Some wars would be better forgotten

Today is Remembrance Day or Armistice Day, the day on which we honour the brave men and women who died, often far from their homelands, fighting for freedom and/or democracy and/or civilization. Many of us will wear poppies, reminiscent of those that blew in Flanders fields. And we will be doing so -- as we will be reminded, over and over -- that we do all this "lest we forget".

Walt means no disrespect to those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Most of them went into battle bravely, if not willingly, because they had to. Willingly or not, they answered their countries' call, and did what they were told to do, without questioning the right or wrong of the wars in which they fought.

Some of those wars, in Walt's opinion, were fought in vain, for the wrong causes. By all means, remember and honour the fallen, and pray for their souls, but forget what I'll call "bad wars". Four examples come to mind.

In Canada, today, the names and dates of two semi-forgotten wars were added to the "National" War Memorial*. They were the Boer War -- more properly the Anglo-Boer War -- and the Afghan War -- more properly the Third or Fourth Afghan War, depending on  who's counting.

The Anglo-Boer war was perhaps the first modern war, and a nasty affair it was, won by the British only by sheer force of numbers, and by tactics such as imprisoning the Boers' women and children in concentration camps. You can look it up.

It was an imperial war, fought by then-Great Britain and its colonial subjects (that's how Canadians got involved) against the Afrikaaner citizens of a couple of tiny republics who wanted nothing more than to be left alone. Did Britain subjugate them in the name of freedom or (as is now pretended) racial equality? Hardly. The war had more to do with the fact that the Boers were sitting on top of a mountain of gold.

The Boer War ended on 31 May 2002. Fast forward a century to find Canadian troops fighting alongside another imperial power against another people who wanted only to be left alone. The imperial power would be the US of A, and the people who wanted to be left to alone were the Afghans.

We pretend now that this fourth attempt to conquer a barbarian and unconquerable people -- the British had already tried twice, the Russians once -- was for the purpose of bringing them the benefits of Western civilization. In reality, history will see the Afghan wars as part and parcel of the larger War of the Middle East or -- my prediction -- the Oil Wars.

Dear readers, let's not kid ourselves about the real reason for Armerican "intervention" in Iraq, Afghanistan and other sandpits. No matter what Presidents Bush and Obama told us, there is considerable doubt, in my mind at least, that the Taliban/Al-Qaeda/ISIS pose any real threat to the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, or any other country which has joined the Armerican "coalition of the willing".

Let's be honest. The American government has sent tens of thousands of men and women to their deaths in some of the must useless land on earth because under that land are billions of gallons of oil. The USA wants to control the entire Middle East to guarantee an uninterrupted supply of cheap(ish) oil, and that's a fact.

Canada and the other members of the "coalition" have gone along with the Americans because, having sat out Vietnam and/or Iraq and/or Libya and/or the last-but-one Afghan war, they couldn't be seen to shirk any longer. Why? Because if it ever came to an actual threat against Britain and/or Canada and/or Australia and/or the Netherlands, they'd be screwed without the protection of the USA, and they know it!

I promised you four examples. As well as the Anglo-Boer War and the Oil Wars, I had in mind the Spanish-American war (which coincided neatly with the Boer War) and, of course, the Vietnam War. But I think the point has been made that there's no point in remembering the bad wars unless we do so with a resolve not to make the same mistakes again. Sadly, that resolve seems to be totally lacking in Washington and the other bastions of democracy and freedom.

* Footnote from Ed.: I put "national" in quote marks because Poor Len assures me that in Canada the word has two different meanings, depending on whether you're saying it in English or French. Advice taken!

Escaping the inevitable decline of South Africa

There hasn't been a lot about South Africa in the news lately. Compared with the "Arab spring" sweeping North Africa, the Western campaign to turn Libya into a heap of rubble, civil wars in west and central Africa, and famine in east Africa, not much is going on in the south.

Yet South Africans of the pale pink variety are deserting the ship which is slowly sinking into the morass of corruption, incompetence and chaos that is Africa today. They are coming to "white" countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada in record numbers.

The UK, however, is not a preferred destination because South Africans, particularly the Afrikaners, remember that it was once-great Britain (and later the United States of Civil Rights) that forced majority (i.e. black) rule on a country that wasn't ready for it, and was getting along quite nicely, thank you, as it was.

The Afrikaners - white South Africans of Dutch, German and French Huguenot descent - had their first real beef with the British in the mid-19th century. They got understandably tired of being told by English missionaries how to deal with the "noble savages", how to govern their society, even how to worship. So they left, trekking north across the Oranje and Vaal rivers to establish their own republics: the Transvaal and the Oranje Vrijstaat (Orange Free State).

Fair enough? Not in the eyes of the British. There followed a series of wars between the imperialist Brits and the fiercely independent Boers, as the Afrikaners became known. ("Boer" means "farmer", and that's what most of them were.) The first was in 1880-1. The second and third lasted from 1899 through 1902 and are collectively known here as "the Boer War".

The conflict is known in South Africa as "the Anglo-Boer Wars", which is more accurate as the British were the instigators. They sought to impose one-man-one-vote democracy, enforced racial equality, English law and the English language on a society not suited to any of those things. (Reminds you of the Middle East today, doesn't it?) For their part, the Afrikaners wanted only to be left alone.

The British won the war, not without more than a little difficulty in spite of a huge superiority of men and materiel. The definitive account of how they did so - including a description of British concentration camps - is to be found in The Boer War, by Thomas Pakenham (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979; Futura Books, 1982). An earlier, shorter book of the same title was written by John Selby, and published by Arthur Barker Ltd., London, 1969.

In his The Boer War, Selby states, as the fact is, that although the British won the war, the Boers won the peace. One of the terms of the 1902 treaty that ended the war was that the Afrikaners could decide racial questions for themselves. In 1948 the mainly Afrikaner Nationalist party won the union-wide election. It then applied the policy of separate development - "apartheid" - to the entire country.

Selby says: In 1899, although world opinion favoured the Boers, many individual countries supported the British. In 1968 it seems that world opinion is against the South African government...but as in 1899, a large body of opinion is on their side. This group applauds the success the South Africans have made of their ecnomy...and it watches, with some sympathy, the South African government trying to do its best for the country.

That was in 1968. The campaign of the one-worlders and reverse racists against "white supremacy" intensified throughout the 60s, particularly in Britain and America. Britain divested itself of its African colonies, long before they were ready to manage their own affairs. And in the USA the civil rights movement and that great lover of racial equality, LBJ, brought about the "reforms" that have produced the peaceful and harmonious society Americans enjoy today.

We return to Selby: There are obviously some things that are wrong in South Africa...but to many observers the present government appears to be handling their task with common sense, and to be trying to be as fair as they can to all races, faced as they are with such a racial mixture.

The government undoubtedly believes that, geared as it is to Western industrialization, South Africa without white men to run it would certainly face economic ruin and might even become a Congo or Nigeria. And they are not willing that either should happen.

The South African government to which Selby refers handed power to the black majority in 1994, thanks largely to pressure from the "white" governments of the West. The world waits now, hoping (but not betting) that Selby will be proven wrong. White South Africans, however, are voting once more...with their feet.