Why does only Trump care about the killing of white South Africans?

Telegraph

25-05-2025

Last week, Donald Trump confronted Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, and accused his country of a 'genocide' against white farmers. Fact-checkers swung into action: wrong on all counts! Whites make up about seven per cent of the population and less than two per cent of murder victims. The clear majority of those killed on farms are black. Trump uses the word genocide lightly and cynically.
But then it's always been surprisingly elastic. You might think 'genocide' means an attempt to physically exterminate an entire people, as in the Holocaust, but the United Nations applies it to either the whole or part of a community; persecution can be physical or mental; and it might be achieved by creating intolerable conditions.
White South Africans feel the latter point definitely applies to them – given recent laws that discriminate in employment and make it easier to seize their land – so why are their claims not being heard more sympathetically? Either 'lived experience' matters or it does not.
Well, one feature of our culture of subjectivity is a tendency towards double-standard. We care deeply, but we pick and choose what we care about.
Governments were notoriously slow to identify the genocide of Christians in Africa; ethnic cleansing in Sudan or Azerbaijan will never get a shout-out at Eurovision. By contrast, Israel is routinely accused of genocide – as is Britain, for its former empire, or Commonwealth countries vis-à-vis indigenous peoples.
White South Africans are thus the latest in a long line of minorities to demand their day in court, and telling them 'a lot of other people are getting murdered in South Africa as well' is not quite the slam dunk that the defence seems to think.
Indeed there was something distasteful about the speed by which fact-checkers 'proved' that the whites to whom Trump has granted asylum are mistaken – people, remember, who say they are fleeing for their lives. The affair, wrote one journalist, is treated by South Africans as a 'joke'.
Is the same humour on show when grown men pose as children to get asylum in the UK? No, and it shouldn't be: the principle of asylum is that we take a claim seriously till it is disproved. Perhaps white South Africans have exaggerated the threat to their community, but it's odd that the first instinct of so many Westerners is to diminish or ironise what we would normally say isn't very funny.
In 2020, in a case that resulted in violent protests, farm manager Brendin Horner was tied to a pole, stabbed and strangled to death. He was just 21 years old.
No doubt some commentators harbour the view that if bad stuff happens to white South Africans, they 'have it coming' given what went on under apartheid. It is undeniably true that when the racist regime died, whites lost political power yet retained economic dominance. They still control three quarters of private land.
South Africa would have benefited from a two-party, class-based politics that tussled between capitalist and social democratic responses to inequality. What it got was a single-party crime syndicate called the African National Congress, which, through theft and incompetence, has left 33 per cent of its beloved people unemployed. In 2023, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported a queer fact: 'South Africa now exports more copper than its mines produce.' How is this possible? Locals steal it and sell it on the black market. They strip it out of railway lines and power cables, even from the wiring in hospitals.
The result of such decay? The rise of small parties espousing anti-white sentiment under the guise of socialism. In 2024, nearly 10 per cent of South Africans voted for the Economic Freedom Fighters – a Marxist party whose leader, Julius Malema, famously sang 'Kill the Boer'. If some whites want out, it's because they can see where things are going.
They leave one racial powder keg for another. Trump has attempted to put a ban on global asylum seekers while accepting a handful of whites whose peril is disputed – an obviously racist policy that exploits the Right-wing backlash against Black Lives Matter. The Maga crowd thinks: 'Americans used to say all lives matter, then the Democrats decided that black lives actually matter more. So, here comes the correction. We shall say, 'white lives matter, too', and restore balance to the force.'
Very often, Trump doesn't correct the liberal zeitgeist so much as he appropriates, inverts and exaggerates it. The Left wants a fight about race? Fine: he'll declare war and drop an A-bomb. Borders are closed, critical race theory is banned in schools. I get why liberals hate Trump for this, but it's frustrating that they cannot see their own part in fuelling the phenomenon – that he exploits the moral confusion they have sown in public life. The post-Holocaust, post-Civil Rights ideal was that society would try its level best to be colour-blind. It was a myth, yes; but a good myth. The Left chose to blow it up. Patriotic meritocracy was replaced with grievance, redistribution, anti-racism. As identity becomes a factor in our politics, groups scrabble for champions, and Trump offers himself to whites.
In a sense, we are all South African now: in America, and in Britain, the state is no longer seen as a neutral referee but a castle to capture. Among the chattering classes, universalist principles – the old 'thou shalt nots' applied to all with no caveats – are replaced with a hierarchy of suffering (causes to endorse, causes to ignore) that masks the revival of ancient prejudices and animosities.
Have you noticed a growing ambiguity around killing? The word 'but' trails behind death like a shady lawyer. Over a thousand Jews were killed on October 7, but Israel is occupying Arab land. Nine children were killed in an Israeli strike on Gaza, but Hamas started the war. George Floyd was killed by a cop, but he did buy a pack of smokes with a counterfeit bill. And whites are killed on farms, but so are black people. Plus these Afrikaners are so difficult! Plus I read on a website that you have to understand the context…
There might be no greater insult than being told to keep a murder in perspective, yet this is precisely what moral sophisticates are doing. I offer an alternative. Let us call all murder a sin and respect its victims, whatever their race or religion.