Bok van Berk hijacked by international facists?

Do a search for "Bok van Blerk" the name of the singer of the song De La Rey and see what unsavoury links you get. It seems the hateful flotsam of the global extreme right wing has latched onto the boytjie from Pretoria.

One of the sites claim that the only way South Africa will belong to the Boers is through the removal of the jews and the blacks (some comment on the stupidity of this claim below). Very little will damage long term Afrikaner political interests more than being associated with this lot.

The De la rey song has caused quite a storm in South Africa.

See the dramatic Bok van Blerk video here.

In the meantime Mhambi brings you the lyrics, nicked from one of those sites (All is fair in love and war). I actually had to correct it a bit because the translation I ripped was not too acurate.

Delarey - Bok van Blerk lyrics

On a mountain in the night
We lie in the dark and wait
In the mud and the blood
As rain and streepsak (translation?) clings to me

And my house and my farm were burnt to the ground so they could capture us
But those flames and those fires now burns deep deep within me.

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?
De La Rey, De La Rey
General, General we will fall around you as one.
General De La Rey.

The Khakis (The British) that laugh
A handful of us against an massive force
With our backs to the clifs of the mountains
They think its over for us

But the heart of a farmer is deeper and wider, they will come to see
On a horse he comes, the lion of West Transvaal (the monicker given to General De la Rey).

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?
De La Rey, De La Rey
General, General we will fall around you as one.
General De La Rey.

Because my wife and my child are in a camp dying,
And the Khakis are walking over a nation that will rise again

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?
De La Rey, De La Rey
General, General we will fall around you as one. General De La Rey.



So now your wondering, who is this General De la Rey fellow?

Afrikaners and Jews

It's undoubtly true that there was much resentment amongst Afrikaners when a Jewish community settled in Johannesburg after the discovery of gold. There was also well documented involvement by Jewish and German industrialists in instigating Britain to attack the Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek (Transvaal).

How anti-Jewish were the Afrikaners? Well for a start some Afrikaners were jewish, the common surname Koen has its origin in the jewish Cohen.

Secondly, when the Afrikaner Nationalsits came to power in 1948 Jewish South Africans endured a period or prosperity and protection they had not had before.

Chris MacGreal wrote an excellent article titled Brothers in arms about the "special relationship" between Jew and Afrikaner.

Anti-semitism lingered, but within a few years of the Nationalists assuming power in 1948, many Jewish South Africans found common purpose with the rest of the white community. "We were white and even though the Afrikaner was no friend of ours, he was still white," says Krausz. "The Jew in South Africa sided with the Afrikaners, not so much out of sympathy, but out of fear sided against the blacks. I came to this country in 1946 and all you could hear from Jews was 'the blacks this and the blacks that'. And I said to them, 'You know, I've heard exactly the same from the Nazis about you.' The laws were reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws. Separate entrances; 'Reserved for whites' here; 'Not for Jews' there."

...

Then Nationalist prime minister Vorster was invited to visit Israel.

At a state banquet, (Yitzhak) Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness".

Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Shocking, yes. But hardly what these international white supremacists wants to hear.

Vorster's visit laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a leading weapons developer and a force in the international arms trade. Liel, who headed the Israeli foreign ministry's South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners.

Well well, the new found darlings of the international extreme right (during the Boer war they were the darlings of the left) helped save the Jewish state. Eat that.

And today after the collapse of the nationalist regime the Jewish community has dwindeld dramatically. The South African economy might be booming, but the jewish community are leaving South Africa.

There is a wider point here. The Afrikaners might have been ideologues, but their politics were primarily driven by practical concerns about their survival. It trumped everything else.

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