Which is worse: A democratic government that oversees a situation where it's minority white citizens, albeit an important "cog in the wheel" as it were, are being brutally and often mercilessly wiped out, or a government that enforced racially segregated hierarchy laws whereby the privileged white did exactly what it pleases without restraints, which also included brutal and often merciless wiping out of its black citizens in the name of protecting themselves against you know...?
Numbers are irrelevant when comes to a killing or its classification, as murders and killings of any human being, be it the 40's 50's 60's or 1970's or in the 1990's,or be it on a farm or nightclub or township, its all still remains murder regardless of the circumstances involved or the percentages and ratio's or motives added to it. Also time period is also not that important to me as some would argue that when comparing the two systems of governance, that one allows for a lesser number description people being killed by a certain race group than the other government ever did combined.
What is genocide exactly and does it apply to the killings of white afrikaner farmers? The United Nations define genocide as "the gravest crime against humanity that is possible to commit...the mass extermination of a whole group of people, an attempt to destroy an entire group and wipe them out of existence".
Legal complicated definitions of the word genocide varies, but essentially that is what it is. The root meaning of the word when you break it in two is "genos" in Greek (race or tribe) with the Latin word "cide" (to kill).
So when does mass killings of a particular race become a genocide? When a relative of a dead farmer says it does or has the hysteria that is so often purported in news media journals given rise to verbal inflation and devaluation of the term genocide?
So far the United Nations and others has not as yet come up with the exact number of people that needed to be murdered first, before that constitutes genocide. All they say is mass murders, but no real numbers or parameters of that which exceeds the limit of killings before it reaches genocide status.
However, former secretary-general of Medecins Sans Frontieres, Alain Destexhe, wrote in his book "Rwanda and Genocide in the 20th Century" that:
"Genocide is distinguishable from all other crimes by the motivation behind it. Genocide is a crime on a different scale to all other crimes against humanity and implies an intention to exterminate completely the chosen group. Genocide is therefore both the gravest and greatest of the crimes against humanity."
Now where do we stand on this issue in South Africa? A well known South Africa individual has said that "the white race in South Africa are all are criminals...we will take the land back. without compensation. "Does that remind you of anyone in the news recently?
Also does those words not fit the description by Alain Destexhe in his definition of what genocide is when he says "implies an intention to exterminate completely the chosen group"?
True this is just one individual's view, not representative of an entire race or people, but he did hold an important responsibility just recently with a particular organization until he got suspended so you could say he spoke with the backing from senior leaders of the ANC Government and not out of his own will. Still it's debatable whether or not he does or does not speak about his own personal feelings toward white folks.
Lecture Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, offers caution when he says "Those who unfortunately do use the word genocide, banalise it into a validation of every kind of victimhood".
Alain Destexhe agrees with Ignatieff when he says "the term has progressively lost its initial meaning and is becoming too dangerously commonplace".
Many have made claims for genocide:
1.The Holocaust.
2.The 1995 massacre at Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia.
3.The Soviet man-made famine of Ukraine in 1932-33.
4.The Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975.
5.The Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia in the 1970's.
6.The president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir.
7.The mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915-1920.
8.Rwanda, where an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus died in the 1994.
A secret report by the United Nations in August 2010,showed that the Rwandan Hutus may have been victims of similar killings by the Tutsis, and yet only the Hutu's are named and shamed as the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide.
Is the argument by white farmers of genocide too insignificant to be classified as genocide? Is what happening in the killing of white farmers an excuse for redistributive justice against the historic oppressor?
During the 1980's,under PW Botha's powerful state security apparatus, political offenders of the Apartheid Government were brutally punished. A tit for tat or the equivalent retaliation as it were taking place since that time. In the 80's about 40,000 people were subjected to whippings as a form of punishment annually, the record shows.
The vast majority anti-apartheid fighters had committed political offences and were lashed ten times for their trouble. When convicted of treason, these persons could be hanged, and it is reality that the government executed numerous political offenders in this way. People's courts were set up, and residents accused of being government agents were dealt extreme and occasionally lethal punishment.
Black town councillors and policemen, and sometimes their families, were attacked with petrol bombs, beaten, and murdered by necklacing, where a burning tyre was placed around the victim's neck. So blacks suffered with the lost of their lives a great deal too, albeit by the looks of things, at the hands of other black people. Still it all took place whilst South Africa was ruled by an Apartheid Government, so they themselves should take the blame for allowing this to happen!
The commercial farming sector is an important component of South African life and industry, so are white farmers paradoxically the target of a vindictiveness and hate filled bunch of minority few uneducated killers, hellbent on wiping out an entire race and why?
Precision farming, attention to detail, good marketing and plain old hard work has made the white farmer an endangered species or was it something else more sinister that runs along with that?
Since 2006, the current ANC government has spent just over $3,7 billion buying up farms for the purpose of leasing them out, but much of that land has not been allocated to anyone in particular.
This means that vast areas are standing unused or that a handful of people are getting great windfalls from this national fiscus. Land redistribution and land reform policies of the government, food security are all very touchy subjects in South Africa, as it contains no actual policies at all except numerous obstacles based on ideologies and political expediencies of an elite group of people in power.
So is ethnic cleansing, genocide or just murder by numbers?
Reference:
1.www.bbc.co.uk/archive/apartheid.
2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid_in_South_Africa.
3.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide.
4.www.history.com/topics/what-is-genocide.
5.www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11108059.
6.www.genocidewatch.org/genocide/whatisit.html.
7.standnow.org/learn/genocide
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