US Rhetoric on SA Genocide is Distorting Reality: James Myburgh on The Danger of Misstating The Threat

On a recent episode of the Makin Sense* podcast, regular panellist James Myburgh, who heads the BRE-DE-RE policy group in Germany, warned that American debates on South Africa have become dominated by extremist rhetoric.

*The Common Sense publishes two primary weekly podcasts. Talking Sense is a one-on-one interview show, where we aim to bring on a wide variety of interesting guests to engage in longer form interviews in which they are given the opportunity to explain who they are and what they know. The second podcast, Makin Sense features a panel of South African-born analysts scattered across the world, from Washington to London, Bremen and Johannesburg, bringing you world-beating global economic, political, geo-strategic, and national security analysis of the major events shaping the world and South Africa's place within it.

On the American far right, Myburgh said rhetoric around violence directed towards Afrikaners is being framed in the belief that it could help: “radicalise white Americans”. On the American far left he said, a similar degree of extremist rhetoric is directed against South Africa’s farmers as: “the embodiment of the colonial oppressor” and therefore framing them as legitimate targets for revolutionary violence.

According to Myburgh, this binary framing has warped the conversation to the point where the real problem of violence has been displaced by ideological battles.

South Africa is an extremely violent society with a murder rate of around seven times higher than the global average. Data that will be published by The Common Sense further shows that South African farmers are more likely to be attacked than is the case for the rest of the population and that those attacks are far more likely to end in a homicide than is the case for attacks against people who are not farmers.

Myburgh cautioned that American commentators often reach too quickly for highly charged labels. He said that there is a tendency: “to always try and reach for the genocide comparison”, but that the term is: “not applicable” and: “the wrong measure” for understanding violent crime on South African farms.

Myburgh argued that exaggerated claims about: “white genocide” prompt a predictable counter-reaction from the political left, who: “report on this obsessively because obviously it is not true”. He said this dynamic allows commentators to: “pretend that there has been no problem at all.”

This he said leads audiences to conclude that the entire issue of violence is: “totally made up.”

To illustrate the political risks of exaggerated claims, Myburgh drew parallels with historical propaganda campaigns. He cited international reporting in 1933 that predicted an imminent massacre of Jews and communists in Germany, reporting which did not come to pass at that time. He explained that Joseph Goebbels had used this as a pretext to accuse Jews of spreading: “atrocity propaganda”, strengthening support for early anti-Jewish laws.

Watch the full episode here.