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Death and the Mielieboer: The Eugène Terre’Blanche Murder & Poor-White Canon-fodder in South Africa

category southern africa | miscellaneous | feature author Sunday April 18, 2010 15:56author by Michael Schmidt Report this post to the editors

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Prickly present - and past

The murder, apparently at the hands of two black farm-labourers, of thuggish AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche on March 20 in what was once South Africa’s white supremacist Western Transvaal heartland, was celebrated by anti-racists the world over.

Inside South Africa, it had the expected result of dire, unfounded panic over a looming race war, and the unexpected result of the rush by mainstream parties to defend the ultra-right’s “right to exist in a democracy”.

We hear a lot about race and continuing racism in post-apartheid South Africa, but who are the Boers, what function did the AWB serve the nationalist elites, and what does the debate over the killing reveal – or obscure – about the country’s forgotten poor whites?


Main photo: PRICKLY PRESENT – AND PAST: Adruska Marais, an unemployed young woman, ekes out a living in the depressed Free State town of Jagersfontein by carving cacti into lamp-stands. On the wall behind her is a photograph of a Boer ancestor from the anti-imperialist war against Britain.


DEATH & THE MIELIEBOER*: The Eugène Terre’Blanche Murder and Poor-White Canon-fodder in South Africa

- by Michael Schmidt

[*a mielieboer is a maize farmer]

The death of the AWB

Sixteen years ago, as impoverished, browbeaten South Africans of all races were herded towards the slaughterhouse mass betrayal of their liberation dream by the African National Congress (ANC) and their midwives the National Party (NP), in the first multiracial elections aimed at propping up the teetering neo-liberal state, armed groups of the 70,000-strong far-right Afrikaner Resistance Movement (Afrikaner Weerstands Beweeging, AWB) played their last desperate hands. These outriders of an ever-receding dream of ruling their own conservative white God-fearing state on the African highveld, the AWB embraced its Götterdämmerung.

The AWB’s pre-election bombing spree failed to derail the relieved, yet lemming-like rush to the bourgeois polls, and its attempt to rewrite the 1900 Relief of Mafikeng by, unasked, coming to the aid of conservative black bantustan boss Lucas Mangope backfired as an outraged Bophuthatswana soldier gunned down three AWB members who had been wounded in the kaffirskietpiekniek (“black shooting picnic”) they had embarked on. The AWB callously celebrated their “glittering victory” with a claimed five dead AWB for 50 dead and 285 wounded blacks – and I callously celebrated the public murder of three AWB whites – one of whom, Nico Fourie, I had met and interviewed while covering an AWB rally on the Natal South Coast several years before. An inexperienced young anarchist militant, I took a photostat of the picture of the three dead men, scribbled across the top ‘n Boer sien sy moer! (an Afrikaner farmer sees his ass!), stuck it up on the wall at work and congratulated myself for my daring and wit. Because despite the imbalanced death toll, it was those images of white supremacists shot down like dogs in the dirt by an ill-trained banana republic soldier right in front of media photographers that truly put paid to the AWB. It was a spent force thereafter.

Crucially, right-wing General Constand Viljoen, lauded as a “soldier’s soldier” for his frontline actions against Cuban/East Bloc-backed forces in Angola, whose Afrikaner People’s Front (Afrikaner Volksfront) forces had been called in by Mangope, took heed of the lessons of the failed incursion and told his substantial private army to stand down. He formed the Freedom Front – ironically today in cabinet alongside the ANC, without Viljoen – and threw his weight behind the democratic elections. This was the vital component in ensuring a relatively peaceful transition, and proved the salvation of the neo-liberal project of the ANC’s Nelson Mandela from the stalemate between anti- and pro-establishment forces.

Demystifying the Boers

But who are the Boers, truly, beyond the cartoons of black-bearded back-countrymen, scarecrows in the corn, leaning on ancient muskets? Afrikaners today are often are the sons, daughters, granddaughters and grandsons of the tens thousands of women who were deliberately starved to death in British concentration camps a century before as their farms were put to the torch. Do not brush aside this key fact because of the whiteness of their skin: their women-folk and children were deliberately exterminated in an imperialist war that generated so much global opposition at the time that it was the Iraq of its day: Scandinavians, Irishmen and Russians gave their lives on the far-away veld; angered Québécois burned down public buildings; and awed anti-American guerrillas in the Philippines learned their tactics by night. Scratch a highveld Boer and you will likely find a bitter hatred of British imperialism – based on living-memory family experience of the camps. And that war was provoked by the imperialists because Britain lusted after and finally burgled the goldfields of the highveld from a frontier people who had progressively retreated into the African interior away from the claws of the bankers, into the spears of the Bantu.

True, they were and often remain an austere, narrow people: one of their Calvinist sects, the Doppers, is deliberately named after the tin cap or dop used to extinguish a candle, the message being the need to extinguish the Enlightenment. And true, they often beat “their blacks” with an offhanded cruelty, and at best established a paternalistic overlordship over them known as baasskap (boss-hood). But in their warfare with, suffering at the hands of, and eventual enslavement of the Bantu, a strange relationship developed: alone among all white settlers on the African continent, they self-identified en masse as Afikaners, as Africans, not Europeans, and severed their ties to their distant motherlands. The they and their black neighbours lived, ate, thought and died, merged and became inextricably intertwined: well over 10-million more black South Africans today speak Afrikaans, the slave’s idiom-rich, story-telling pidgin-Dutch of old, than do whites; while platteland (big-sky farmland) Afrikaners are fluent in African vernacular languages. For the British-backed English-speaking elites, the mining bosses and big land-owners, this closeness was worrisome; something had to be done to divide and rule them. Racialised divisions worked successfully among the working class until multiracial revolutionary syndicalism mounted a challenge from 1917 – a challenge undermined and dissipated within five years by the black nationalist mystifications of the aspirant bourgeois party that became the ANC. It may be that despite their progressive approach to the racial question, the syndicalists lost their grip on the labour movement because of the allure of politics of racial polarity that pitted whites and blacks against each other, a politics seized on with fervour by the NP on its ascension to power in 1948.

Demystifying the AWB and poor rural whites

And who are the AWB other than strutting cartoon neo-Nazis spouting dire eye-for-en-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth rhetoric? Well, despite the childish shock-value of their swastika-like flag, they aren’t neo-Nazis (pagan Nazism gained little purchase in Protestant South Africa); no, they are ultra-conservative Calvinists who dream of a separate white bantustan of their own – this being the same stolen dream of generations of Boers; but no, they are not quietist, having established a violent armed outlaw militia presence since their formation in 1973, and yes, they attracted the admiration of many on the international far-right including neo-Nazis. When hood-eyed charismatic leader Eugène Terre’Blanche (his surname meaning White Earth), famous for his outdated horseback parades and thunderous Old Testament oratory, exited jail in 2004 for a vicious assault on a black worker, an AWB Brigadier told me the movement was transforming itself from a militia into an Afrikaner cultural organisation. Terre’Blanche was viewed by the radical right – and most anarchist-communists in SA probably can only concur – as a conservative buffoon, useful to the “New South African” political-economic establishment as a scary outsider, patrolling the perimeter like an underfed, mangy Rottweiler on a chain, proof of their own smug centralism and “moderation”, of the palatability of the extremist shock doctrine of neo-liberalism they peddle to the poor.

And who are those poor? Of course, they are overwhelmingly black, coloured and Indian, in this, the world’s most economically unequal country, one skewed by more than 300 years of racialised divide-and-rule. And yet a detailed study currently underway of early slave revolts in the Cape by veteran South African anarchist-communist Nicole Ulrich shows that Irish sailors, Malay slaves and indigenous cart-drivers launched combined, multiracial assaults on parasitic capitalist baasskap, a hidden history that refutes both black and white nationalists’ view of our history as a classless struggle of white against black and black against white. These days, when the laid-off mine-workers of deindustrialised small towns like Stilfontein demonstrate, they do so shoulder-to-shoulder, poor blacks and whites together. Multiracial working-class consciousness is slowly rebuilding, but it is also seriously challenged by the ugly racialised climate in the country at the moment in which all questions of class, culture, transformation and so forth are always reduced to a crude white-over-black narrative. Not only does that narrative deliberately shut down any possibility of multiracial working class resistance, but it fails to address the fact that, genuine racist prerogatives aside, the NP elite could only make minority rule work if the majority, the poor, could be sub-divided, and this they did with substantial success, fragmenting working class black, white, coloured and Indian identities into different laagers, and fragmenting the black identity further into Zulu, Venda, Xhosa, Tswana, Pedi etc ethnicities. A 2009 University of Pretoria study shows that out of probably 50-million South Africans, the white elite consists of a mere 310,000 individual parasites – with poor and working class whites accounting for a staggering 3,3-million out of 4-million people.

So apartheid was about all whites oppressing all blacks? No, the paltry racial privileges given to poor whites under apartheid were a pitiful pay-off with the cynical intent of dividing their interests from those of poor blacks. Of course the apartheid state was an explicitly racial state (although the NP pretended they were separatists, not supremacists) in a way that few others outside of Nazi Germany were. I’m not saying that outright racism was not their motivating factor; in fact every NP leader until PW Botha had been pro-Nazi during WWII. But white supremacism was more than a motive for the Broederbonders and the elites: it was a divide-and-rule tool, a class-war tool, useful to run a smokestack economy by playing workers off against each other. Poor Afrikaners had been so utterly economically destroyed by the Anglo-Boer War that much of the later apartheid apparatus was solely directed at a partial social upliftment for the millions of malnourished poor Afrikaners – as part of a winning-hearts-and-minds strategy for maintaining the tiny Afrikaner elite in power. In no way can the brutality, torture, killings and mass dehumanisation of South Africa’s poor blacks be compared to the more comfortable experiences of its relatively shielded poor whites. And yet poor whites were the canon-fodder of the elite’s wars (no, really: drafted into the apartheid army in 1985, I met whites who had never seen cutlery before), their precarious livelihoods as mechanics, fitters and boilermakers constantly threatened by millions of cheaper, underpaid poor blacks. In other words, their class vulnerability was used to keep them racially loyal to the apartheid state. And when the NP slowly liberalised, they proved easy to scare into ultra-con organisations like the AWB. The racist class structure was forced to change in 1990-1996 not only by a partly-ANC-led internal insurrection and the collapse of ANC-backing Soviet Russia, but by the fact that the elites had no way to modernise the economy and to build a manufacturing sector without breaking the colour-bar and upskilling black labour. In other words, the apartheid racial state deracialised for reasons of capitalist class survival. To fail to recognise the primacy – but not exclusivity – of class in this situation, class rule wearing racial armour, is the weakness of both black and white nationalists. And the use of white extremist organisations to the elite? To book-end the frightened middle-class whites (and later, blacks too) between two false options, racist white nationalism and racist black nationalism, a scare tactic that continues today. The rush of the mainstream political parties from the South African Communist Party (SACP) on the left to the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) on the right to condemn the killing of Terre’Blanche perhaps betrays the dead man’s true usefulness to our parasitic elites.

The death of the Boers

Unlike the killing of Fourie and his cohorts sixteen years ago, when I heard of the death of Terre’Blanche, which many heralded as poetic justice, I was not seized by a celebratory fever, although there was merry-making in many townships, especially by those like Martha Mokone, a victim of an AWB bomb who commented that he should “burn in hell”. I understand the need for ghoulish celebration: after all, I’d done it myself before. But this time, I felt strangely quiet and troubled. Terre’Blanche was so diminished from the terrible, looming figure of the past that my hatred of he and his ilk had all but drained away. The scrappy farm-house with the bare walls and boarded up front window in which the white supremacist was killed over Easter Weekend – seventeen years after the Easter Weekend when a right-winger assassinated SACP leader Chris Hani – was hardly the home of a wealthy man, although wealth is relative in this, the world’s most unequal society.

Yes, he was a white baas to his alleged killers, two young black labourers, Chris Mahlangu, 27, and a 15-year-old youth, and yes it appears this was not a political assassination but a wage dispute with that spiralled out of control. Yet that clock-spring spiral which turned dispute into murder must have been wound tight by a potent combination of racial friction and class antagonism. And the way Terre’Blanche died was the way so… ordinary; it was the way many poor rural whites die, hacked to death in their beds for reasons grand and petty, criminal and (despite strong government denials) racial. It’s not that there is a “Boer Genocide” (as yet) as many on the far right already proclaim, but some powder-keg combination of race and class is killing our white farmers at an alarming rate. This race/class volatility is nowhere more apparent than in the ANC government’s complete failure to meet its own benchmark of redistributing 30% of the land to land-hungry rural blacks in order to ameliorate the apartheid ownership pattern whereby 80% of the population owned only 13 % of the land. Against this tense backdrop, the murder rate of white farmers is four times higher than the rest of the population – in a country with the highest murder rate in the world of any country not at war – and the viciousness which accompanies many killings belies purely criminal motive.

This is not to say that there have not been numerous well-documented, well-publicised cases of Boers torturing and killing poor rural blacks – but the point is that extreme violence committed on the Boers is almost totally ignored by the mainstream media which props up the statist-democratic farce. In one grim example, when two elderly white women in a small Free State town were gang-raped a year ago, allegedly by a black gang, tortured to death and the severed breast of one woman used to paint anti-white slogans on the wall, not a single media outlet named this a hate crime. Only one newspaper even covered the atrocity, the Afrikaans-language Volksblad – and then only to decry the “hate-speech” of the women’s traumatised relatives calling for a return of the death penalty for murder. Only with Terre’Blanche’s death is the mainstream belatedly making a tentative link between ANC hate speech calling for the killing of the Boers and, well, the actual killing of Boers. Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous statement of his own ethical failing – that when the Nazis came for the communists he did not speak out for he was not a communist – runs naggingly around and around in my head. Did the white supremacist idea of the AWB deserve to die? Unquestionably. Did Terre’Blanche the racist thug, awful poet and great orator deserve to die? Quite possibly. Will I not speak out merely because I’m not a Boer? No; I’ve said my piece.

Racist, brutal Terre’Blanche may have got his well-deserved come-uppance, but there is little to genuinely celebrate for the country’s desperately poor blacks and whites for whom his death is insignificant and irrelevant; their circumstances of exploitation and exclusion are not likely to be improved anytime soon by the country’s ANC elite.


Glossary:

Highveld - the high-plateau grassland prairie / steppe of central South Africa which is the country’s primary grain-farming and mining region
Götterdämmerung - zero-sum political end-game
1900 Relief of Mafikeng - the lifting by the British in 1900 of the Boer siege of the city of Mafikeng – once situated next to the Bophuthatswana capital of Mmabatho
bantustan - nick-name for the patchwork of quasi-“independent” black ethnic states, or “homelands,” in which half of all South African blacks lived, separated from white-controlled apartheid South Africa, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s
Bophuthatswana - a bantustan in the north of the country near the Botswana border, designated by apartheid South Africa for the separate settlement of the Tswana ethnic group and claiming “independence” under Lucas Mangope between 1977 and its reincorporation into South Africa in 1994 after the defeat of Mangope and the Afrikaner Volksfront
baas - boss

ROAD TO NOWHERE: Retrenched road-worker Louis Olckers speaks of his days swinging a pickaxe with pride, but today he watches with envy the traffic pass by on the road that he built to Free State capital of Bloemfontein, knowing he can’t afford to follow.
ROAD TO NOWHERE: Retrenched road-worker Louis Olckers speaks of his days swinging a pickaxe with pride, but today he watches with envy the traffic pass by on the road that he built to Free State capital of Bloemfontein, knowing he can’t afford to follow.

THE RED DEATH: Christo Hendrikz in his funeral parlour at Jagersfontein, the only business doing well as HIV/Aids – known colloquially as “the woman in the red dress” – cuts a swathe through the black and white poor rural of South Africa.
THE RED DEATH: Christo Hendrikz in his funeral parlour at Jagersfontein, the only business doing well as HIV/Aids – known colloquially as “the woman in the red dress” – cuts a swathe through the black and white poor rural of South Africa.

GHOST TOWN: Former diamond-mining boom-town of Jagersfontein in Free State is today almost derelict: the public swimming pool stands empty & weed-ridden, the churches echo with cooing of pidgeons, most of remaining inhabitants, black & white, unemployed.
GHOST TOWN: Former diamond-mining boom-town of Jagersfontein in Free State is today almost derelict: the public swimming pool stands empty & weed-ridden, the churches echo with cooing of pidgeons, most of remaining inhabitants, black & white, unemployed.

author by Crissttipublication date Mon Apr 19, 2010 13:15author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Excellent article. What a complex situation in South Africa, in so many ways. It is really necessary to speak out against racism and racist violence, whether black or white. I have to say that the dismissal of racism against whites is... disturbing. Do we really stand up for what we say we do?. Do we even really believe it?.

author by José Antonio Gutiérrez D.publication date Tue Apr 20, 2010 20:12author address author phone Report this post to the editors

While I agree with Crisstti that racism has to be fought in whatever form it exists, we need to avoid falling in the trap (in which many anti-racists fall) of understanding racism purely as an emotional subject or as a bad thing that can be fought through enlightnment alone, no matter how important education actually is in the fight against rcism. Race conflict is rooted in the material conditions of existing society, and it expresses class struggle no matter if it does in a wrong way or in a distorted fashion -whether conflicts within the very working class or conflict between the "poor" (which comprise more than one class at times, including small owners, etc.), or conflicts with a source on imperialism and colonialism, etc.

This is why it was such a chilling statement when this Boer farmer said in TerreBlanche's death that there was not such a thing as a "rainbow nation"... because it send us a reminder that the sources of race tension in South Africa (which are material) are not gone and it reminds us of the frailty of this "post-conflict" society (all of the South African political spectrum is well aware of the shaky fondations of the "rainbow nation" and this is what explains in my opinion their rush to condemn TerreBlanche's murder).

However, it would be a mistake to reduce racism or race conflicts to a purely economic factor, or to do a mechanical class struggle interpretation as if there were no other factors behind it. Once racism takes off, it is a really complex cultural phenomenon and I don't believe that it can be dealt with only with economic reform -racism needs to be challenged and confronted directly as well. But it is important to remember at all times, that its roots are firmly stuck in material realities.

The article in two moments gives extremely lucid insights on the source of race tensions:

1. "This race/class volatility is nowhere more apparent than in the ANC government’s complete failure to meet its own benchmark of redistributing 30% of the land to land-hungry rural blacks in order to ameliorate the apartheid ownership pattern whereby 80% of the population owned only 13 % of the land".

2. "The scrappy farm-house with the bare walls and boarded up front window in which the white supremacist was killed over Easter Weekend (...) was hardly the home of a wealthy man, although wealth is relative in this, the world’s most unequal society". After all, for the young chaps that murdered him he probably was nothing else than "a white baas"...

Obviously, the article was not an exhausitve research on race conflict in South Africa but a personal account on a political development, so these two elements were not looked at in depth. But they required to be looked in more detail in the future if we are to have a correct understanding of racism. I do think that we need to develop a more coherent understanding of the race-class interaction, one that goes beyond an emotional opposition without falling into economicism and class-reductionism as an "explanation".

author by Michael Schmidtpublication date Tue Apr 20, 2010 23:44author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Thanks for your insightful - and I believe correct - comments, Jose. Thanks for pointing out that the poor is a multi-layered class; I'd just like to tease out what, in the South African scenario, we mean by our terms.

1) "Working class" in our definition is sometimes used as short-hand for the workers, peasants and the poor. But where we use it as a term separate to peasants and the poor, we mean the working proletariat and it consists in our definition of the employed poor, largely concentrated in depressed out-lying suburbs of the cities, the hostels of industrial centres, previously black-only, Indian-only or coloured-only townships, depressed small rural towns, and agricultural, mining, fisheries and forestry labourers (whether migrant or sedentary, sharecropper or labour tenant). Their work is becoming increasingly precarious and piecemeal however. They are usually educated up to early high-school or school-leaver level in former non-white schools or farm schools but very few get a tertiary education. They often live in small brick, cinderblock or well-constructed corrugated-iron homes which they may well own, and usually pay their water and electricity by pre-paid card. Many are relatively established in urban and peri-urban areas and have deep traditions of unionisation, of civic organisation and of militancy.

2) "Peasantry" are the self-employed rural poor who usually live in former bantustans and in areas still under tribal law, subject to the rule of a chief and, ultimately, the Congress of Traditional Leaders. They are sometimes educated at Christian missions, but often not at all. They do not own land, for it is held "in trust" by the chief on behalf of the state, and survive mostly by subsistance farming. They usually live in thatch or mud-walled huts and rondavels and usually have no water or electricity and almost no government services. They often use the "bucket system" for sewage removal and get their water from the rivers and collect firewood to cook and heat their huts. They have deep roots in the countryside, are a fast-declining sector of the population, due to urbanisation, and have few traditions of mass resistance beyond the Pondoland and Sekhukhuneland uprisings of the 1950s.

3) "Poor" are the unemployed poor who eke out a living in the inner-city ghettoes, on the outskirts or underbellies of the cities and towns, and alongside their wealthier employed working class neighbours the townships. Sometimes we call this the underclass (the Marxists call it the lumpenproletariat). When they are not homeless and living rough in the bush or on the street (which is very common), they live in poorly-constructed corrugated-iron, plywood or cardboard shacks, mostly as tenants in the tiny back yards of township plots (these are known in Afrikaans as "bywoners"). They have fragmentary schooling, usually a mission or farm school at primary level and a few of the fortunate ones have some high school in the townships. Some drift across the country, chasing short-term seasonal work as harvesters, or they live off their grandparent's old-age grants, off child-care or disability grants, or by begging and stealing. They have no in-house water or electricity and use community water stand-pipes and portable public toilets - where they can find them. Many of them are new arrivals in the cities and towns - usually of peasant origin - and are a very fragmented grouping which has experienced rapid growth. Their socio-political traditions are shattered and in constant flux.

I just need to note that we had a 40% unemployment rate *before* we lost 1-million jobs in the recession. You will find all four "official" races in all three layers, except that there is only a negligible handful of white peasants. All three groupings are vulnerable to the manipulations of exploitative labour brokers, human traffickers, charismatic religious sects, tub-thumping racist politicians etc.

author by African4publication date Tue Jun 14, 2011 01:38author address author phone Report this post to the editors

The ANC government owns 24% of all the land in South Africa. Add the 17% to it and you get a closer figure of black land ownership. To that you still need to add land owned by indians and land owned by coloureds. The funny thing about myth is, that the ignorant takes it as fact.

author by PoorLittleBoer - Black Battlefrontpublication date Tue Feb 09, 2016 23:29author email author address author phone Report this post to the editors

* PDF version: http://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/01/27/michael-schmidt-s...reed/
* MarkDown source: http://pastebin.com/zFsEdJdE

"Strandwolf's Creed" by Michael Schmidt
=======
The Black Battlefront Manifesto
-----------
### Introduction

These are ideological blog posts by prominent anarcho-fascist writer Michael Schmidt from 2010 and 2011. These posts were once published at [strandwolf.blogspot.com](http://strandwolf.blogspot.com) but were taken down by Schmidt in 2015 once his identity as the writer was revealed. Before being outed as a white supremacist, Schmidt was best known for co-authoring the controversial anarchist history [Black Flame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Flame:_The_Revoluti..._1%29) with longtime friend and collaborator [Lucien van der Walt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_van_der_walt).

"Strandwolf's Creed" is deeply personal, revealing the author's political vision as the product of his proud Afrikaner heritage. Schmidt's outline for Boer progress is steeped in history, providing a racist, elitist, and deterministic view of not only human evolution, but human progress well into the 21st Century. Through his writings as "Strandwolf" (or, early on, "Ardent Vinlander"), Schmidt is building the plan for his movement, a red-brown admixture of anarchism and white power.

Black Battlefront, the militant group fueled by this manifesto, would be the culmination of decades of activism for Schmidt, allowing him to recruit activists into a whites-only organization with aggressive racism at its core (curiously an "anti-racist" concept to the author). Schmidt's calls for racial segregation closely mirror his recommendations for the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF), revealed in a [leaked internal memo](http://www.pdf-archive.com/2015/10/12/schmidt-memo/schm...o.pdf).

These writings coincide with posts by Schmidt as "Karelianblue" (in the white supremacist Stormfront forums) and "Françoise Le Sueur" (on Facebook), where Schmidt was actively recruiting for Black Battlefront. For background, see Schmidt's posts [here](http://filepi.com/i/S5r9NDz) or [here](http://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/01/26/michael-schmidt-k...t-00/).

"Strandwolf's Creed" has been reassembled for clarity and legibility, but the original text has not been altered (even misspellings and typos have been kept). There are bound to be other minor formatting errors from the OCR/transcribing process; feel free to download the text as [MarkDown](http://pastebin.com) or [PDF](http://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/01/27/michael-schmidt-s...reed/) and fix these bugs.

See screenshots of the original posts, complete with white nationalist imagery, [here](http://filepi.com/i/P2OoSTj) or [here](http://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/01/26/michael-schmidt-a...ront/).

about me
-----------
### White African National-Anarchist

The Strandwolf ("beach wolf") is the brown hyaena found on the lonely Atlantic beaches of the Namib desert: with more powerful jaws and greater stamina than a lion, the hyaena hunt in matriarchal packs and, inverting their clitori, are impossible to rape. They are viewed by the indigenous people as spirit-animals. Strandwolf is the blog of Black Battlefront, an anti-racist revolutionary cadre network of White African politico-social soldiers in Southern Africa who aim at defending our unique culture, under the anarchist black flag! We take our inspiration from militants and cultural warriors of the calibre of Nestor Makhno, Kai Murros, Jim Goad and Troy Southgate. Strandwolf is a ghost in the machine of the African night, a spectral flicker on the shores of the Skeleton Coast, a low-slung hunter on the night-time highway that stretches forever away from the roiling smokes of Johannesburg into the bleach-and-acetate reaches of the platteland where gaunt windpompe scratch stars in the sky.

MY CREED PART I: CONQUEST – by Ardent Vinlander
-----------
### Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 4:48am

1. The white (wo)man is in Africa by conquest. This is inescapable; that gunpowder beats spear, wolves rule over sheep. And yet we are human and not animals, thus we mark our territory not with urine but blood.

2. This right of conquest may not be ethically "right" but it is the forge of history – and the alloy that results, its temper and strength are then set. How we deal with that is both rooted in, and starts, now.

3. The implication is that primitivism, Africanism or any qualified or absolute return to a pre-colonial "state of grace" is impossible. Also clear is that redress and reparations for past wrongs, grievous though they may be, are impossible. Thus may the Herero seek apology from the Germans for genocide, but not redress.

4. And so, only those directly guilty of actual crimes can be held responsible; future generations cannot be made to pay for the "sins of their fathers".

5. The Xhosa nation was a formidable foe – the Battle of Amatola being the supreme example – and it took nine wars to suppress them. The Zulu nation was a formidable foe – the Battle of Isandlwana being the supreme example – but shortly they too were reduced, as others before them. There is no shame in going down fighting to superior forces.

6. Our enemies are not those who fight us in the open, hoping to mark their territory with our blood, but those who rot us from within, corrupting the will.

7. The inescapable lot of the defeated is humility and servitude, but there is no shame in lowly status, for all parts need to function for the good of the whole.

8. Gunpowder and the lash are not in themselves progress, but they disciplined fractious hordes to a common purpose, for the good of the whole.

9. That purpose was civilisation, as the white (wo)man brought electric light, roads, canals, plantations, mines, engines, aircraft, automobiles, schooling, faith – both inspiration and aspiration, without which all peoples go to seed.

MY CREED PART II: CULTURE – by Ardent Vinlander
-----------
### Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 4:51am

1. Cultural identity is not fixed – and often involves "sub-cultural" norms defined by peer group education and experience, locality, dialect and so forth.

2. So there are no cultural absolutes, no "pure" culture. The example of the West African origins of rock 'n roll is evidence of this.

3. And yet cultural identity proves exceptionally strong – determinant of identity, adherence, cleavage, and ultimately of a people's fate.

4. In the age of the Internet and mobile communications, one's "community" is often no longer localised or even restricted to much more than a dialect group or interest group. Thus while some communities are entirely "virtual", others are very much bound by real-time/space.

5. In this period of flux, then, cultural currents and sub-cultural undertows pull in various directions – towards fragmentation and specialisation, the niche, and towards consolidation and universalism, the global.

6. Both are "artificial" to the extent that they are intentionally striven for, yet both are "natural" to the extent that they are instinctually driven.

7. This may manifest both – and often simultaneously – in autarch-individualism and in mob-mentality herd instinct.

8. Culture then cannot be assessed as "reactionary" merely because it seeks to conserve, artificially or naturally, a set of values, beliefs, practices and artefacts. In the same light, a culture cannot be assessed as "progressive" merely because it seeks to change, artificially or naturally, a set of values, beliefs, practices and artefacts.

9. Progress and reaction only have meaning in relation to human rights and ethics, in other words, in relation to the standard of the Golden Rule. But the Golden Rule is rusted by weakness: it allows no place for defensive actions aimed at supporting a culture's right to life, limb and liberty. In other words, ethics need to come armed.

MY CREED PART III: AGGRESSION – by Ardent Vinlander
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### Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 6:00am

1. Aggression is a natural and artificial human capability. In other words, it is both an instinctive fighting mechanism, defending life, limb and liberty – and a conscious defence of higher values, Including territory, beliefs, practices and artefacts.

2. Aggression is not always expressed as violence although it always contains within it the threat of violence – as it is also expressed as territory, authority, ability and consciousness, all of which are a combination of both artificial and natural prerogatives.

3. Natural prerogatives are essentially grounded in biological warfare, the defence of the species and of its ability to survive and propagate, its instinctive motor ability to grasp and shape the physical realm; they are the flint-tipped spears by which our ancient ancestors routed bears from the caves which became our shelters.

4. Artificial prerogatives are essentially grounded in psychological (some would call it spiritual) warfare, the defence of the species' ability to interpret and predict, its learned diagnostic ability to intuit and give shape to our dreams; they are the ochred cave paintings of Lascaux and other Palaeolithic sites

5. The origins of these ingrained prerogatives are shrouded in the emergence of consciousness within the fog of pre-history – those unrecorded centuries of our coming into being.

6. And yet we know that the development of speech, the root of both natural and especially of artificial prerogatives, was driven by the need to communicate defence against the sabre-toothed which stalked our early kind.

7. Forged in the fires of social defence against our racial enemies, speech gave flight to consciousness. Thus was aggression the foundation on which we were able to later erect the flying buttresses of philosophical thought.

8. So equipped with social organisation, communication, the tools of biological and psychological warfare, and higher consciousness, we ascended from the status of animals undifferentiated from the natural landscape to the Colossus which stands astride the world.

9. And yet we retain our binary nature: our feet planted in the soil of our origins, our eyes searching deep into the far reaches of interstellar space, knowing we are not the measure of all things – and yet measuring all things, knowing we conquer by understanding.

10. Thus social aggression is the foundation of our racial consciousness and our racial consciousness is the tool by which we conquer.

MY CREED PART IV: RACE
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### Sunday, September 26, 2010, 2:08am

1. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the sole survivor of discrete, parallel yet seldom contemporaneous and only sometimes competing human strains of development. It is in reference to this sole survivor that we incorrectly speak of the "human race" which outiasted other proto-human races including the Neanderthals, Homo Erectus and Homo Robustus.

2. And yet the Sapiens Sapiens species is diverse, with its greatest smorgasbord of genes pooled in the great mother-continent of Africa – which by the law of averages should thus have produced its highest levels of cultural diversity, consciousness and civilisation. And yet the brute tribalism that dominates from the Sahara to the Savannah is almost undifferentiated in its suffocating, stultified primitiveness, locked in to ancestor-worship voodoo and unquestioning authoritarianism. Even the physical features of the people have only slightly evolved, producing a narrow range almost entirely represented by the Nilotics and the Bantu.

3. Only the slender archaic haplogroup F strand of this great gene-pool proved adventurous, trekking further afield to leave Africa and establish a unique root-race in what is today the Middle East. It is from this root-race that the greatest physical-cultural diversity of the world emerged, from the blackest Papuan headhunters, to the reddest Pictish warriors.

4. These incredibly diverse haplogroup populations were differentiated by hundreds of thousands of years of genetic adaptation, mutation, in a word, evolution. The result was the great racial gene-pools of what would today be recognised as Asiatics, Native Americans, Australasians, South Asians – and our own race, the Europeans, in particular represented by the haplogroups R1a, R1b, and I1.

5. Each race is uniquely adapted to their environmental conditions, in other words, they have a genetic connection to the landscapes within which they developed. This is expressed in terms of the race's physique: stocky build, black skin, brown eyes and broad noses for the Aborigines of arid Australasia; tall build, white skin, pale eyes and narrow noses for the Nordics of icy Scandinavia. And it is also expressed in terms of culture: the Aboriginal cave paintings of Ayers Rock have the same function as the Cro Magnon cave paintings of Lascaux, the interpretation of the natural-physical world in spiritual-psycological terms; these expressions tie the race to the landscape, a landscape which very directly gave rise to their racial form; thus each modern race has a natural ancestral homeland.

6. Neccesity is indeed the mother of invention. The extreme environments into which proto-Europeans wandered demanded the utmost of their ingenuity, skill, cunning and inventiveness. We presume there were proto-Europeans who also tried to sit on their bums drinking maize-beer watching the women work, but that they were wiped out in their first winter. And yet we still find "21st Century Hunter-gatherers" – derived from the same root-race as the Europeans – who have clearly not been pressed by circumstance to evolve over the past 10,000 years; no hoes, no millet, no necessity, no invention.

7. Some of the tension in forming civilisations arises between sedentaries (those who build settlements, based on agricultural surplus), and nomads (who at the most, drive cattle). But there is a clear distinction between the wandering Vikings who built ships and roamed far and wide for plunder and women – establishing settlements with permanent structures and a written culture along the way in many cases, and the African herdsmen who simply chase the seasons from waterhole to waterhole. In other words, the Viking was never a true nomad.

8. Africans did build tribal-militarist kingdoms with some elements of civilisation and some attempt at building large-scale settlements: Ashante, Ulundi, Great Zimbabwe etc. But although the Portuguese, on first arriving in West Africa in the 1500s, treated the local king as equal because they had a standing army, a form of "university" and a bureaucracy, the West Africans had fallen from that quasi-Medieval state into savagely warring factions by the time European civilisation penetrated the interior – and never recovered.

9. So "Medieval" is the closest that blacks have come to civilisation, while some still today languish 10,000 years behind the Europeans who gave Africa its science, industry, infrastructure, education, medicine and large-scale agriculture, most of it fallen into terrible disrepair under black rule since the late 1950s. In order to, if not forestall this decay, at least build the bulwarks of a white redoubt strong enough to stand against this darkling tide, we require organisation.

MY CREED PART V
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_Editor's Note: There is no post with this title in known screenshots of strandwolf.blogspot.com. Keeping this placeholder in case the text surfaces._

MY CREED PART VI: NATIONAL-ANARCHISM
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### Tuesday, November 16, 2010, 9:54am

1. The form of organisation worst suited to the creation of intelligently-run, ergonomic, environmentally sustainable, progressive, innovative white communities is statist capitalism, capitalism because it is an alien Judeo-Christian system which lives parasitically off the social wealth created by all races, the white foremost among them, and statism because it is the armoured claw of the parasites, the enforcer of the inequality which keeps the majority of our people poor.

2. Previous forms of organisation aimed at creating a whole society have failed dismally, especially grand apartheid and its British, Dutch, and Afrikaner predecessors. The apartheid state was a corruption of white rule not only because of the abominable, inhuman way in which it treated its black neighbours – but because it lived parasitically off the white working class which it employed as its ultimately disposable enforcers of minority elite privilege. Likewise, white separatism such as the Orania project which are merely this system in miniature, are anathema to us, as is self-defeating white terrorism such as the Wit Wolve, devoid as it is of ethics or strategic thinking.

3. The form of organisation best suited to the creation of a white society of recognisably human and humane form is revolutionary anarchism, a progressive socio-political form which eschews the reactionary reinforcement of white supremacist state/capitalist oppression and exploitation, and which also avoids the pitfalls of either precipitate, terroristic adventurism or the seductions of a retreat into an unattainable mystical past – a form that boldly attacks privilege and parasitism on all fronts, the sweeping, multidimensional battlespace.

4. And the form of revolutionary anarchism that best suits the construction of an alternate, autogestive white society is one that draws on an eclectic set of principles derived from various leading-edge traditions. From Jim Goad we take the sensibility of a combative working class mentality that is plainspoken and honest. From Nestor Makhno we take the military-tactical lessons of locating ourselves within the heartlands of our communities, and of being internally of one mind yet externally pluralistic in our alliances. From Troy Southgate we take the metapolitical lessons of our spiritual-psychological ties to the landscape of Africa, land we won by right of conquest.

5. These ideological wellsprings enable us to ground our battle in an actual physical and mental space. An in order to be truly grounded, we need to be scrupulously egalitarian and what this means in the southern African battlespace is that we are compelled to judicially recognise the right of white anarchists and black anarchists to establish their own separate, culturally-distinct formal organisations and informal networks. For while African revolutionary anarchists, by the rationale of even the Bolshevik-tainted international anarchist movement, it is entirely legitimate to establish separate white anarchist organisations, based on the following three points:

6. Our status as a demographic / cultural minority (in the US that means blacks, Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans, but here it means whites, Asians, Coloureds and Indigenous). This might refer to a group being a minority in a specific geographic locality but also relates to white cultural hegemony which obviously no longer obtains in terms of primary cultural indicators such as the content of national public broadcasters. Secondary cultural indicators, such as the wearing of Western dress by most blacks, is not, however, evidence of the survival of white hegemony.

7. Our status as a vulnerable group. Here the driving factors range from the declining white population (about 500,000 white South Africans have emigrated since 1994, while fertility rates also decline), to the economic status, the class, of the white population group. According to a 2009 Unisa study, 1.5-million out of 4 million whites are poor, often unemployed, working class, another 1.8-million are in the better paid skilled section of the working class. Only 423,000 are middle class and only 310,000 are wealthy. This points to the necessity, with 3,3-million whites in the working class or unemployed underclass, of organising primarily among those classes.

8. Our status as a group suffering judicial or extrajudicial discrimination. Here the factors include the wave of largely unrecognised race-hate crimes against the farming community, especially in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and of course race-discriminatory legislation aimed at curbing the socio-economic mobility of whites, again marked in those two countries in particular.

9. So, in order to organise as a legitimate social-revolutionary force, grounded in southern African realities, and to fight in an ethically-armed, community-grounded manner against the extinction of the remnants of our hard-won geographic and cultural conquests in Africa, we form a revolutionary "black" (ie: anarchist) organisation, to engage on the multidimensional battlefront: Black Battlefront.

MY CREED PART VII: HEARTLAND
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### Sunday, April 17, 2011, 6:20am

1. In order for the Aryan African working class to adequately defend itself against its enemies, it is first necessary to define our territory and to be explicit about who those enemies are. Though the demographic demon of black genetic propagation is our acknowledged primary threat and challenge to our foothold on the continent, black people per se are not our enemies. In fact, in order to adequately argue in the court of international opinion our right to self-determination requires that we fundamentally acknowledge the black's equal right to those parts of Africa that they in turn won by right of conquest, however defined.

2. This in turn requires a Swiss-like cantonal policy of armed neutrality, of watchful good-neighbourliness, which will allow black and Aryan Africans to live peaceably according to their own separate traditions, in their agreed territories, and where necessary, naturally to conduct cordial, if not fraternal, bilateral diplomatic and commercial relations in an anti-imperialist fashion.

3. So then, who are our enemies? They include the propagators of abstraction: Jesus, Mohammed, Freud and other progenitors of the idea of an invisible, voodoo power that knows better than we, the living biological distillation of millions of years of real, hardcore survivalist evolution. This includes post-modernists like Deboard, zero-sum fanatics like Pol Pot and other obfuscators of real life as lived by real people. These enemies obscure clear thought among Aryan people.

4. The propagators of guilt: Mandela, Fanon, King, Guevara and other debasers of Aryan culture – plus their liberal media and marketing hacks, who push this crippling dogma via their footholds in insecure Western institutions of debased learning and culture. This includes feminists, Maoists and others who deny the right of conquest – and its uplifting, civilising mission. These enemies sap our will by denying our unassailable centuries of cultural, military, scientific and economic achievement.

5. The propagators of parasitism: Stalin, Rothschild, Oppenheimer, Rupert, Sexwale and other drum-majorettes of the capitalist dysfunction whereby the hard-working, honest majority in the Occident (most often Aryan) is regularly dispossessed by non-productive Oriental elements (sometimes Semitic – both Arab and Jew). This includes investment bankers and all supra-national expressions of parasitic, non-productive greed, usury and outright robbery of the public purse.

6. And in dispossessing our enemies, what then should our territory be? Our territories can historical be defined in numerous ways, and many resconstructionist projects look towards the old Boer Republics of the Transvall and Orange Free State – but these agrarian cultures have long been lost to British imperialism and their local comprador lackeys, swallowed up by liberal, multicultural industrialisation. Not that we reject industrialisation, but rather its deleterious effects: the compound system of impressed immigrant labour, the deliberate creation of a black underclass to undercut already slender white working class gains.

7. We can rather lay claim to the western portions of the Old Cape and its hinterland, settled from 1652: from Cape Town as far east as Graaf-Reinet, sweeping northwards to embrace the Karoo and Kalahari and further, across the Orange River into Old German South-West Africa, as far north as the Karas region's northern boundary and as far west as Lüderitz. Surrendering the gold- and coal-mining, industrial and financial heartland plus the eastern ports, farms and plantations to majority-black South Africa would nevertheless leave us with a coherent territory, predominantly Afrikaans-speaking, with a white and coloured majority, of hardy seafaring and farming folk, whose economic strength rests on the civil port of Cape Town, on wine and fruit growing, on diamond-mining, tourism, clothing mills, fishing, game and sheep farming, with its own university, hospitals and tertiary institutions, navy, air force, press, broadcasters and unique cultural traditions stretching back three and a half centuries.

8. But it is insufficient to simply lop off this historical Aryan African heartland: its civil, judicial, legislative and military powers must be decentralised to District level, all Districts to be federated horizontally and to be administered by regularly rotated, immediately-recallable delegates narrowly delegated by quarterly plenary District Conventions whereby residents hold all executive decision-making powers. And all Districts shall gather their delegates annually or as often as required to form a Convention of Districts which shall be narrowly mandated to decide on matters of national importance.

9. On the national question, while all black and Asian residents of the territory shall automatically be deemed without prejudice to be foreigners, most of the blacks presumed to be South African citizens, all Aryan, Coloured and Bushman residents of proven Old Cape / Karras heritage shall automatically be citizens, with preferred residency and citizenship offered to Aryans of any origin, provided that the four historic towns of Stellenbosch (1679), Franschhoek (1687), Swellendam (1743) and Graaf-Reinet (1786) be reserved exclusively for Aryans, and that each District Convention have the right to decide on racial zones of use and exclusion.

Appendix
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### More strandwolf.blogspot.com posts by Michael Schmidt

1. Ode to a Dying Race (Saturday, February 13, 2010, 2:25am)
* http://www.youtube.com/thisissaga#p/a/f/1/1EQeR3nbO2k

2. Strandwolf is back in action! (Sunday, September 16, 2007, 3:36am)
* "mas vale morir de pie que vivir de rodillas! it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!" – praxedis guerrero, mexico, (1882-1910) killed while lighting the fuse on the mexican revolution, aged 28

3. Platform of the Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria, 1945
* check this out – this is the real deal! _Editor's note: The text that follows originates from [anarchistplatform.wordpress.com](https://anarchistplatform.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/plat...1945/)_

Related Link: http://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/01/27/michael-schmidt-strandwolfs-creed/
 

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