutu have always resented the tall, imposing, attractive Tutsis, who had dominated them on-and-off since the 15th century. When Hutus picked up machetes to slash to bits nearly a million of their Tutsi neighbors in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, they were, on a deeper level, contends Richburg, “slashing at their own perceived ugliness, as if destroying this thing of beauty, this thing they could never really attain, removing it from the earth forever.”

Are shades of this impulse alive in the savagery inflicted on the European “settlers” of South Africa (and Zimbabwe and the Congo before them)? Who can say for sure? This much I know: Empowering political majorities in Africa has helped, not hindered, the propensity of hostile masses to exact revenge on helpless minorities.

It would be a mistake to believe, as the American ruling Idiocracy preaches, that minorities in the US—soon to form a majority—will relinquish race and tribe as unifying principles, in favor of the US’s constitutional design.

Like South Africa, America is a creation of (northwest) European settlers. And it is in Man’s nature to dislike those who are unlike him—all the more so when they, as a group, have accomplished what he has not.

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Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly paleolibertarian column since 1999, and is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016) & Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011). Follow her on Twitter, Facebook & YouTube.