So very beautiful were the neat rows of white crosses on the Mall in Washington DC in memory of the thousands of South African farmers, black and white, who were killed while trying to build their country. Standing in the shadow of the Washington Monument and with Lincoln looking down at them, these great and good and brave people finally received a remembrance fitting of their sacrifice.

The neat rows had an echo of Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac River, which was fitting because Arlington is the most beautiful and sacred place on Earth, as it literally marks the price the world paid for freedom from tyranny and hate.

Civilised people everywhere have a great respect for the ritual of death. For Afrikaners and black South Africans, this is particularly so, one of the many things these two groups have in common. Benji Shulman, who runs the Middle East African Research Institute, tells the story of how, after the 7 October massacres, his community put up posters of the dead and the missing in central Johannesburg. The same thing was done in cities around the world. In places like New York, those posters were quickly torn down by protesters, thrown on the ground, trampled, and spat upon. But in Johannesburg they were left untouched by the tens of thousands of working-class passers-by. The families of the dead farmers can be confident, therefore, that millions of South Africans looked upon the images broadcast from Washington with nothing but solemn respect and sympathy and sadness.

It was cutting, therefore, to see how the legacy media and the ANC behaved over the weekend in their reporting and commentary. Snide, nasty, vindictive, and often dishonest. How can anyone who would call themselves human look upon such a solemn and beautiful scene for such amazing and wonderful people and respond with anything but awe, respect, and prayer? Pray for them, they are completely lost and know not what they do.

The people who made possible the memorial must be thanked unambiguously for what they have done. President Donald Trump and Secretary Marco Rubio for allowing the use of such hallowed ground to eulogise people who might not have been Americans but who, to a man, undoubtedly valued what America stands for and who, in some small way, are all Americans now. Our colleague James Myburgh, who travelled from Germany to give the key address at the National Press Club and said such strong but calm and thoughtful and unifying things. It was a fitting platform for the years he has dedicated to researching the truth about what was happening on South Africa’s farms. South Africa’s farmers might not know about James, but he knows about them and has worked so hard to produce the information necessary to protect them from violence. Our friends David Ansara and Martin van Staden of the Free Market Foundation, who travelled from Johannesburg to speak. And our friend Advocate Mark Oppenheimer, who travelled from South Africa to speak so well on the poison of racist ideology and incitement, a warning the whole Western world needs to hear. None of these men are farmers, but they went for South Africa’s farmers because they are such good and decent people. Ernst Roets, who put the whole thing together because of a deeply held commitment to his people, deserves unqualified thanks.

Ambassador L Brent Bozell should confidently report to Washington that South Africans on the ground welcomed his government’s beautiful gesture and that it represents the strongest foundation yet from which to build a new US/South Africa pact.

It is worth recording here again for the record that during the years of South Africa’s liberation conflict, the ANC had a deliberate and articulated strategy to target and kill South Africa’s farmers. After democracy was achieved, the ANC shut down specialised policing units that dealt with such crimes, dismantled the rural commando system that protected farmers, and sabotaged the police reservist system that had been promised to replace it. They then drove a relentless propaganda campaign that farmers abused their staff en masse, were responsible for maintaining rural poverty, refused to “share” their land, and were therefore a threat to South Africa’s national stability. Thereafter, they passed a law justified on the exclusive grounds that it would finally allow the state to remove the farmers and thereby bring social justice and stability to South Africa. The median estimate is that farmers in South Africa are 1.96 times more likely to suffer an armed attack on their homes and businesses than is the case for the broader population, and that those attacks are 6.7 times more likely to end in murder.

Leave the last words to James: “This normalisation of farm and home attacks by our intelligentsia and the government’s dismantling of the state's capacity to combat this kind of crime has had terrible consequences, not just for the victims of farm attacks, but for all South Africans. The goal [now] must surely be to ensure that what is taken for granted in other societies should once again become the norm in South Africa as well, that no South African, wherever they live, should have to fear even their own houses, to fear both day and night alike.”