Why would I take the time to address the propaganda efforts of someone like Dan Corder?

After all, he’s just a DJ. Besides, what do we really gain from crossing swords across ideological chasms like ours? He supports what I consider an existential threat, I support what he considers an unforgivable evil.

But while Dan is not a serious thinker, and is often less than honest in his arguments and attitudes, he is a symptom of the system. The best way to read this essay, is not as a mere personal criticism, but as a criticism of pro-regime discourse as a whole. Corder's smug and condescending content is an excellent foundation for a lesson in public rhetoric, and how political regimes are defended by those whose careers rely on its promotion.

To progress in a political regime which is founded on the gradual destruction of the welfare of your own ethnic group, your career can only be premised on the promotion of the self-destruction of your own kind, creating a performative contradiction (see my essay on Max Naumann).

One must pretend to be a “friend of the common man”, and acknowledge one’s privileges while fighting to hold on to them. One must encourage the destruction of one’s own people while being effective in self-promotion. One must lie.

Dan and I never really knew each other, but I was aware of him at UCT. He was a cheerleader for the Fallist protests from the sidelines, and an active propagandist, while I was a reluctant supporter who joined in the protests at first, and then rejected them once segregationist and genocidal rhetoric became prominent, and became persona non grata on campus.

I was once a communist, an orthodox Marxist who believed that an equitable nonracialist dispensation could be reached, and held the Rousseauian attitude that the cause of evil in society was institutional control and inequality, and that spontaneous populism would reveal the best in humanity.

Fallism showed me this was at its heart the opposite of the truth. The leaderless network-mob which drove the early Fallist movement went from nonracialism to promoting genocide within the space of only a couple of months.

I spent the next several years re-evaluating my entire worldview. Dan has not.

We stare at each other across a great social divide, he and I. He is a prominent creature of the establishment, and I am a prickly and marginal outsider.

One of Dan’s little videos went viral recently, and nobody challenged them on their substance, just on his hypocrisy (which never really works as a criticism), and this has left him mocking his critics with charges of “fragility”.

But he is right, we are fragile. We are mortal, and we can be harmed, and there are many that wish to harm us, and many who do, though people can ignore it because it isn’t affecting everyone at the same time, and the worst has yet to manifest.

That is because it is easy to dismiss the extremists. It is easy to forget that people tend to wait for a critical mass of public confidence before doing evil at scale.

After all, while natural urges often carry people to bloodlust, even then, they are so bound by the primal calculations of bodily vulnerability, that in the tempest of that hormonal flux, they still do not explode and kill until a large number of their own kind, similarly energised, present themselves for combat with the same target.

Like young chimpanzees patrolling territorial borders, Ulster men parading through Catholic neighbourhoods, or EFF thugs marching on white highs schools, the preparatory exercises for confrontation test the consciousness of vulnerability.

It is only through organisation or derangement that this instinct to self-preservation can be overridden by numerical security, and so those who wish to kill excercise great efforts at steering the thinking of leaders and influential people in the direction of collective violence.

But these people who resort to intellectual means for valorising violence forget something - the knives are not always out, nor can they afford to be - many months, even years can go by without a major flare-up, even in the hottest zones of territorial contest. Animals in the wild, and political communities in society do not simply attack at any moment. There is a constant testing of boundaries, managing of peace and war, escalation and de-escalation - conflict is costly, and to be avoided unless necessary.

And so most spend their time tallying the sins of their targets, and presenting the case for action: why “these people” or “those people” are evil and deserving of punishment.

And what better witness for the prosecution than a compliant family member of the defence, ready to give a damning testimony of their collective character?

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The messenger

I thought it worth having a peek at Corder’s other content to see how he presents himself. Dan’s public persona may seem goofy on first glance, but it serves a rhetorical function.

The beanies he wears, often stacked up, often switching out from one jump-cut to the next, indicate a playful attitude.

Wearing the kind of beanie he does on its own, in combination with the simple streetwear he favours, is a nod to black urban streetwear, a way of signalling (more to other whites than to black people) that he is down with the homies.

The playful irony of the stacked beanies is a way of distancing himself from the “friend of the working man” schtick he might otherwise be accused of adopting.

The lame, cutesy and condescending humour exist as a defence against any who would take him seriously and attack his opinions. The “aw schucks” routine is a tried and tested way of disarming interlocutors – Russel Brand is a master at it.

This slippery unseriousness also allows him to take liberties with factual accuracy, since anyone who accuses him of lying could be parried by the defence that his content is humorous, which justifies broad strokes and cutting corners.

But another interesting affectation is the regular use of a blazer in his wardrobe – this is always in combination with casual wear. He has pretentions to the authority of the public intellectual, but lacks the confidence to lean into the demands of rigour that would place on him, and so opts for ambiguous signals instead.

Perhaps his most effective trick though, is formal nonpartisanship. The BBC use this extensively – stack the studio with the OFCOM-mandated balance of Tory and Labour politicians, and the fact that you’ve selected four people of identical opinions on the topic at hand is overlooked.

Similarly, Dan criticises all political parties, but pushes a very clearly hard-left ideological position. His formal nonpartisanship allows him to avoid simple accusations of bias, while pursuing a bias of a deeper nature.

In this fashion, he both defends and legitimises the current regime through criticism. Paradox it may be, but not a contradiction. Soviet press would often be allowed to publish criticisms of the government by saying they didn’t go far enough with the policies they were already pushing. “Stalin cannot fix the problem! We need fifty Stalins!”

He goes a little further in some of his content though, by asserting, vox populi vox dei, that because the nonracialism of the DA has not gained any significant black votes, it is consequently worse than the ANC, and that while the ANC is bad, nobody is any better. And because the DA have been accused of racism, it must be true (no smoke without fire), but that accusations in the other direction are groundless.

Likewise, Corder’s entire aim is to accelerate the left-wing program of the ANC, and has narry a peep to add on the negative impact of its general policy program. He sticks to criticising corruption, but offers no criticism of the systemic means by which the corruption is sustained, unless it can be blamed on white capital.

Yet for the DA or Afriforum, even the most modest positions taken are seen in the context of accusations of systemic racism, while ignoring the more unapologetic and legally instantiated racism of the ruling party.

The status quo is a reform project, and so no matter how much things change, they must continue in the same direction, or else one is undermining the values it is based on. No matter how bad or serious it gets, there is no “too far”.

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The Frame

From 1994 until around 2013-ish, the public debate was in a sort of suspended limbo. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission drew a line in the sand and made retribution for apartheid-era crimes a no-go zone, though one cannot bury racial grievances for eternity.

This made it easy to form a civil basis for race relations, so long as certain topics were off the table – Zimbabwe-style land grabs, racial discrimination, expulsion, revenge, apartheid/colonial apologia, separatism, etc.

And to avoid having these ideas crop up, we all pretended for a while to buy the lie that apartheid ended peacefully. The reality was that an ocean of blood and a mountain of soviet aid had been spilled across the country to get the ANC into a position to negotiate with the NP.

The balance of forces at the time of the first majoritarian administration made it risky to engage in any sort of one-sided prosecution, since the ANC and other Charterist groups were guilty of at least as much carnage and cruelty, whether against whites or, as was more often the case, against each other: torture camps, child murders, necklacing, burning villages, assassinations (see my essay on The People’s War).

And the acceptance of property rights and a promise to abstain from retribution were the primary conditions by which this peace was achieved – the collapse of the Soviet Union as a backer of the ANC put the NP in a position to negotiate without existential fear, and Anglo-American establishment peacebrokers introduced certain watered-down freemarket principles to the ANC as a means for gaining influence and establishing common ground.

Nobody really got what they wanted, and neither side got to test their strength in open battle.

It was a dream deferred, a contest of wills denied.

And at this time, Dan Corder’s father was involved as a legal advisor to the framers of the interim constitution. Hugh Corder was getting his degree during the 1976 student uprisings, just as his son the radio DJ was getting his degree in the midst of the Fallist student uprisings of 2015-18.

Their formative years were both spent defending and promoting black nationalism as an antidote to white privilege. Having been handsomely rewarded for his beliefs in his life-long career, it is to be expected that Hugh passed his attitudes down to his son Dan.

And Hugh was deputy Vice-Chancellor during the Fallist protests himself, assisting the destruction of his university and coddling a pro-genocide intellectual movement while his son made propaganda videos for it.

The years from 2012-2015 saw the Marikana massacre, the emergence of the Zupta-financed White Monopoly Capital propaganda, the death of Mandela, the emergence of the EFF, and the rise of Fallism, a student movement driven, yes, by financial conditions of several students, but also by racial hatred, resentment and lazy entitlement.

The public debate shifted in those years. The primary questions today are existential ones, not examinations of rational policy in the general interest.

Now, the debate hinges on whether white people should be allowed to keep any property at all, moveable or immovable. The political process that answers this question will be one that either recognises our membership of the political community, or strips us of all rights and all means for recovering them.

Dan has sided with those who wish to strip us of any and all rights in the land of our birth. He defends racial discrimination because he has benefitted despite it. He supports the expropriation of farmland, because he does not own any. He supports the expropriation of companies, because he owns none. He supports the expropriation of capital because he receives a salary from people who support these ideas.

And above all, he supports these ideas, because he has no children whose futures would be burned by torching the country.

And in his public broadcasts, he supports any and all argument that advances these causes, accusing anyone who resists of greed and racism.

All our property is ill-gotten, and no matter how hard we work or how much value we create, the pinch of shit ruins the whole bucket of ice cream, and we cannot eat from it.

Therefore, how could we object to being made penniless and destitute?

Of course, Dan will deny the consequent, and say that nobody is calling for this, for now. This is a lie, since all our peers were extremely firm on these points, we both knew the prominent members of the movement, and we know that they held the consensus on campus against nobody dared push back, no matter how many lies fed it.

That blood would need to be shed – that liberty is not real if it is handed over, but only if it is taken, was an axiom of our generation’s ideological training from works of Franz Fanon or Steve Biko.

Dan knows the game he is playing, and that game is feeding the crocodile. You stroke the ego of the prejudiced, and direct their criticisms toward scapegoats the regime already wants to sacrifice.

But I have fed crocodiles for a living, and I know that when you run out of meat to feed them to keep them fat, they will eat you alive.

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The case

Dan Corder’s argument is quite simply that white people got wealthy through theft, racism and wealth redistribution, and therefore that it renders any argument against theft, racism and redistribution in the present day illegitimate.

He also claims this entirely explains the inequality present today, and implies from heavily laden context, but without directly stating it, that this inequality can only be fixed with race-based discrimination in the other direction, and that no white person has any reason to complain about the racial discrimination used, as well as saying that it takes more than 30 years to fix such an inequality.

This is wrong on all counts.

The only justification for continuing the current program of redistributive extortion is spite. But this is hard to pin down when concepts of equality, poverty and redress are juggled so as to blur and tangle them. They have no effect if they are disentangled.

So let us talk about poverty.

It is absolutely indisputable that the discrimination which was used to protect the already skilled and literate white civilisation which colonised South Africa maintained the stability which produced the wealth the black government inherited.

It is absolutely indisputable that there was sufficient capital, skills and manpower to give South Africa a massive and sustained growth trajectory post-apartheid that would have resulted in a potent reversal of the conditions of poverty which Corder appears to lament.

But instead, the racial discrimination employed now has barred the possibility of using the skills base of white South Africa to enrich black South Africa, and has created an elite political economy based almost entirely on cartels, racketeering, organised crime and extortion.

This is not physiotherapy for asymmetrical muscle development, it’s chemotherapy – it only makes sense if you regard part of the body politic as a cancer.

Because whatever the ANC have done is not benefitting black people, at least not the poor. But it is making life increasingly difficult for racial minorities (and not just whites).

But let us say that his justification is not the alleviation of poverty, but the justification of “redress”. Well then that would be a matter of individual possessions, and a progressive tax system with a tax break for black taxpayers would be sufficient. It is too late for a once-off wealth tax – fortunes have risen and fallen since 1994, wealth has been created and destroyed.

Land reform could be done on an individual, case-by-case basis that recognises value created in the interim. But that is precisely the form of justice that is being rejected, and the Zimbabwean model which is being proposed these days.

Reasonable and fair solutions simply aren’t what Dan is advocating for. He’s advocating for Black Economic Empowerment (extortion) ethnicity-based land reform (ethnic cleansing), racial-cultural hegemony, and Employment Equity (anti-merit hiring).

The big issue which allows one to sidestep reasonable discussions of redress or poverty, is inequality – the abstract notion of levelling group-based averages.

Leaving aside the impossibility of achieving actual social equality and the perverse incentives created by trying to fight it, there is no average man – the old quip about having 2.4 kids is a fair illustration – the aggregates and averages don’t matter to the welfare of average human beings, because humans are not statistical averages.

It isn’t the welfare of actual human beings that is being discussed, it’s the appearance of human beings represented by statistical abstractions. It is whether the appearance of justice can be achieved.

Poverty is also a lever in this dialogue. But if curing poverty was the aim, we wouldn’t be looking at economic racial discrimination as a solution. BEE and EE programs clearly and evidently have deepened statistical inequality, and have made all the systems which support complex society more fragile and sclerotic.

So if we are to wait until all black poverty is cured for the discrimination to end, the argument becomes: white people cannot complain about discrimination so long as black poverty exists. That makes the sunset clause for racial discrimination the day when all white people are poorer than all black people.

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Factual issues

In order to present this argument, Dan had to rather aggressively distort the history of the early 20^th century. But he is not entirely to blame for this, much of it is stuff we received through our regime-sanctioned education.

According to him, the purpose of the Boer Wars were to unite the whites. Then in 1910, they took away the vote from black people. Then they set up a massive welfare state for whites.

The “unite the whites” argument is stupid, because the aim was simply control of mineral resources. In reality, the point was to eradicate Afrikaner culture and establish Anglophone supremacy over the landlocked mines and the distant sea ports in order to protect control over global gold-backed currency. This failed because of Afrikaner numerical superiority and the necessity of politically including them to secure the peace.

Ethnic considerations were all about keeping the spice flowing.

Plus, black people never had the vote in the Boer republics, and were deemed citizens of their historically occupied ethnic territories – boundaries settled when the population was around 1.5-2 million people across a territory three times the size of Germany.

The state maps did not represent actual political control, but an exclusion zone for other settler states. The franchise in the Cape, where nonwhite property-owning men could vote, was not abolished until a series of reforms between 1922 and 1936.

What Corder does get correct is that the state tried to pacify the calls by the unions and the Communist party (though he does not mention these forces by name) to secure citizens’ privileges for white workers on the Witwatersrand (“South African Communist Party for a white South Africa!”).

This is the same event that led to the expansion of the white franchise, as a means of pacifying the white proletariat and directing their energies into civil politics, where it could be contained. After all, ordinary citizens have no meaningful effect on the policies passed by their representatives, as numerous modern studies have shown.

Aside from the blunt falsehoods, there are the subtler decontextualised remarks.

The “generous welfare programs” Corder cites include no pensions, unemployment benefits, medical aid, public housing or any other such amenities. They merely privileged citizens of the white republic over citizens of the black homelands in employment.

The tensions arose precisely because the British conquest of the African subcontinent resulted in the exploitation of African labour – the Hut Taxes, which were designed to drive Africans into the mines.

If Corder wanted to make a firmer argument for injustice, he could point to the massive asymmetry of tax collection at the time – until the Afrikaner nationalist government took over, the majority of taxes were taken from black people in the homelands. No schools, hospitals, welfare programs or public infrastructure was built there with their tax money until the Nats took over.

But this issue of “homelands” brings us to the liveliest question of our time.

Land

The 1913 Land Act was imposed while the total population was approximately 6 million. A hundred years prior, when the initial settlement patterns were established, it was 1.5 million. In a land the size of ours, this made for an extraordinarily vacant expanse.

We can discuss whether this is “fair”, but that is equivalent to complaining that Poland and Germany are not given enough of Russia, or the Canada isn’t sharing its land with India. The only differences between African wars of conquest and European ones, is the strength of the weapons, and the salinity of the water crossed.

The facts of wars of conquest are the same everywhere in the world – your people hold the land they can, and defend it as they must. And the Land Act recognised the political boundaries of these conquests, in order to contain the destabilising effects eventually seen in South Africa after 1979: the primary duty of any state is to provide security to its citizens.

While it will remain foregrounded that white colonists were militarily stronger than Africans, there can be no reasonable argument that one is morally prohibited from pacifying a violent enemy just because they are weak enough to lose the fight. That would make self-defence moral only when one is guaranteed to die doing so.

So that only leaves the issue of whether the territorial conflicts were defensive or offensive. I will not offer a comprehensive account here, as that would take a couple of months of research, but let us make the more modest case that at least some colonial wars were defensive.

So let us start at the beginning – the settlement of the Cape peninsula. For 20 years, disputes over land use rights persisted in the absence of any territorial boundaries recognisable to settled peoples. Thereafter, a treaty was signed with the Goringhaicona (translated here) trading the Cape peninsula for £800 (R4.25 million in today’s money), and the same a few months later for the Hottentots Holland hinterlands for the same quantity, though the actual goods traded for both amounted to £9 12s 9d, or around R50 000 today (see pages 200-201 here).

What is interesting, is that the first hostile contact between the two only happened two years prior, when the chief of the Goringhaicona rode into town, causing the settlers to scatter, after which their houses were looted. The subsequent confrontations before the treaty were singed were of a petty nature – two hunters were murdered after wandering into the site of a massacre of the Chainouqua by the Goringhaicona, a few episodes of stock theft, and an annual trip by the Cochoqua to trade, in which they apparently would invariably steal whatever goods they could carry, which is a petty amount when one does not command horses or carts.

In order to settle these issues, the settlers brokered the treaty, to which the Goringhaicona chief was apparently amenable. Goringhaicona were allowed to graze their cattle on any free pastures around the border, and the VOC pledged a mutual security pact to protect one another form incursions by non-parties, European or African.

Citizenship at this time was nonracial, and interracial marriage was not forbidden, though sex with slaves was illegal. Burgherschap was predicated on baptism and residence alone.

Well, this was tested not six months after the Cape Purchase treaties were signed, when a hunting party venturing out of VOC territory for game were rounded up and executed. The VOC sent a party to investigate, with instructions that if it was found that the hunters were murdered, they should retaliate with punitive force. Before contact could be made, they were met at the Bergrivier by another investigative company, who reported a raid by the Cochoqua at Saldanha under false pretext of trade. While they discussed these matters, they were ambushed and four killed.

The expedition then took cattle abandoned as the Cochoqua fled the expeditions advances, and four were captured. They were ritually executed in the traditional manner (bludgeoning with wooden clubs) by the Choringhiacona.

This began the several wars of expansion which resulted in the VOC conquest of the Cape. The Xhosa wars under the British followed a similar pattern, with cattle raids and farm murders on the eastern frontier calling in punitive expeditions which did not abate until the Xhosa were finally subdued in their entirety.

It is population growth and cattle raiding that led to the clashes that we remember in the history books. The Xhosa wars were wars of pacification of a people who could simply not abide by peace treaties, nor police their own people’s tradition of cattle raids.

After British conquest, the Cape colony still allowed them the vote, if they could secure the property to qualify, and accepted tens of thousands of refugees from the Zulu wars of expansion under the same rights. The Cape franchise system was one in which any man with sufficient property or income could vote, regardless of race.

At every stage of conquest, treaties were struck and broken, land was partitioned and dealt, and groups were either assimilated into the polity (the Cape), kept as seasonal workers, or fended off to territories at a defensive distance.

The Great Trek is remembered by Afrikaners today predominantly for two episodes which show the two sides of settler-African relations.

The Barolong ba Seleka aided the Boers in their trek by providing cattle and water, in exchange for military support against the murderous Mzilikazi, whose scorched-earth response to the Tswana failure to pay his taxes resulted in the destruction of a nascent civilisation, whose stone remnants are to be seen across the highveld today, famously dramatized by Sol Plaatjie in his novel Mhudi.

The Zulu under Dingane agreed to give a large parcel of land for settlement in exchange for the risky return of a large head of cattle he had not the military manpower to retrieve from his enemies. He broke the treaty, massacred his trading partners, and was soundly defeated for it at the Battle of Blood River, still commemorated today as an act of God’s mercy on the Boers.

The notion that our history is nothing but a sustained, unprovoked and bloody slaughter of blacks by whites, motivated purely by greed, fear and hatred, is a convenient nonsense promoted by communists, black nationalists, and the ignorant. Many naïve others believe they will receive an equitable share, though if the history of our 30-year long land reform process is any indication, this is foolish.

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Where to now?

All disputes could have found a reasonable settlement, had the British not conquered and united South Africa. But this is in the past. The old republics will never come back.

The unification tied the survival of the Union state to the performance of the mines, which in turn depended on cheap African labour, and still does.

No breakup of South Africa between 1948 and 1994 could have succeeded, because it was a white democracy. Rural white constituencies were essential to the government staying in power, and those people’s land would have to have been sacrificed to give the “homelands” enough contiguous territory to be legitimate and survive economically.

In 1977, after the Wiehan report, it was recognised that apartheid was not sustainable, due in part to the Soweto uprising, but more importantly, to the coal miner strike of ’73. Consequently, a controlled reform process was initiated by which the colour bar and migration controls were gradually removed.

Elites secretly began dialogue with the ANC, who in 1979 decided to use Soviet money, arms and intel to viciously slaughter their way through the ranks of all the other black liberation movements, and destabilise the country.

When they got to the bargaining table, even a tiny desert exclave for Afrikaners was not on the table.

1994 was not a reversal of colonial conquest, it was the handing over of the British conquest to a coalition of Xhosa elites and black urbanites from within what was known as white South Africa, who then seized control over vast lands they had never had claim to, namely the Cape (see here for a detailed explanation).

The indigenous inhabitants of the Cape, and the second arrivals (us pale fellas), have been subject to racial discrimination at the hands of people who have had no claim to this land at any point in history, purely as a result of pragmatic power-politics - an accident of history.

That is not their fault, but they can stop now, and we can achieve a small modicum of peace and prosperity, without having to secede from the Union. All that the powers that be need to do to achieve peace and cohesion would be to accept whites as part of the polity, and cease discriminating against us.

But this tolerant reform, the removal of racial discrimination, will never come, because our generation of black people, educated in the wake of the Fallist revolution, consider a collective and totalising answer to the Land Question to be a categorical imperative, and consider us elite competition.

This reform will not happen so long as public dialogue is inflexible on the key issues. If we fail to change, we are headed to destruction: there will be division, there will be collapse, and there will be blood.

Maybe Dan can find it in his heart to take such existential questions seriously one day.

But right now, he is too busy trying to be popular.