- Please note that the correct term is "Boer nationalists" and not "rightwingers". We are not an (extremist) element on the spectrum of the South African professional party-political comedy. We wish to be no part of this "rainbow spectrum". We do not consider ourselves bound in conscience by a constitution, laws, rules and statutes made on our behalf without any form of consultation with us or consent by us. If and when we do obey these oppressive laws, we do it out of a higher conscience, and out of respect for the semblance of the order of things. We have a right to resist an oppressive constitution and oppressive laws. Actions borne from coercion can never be interpreted as the giving of consent.
From an open letter Professor Tobias Louw addressed to the Institute for Security Studies dated September 16 2003.
- After their arrest and conviction for illegal armed occupation, their khaki-clad leader, Willem Ratte, wrote furiously from gaol to contest his English press depiction as some right wing anachronism. what outweighed this was a First Anglo-Boer War antecedent. In his torrential and powerful manifesto, Ratte insisted:
Were the Boers of 1880 called right-wingers, for resisting the imperialist British occupation? Then, as now, you had an alien regime lording it in Pretoria over our people, whose gutless president had betrayed and handed over his sovereign state.
Then, as now, the new (neo) colonialist administration pretended to be God's gift to the supposedly "dirty and dumb dutchmen", and tried its beast to smear the pro-independence party as only a few backward "Don Quixote's tilting at windmills". Our struggle has nothing to do with right or left ... this being incidental, like religion in the Irish-British conflict, but everything to do with a nation having an inherent right to be free.
From: The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration. Page: 121.
Chapter 3. The South African War / Anglo-Boer War 1899 - 1902. and political memory in South Africa. Bill Nasson.
The one dimensional / nebulous & reckless term Right Wing therefore does not accurately describe nor does justice to the centuries old just struggle of Boer self determination as the mass use of the term even post dates the first Boer freedom struggle & was not even used to describe to the Boer Commandos of the Anglo-Boer War.
1 comment:
These articles do not get the attention they deserve! Your labours and efforts are much appreciated indeed!
Keep up the good work!
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