This Ain’t “Just For Fun.” This Is A Serious Warning!
Just for the fun (and to mess with folks at a cabana club in Palm Beach):
Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico.
Now, to be serious.
Anthropological Realities:
The Inuit and their three subdivisions – Inughuit, Tunumit and Kalaallit - are the indigenous peoples of Greenland. Each group has its own language or dialect; most – for practical reasons – speak Danish and Kalaallisut; collectively they represent eighty-eight percent of the population of the world’s largest island; they genuinely do not like being referred to as Eskimos.
Despite being larger than Greenland, Australia is considered a continent and – without the extra benefits of Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands – roughly the size of the continental U.S. Humans first migrated to the island/continent 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, eventually establishing some of the oldest, if not the oldest, continuous cultures in the world. By the time of European colonization, Aboriginal people had established complex cultures, speaking more than 350 languages and with varying degrees of technologies and settlements. Dutch explorer Willem Jansz and the crew of the Duyjken arrived at the Pennafather River on the Cape York Peninsula in 1606; the first British fleet – historically referred to as the “First Fleet” - of nine transport ships and two small war ships arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788 to establish a penal colony.
Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa in 1488, followed almost fifty years later by the Vasco da Gama; a century-and-a-half later the Dutch East India Company planted the first European settlement near modern day Cape Town, South Africa. Dutch settlers were late-comers – first arriving at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. According to the South African National Census of 2022, their descendants, often referred to as Boers or Afrikaners, make-up 10.6 percent of the national population; they claim to speak Afrikaans as a first language at home – making theirs the third most widely spoken home language in the country. Evidence suggests the Khoisan (a name bestowed on them by a German anthropologist in the 1920s), Khoekhoe and San peoples arrived 20,000 years ago.
So…
Barely shy of ninety percent (89.5%) of the roughly 57,000 Greenlanders are Inuit (Kalaalit); they’re Indigenous. The almost one million inhabitants of Australia (984,000 or 3.8% of the population) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia are genuinely “Indigenous.” And the Khoi-San (also spelled Khoi-San, Koiesaan, Khoisaasn), residing mainly in South Africa’s Kalahari region, are the Indigenous people of South Africa. Despite claims by members of the current presidential administration, the Boers and Afrikaners – even those tracing their lineage back to the 1652 - are (historically speaking) new comers; they are not indigenous.
Why are two priest/counselors – Roman and Anglican/Episcopalian Catholics - writing about the Indigenous people of South Africa?
Because, amidst its efforts to expel hundreds of thousands of documented and undocumented men, women and children who have contributed to the life and economies of the United States and others desperately seeking refuge from dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua or from the drug cartels that supply America’s demands for cocaine, heroin and fentanyl or the Haitian gangs armed with American-made and American-sold rapid-fire arms, the administration of President Donald Trump has initiated “Mission South Africa.”
Mission South Africa?
Whatthe(we won’t go there but you can)…?
Designed to make America even whiter, MSA is supposed to help white Afrikaners come to the United States as “refugees,” according to documents obtained and reported by The New York Times on March 30.
Quick history:
The Boers fought two wars (1880-1881) and (1899-1902) against the then expanding British Empire; they lost both. Not good news for the Boers, because Britian outlawed slavery in 1833.
In South Africa, slaves (black)magically became indentured servants and South Africa continued to pass its own versions of Jim Crow laws – educational requirements and property qualifications (1892), limits on the amount of land Africans could own (1894), a requirement that Blacks carry special ID badges (1896), denial of the right to vote and restrictions on where Africans could live and travel (1905), travel restrictions on Indian residents in South Africa (1906). A real doozie was the South Africa Act of 1910, which enfranchised Whites and gave them complete control over all other racial groups, even denying Blacks the right to sit in Parliament.
The Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted Black people from buying or renting land in “white South Africa” and forced the removal of Black people from their own lands. The Act defined less than one-tenth of geographical South Africa as Black “reserves” and prohibited any purchase or lease of land by Blacks outside the reserves. A subsequent Group Areas Act reinforced the division and further reduced economic opportunities for Black people.
The timeline of apartheid is generally dated to the 1948 election of the (white) National Party and the 1950 passage of the Group Areas Act, designed to separate whites and Blacks and ban the Community Party; Nelson Mandela and others began their campaign of civil disobedience following passage of the GAP.
The above was just a small taste of legislated white prejudice and the oppression of South African Blacks, Indians and mixed-race peoples.
Over the next almost fifty years, international opposition – in politics, sports, culture and religion – to the injustices of apartheid grew; Pope John Paul II became an outspoken opponent of apartheid. Addressing the International Court of Justice in May1985, he declared, "[N]o system of apartheid or separate development will ever be acceptable as a model for the relations between peoples or races." During a September 1988 papal visitation to countries surrounding South Africa, he called for economic sanctions against the South African government.
Today’s situation of Afrikaners must be understood in terms of the word apartheid – a socio-political system of institutionalized (and government supported and enforced) racial segregation that existed in the Republic of South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. South African baasskap (“boss-hood” or “boss-ship) was an integral part of the minoritarian system designed to guarantee that white South Africans maintain the highest social status, followed by Indians and those of Indian descent, Coloreds – those of lower economic ranks and multiracial descent, and Black Africans, consigned to the lowest socioeconomic ranks.
The 1950 Population Registration Act engraved these distinctions – based on appearance, known ancestry, socioeconomic status and cultural lifestyle - and included several sub-classifications for “Colored” and “Indian.”
Anti-apartheid legislation was passed in 1991. Finally buckling under internal and external pressures, the white/Boer government allowed and lost South Africa’s first free and universal franchise election on April 27, 1994. “Today is a day like no other before it… today marks the dawn of our freedom,” announced African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, a free South Africa’s first Black president.
In 1996, the South African government initiated programs of land reform with promises of settling redistribution claims by 2005 and redistribution of white-owned commercial agricultural land to Black South Africans. These tasks have not yet been fully accomplished. To date, the majority of land remains in the hands of the white minority.
On February 7, three weeks after taking office, Trump claimed South Africa’s expropriation legislation would “enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” and claimed the legislation was part of a number of discriminatory policies and “hateful rhetoric” towards “racially disfavored landowners.” As a result, he said he would pause all aid to South Africa and offered to resettle all “Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”
[Trump also attacked the South African government for accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice.]
Professor Ruth Hall of the Institute for Poverty, Land, and Agrarian Studies of the University of the Western Cape told BBC News (February 23, 2025) that today’s “structural apartheid geography” is “very much intact,” despite a growing black middle class in South Africa and this structural apartheid remains a fundamental problem for the majority of black South Africans “who either do not have access to well-located land in the cities or who live in rural areas without secure rights.”
While agriculture remains one of the main sources of South African revenue, the majority of commercial agricultural land is still in the hands of the white minority which makes up around 7% of the population.
Today, Afrikaner nationalism and identity are based on farming and language. Following the end of apartheid in 1994, the ANC government said it wanted to return 30% of this land to its original owners by 2014; in 2018 BBC News reported that only 10’% of commercial farmland had been redistributed.
South Africa does not release crime figures based on race but the latest figures revealed that 6,953 people were murdered in the country between October and December 2024. Of these, 12 were killed in farm attacks; one was a farmer, while five were farm dwellers and four were employees, who are likely to have been black.
On February 25,2025, BBC News reported:
“A South African court has dismissed claims of a white genocide in the country as ‘clearly imagined’ and ‘not real,’, undermining comments made by US President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk…
“Trump has referred to the ‘large-scale killing of farmers’ in South Africa, while Musk has condemned what he said were ‘racist ownership laws’ and previously condemned the ‘genocide of white people.’
“Despite vowing to crack down on immigration, Trump has said that white South African farmers would be allowed to settle in the US as refugees because of the persecution he said they faced.”
NBC News (February 10, 2025) reported that in 2018, Trump ordered then Secretary of State Mike Pomeo to “closely study the large scale killing of [white] farmers.
“But there is no evidence of such a killing spree, experts have said. In 2018, former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard called the idea of a white genocide a disproven myth.”
The same NBC report noted:
"’Far-right-wing groups in South Africa actively go to America and promulgate this idea of a white genocide because, of course, when you have a high murder rate, white people do get murdered,’ [Gasreth] Newham [head of the justice and violence prevention program at the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa] said, adding that the proportion of white people murdered is lower than other race groups, not higher.
“’Inside South Africa, the false claims have been “weaponized for political purpose,’ [Ruth] Law, the professor at the [Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies] at the University of Western Cape, said, with lobby groups ‘deliberately misrepresenting this as confiscation, racially based confiscation, and linked to a supposed white genocide.'”
On March 30, The New York Times reported:
“There have been murders of white farmers, the focus of the Afrikaner grievances, but police statistics show they are not any more vulnerable to violent crime than others in the country. In South Africa, more than 90 percent of the population comes from racial groups persecuted by the racist, apartheid regime.
“In a statement, the State Department said it was focused on resettling Afrikaners who have been ‘victims of unjust racial discrimination.’”
Here’s the Trump plan:
Play to his audience that eats-up and believes in “white victimhood.”
Keep South Africa in a desk drawer or back pocket until the next time he needs to deflect, disseminate and divert.
Cry for all those “poor, oppressed white landowners,” who still control most of agricultural land in South Africa.
Pretend that white/Boer/Afrikaner oppression of the Indigenous peoples of South Africa “is a thing of the past.”
Rewrite history to pretend that white South Afrikaners are “more oppressed” than the children of Ukraine who have been stolen from their families and adopted out to Russians, while demanding the expulsion of Ukrainian refugees currently in the U.S.
When he really needs to distract attention from another of his administration’s horrors, bring to the Oval Office two or three Afrikaner families for a photo op.
Even though the river from which they derive their name gets nowhere near South Africa, Nile crocodiles are ubiquitous. Be prepared! Trump and his associates will cry crocodile tears for those poor white Boer/Afrikaner South Africans who still control much of the countries agricultural land and the nation’s economy.
The Trump claims will be as phony as his penis-like projection of the track of Hurricane Dorian or re-designation of the Gulf of Mexico.
Again and just for fun:
Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico.