CZM Rewind: The White House Weighs in on White Genocide & Apartheid International

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello everyone, Molly here. There won't be
a new episode this week or next week, as this
Thursday is Christmas Day and next Thursday is New Year's Day.

(00:22):
Regardless which holidays you celebrate, I hope you're enjoying a
little peace and relaxation here at the end of the year.
Whenever I have to choose which rerun will go out
on the feed, whether it's for a holiday or if
I'm sick or on vacation, I have a hard time
picking something that makes sense. I mean, first of all,

(00:43):
I have so few standalone episodes. I can't just run
part one of a five part series as a rerun.
That's ridiculous. And the show's only been on for a
year and a half or so, so it can be
hard to pick something old enough that you didn't just
hear it. But here at the end of the year,

(01:06):
I knew exactly what I wanted to do. When I
look back at twenty twenty five, I'm pretty proud of
most of the work I did on the show. We
started this year by finishing off the five part series
of episodes about Dennis Mayhon, the klansman who sent a
bomb to the Diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona, in two

(01:27):
thousand and four. A few weeks after that, I wrote
a coda to that story when the city of Scottsdale
bowed to pressure from the Trump administration to close that
diversity office. In the spring, I told you about one
pardoned January sixth defendant who got shot on the side
of a lonely state highway, and by fall I was

(01:49):
writing about a different January sixth defendant making a bid
for Congress. I found funny little quirks of history, like
the story of New York City may elect Son Donnie's
father reading Marx for the first time after the FBI
showed up demanding to know if he was a communist.

(02:09):
And I found moments of heartbreaking human kindness, like the
final acts of Ricky John Best and Talisian nam Kaimiche,
the men who lost their lives to stop a Nazi
on a train from attacking a teenage girl and hijab.
I spent months writing about the lives of two men

(02:29):
who were particularly close to George Lincoln Rockwell in the
final years of his life. I thought I already knew
the story of the assassination of the leader of the
American Nazi Party, but even I was surprised by the
twists and turns that one took. I definitely didn't set
out expecting to learn so much about the New England mafia.

(02:53):
In twenty twenty five, I wrote about murders and lawsuits.
I learned more than I cared to know about the
process us of seeking an advisory opinion from the Federal
Election Commission. And I found out ris And isn't nearly
as dangerous as TV shows led us to believe. Maybe
it's embarrassing to admit this, but I actually really like

(03:16):
pretty much every episode of this show. I love learning
strange new things every week, and I love sharing them
with you. But when I look back on this year,
to me, there's a clear winner. There was a series
of episodes that was weirder, more surprising, and more fun

(03:39):
and more upsetting to research and write than anything else.
This series of episodes was more challenging than anything I've
ever done, and it forced me to expand my own
research skills in ways I could not have predicted. It
was the most far reaching, both in terms of geography

(03:59):
and time scale, of anything I've ever written. It spanned
centuries and continents. I had to read government documents translated
from half a dozen different languages, at least one of
them from a government that doesn't exist anymore. I read
books and academic journals and doctoral dissertations, but I also

(04:23):
read racist prophecies and bomb making manuals. I used source
material produced by klansmen, the CIA, German anti fascists, Croatian
war criminals, British neo Nazis, and South African death squad leaders.
I had to read a murderer's very bad poems. I

(04:44):
even watched a movie starring Dulf Lundgren and I loved
every minute of it. Looking back at this year, that
is absolutely nuts. That is a crazy thing to say.
I spent the entirety of March in April going completely mad,
digging through archival material and Afrikaans instead of finishing planning

(05:09):
my own wedding. I'm not kidding. I made my husband
do it. He did a great job. I think this
worked out, but we didn't even have an officiant until
like three weeks out from the ceremony, mostly because I
couldn't tear myself away from this story. So when I
had to figure out what to run on the feed,

(05:30):
for back to back reruns. I knew what I wanted.
I wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance
to listen to what I think was my best work
of twenty twenty five, the eight episodes I wrote this
spring about white nationalist terrorism in the final years of
apartheid South Africa. So for the next two weeks, those

(05:53):
eight episodes will run two at a time, two on Tuesday,
two on Thursday. And those apisodes will run as they
were originally recorded. I haven't gone back and changed them,
but I will record a new little introduction for each pair.
It might be corrections or updates, or just some little
connection to another episode of the show for you to

(06:15):
think about as you're listening. This first pair of episodes,
The White House weighs In on White Genocide and Apartheid International,
originally aired on February twenty seventh and March thirteenth. Listening
back to them now, it's funny to hear that I
obviously had no idea what I was getting into when

(06:37):
I wrote the first episode, and by the time I
wrote the second one, I had some idea that this
might be a longer series. I do want to note
now that there is a mistake. In the second episode,
I did correct it down the line, but I misspoke
the first time I brought up James K Warner, I

(06:59):
called him Robert for some reason repeatedly, and then I
got so in my head about the mistake that even
when I made the correction in the fourth episode, I
accidentally called him Robert again. I have no idea why
I can't keep this straight, but it's James K. Warner,
and that is a guy we'll talk about again eventually,

(07:19):
so you should know it's James in this story. He's
just a name on some paperwork, but he does connect
in a lot of different places. I don't think I
actually said his name in the John Patler episodes, but
when Patler was arrested at an American Nazi Party rally
in DC over the Fourth of July weekend in nineteen

(07:40):
sixty one of the stormtroopers he was arrested with was
James Warner. It is a small world for these weird
little guys. And speaking of connections to other stories, this
series opens with a Nazi rally on the steps of
the state Capitol in Sacra, and that rally was hosted

(08:02):
by a group called the Golden State Skinheads. That's the
same skinhead group from the American Third Position Party episodes
from August and September of this year, and that rally
in Sacramento was just one of the events held all
over the country that day. In photos taken at the
event in Los Angeles, you can see William Daniel Johnson,

(08:23):
the lawyer who helped those Skinheads form their political party,
and the rallies that were held on this same day
in Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Those were hosted by a group
called Folksfront, the same group that organized arian Fest two
thousand and four, the event Dennis Mahon attended right before
he decided to build that bomb. I'm always saying all

(08:48):
of these stories are connected, but some of the connections
in these stories didn't jump out at me until I
was listening back to them this week. You don't need
to have listened to all of those episodes. It's okay
if none of that means anything to you, but it
is a fun little easter egg for anybody keeping track
as we go. Oh one more thing, My eternally patient

(09:13):
and infinitely talented editor Rory lent his services for some
voiceover work in one of these and when it aired
the first time. Some of you were furious and disgusted
by how good his Donald Trump impression is. I think
it was brilliant, but it is definitely a jump scare anyway,

(09:37):
without further ado, the first two episodes of the South
Africa arc, on February twenty seventh, twenty twelve, three people
were arrested after a rally outside the California State Capitol
Building in Sacramento. If not for those arrests, the Little

(10:00):
protest may not have even made the news at all.
A dozen similar rallies organized by the same group that
were held that day and other cities certainly didn't. But
a California Highway Patrol officer fell and scraped his knee
trying to tackle a counter protester, which made the event
national news with headlines like Occupy protesters clash with police

(10:24):
officers injured. The arrests were reported by the Associated Press
in stories carried in newspapers around the country. The initial
wire story opens with a cursory explanation of the underlying event,
offering up the phrase a rally by a group protesting
violence by blacks against whites in South Africa, but news

(10:47):
reports about the events focus on the men who were arrested,
three members of Occupy Sacramento, part of the larger nationwide
series of Occupy protests that had sprung up around the
country a few months earlier. In follow up stories about
the arrests, officers say the event led them to reevaluate
their strategy for confronting Occupy protesters, who they describe as

(11:10):
aggressive towards police. Initial reporting quotes one Occupied protester who
spoke to the group's motivation for showing up to counter protest,
but none of the news stories follow that lead who
exactly were the people who had organised the event of
the Capitol and why would those counter protesters believe that
the group had connections to the clan. The Associated Press

(11:34):
write up notes in passing that the three dozen rally
attendees of the Capital were all white and almost all men,
many with shaved heads and prominent tattoos, but it doesn't
offer any indication that those very visible tattoos had any
particular message. The reporter doesn't quote the man who organized

(11:58):
the rally in Sacramento, but they do include a comment
from the national spokesman for the organization behind the events,
Marris Gulett. Told a reporter that he wasn't surprised that
counter protesters had disrupted this peaceful march. What's missing from
the articles, though, is that the event in Sacramento was

(12:20):
hosted by the Golden State Skinheads, and while he may
have been speaking on behalf of something called the South
Africa Project, Marris Gulett was a lifelong member of the
Aryan Nations who had recently been released from prison for
bank robbery. Just beneath the surface of those rallies, had
anyone bothered to look, was an old woman in Louisiana.

(12:43):
Years before she started organizing American skinheads at poorly attended rallies,
she was a key player in an international terrorist plot
to disrupt South Africa's first post apartheid elections. I'm Molly
Conger in this is weird, little guys, we have to

(13:20):
talk about white genocide. I'd really rather not, but that's
just the way things are. The most important thing you
need to know about white genocide is that it is
absolutely not a real thing. It's not just not happening.
It isn't really a thing that can happen. The white

(13:43):
race is not dying out. White people are not subject
to a targeted campaign of extermination by any government, But
on the extreme right, there is an intense fear of
a loss of white dominance. For years now, on the
homepage of The Daily Stormer, there's been a little widget

(14:04):
in the sidebar called Demographic Countdown. It's an actual countdown
clock to the moment the United States will hit a
demographic tipping point when the white population drops below fifty
percent for the first time. As I'm writing this, they
have calculated that moment to be eighteen years and two
hundred and twenty one days from now, So mark your calendars.

(14:27):
I guess they fear what they call the Great Replacement,
the idea that through immigration and interracial marriage, white people
will become a minority in historically white majority countries. Abortion, contraception, pornography, homosexuality,
all of these things are in their minds, causing white

(14:49):
birth rates to fall, all while non white immigrants pour
over the borders replacing them. It was David Lane, a
member of the neo Nazi terrorist group The Order, who
coined the pithy slogan that encapsulates the sphere. His fourteen words,
we must secure the existence of our people and a

(15:11):
future for white children David Lane wrote those words from
his cell in federal prison. His idea of securing the
existence of his people involved murdering a Jewish talk radio host.
David Lane died in prison, but those fourteen words have
taken on a life of their own, becoming one of

(15:32):
the most well recognized white supremacist slogans worldwide. This white
extinction anxiety is a motivating force for acts of horrific
violence on an individual level. Anders Bravich, a man who
murdered seventy seven people in Norway in twenty eleven, wrote
in his manifesto quote, what is happening to the indigenous

(15:56):
peoples of Western Europe and our cultures amounts to a
merciless and bloody genocide. When Breton Tarrant murdered fifty one
Muslim worshippers at mosques in christ Church, New Zealand in
twenty nineteen, he titled his manifesto The Great Replacement, and
in it he cites Bravic as an inspiration. But it's

(16:18):
that same feeling, this paranoid, reactionary whiteness, that South African
media studies professor Niki Falcov calls an anxious racial fantasy
that motivates the violence of policy too. When Republican politicians
froth at the mouth spreading fear of immigrant hordes at
the border and give campaign speeches about how they're all rapists,

(16:42):
with the unspoken implication that they'll impregnate your white daughters.
They're murderers, they carry deadly diseases, and they traffic poisonous
drugs that will kill your white sons. That's the same fear.
It originates in the same place, and it leads us
to the same violent ends. But the great replacement myth

(17:06):
is just that, a myth, of course, but one about replacement.
They believe white people are being displaced. They are being replaced.
Their cultural hegemony is at risk. When immigrants bring their languages, customs,
and religions with them into white countries in a racial marriage,

(17:26):
is making new generations less and less racially pure. The
belief in the conspiracy theories of white genocide and great
replacement go hand in hand, and they're often used interchangeably.
But for that white genocide to be more than metaphorical,
more than a slow death of this imaginary hegemonic white culture,

(17:48):
there has to be actual violence against white people. If
white people are victims of an ongoing genocide. Surely you
can point to blood on someone's hands, you have to
have a body. And the example that bubbles to the
surface more often than not is the myth of the
South African farm murders, and that's what got me started

(18:13):
on the subject of this week's episode. Those rallies in
twenty twelve were organized by a group calling themselves the
South Africa Project, and their stated goal was to raise
awareness of the genocide of the white South African The
narrative is built around the idea that white South African
farmers are under attack, that they are being brutally murdered

(18:36):
in alarming numbers by black men motivated specifically by a
desire to kill white people. The very idea of the
farm murders as some discrete category of crime is a
contentious one. Have white farmers been murdered, Yes, but that's

(18:58):
where the truth leaves the room. As a nation, South
Africa has a higher rate of violent crime than many
other similarly situated countries, but the idea that rural white
landowners are at a uniquely high risk of being murdered
in racially motivated violent attacks is simply not true. But

(19:20):
it's a myth that serves a rather particular political purpose.
As Nikki Falcon writes in her book Warrior, State, Risk, Anxiety,
and moral panic in South Africa, white people are not
the only victims, or indeed only the victims of rural murders.

(19:42):
Black laborers, though seldom spoken about in these terms, are
frequently among the victims of murders perpetrated by outsiders, and
they are also killed by white managers and employers. Rates
of femicide and domestic violence on farms are thought to
be high, affecting both black and white women. Nonetheless, the
trope of the farm murder as a specific type of

(20:04):
violent crime featuring white victims and black killers is frequently
invoked to provide evidence for the alleged genocide. In two
thousand and three, the South African Police issued their final
report on an inquiry conducted into the alleged phenomenon. In
analysis of all reported incidents on farms and smallholdings spanning

(20:27):
nineteen ninety eight two thousand and one, nearly ninety percent
were motivated by robbery, seven percent were the result of
labor disputes, and only two percent were found to have
any racial or political motivation in any direction. In a
country with nearly twenty thousand murders annually, there are an

(20:51):
average of fifty per year that could be classified as
farm murders, and again all most all of those are
robbery homicides, not organized political violence targeting people of a
particular race. As Falkov puts it, there is evidence for murder, atrocity,

(21:15):
even torture, there is no evidence for genocide. The genocide
myth is an iteration of long standing white justifications for
racist domination. To put it another way, the intense and
formative anxiety of whiteness that it is always under threat
would appear among South Africans regardless of whether the farm

(21:37):
murders happened or not. This anxiety of a whiteness that
is under violent threat is incredibly useful. Carolyn Holmes, a
professor of political science at the University of Tennessee Knoxville,
has written extensively about this phenomenon, addressing specifically the ways

(21:57):
this myth making is marketed to a racially anxious white
audience outside of South Africa, writing that white audiences are
a quote mobilizing around stories of violence against perceived members
of their group. As a way to protect their racial status.
African nationalist groups like Afroforum and the Swedelanders tour the

(22:20):
United States, meet with American right wing groups, produce material
in English, and make appearances in American media because they
know this message sells here, and lately it's really taken off.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted something on truth Social

(22:40):
that sent up a big red flag for me. I mean,
almost all of his posts are pretty alarming, but this
one sent me scurrying into my archives. On February tewod
he posted.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of
people very badly. It's a bad situation that the radical
left media doesn't want so much as mention. A massive
human rights violation at a minimum is happening for all
to see. The United States won't stand for it. We

(23:17):
will act. Also. I will be cutting off all future
funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this
situation has been completed.

Speaker 1 (23:30):
He made an almost identical post a week later on
February ninth, and in between those two posts, he issued
an executive order with the title addressing the egregious actions
of the Republic of South Africa on its surface The
egregious action he's referring to is the Expropriation Act of
twenty twenty four, an Act of the South African Parliament

(23:52):
signed into law by the South African President in January
of this year. But both his reaction to it and
his own history of engagement on the subject of South
African land reform are instructive here. He's not actually reacting
to the text of that bill. He's reacting to the
imaginary world constructed by people who wish apartheid had never ended.

(24:18):
I'll get into a little bit of what the Expropriation
actually says, but first let's go back in time a
few years, because, like I said, when I saw Trump's
post a few days before that executive order, I had
a feeling he was retreading old territory. This wasn't the
first time he'd fired off a half baked take on

(24:40):
South African land reform. Back in August of twenty eighteen,
nearly two years and almost five thousand tweets into his
first term, he tweeted the word Africa for the first time.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
As president, I have asked Secretary of State sect Bomb
to closely study the South African land and farm seizures
and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. South
African government is now seizing land from white farmers at
Tucker Carlson at Fox News.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
The tweet was posted at ten thirty eight pm, less
than an hour after a segment on Tucker Carlson's nightly
broadcast fearmongering about land reform under President Ramaposa.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
We've got a solicit investigation for you tonight. The President
of South Africa, Siro Ramaposa, has begun and you may
have seen this in the press, seizing land from his
own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin color.
That is literally the definition of racism.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Oddly, that segment doesn't mention anything about farmers being killed.
Trump's decision to include that in his tweet indicates that
he'd been consuming right wing media about South Africa elsewhere
prior to this nightly date with Tucker Carlson's show. If
I had to guess, though, I'd say his belief in

(26:13):
the farm murders did probably still come from Tucker Carlson.
Just three months earlier, he'd invited the leader of a
white nationalist group onto the show to spread disinformation on
the topic.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans speaking, is being
targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders. But
instead of protecting them, the government just passed a law
allowing it to seize their farms that any compensation, based
purely on their ethnicity, and distribute those farms to more
favored groups. Thousands have already migrated out of the country,

(26:47):
but they've struggled to attack attract any sympathy abroad for
some reason. Ernst Roots is deputy CEO of Afroforum. It's
a South Africa civil rights group. He was just in
the United States to meet with a government officials.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
Afroforum is not really best described as a civil rights organization,
that's what they call themselves, but I would profer that
apartheid apologists is a more fitting description. In twenty sixteen,
after the group released Tainted Heroes, their documentary critical of

(27:26):
the struggle against apartheid, a spokesman for the African National
Congress called the film pure propaganda and suggested that a
better film might feature the stories of the AFROFUM members
and the ways in which they had collaborated with the
apartheid regime. Arenst Ruth's appearance on Tucker Carlson's show was
during his trip to Washington, d C. To meet with

(27:47):
federal government officials and right wing think tanks. Along with
Afroforum CEO Kelly Krele, he met with staffers for Senator
Ted Cruz, officials from USAID, and the pair posted a
photo of themselves with National Security Advisor John Bolton. They
posted about meetings at the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation,

(28:08):
and the International Republican Institute. They claimed to have met
with at least one member of Congress, but they declined
to say who it was. Their May twenty eighteen tour
of the United States was meant to capitalize on the
sudden international interest in the plight of the persecuted white
South African Just two months earlier, in March of twenty eighteen,

(28:32):
News Corp Australia sent reporter Paul Towey on a four
week tour of South Africa. The timing is curious. This
was right on the heels of right wing media influencers
like Lauren Southern and Katie Hopkins traveling to South Africa
to make content, and for weeks Australian news outlets owned
by Rupert Murdoch, ran stories and videos about horrific violence

(28:55):
against white farmers, with headlines like horror hails from South
African farmers in the Australian South Africa's white farmers attacked, raped,
forced from land in the Daily Telegraph, White minority targeted
in South Africa in the Courier Mail, and wrights groups
silent on the whites of South Africa in the West Australian.

(29:20):
In video reports, Tooey claimed that he was quoting the
Ramaposa government when he said they were specifically targeting white
South Africans for land seizures. Australian Facebook feeds were flooded
with short videos about a pending genocide of white South Africans.
Twoy's reporting relied heavily on the misrepresented crime statistics produced

(29:43):
by Afroforum, and many of his stories quoted liberally from
Afroform directly or interviewed the aggrieved white farmers whose stories
had been featured in Afroform propaganda campaigns in the past.
As far as I can find, Paul Towey explicitly disclosed
any relationship with afro Forum, but the group did take

(30:06):
credit for influencing his coverage, claiming to have provided assistance
to a prominent Australian journalist. In the midst of this,

(30:28):
onslaught of reporting essentially force feeding African or white nationalists
propaganda to the entire Australian public. Australian Home Affairs Minister
Peter Dutton told a reporter from the Australian right wing
tabloid The Telegraph that he'd seen some very concerning media
coverage of the violent persecution of white farmers and he

(30:49):
hoped to assist them in resettling in Australia. He'd ordered
his department to explore options for fast tracking humanitarian visas
for white South Africans, saying people do need help, and
they need help from a civilized country like ours. Dutton's
comments were not well received. He dismissed the criticism as

(31:16):
lots of outrage from crazy leftists, and he said that
the outlets who covered the story negatively, like ABC, The
Guardian and the Huftington Post were dead to him. But
the criticism wasn't just coming from the media. The United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees issued a statement warning of
the dire conditions for refugees living in a Processing Center

(31:38):
on the island of Nauru, urging Australia to prioritize actual refugees.
The UNHCR Director for Asia and the Pacific said, the
decision of the government to open its migration pathways to
different categories of people is a sovereign decision, but from
the UNHCR perspective, we do encourage that resettlement upper tunities

(32:00):
that are for refugees and humanitarian quotas that are for
deserving cases should not be impacted by these decisions on migration.
The South African government summoned the Australian ambassador and demanded
a formal retraction of Dutton's statements, with their Foreign Affairs
minister writing the South African government is offended by the

(32:22):
statements which have been attributed to the Australian Home Affairs
Minister and a full retraction is expected. Australian Prime Minister
Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop managed to smooth
things out with South Africa by clarifying that Dutton's offer
did not represent the actual policies of the nation, but

(32:43):
Dutton never actually retracted his statement, and as for af reforms,
attempt to capitalize on that attention on their trip to
the United States, they only actually managed to meet with
staffers in Ted Cruz's office, not the Senator himself, and
a spokesman from usaid downplayed the significance of having taken

(33:05):
a meeting with the pair, offering a bland statement that
they take a lot of meetings. Their claim to have
met with John Bolton is an overstatement too. A spokesman
from the National Security Council clarified that Bolton had no
idea who Roots and Creole were and he had not

(33:25):
met with them. They'd simply run into him in the
hallway at a Fox News studio and agreed to pose
for a photo with fans. For what it's worth, the
photo of Roots with Bolton does show that Roots is
wearing the outfit he appeared in on an episode of
Tucker Carlson that aired a few days later, and the
men are standing in front of what appears to be

(33:46):
the kind of large garment steamer that you might find
in a dressing room in a television studio, not a
government office building. Peter Dutton was the subject of international
regis and he very nearly caused an international incident. The
leadership of Afroform had made no headway in their attempts

(34:08):
to meet with government officials, But none of that really matters.
The only thing that mattered in the end was that
Tucker Carlson took the bait and he put ernst Rutz
on a television program that the President of the United
States watched religiously. That segment aired on May fifteenth, twenty eighteen.

(34:31):
Trump didn't tweet about South Africa that night. I can't
prove he saw that episode. But three months later in August,
when Tucker Carlson had another guest on to talk about
South African land reform, the president's tweet that night wasn't
just about land reform. He specifically referenced the idea of

(34:54):
large scale killings of white farmers, something that hadn't been
discussed in that night's episode, but it had been the
subject of Carlson's interview with Roots back in May. That
pathway from white supremacist propaganda in South Africa to a
presidential tweet is fairly clear. Trump quoted and tagged Tucker

(35:17):
Carlson in his tweet, a tweet he posted forty five
minutes after the segment aired. The guest on the show
that night was a Cato Institute fellow named Marion Tupi,
so not actually a representative from Afrofum, but when Afroforum
met with various right wing think tanks back in May,
Marion Tupi was the Cato Institute policy analyst who replied

(35:41):
to Huffington Post's requests for comment about their meeting with
the group. He even c seed Ernst Roots in his
reply to the Huffington Post, a message that included a
bizarre comment that the current South African government was explicitly
racist and in fact comparable to the apartheid government. When

(36:03):
Donald Trump tweeted about South Africa for the first time
as president, he said he was going to have Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo closely study the issue of South
African farmers. But I can't actually find any kind of
official follow up to that. I found a brief mention
in an article from twenty twenty about Pompeo's first trip

(36:24):
to Southern Africa a Secretary of State, So I guess
we can at least deduce that closely studying the issue
didn't actually involve going to South Africa for at least
a year and a half but there's no official policy
statement or reference to any study performed. That article just

(36:44):
quotes Pompeo calling the proposed land reform bill disastrous for
the South African people and much like Peter Dutton's comments
in March of twenty eighteen, Trump's tweet in August twenty
eighteen was not well received by the South African government.

(37:05):
Within hours, their official Twitter account responded, tweeting South Africa
totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide
our nation and reminds us of our colonial past. Hashtag
land expropriation at real Donald Trump. The following morning, a
spokesperson for President Rama Posa called into a news broadcast

(37:28):
on e NCA, South Africa's most watched television news channel,
to say the government would not be using tweets to
conduct international relations.

Speaker 4 (37:40):
The presidency has noticed the two which is attributed to
the US President President Donald Trump. In our view, the
treat is unfortunate and miss informed. However, we've chosen and
not to respond to it via social media. Instead, we'll
use the diplomatic channels that exist for such purposes.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
Later that day, the same spokesperson whose Eladico told CNN
hysterical comments and statements do not assist in the process.
The majority of South Africans want to see land reform.
The majority of our farmers, white and black, want to
be part of this initiative. And President Cyril Ramaposa hit
back in remarks at a conference in Limpopo later that week.

Speaker 5 (38:26):
I don't know what Donald Trump has to do with
South African land because he's never been here, and he
must keep his America. We will keep our South Africa.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
How do as you do.

Speaker 5 (38:42):
South Africa is our land. South Africa belongs to all
the people who live here in South Africa. He does
not belong to Donald Crab. He can keep his America.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
But then the story just sort of went away. I
can't find much in the way of official follow up
from either government. Trump went back to tweeting and Ramaposa
went back to working on a plan for land reform.
Back in twenty eighteen, the new story Trump was reacting
to was merely a proposal to amend the South African

(39:22):
Constitution to clarify existing powers of expropriation, and that didn't
actually happen back then. Now, in twenty twenty five, President
Ramaposa has signed into law the Expropriation Act, which does
allow the government to expropriate privately owned land. And that
might sound very scary if you don't know what it means,

(39:46):
and that's certainly the emotional reaction the act's opponents are
counting on. But the power codified in the Act isn't
new to South Africa or unique to that country. Expropriation
of land in the public interest was a power already
granted to the government in South Africa's nineteen ninety four constitution.

(40:07):
And I'm sure you're familiar with the Fifth Amendment of
the United States Constitution, but there's more to it than
pleading the fifth Honestly, come to think of it, they
probably should have broken that one out into a couple
different amendments. But on top of giving you the right
to not incriminate yourself, the Fifth Amendment has something called

(40:30):
the takings Clause, which limits the power of eminent domain
by requiring just compensation. In other words, if the government
believes that it is in the public interest and they
pay you a fair price, they can take your land.
The constitutions in countries like Spain, Germany, India, and Australia

(40:55):
have similar provisions. What South Africa is proposing is some
unimaginable tyrannical nightmare. It's eminent domain. There is a provision

(41:23):
in the act that's getting quite a bit of attention.
In Trump's executive order, he writes, in.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
Shocking disregard of its citizens' rights, the Republic of South
Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act thirteen of twenty twenty four
to enable the Government of South Africa to seize ethnic
minority African honors agricultural property without compensation.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
Putting aside the commentary about race, the Act says nothing
at all about race or euthnicity. The without compensation language
has been the focus of much of the negative coverage
of this act. I'm not an expert on South African politics,
or constitutional law in any country, or really even the

(42:16):
ins and outs of eminent domain. But I did read
the Expropriation Act, and I'm not sure Trump did. It's
fifty two pages long, but each page is printed once
in English, followed by the same page in Afrikaans, so
I guess that makes it a twenty six page law.

(42:36):
Chapter five of the Act is called compensation for expropriation,
and it discusses in detail how compensation is calculated and paid.
There's a lot of boring bits about interest and mortgages
and taxes, but I want to talk about Chapter five,
Section twelve, and then skip on down to sub section

(42:59):
three D, which begins it may be just and equitable
for nil compensation to be paid where land is expropriated
in the public interest, having regard to all the relevant circumstances,
including and the four conditions laid out there. For scenarios
where it may be appropriate to offer a landowner no

(43:21):
compensation are things like when the land is entirely unused
because the landowner's main purpose is not to develop the
land or use it to generate income, but instead to
benefit from appreciation of its market value. Or if the
land is currently owned by an organ of the state
and they're not using that land for its core functions

(43:43):
and they're unlikely to require it in the future. If
the owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise
control over it despite being reasonably capable of doing so,
or if the present value of the land is less
than the amount of direct state subsidy in the US
acquisition or improvement of the land, the furor being whipped

(44:05):
up about the law makes it sound like the South
African government has written a law that says white families
will be driven from their homes and stripped of all
their possessions. But the law says nothing at all about
targeting any particular group for expropriation, and the conditions under
which someone might be offered anything less than equitable compensation

(44:27):
would necessarily exclude land that anyone actually lived or worked on.
The goal of land reform at its core is to
address the wrongs of apartheid. The Native's Land Act of
nineteen thirteen prevented black people from buying land, setting aside

(44:48):
just seven percent of the country's land for use by
black South Africans. A later amendment expanded that to thirteen percent,
but the law itself wasn't repealed until nineteen ninety one.
A land audit conducted by the South African government in
twenty seventeen reported that seventy two percent of all privately

(45:09):
owned agricultural land in South Africa was owned by white people,
despite the fact that white people make up about seven
percent of the South African population. I couldn't actually find
any specific information about how much of that land had
changed hands over the years, but in a twenty twenty
article in the African Journal on Conflict Resolution, doctor Adoia

(45:33):
Achinola wrote, farm owners or farmers are predominantly made up
of the white group, who in most cases inherited the
farms from their families. A prevailing narrative is that in
most cases these lands and farms had been forcifully taken
from black South Africans during colonialism and apartheid. It may
be said, therefore, that few white farmers had genuinely bought

(45:56):
the lands, particularly in opposed apartheids South Africa. This isn't
a wrong of the distant past. In nineteen ninety four,
when apartheid was finally ended, the South African National Congress
announced an ambitious plan to return at least thirty percent
of the stolen land by twenty fourteen. By twenty eighteen,

(46:19):
though only an estimated ten percent of land had been
returned to indigenous people. The policies of the current government
won't lead to terrifying scenes of black soldiers forcing pretty
white mothers off their land at gunpoint, although that certainly
the image conjured in the white supremacist imagination. It's a

(46:41):
slow boring process involving petitions and judicial review. It's not
a revolution, but it is an important step in the
ongoing process of undoing apartheid. The President of the United States,
it seems, does not feel that way. His executive order

(47:02):
not only ends all foreign aid to South Africa, but
it allows quote africaners in South Africa who are victims
of unjust racial discrimination to be admitted and resettled in
the United States as refugees. So not only is he
saying that white South Africans are politically persecuted to such
an extent that they are refugees deserving special treatment, they

(47:27):
are essentially the only refugees in the world worthy of
assistance by the US government. Because he ordered an end
to refugee resettlement programs on his first day in office
last month. It probably doesn't help that the president is
heavily influenced by Elon Musk, a man with a long
history of spreading propaganda about white genocide in South Africa.

(47:51):
In twenty twenty three, he replied to a tweet from
an account called end Wokeness, writing, they are actually killing
white farmers every day. It's not just a threat. Musk
was born in South Africa under apartheid, and he emigrated
to Canada in nineteen eighty nine to avoid compulsory military service.

(48:12):
The South Africa he knew was one under apartheid, and
in addition to his frenetic posting about white genocide conspiracy theories,
he's also accused the South African government of having quote
openly racist laws. After he refused to participate in regulatory
hearings with the Independent Communications Authority in South Africa, his

(48:35):
plan to launch Starlink service in South Africa hit a roadblock.
The country requires licensees operating a national network or selling
internet services nationwide to be at least thirty percent black owned,
a requirement Musk claims is simply not possible. Trump has
yet to nominate a pick for South African Ambassador, but

(48:58):
the current front runner is rumored to be Breitbart Editor
in chief Joel Pollock. I considered cutting a clip from
an interview Pollock gave a South African TV news program
the other day, but the man has all the charisma
of a wet rag. But the idea of the Breitbart
editor becoming the South African Ambassador did remind me of

(49:21):
another video back in twenty eighteen amidst all that ongoing
public interest in Australian tabloid coverage of anti white violence
in South Africa, Breitbart News held a town hall event
in New Orleans. The topic of the event was something else,
big tech and free speech. But during the Q and

(49:43):
A session, and Colter came out strong in support of
white genocide conspiracy theory.

Speaker 6 (49:52):
But I mean, we are seeing a genocide. They are,
and if we're going to take any refugees, it seems
to me it ought to be particularly these white farmers
who are being chosen and I'm killed in really horrible ways,
and you can find it by doing a Google search,
but you can find these web pages. It's not They're

(50:12):
not just going in and shooting them pointlink. They're really disgusting.
They're boiling people to death, just really sick, sick tortures.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Her answer was in response to a question from an
unnamed audience member, just a random guy at a town hall,
but I recognize that voice.

Speaker 4 (50:36):
This question is for miss culture. Why do you think
the mainstream media has been silent on the genocide of
white farmers in South Africa? And why does social media
censor post about the issue, And how can we draw
attention to these.

Speaker 6 (50:48):
World I am so glad you asked that question.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
That's Patrick Casey. Back in twenty eighteen, he was the
leader of the white supremacist group Identity Europa. The person
injecting white genocide talking points into this Brightbart event in
twenty eighteen was the head of a white supremacist organization,
and not just any white supremacist organization. Identity Europa was

(51:24):
a primary organizer of the Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. It was Identity Europa members who
started the chance of you will Not Replace Us as
they marched through the University of Virginia with their torches.
But remarkably, Anne Colter took the ball and ran with it,

(51:47):
and she demonstrated that she was deeply immersed in this
same racist worldview. She had these talking points ready to go,
and he might be asking at this point, what does
any of this have to do with a few dozen
skinheads getting pelted with rocks and Sacramento in twenty twelve.

(52:10):
Those rallies against white genocide back in twenty twelve were
poorly attended and barely reported on the idea behind this
organizing strategy. Was pretty similar to the twenty seventeen March
against Sharia rallies. I talked about a few episodes ago,
a nationwide series of public protests designed to give the

(52:31):
appearance of widespread public support for a pretty unpopular racist idea.
But when Act for America pulled that stunt in twenty seventeen,
they were able to attract some mainstream Republican attendees, and
more importantly, they had access to the legitimizing force of

(52:51):
the right wing media ecosystem. Act for America issued their
press releases directly to Breitbart. The CEO was able to
publish her own write ups on the events on their site.
They didn't have to wait for the idea to make
its way through the human centipede of right wing media,
slowly laundering fascist ideas through intermediaries and conning journalists into

(53:16):
picking it up. The group that put on those rallies
against white genocide in twenty twelve didn't have that kind
of access. The South Africa Project was very obviously a
front for the Aryan Nations Chapter in Louisiana. They were
having trouble forcing their way into the conversation and attracting

(53:38):
any normal people to their events, But the very same idea,
presented in almost exactly the same way by a man
in a suit, made its way directly into the White
House just a few years later. The message hadn't changed,
the motivation behind it remains the same. The myth of

(54:01):
the South African farm murder exists to stoke white anxiety.
For africanternationalists, it's a desire to return to apartheid. For
the American audience they sell it to, it's a longing
to roll back civil rights and integration. It may be
dressed up as foreign policy, but it's no different from

(54:23):
the message on those flyers printed out by Aryan Nations members.
It just took the right messenger to get on Tucker
Carlson for the President to hear it. I did set
out to just write a story about those rallies and
the people involved in them, but current events keep getting

(54:43):
in my way. I never really know where a story
is going to take me until I have forty or
fifty browser tabs open and a dozen pages of notes
that don't really make any sense. But this one took
a hard right turn. Early on, I thought for sure
that the star of the story of these white genocide

(55:05):
rallies would be Billy Roper. It seemed like such an
interesting coincidence that in both of these tales of fate
grassroots rallies for racist causes, there's Billy stepping up to
the plate to hold an event in Arkansas. But when
I started probing a little deeper into the woman behind
the South Africa Project, I made an alarming discovery. Before

(55:32):
Monica Stone moved to a small town in Louisiana to
marry an American clansman, she lived in South Africa, and
she had a different name. And it's a name that
I found in some very strange places, like the memoir
of a British Man seeking redemption for his years in

(55:52):
a violent fascist movement, or deep within the text of
the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. But you'll
have to wait until next week to hear an almost
unbelievable tale of international gun smuggling, bombings and shootouts that
failed to prevent the end of apartheid. Come with me

(56:34):
for a moment. Back to February of twenty seventeen. It
was just weeks after Donald Trump had been sworn in
as president for his first term. There was a lot
of uncertainty, a lot of fear. Millions of Americans marched
in Washington, d C. To protest his presidency in its
first days. There was still some hope in those early

(56:58):
days that maybe he hadn't meant most of what he'd said,
maybe it was campaign bluster, hot air and empty words.
Within a week, though, he'd signed an executive order banning
travel to the United States from predominantly Muslim countries, sparking
a wave of protests at airports and signaling that he

(57:19):
intended to follow through on his xenophobic, anti immigrant campaign promises.
A month into his presidency, tens of thousands of Americans
in at least fifty cities around the country rallied for
a protest on President's Day, calling it not my President's Day.
But that same week, half a world away, a very

(57:42):
different march was taking place in Zagreb's city center. A
few dozen men in black uniforms stood in formation, led
by Drasen Khlemenek, leader of the Croatian Fascist Party HSP.
They chanted the slogans of the Eustache, the Croatian fascist
movement of the nineteen thirties and forties, alongside the Holocaust

(58:06):
carried out by Nazi Germany. The Eustasia had undertaken a
genocide of their own, operating their own concentration camps and
slaughtering whole villages of Jews, Roma and Serbs. As those
marchers assembled in the city square and the brass band
finished playing, the men took an oath of allegiance to
their Croatian homeland and to Donald Trump. Most of those

(58:51):
marchers had empty hands, some held brass instruments, but at
the front of the column several marchers had called flags,
the Croatian flag, of course, and an American flag to
show their support for Donald Trump. But one man at
the very front of the line was carrying the flag

(59:12):
of the German Ultranationalist Party NPD. The march's organizer, Drazen Klemenek,
was arrested that day for shouting zadom spremni, which is
the Croatian equivalent of yelling Siegheil in Germany, but when
he did get a chance to speak to the press,

(59:32):
he explained the presence of the German NPD flag. The
man who'd been carrying it was Alexander Nydeline, a representative
from NPD, and he was there to show his party's
support for HSP, but that march in February of twenty
seventeen wasn't Alexander Nydline's first visit to the Balkans. In

(59:55):
nineteen ninety three, Nydeline enlisted in the Convicts Battalion, a
paramilitary a unit of the Croatian Defense Council made up
of prisoners and foreign mercenaries. Its leader was later convicted
of crimes against humanity for his actions during the Bosnian War.
Nydeline didn't stay with the unit for very long. In

(01:00:15):
the years since, he's taken issue with being called a mercenary,
arguing that he never actually got paid. Because just before
Christmas of nineteen ninety three, Nydeline and two other German
mercenaries deserted from the Convicts Battalion. They took as many
guns as they could carry and disappeared into the night.

(01:00:36):
A few weeks later, those German mercenaries and those stolen
guns turned up seven thousand miles away in South Africa.
I'm Molly Conger and this is Weird Little Guides. This

(01:01:10):
is a story about Monica Stone. I think she may
be our first weird little guy who happens to be
a woman. There was Dallas Humber, I guess the voice
of Teragram, but she wasn't the central character in that story,
just the disembodied voice urging young men to kill. Weird

(01:01:32):
little guy is a gender neutral term in my mind.
I haven't been avoiding telling the stories of women in
the white power movement. It's just that, for the most part,
the very nature of their beliefs kind of prevents women
from taking center stage, even in their own lives. But
this this is a story of a woman who has

(01:01:53):
dedicated her life to the cause, and in her case
the cause is apartheid. Like all my stories, this is
really only kind of about one weird little guy, and
this might be the widest net I've ever cast trying
to understand one person's life. The story covers decades and

(01:02:16):
spans continents. There are bombings and shootouts and murders. There's
international guns smuggling, mercenaries and paramilitaries, and war crimes, successful
assassinations and foiled terrorist plots, their trials and prison breaks,
and crimes left unpunished, some with extradition, petitions left pending

(01:02:36):
for decades with no hope of justice. There are some
familiar landmarks, names of people, and organizations I recognize, like
David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan and the Turner Diaries.
But there are people and groups in this story that
were new to me, characters we haven't met yet and
may see again in future episodes exploring these fascist friendships

(01:03:01):
across borders. But at its core, this is a story
about Monica Stone. She isn't in all the parts of
the story playing out all around her, but the context
matters more than ever, because this week we're going to
dig into a weighty idea, the fascist International. I haven't

(01:03:24):
forgotten where we started. Maybe you have. That's understandable. I
left you hanging there for a week while I recovered
from a stomach virus. But two weeks ago we were
talking about white genocide. The story began in Sacramento in
twenty twelve, a group of neo Nazi skinheads was rallying
at the state capitol in California to raise awareness of

(01:03:45):
the plight of the white South African farmer. In that episode,
I picked apart this myth, the idea that white farmers
are being slaughtered every day in a post apartheid South Africa,
that white South Africans are in danger of being completely
wiped out by a white genocide. That idea has been

(01:04:06):
quite popular among white supremacists around the world for some time.
Norwegian mass murderer Anders Bravik devoted a few pages of
his fifteen hundred page manifesto to it. When Dylan Rufe
murdered nine people at a black church in Charleston, South
Carolina in twenty fifteen, his Facebook profile photo showed him
glowering at the camera in a black jacket with two

(01:04:29):
patches on the breast, the flag of Rhodesia and the
flag of apartheid South Africa. I come across the idea
pretty often in my work. So many of my weird
little guys are obsessed with the idea of a fully
segregated society and the state violence against black people that

(01:04:49):
comes with it. But that's where the idea lived. It
lived on stormfront and on four Chan, and in manifestos
and on Nazi podcasts. Those rallies in twenty twelve were
pretty unique. The public display of the apartheid era South
African flag at an American political rally was unusual. It

(01:05:14):
was unusual enough that it was mentioned in news stories
three years later, when the flag appeared again on Dylan
Rufe's jacket, But like so many once fringe ideas, it's
part of the mainstream political discourse.

Speaker 2 (01:05:28):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
I won't retread all of that. We talked about it
in the last episode, but now the President of the
United States is repeating the talking points from the flyers
those skinheads printed out in twenty twelve. And I originally
set out to just talk about those rallies as a
sort of standalone story, this strange incident that seems to

(01:05:51):
have happened in total isolation. As far as I've been
able to find, the group behind it had never put
on a public event before, and aside from a poorly
tended follow up in DC later that same year, they
never did again. The website has been offline for years,
and there's hardly any mention of the group at all anywhere.

(01:06:14):
A lot of white supremacist groups are short lived, so
that's not really unusual, and this group, the South Africa Project,
was pretty obviously just two people running a side project
out of an Aryan nation's po box. But I can't
let anything go, so I started to dig, and it

(01:06:34):
became clear very quickly that there was a hell of
a lot more going on here than I thought. Back
in twenty twelve, when those rallies took place, both the
SPLC and the ADL had stories on their website explaining
that those events had been organized by American neo Nazis.

(01:06:55):
Both groups zeroed in on Morris Goulette, a longtime Arian
Nations made member and the man who'd given comments to
the press as the organization's spokesman. Both outlets identified several
local organizers of those assorted rallies. The Golden State Skinheads
hosted in Sacramento. Billy Roper headlined the rally in Arkansas.
Rallies in Tennessee and Pennsylvania were hosted by members of

(01:07:17):
Folksfront and so on. But in one single line in
a blog post that isn't even on the ADL's website anymore,
the events are attributed to a woman named Monica Stone.
In this passing mention crediting Stone with the idea for

(01:07:38):
the rallies. The post notes that she was a South
African immigrant and a longtime member of the Christian Defense League.
The CDL was a Christian identity group that grew out
of the same milieu as the Aryan Nations in the sixties,
but it never really achieved the same level of influence.

(01:07:58):
But that's all there is. Monica and Louisiana, Monica from
South Africa, Monica speaking at the Arian Nations World Congress
about the need for international solidarity between American neo Nazis
and africanter nationalists. But Google gives you exactly nothing about
this woman before or after this brief moment in time

(01:08:22):
in twenty twelve. And so at this point I'm locked in.
I have to know more about this woman. How did
she end up in Mandeville, Louisiana, a town of just
ten thousand people that I've only heard of because it's
where David Duke lives. So I started with the information

(01:08:43):
that I have a name, hopefully it's her real name,
a city, and some potential known associates. If her longtime
membership in the Christian Defense League is the only notable
fact about her, maybe that means she was a very
important member of the group. And lucky for me, it

(01:09:05):
turns out she was. The organization has or had, I guess,
since it's defunct as far as I can tell, been
run by a man named Robert K. Warner since the
seventies and When he took over, he moved its headquarters
from California to Louisiana to be closer to his friend
David Duke, and in addition to the Christian Defense League,

(01:09:28):
Warner also ran a Christian identity church called the New
Christian Crusade Church. Corporate filings for the church show Robert K.
Warner as an officer of the organization, which I expected,
but in twenty eleven he filed an amendment adding someone
named Monica Huggett as the church's chief financial officer, and

(01:09:51):
he changed the address on file to a residential address
in Mandeville, Louisiana. Property records for Saint Tammany Parish sure
that a mortgage was taken out at that address by
James Stone in nineteen ninety two, but after he died,
the property was sold by his widow, and on the
documents for the sale, she's listed as Monica Huggot Stone.

(01:10:17):
And that's the kind of concrete paper trail I love
to see. There's no doubt at all here that the
Monica Stone behind those twenty twelve rallies is the Monica
Huggot who married James Stone in two thousand and lived
in Mandeville, Louisiana, two miles away from David Duke. So

(01:10:37):
now I have a new name, Monica hugget And this
is where I ran into trouble. Almost immediately. Everything is
in Afrikaans. Most of the English language material about someone
named Monica Huggot is about the renowned British conductor and

(01:10:59):
baroque violin. But that is an entirely different person who
I am almost one hundred percent sure has never helped
an Italian terrorist build a bomb. Violinists have to be
very careful with their hands, you know. But they were
a handful of extremely tantalizing clues that convinced me to

(01:11:19):
power through the agony of trying to translate blury old PDFs.
One of the first English language sources I found referring
to a South African named Monica Huggett is the final
report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The
Truth and Reconciliation Commission was authorized by President Nelson Mandela

(01:11:42):
in nineteen ninety five and it was chaired by Archbishop
Desmond Tutu. The body's goal was exactly what it says
in the name, to find the truth about what happened
under apartheid and try to find a way to move
forward as a nation. I had three central tasks to

(01:12:03):
discover the causes in nature of human rights violations in
South Africa between nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety four, to
identify victims with a goal of paying reparations, and to
allow amnesty for those who fully disclosed their involvement in
politically motivated human rights violations. This wasn't a tribunal, This

(01:12:26):
was a restorative justice process. They hoped to be able
to provide amnesty to people who were honest. Over the
course of three years, the Commission heard testimony from over
twenty thousand people, both victims and perpetrators. Monica Huggett did not,
as far as I can tell, ever, testify before the Commission,

(01:12:49):
but her name is in there. Specifically, it appears in
Volume two, the seven hundred page portion of the report
dealing with quote the Commission of Gross violations of Human Rights,
and more specifically, it's in Chapter seven Political Violence in
the Era of Negotiations and Transition. Unto the subheading links

(01:13:11):
with international right wing groups, the report reads the first
link between ultra right terrorism and foreign agencies came to
light in nineteen eighty two when mister Fabio Maryello, mister
Massimobulo and mister Eugenio's Office, all white foreign expatriates known
as the White Commando, were convicted of the nineteen seventy

(01:13:32):
nine bombing of the offices of prominent academic doctor Jan Lombard. Originally,
mister KuPS Vermullen and Miss Monica hugget a foreign right winger,
were arrested with them, but Huggitt turned state witness and
Vermullin was released after a few days. Huggett's name was
subsequently linked to the shootout in March nineteen ninety four
between the South African Police and three German right wingers

(01:13:54):
in the Donkerhook area. One German right winger, mister Stephen Rays,
was arrested, mister Thomas Koons was shot dead, and a third,
mister Horst Cleans, later arrested. A fourth, mister Alexander Nydline,
was later charged in the Cullen and Magistrate's Court for
illegal possession of a firearm. And I think you can

(01:14:15):
see why I was willing to invest the effort to
find out more about this, because that's a hell of
a thing to find under the first rock you turn over,
Italian terrorists bombing university offices in Pretoria nineteen seventy nine,
German mercenaries getting into a deadly shootout with the police
in nineteen ninety four, And there she is right at

(01:14:37):
the center of two separate acts of pro apartheid terrorism
fifteen years apart. Now there are some problems here. First
of all, her name is spelled wrong, only a little wrong.
It's missing one of the teas. But Alexander Nydline's name
is spelled so incorrectly that you couldn't find this by

(01:14:59):
searching for his name. The report calls him Alexander niedna Loin,
which as far as I can tell, is not anyone's
name or a real German name at all. And the
bombing of Professor Lombard's offices at the University of Pretoria
happened in nineteen eighty, not nineteen seventy nine. It also

(01:15:20):
describes Monica Huggett as a quote foreign right winger, which
really threw me off at first. I've heard her talk.
She sounds South African, and she's even said in multiple
interviews that she was born and raised there the confusion
in the report maybe because she had publicly identified herself

(01:15:41):
as a member of the American ku Klux Klan and
that may have been interpreted as her being American, And
by the time the Commission was starting their work, she
had left South Africa and was living in the United States.
They never actually had a chance to speak to her.
I'm willing to cut them in slack on the details here.

(01:16:01):
They were close enough for government work, as my dad
used to say, and they had a lot of work
to do. But as my subsequent research shows, beyond a
shadow of it out Monica Huggett was born and raised
South African. But keep those four Germans in the back
of your mind for now. We'll see them again. Alexander

(01:16:24):
Nydline you've already met. He was the German NPD member
swearing allegiance to Donald Trump at a Croatian Nazi rally
in twenty seventeen. According to blurry old scans of arrest
warrants from nineteen ninety three, Stephen Rays and Thomas Kunst
were the other two German mercenaries he deserted with just
before Christmas that year, and just as an aside, I

(01:16:46):
am admittedly not at all an expert on the Bosnian War,
so it took me a minute to parse the letterhead
on the warrants. They were issued by the non existent
country of the Croatian Republic of Hertzeg Bosni, which explains
why Nydeline had no problem re entering Croatia after fleeing
as a fugitive all those years ago, and the fourth

(01:17:09):
man forced Glens he still wanted for murder in Namibia.
Early on in my search for more information about this
mysterious woman at the center of these two terror plots
carried out by foreign neo Nazis, I found a master's
thesis submitted by Mada Visser to the University of Pretoria

(01:17:31):
in nineteen ninety nine. It's in Afrikaans but translated. The
title is the Ideological Foundations and Development of the White
Fascist Movements in South Africa nineteen forty five to nineteen
ninety five. After some truly agonizing trial and error trying
to find a way to translate a three hundred page

(01:17:51):
PDF without paying for something, the thesis was immensely useful,
but every clue just raised more questions, and I was
running into dead end after dead end trying to track
down the primary sources in the footnotes. I can find
a lot of things, but digitized archives of forty year

(01:18:13):
old newspapers published in another language in another country that
might not even still exist at all. For all I know,
I came up empty, and I was on the verge
of total nervous collapse at the idea that there's information
out there that is just not available to me. When
I had another idea and I found an unlikely ally

(01:18:40):
the Central Intelligence Agency. That's right. A special shout out
this week goes to the CIA, more specifically the Foreign
Broadcast Information Service, which was operated by the CIA until
it was renamed the Open Source Center in two thousand
and five. Originally called the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, it

(01:19:03):
was authorized in nineteen forty one by President Roosevelt, and
its original purpose was to record, translate, transcribe, and analyze
propaganda radio programs produced by the Access Powers during the war.
Over the years, its mission grew to include peacetime operations,
and they eventually added television and print media into the mix,

(01:19:24):
collecting and translating news from around the world and disseminating
reports for use by intelligence agencies and diplomatic and military organizations.
It's basically just an international news aggregator for government employees.
And look, maybe all those old South African newspapers do

(01:19:45):
exist somewhere. I found one, not the one I was
looking for, not one with real journalists and investigative reporting
like I'd hoped. The only paper I could find a
large catalog of digitized archive was a paper called D Transfoller.
It was an African or nationalist newspaper. That paper once

(01:20:07):
unsuccessfully tried to sue another South African newspaper for calling
them Nazi propaganda, but it was such overt Nazi propaganda
that the judge dismissed the suit and ruled that the
editor of the Transfaller quote did make his newspaper a
tool of the Nazis in South Africa and he knew
it end quote.

Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
So D.

Speaker 1 (01:20:31):
Transfoller wasn't exactly the resource I was hoping to find,
But eventually I gave up trying to find old South
African newspapers and something that was much easier to find

(01:20:52):
were the unclassified daily reports from the Sub Saharan office
of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. So just this once,
I guess I will give a reluctant nod to the CIA.
So now I have some contemporaneous reporting that has been

(01:21:12):
translated into English by someone who's presumably a professional and
not a robot, and the pieces are starting to come together.
I can start to see the picture here. This bombing
campaign in nineteen eighty is starting to come into focus.
In August of nineteen eighty, a newspaper editor in Pretoria
received a letter on letterhead bearing a symbol remarkably similar

(01:21:37):
to the cross emblem used by the American Ku Klux Klan.
A group calling themselves the VIT Commando or the White
Commandos claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor Jon Lombard's
office at the University of Pretoria, and the group threatened
further attacks, writing that people and organizations working toward integration

(01:21:59):
would be warned first and then eliminated. The VIT Commando
had formed just a few months earlier, in May or
June of nineteen eighty. Sources vary. Monica Huggett would later
testify that she joined the newly formed VIT Commando after
meeting Massimo Bolo at a meeting in Pretoria in June
of nineteen eighty. As described in the memoirs of Ray Hill,

(01:22:23):
a man who ended his lengthy career as a fascist
organizer by playing informant for the anti fascist magazine Searchlight.
The meeting was a summit for leaders of the British
fascist group National Front, the africaner nationalist group AWB, the
far right South African Political Party HNP, and an Italian
fascist group called Unido. So even though her involvement with

(01:22:47):
vit Commando is the first time I can put her
on paper involved in a terrorist organization, it was obviously
not her first introduction to the idea. She had to
have been deeply involved for the at least one of
those fascist groups to have even been in the room
where Massimo Bolo invited her to join his terrorist cell,

(01:23:09):
and the group got started right away. Just two months
after forming the group, the bombing of Lombard's office was
already their third big public display. They'd started a fire
at a drive in theater and fire bombed the Johannesburg
headquarters of the Institute for Race Relations in December. They
claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor F. A. Meritz's

(01:23:30):
office at the University of South Africa, and they would
carry out at least four more bombings before members started
getting arrested. The first four arrests came in early February
of nineteen eighty one, a government employee in Pretoria named W. G.
Van Dyck, the director of the South African National Front,
Alan Fotheringham, an Italian fascist named Massimo Bolo, and, as

(01:23:54):
the newspaper put it at the time, mister Bolo's girlfriend,
Miss m. Huggett of Kempton Park. Now that's the only
source I could find alleging a romantic relationship between the pair.
It never comes up again, so I don't know. And
in the weeks that followed, police would arrest even more

(01:24:16):
alleged members of the VIT Commando Fabio Miriello, an Italian
born South African citizen who'd emigrated four years earlier, kuz Vermulin,
the leader of the World Apartheid Movement, and an Italian
immigrant named Eugenio Zoppie and his wife Laura Zenenga. Those
are all the names I could find in most of

(01:24:37):
my sources. I found a few more names in an
unlikely place, documents released by the Italian government as part
of their investigation into the Bologna massacre. A nineteen eighty
bombing of a train station in Italy, will you to
have been the work of fascist terrorists? Do list several
additional names of Italians who were in South Africa at

(01:24:59):
the time and leave to have been involved with the
vid Commando, But there's no mention of those extra Italians
in the South African or English language press as far
as I can find. As a matter of fact, there's
no mention of almost any of those people. Ever. Again,
only Miriyello, Bolo, and Zoppis actually faced charges. Mariellon and

(01:25:21):
Bolo were charged with sabotage the bombings and possession of
a massive cache of weapons that had been stolen from
the South African Defense Force, including fifty kilos of plastic explosives,
sixty seven hand grenades, a couple of land mines, eight rifles,
four pistols, a machine gun, and five thousand rounds of ammunition.

(01:25:41):
When Bolo and Mariello went to trial later that year,
Monica Huggett testified against them. In exchange she wasn't charged,
she admitted that she had procured the bomb making manual
for Bolo, books that she'd ordered from her clan contacts
in the United States. I was a little surprised to

(01:26:02):
see a familiar title here. One of the books she
had sent to her from America was called The poor
Man's James Bond, which is the same bomb making book
that Dennis Mahon bought for the ATF informant that he
was in love with after she expressed an interest in
bomb making. What a Small World. Huggett also testified that

(01:26:24):
she'd accompanied Bulow to Professor Lombard's office to scout out
the best location to place the bomb. She explained that
Bulow's residence had become unsuitable as a workspace after too
many of his friends moved in, so she rented a
property under her own name that he could use to
work on his bombs. On the stand, Huggitt explained that

(01:26:46):
she's a political activist. She's a member of the American
ku Klux Klan and the VIT Commando never intended to
endanger any human lives now, for what it's worth not
to give this woman the benefit of the doubt. But
despite the repeated threats to follow up with more violence,
to take up arms, to commit actual acts of violence

(01:27:09):
against human beings, no one was ever actually injured by
a vit commando bomb. They went off in empty offices.
I think she may have been telling the truth. They
were warnings. Huggett told the court that their goal was
to wake people up to the dangers of integration, to

(01:27:30):
send a warning that more violence was inevitable if this creeping,
incremental progressive reform that people were talking about were to
actually happen. She swore the group had no intention of
actually hurting anyone or trying to overthrow the government. By
the end of nineteen eighty one, Mussi Moobolo had been

(01:27:51):
sentenced to fifty two years, though forty two of those
years would run concurrent with other abortions of the sentence,
leaving him with just ten years to act actually serve.
And Fabio Miriello was given nineteen years, but same deal.
It was effectively just five, but Bolo didn't even serve
those ten. He was released without any explanation that I

(01:28:13):
can find, after just four years in nineteen eighty five,
and immediately deported back to Italy. I'm not entirely sure
what became of Muriello, but Myivisser's thesis says he was
known to have reconnected with Monica Huggett after his release,
and the pair both got involved with the South African
branch of the American Neo Nazi religion, the Church of

(01:28:33):
the Creator. As for Eugenio Zopis, the young Italian immigrant
was charged only with the theft of the weapons. He'd
been the one to actually steal them from the South
African Defense Force, and he was also sentenced to five years,
and he appealed that sentence to the court. So the
following year, his lawyer was urging a judge to consider

(01:28:56):
the mitigating factors. He's so young, just twenty three years old,
and he was a brand new immigrant at the time,
and he didn't speak any English. He'd been manipulated by
the much older Fabio Muriello. His lawyer went as far
as to say that Eugenio Zeppas had joined the VIT
Commando entirely by accident, and he had no idea of

(01:29:18):
the true nature of the organization until after he was arrested.
The article about the dismissal of his appeal only lays
out what his attorney said. It's not clear from the
reporting I can find if anyone contradicted those statements in court,
because you might have guessed, but it's not true. I

(01:29:41):
mentioned earlier that the most complete list of names of
those Italian fascists who were arrested in South Africa in
connection to the vict Commando bombings was buried somewhere in
two thousand pages of documents released by the Italian government
related to the Bologna massacre. In August of nineteen eighty,
the same month that the VIT Commando bombing started in

(01:30:03):
South Africa, eighty five people were killed when a bomb
went off inside the Bologna Central train station in Italy.
It is, to some extent kind of a mystery still.
There were a number of trials spanning over a decade,
and several members of an Italian fascist group were convicted,

(01:30:24):
but the group itself never accepted responsibility for the bombing.
It is perhaps in some ways akin to the Oklahoma
City bombing. Legally, we found the guy who did it,
but there are a lot of questions we're never going
to get answers to, and there are a lot of
weird paths you could let your mind go down trying

(01:30:45):
to find them. So without losing my sanity or dragging
you into the incomprehensible depths, Suffice it to say Eugenio's
office was not an innocent, confused young man when he
stole a small arsenal of weapons the vit Commando in
nineteen eighty. In nineteen seventy six, he was one of
fifteen members of an Italian fascist group who armed with

(01:31:08):
clubs and chains, beat a young communist organizer to death
in a small town outside of Rome. And, contrary to
his lawyer's claims that he had by pure coincidence, met
and befriended a fellow Italian right after he moved to
South Africa, only to be manipulated by this new friend
into committee crimes. There is actually evidence that Zoppas had

(01:31:31):
been sent to South Africa specifically to meet with Fabio Mariello.
In the months before Zappas arrived in South Africa, a
member of Italy's Black Order wrote Mariello that he was
sending six members down very soon, with more to follow.
In nineteen eighty four, the newspaper of the Italian Communist

(01:31:52):
Party listed Zappas among the names of seventy six fascist
fugitives believed to have fled the country. Diplomatic records show
the Italian government was requesting his extradition from Paraguay by
nineteen eighty six, and I don't know what happened to
him after that. In what is becoming a constant refrain,

(01:32:21):
I do want to stress that I'm not an expert
in South African history. I'm not a scholar of the
apartheid era. I'm not a historian. Every week I have
to gain some new specialized knowledge to try to give
context to the story I'm trying to tell. And there's
only so much one person can sort out in a
couple of days. So bear with me, because I do

(01:32:42):
want to try to give some context here. This VIIT
commando bombing campaign in nineteen eighty didn't come out of nowhere.
When Monica Hugget testified against the men she'd helped carry
out those attacks, she said their goal had been to
demonstrate that many white South Africans were posed to the
path of gradual concessions being made by the National Party.

(01:33:06):
And I was confused by that. It will be another
fifteen years before apartheid ended, and the National Party loved apartheid.
What is she talking about? Apartheid is inherently violent. It
is a form of violence in and of itself. There
is no peaceful or kind way to run an apartheid state.

(01:33:30):
There is no nonviolent ethno state, and that's obvious, but
the kinds of violence and the visibility of that violence
change from year to year. I don't mean to say
that things like the forced removal of Black Africans from
their homes and their lands are not violence. It is

(01:33:52):
every action carried out in service of implementing and maintaining
apartheid was an act of violence. But some years were
bloodier than others, and while the political movement to end
apartheid ebbed and flowed, two people have always and will
always resist injustice. But in nineteen eighty, when those bombs

(01:34:18):
went off, there was a growing awareness on all sides
of the issue that something was going to have to change.
Whether they liked it or not. The country was about
to experience some of the most violent years of apartheid.
For those committed to maintaining the status quo and holding

(01:34:38):
on to political power, that would mean making some targeted
compromises and more importantly, doubling down on state repression. The
Soeto Uprising had made apartheid a pr problem. I think
for most people, dead school children is more than a

(01:35:00):
PR problem, but for the National Party, that's what it was.
In nineteen seventy six, thousands of students walked out of
class in protest of a nineteen seventy four law requiring
the use of Afrikaans in school. Students sang and held
signs as they marched, and they planned to rally at
a nearby stadium. Words spread to other nearby schools and

(01:35:23):
students poured out into the streets to join the march,
and when they heard the police had blocked their intended route,
one of the march organizers urged calm, telling the crowd,
brothers and sisters, I appeal to you, keep calm and cool.
We have just received a report that the police are coming.

(01:35:44):
Don't taunt them, don't do anything to them. Be cool
and calm. We are not fighting. And when they encountered
the police for the first time, for a moment it
seemed cooler heads had prevailed on all sides, but the
police weren't actually retreating. They were waiting for reinforcements, and

(01:36:09):
just half an hour later, the first tear gas canister
was fired into the crowd of children, and some of
them ran, but most of them stayed, facing the police. Unmoving.
According to several accounts I found, the children were singing

(01:36:31):
when the first shot was fired. The police opened fire
with live rounds on the crowd of children. One of
the first children to die that day was a twelve
year old boy named Hector Peterson. The photo of his tiny,

(01:36:53):
limp body in the arms of an older boy, with
Hector's sister running beside him, was seen around the world.
Black South African photojournalists Sam and Zeema had captured the
true face of apartheid, and people were horrified. The violence

(01:37:14):
spread like wildfire, and the worst of it lasted for
three days. There was an explosion of internal resistance. White
university students marched against the killings, Black workers went on strike.
Riots broke out in black townships all over the country.
Buildings burned, and when the dust had settled, hundreds were dead.

(01:37:40):
The small reforms introduced in the late seventies had nothing
to do with the National Party softening its stance on apartheid,
but the apartheid regime saw some advantage to reducing international
criticism and disrupting black resistance. Amidst these tepid reforms, divisions

(01:38:01):
grew some white South Africans who had seen those pictures
of children's corpses now saw apartheid as what it was,
a true evil. Others were repulsed by the violence, but
seemed satisfied with the gestures toward reform. People like Monica Huggett,

(01:38:22):
were worried that these promised reforms, things like repealing the
ban on interracial relationships, would set the country on a
road to hell. In her testimony the trial for Mariello
and Bolo, she laid the blame on her Italian accomplices,
but made no apologies for her own motivation, saying, on
the stand, I was opposed to integration. I still am.

(01:38:48):
The week Mariello and Bulo were convicted, American newspapers carried
a four sentence wire story about the trial, noting that
it was South Africa's first ever prosecution of white terrorists.
How South Africa was entering its bloodiest decade of political violence.
Someone had finally gone to jail for pro apartheid terror

(01:39:09):
But it's significant that they were only willing to prosecute
those Italian men. There's hardly any mention at all of
the South African woman who served as the point of
contact for these foreign terrorists. Many of the stories in
South African outlets stress heavily that the group was foreign
in origin, that its members were foreigners, that they didn't

(01:39:30):
even speak Afrikaans, that they had no connection to any
South African political organizations. But that assertion is complicated a
little bit by an anecdote from ray Hill's memoirs. On
the first day of the trial, as Below and Miriello
entered the courtroom, a man in the gallery stood and
applauded for them. That man, Pete Rudolph was a former

(01:39:55):
police officer, and at the time of the trial in
nineteen eighty one, he was a sitting member of the
Pretoria City Council and a member of the far right
party HNP. He would eventually leave party politics behind and
form a white supremacist group called the Order Bora Folk
or the Order of the Boer People. He borrowed the

(01:40:20):
name from the plot of the Turner Diaries. After Miriello
and Bolo were convicted, the VIC Commando ceased to exist.
It was just one of countless short lived right wing
organizations in a shifting political landscape. Groups formed and splintered
and disappeared all the time. Sometimes there was even doubt

(01:40:42):
about the actual existence of some group claiming credit for
one attack or another, and a lot of groups had
significantly overlapping membership. But the end of the VIC Commando
was not the end of Monica Hugget's involvement in pro
apartheid violence, not by a long shot. Now, in my
timeline of events, I lose track of Monica after nineteen

(01:41:05):
eighty one. I can't say what she was up to
for most of the eighties, but by the time I
find her again in the record, she's a high ranking
member of the Africaner nationalist neo Nazi organization called the
Africaner verstansbawaging the Africaner Resistance Movement in English or just
AWB for short. It was founded in nineteen seventy three

(01:41:30):
by Eugene terre Blanche, and the AWB wasn't happy with apartheid. No,
it wouldn't do at all. Apartheid was too left wing,
it was too liberal, and there was too much risk
to bore identity for them to be living in proximity

(01:41:50):
to black Africans even under apartheid conditions. They're secessionists and
they believe the only solution to the problem is a
pure white ethno State, a folk shop or the white
South African. It's a little bit baffling that she was
able to resume her activities retaining a fairly high level

(01:42:12):
of prestige and responsibility, particularly when it came to her
international contacts after she, you know, turned State's witness against
Maryellow and Bolo. Surely everyone knew she'd sold them out
to save herself, but maybe her colleagues didn't see it
that way. Maybe she was important enough that they were

(01:42:33):
willing to make that sacrifice to keep her on the
outside doing whatever it was she was doing. I had
hope to get through the end of the nineteen eighties
in this episode, but I think we have to leave
it here. In the mid eighties, our Italian mercenaries were
in the wind after serving just a handful of years

(01:42:53):
behind bars. I can't find Monica no matter how hard
I squint at old TV news bus role of South
African Nazi rallies. But I think she's there somewhere. And
next week, before we rejoin Monica in her own story,
we'll pick up in nineteen eighty nine with one of
our German mercenaries, five years before shooting it out with

(01:43:17):
the cops, just days before the nineteen ninety four South
African election, Horst Glens was trying to prevent a different
African nation from holding its first democratic, multi racial elections.
He failed both times, but in nineteen eighty nine, Clem's
in his South African Nazi terror Celle took two lives

(01:43:41):
in a failed attempt to prevent Namibian independence. Weird Little
Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conker. Our

(01:44:03):
executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I almost certainly won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show.
We have our listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

(01:44:26):
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my real guys.

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