Will We Learn the Lesson South Africa is Teaching Us?

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter Podcast. My name is John Harris. We are going to talk about not

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Southern Baptist stuff today. I hope that's okay with you all. Put it in the comments. If it's not okay with you, you tell me it's not okay because I, look,

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I understand it's important. The SBC convention's coming up next week. A lot of you in the audience are Southern Baptist.

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I've never done a poll. I just know that there are a lot of people who are. And there's things, there's questions I've gotten, things that some of you want to pick my brain about.

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I'm not perfect. I don't even understand quite every issue. There's so many of them coming at me so fast. I'm trying to prioritize what's important, what's not.

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But here's the thing. For every hour that I spend, probably on the podcast, there's like nine hours spent talking to people in the

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Southern Baptist convention. In political positions, strategizing about things.

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There's just so much. So I had to take a break today and I hope that's all right. We're gonna talk about South Africa a little bit.

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And a documentary I watched last night on South Africa. We're gonna talk about another post that was shorter than I made yesterday.

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Things I'm just reflecting on concerning culture. Things that I'll probably have to touch on in the book that I'm writing now.

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And so I wanna try to get them straight in my head. And as I'm going through that process, I'll just include you guys, you all, as they say in the

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South, in that if that's fine with you. So let's talk about South Africa. I think there's some lessons to be learned from South Africa.

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What the situation that's going on right now in South Africa with white farmers being killed, murders.

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Some people have called it a genocide. If it's not a genocide, it's a kind of a proto genocide.

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That's what I call it. And I wanna talk about how this came about and why it's being ignored.

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What led to it? What are the lessons from what's happening in South Africa that we can learn here in the

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United States? Because I see parallels all over the place. And it's one of these things that shows me what we're dealing with is an iteration of Marxism.

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Critical race theory is an iteration of Marxism. Yeah, are there things that are different in the way that it developed this iteration of Marxism in the

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United States? Yeah, okay. Interest convergence is something unique a little more.

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Some of the ways that they go about viewing things is different, but it is... If you fast forwarded 100 years and someone was writing a history of the

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United States or just a history of Marxism, if they're just including critical race theory, it's going to be viewed as a subset, if it's mentioned at all, of cultural

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Marxism or neo -Marxism or something like that. It's not going to be this big nerdy thing that in the moment, as you're close to the situation, people who want to specifically get nerdy about critical race theory read all the sources and here's what this person thinks as opposed to this person thinks.

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It's the telos that matters, the purpose of it. What is it designed to do? It's designed to deconstruct.

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It's designed to rip things apart. It's a tool of destruction and intersectionality, a tool of construction.

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And this has been the plan for a long time. I mean, I'm talking like,

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I could trace it back, which I do in my book, to the French Revolution, not all the features that we have in cultural

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Marxism and in the critical theories of today, but we have this desire to create some kind of an egalitarian society by ripping down structures and institutions that keep us from getting there through the use of some centralized force.

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That's been, it's been the same story that whole entire time. And so the way that Marxism developed in South Africa was also along racial lines and it's very similar.

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It's strikingly similar. It's the same basic thing to what we're facing now.

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And that's what becomes obvious to me. And so I'm gonna read this to you and make comments along the way.

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I should note that I've never been to South Africa. There are, I know a few people who have been and I've talked to people who've lived there.

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I've read some about, actually it was last year, maybe early last year. I had an interest, and I still do actually.

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I wanna get back to that at some point. I had an interest in reading about the Rhodesian army. So I read all this stuff about the

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Rhodesian army and was fascinated by it and didn't know about Rhodesia, learned about it.

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And what happened in Rhodesia, there's some similarities to what's happening in South Africa. And I remember watching a documentary.

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This was about a year ago, I think. On, it was from late 1960s,

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I wanna say, early 1970s, somewhere in there. It was probably 70s, probably early 1970s, about Rhodesia and how racist

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Rhodesia was, how terrible Rhodesia was. And I heard so many talking points in this documentary that sounded like they could have been said today in the

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United States or in Great Britain, perhaps, or, I don't know,

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Australia, one of the English -speaking countries that's dealing with this. And I thought, that's remarkable.

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That's just, it's amazing. It's the same feeling I got when I was reading the Chicago Declaration from 1973, and which

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Carl Henry signed, a mainstream evangelical, which all sorts of evangelicals signed. And I looked at it and I thought, this is exactly what we're facing now.

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And history doesn't repeat exactly, but it rhymes. And this is a major parallel.

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It is a major rhyme and it's screaming at us to listen. And the question is, will we?

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Will we listen and will we learn? I hope this prompts some of you, maybe, to do some deeper digging into the issue.

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But I wanna read this for you. South Africa is teaching us a lesson.

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Will we learn? Last night, I decided to watch Laura Southern's Farmlands, which is a documentary from 2018 about the ongoing proto -genocide against white

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South Africans, especially farmers. Both the South African government and the media continue to suppress information exposing this reality.

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Perhaps watching the documentary as an American in 2021 hits closer to home than it would had

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I seen it when it first came out. The parallels between what is happening in South Africa and what is happening in the

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United States are striking. Though Southern does not highlight everything that led to the crisis at hand, anyone with a cursory knowledge of South African politics knows that preceding and accompanying much of the current violence has been a campaign to destroy and rewrite

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South African history. Not only are older books on South African history destroyed and replaced with Marxist retellings, but geographic locations have been renamed and monuments to white

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South Africans taken down. And does that sound familiar to anyone? I remember just yesterday,

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I heard Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson monuments in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, are now going to be taken down in 30 days.

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I think because I live in Virginia, it's hitting closer to home because there's been so many things. We literally have a task force, or I think they call it a historical commission, something like that, that has advised the renaming of 20 schools in Virginia that were to either

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Confederates, people that believe in segregation of some kind, or to slave owners.

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So even like Patrick Henry High School is on that list. So I've seen where this is going.

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And in most states, you could probably point to some examples of this kind of thing happening.

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Like the United States, South Africa has a history of racial tension famously manifested in apartheid.

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However, also like the United States, Marxists exploit this fact without giving a full account of what preceded apartheid and what took place after the

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African National Congress took control of the country. Now, I wanna stop right there because I think most reactions from social justice advocates are, they would immediately think that someone who wrote what

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I just wrote, that Marxists are exploiting something like apartheid, they would say, you must be justifying it.

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If you even think someone could be exploiting it, you must be justifying it. And the answer to that is no.

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But because of the way that I view history and my less than optimistic view of humans because of my

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Christianity, just knowing that we are sinful people, I do view history as, it really rarely is, if ever.

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I mean, revelation will tell us if it's black and white, but rarely is history black and white in the sense that there's the good guys and they're all good.

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And then there's the bad guys and they're all bad. Yes, there are some men that are very admirable. That's why we do need some heroes.

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Paul said, follow me as I follow Christ. That's totally legitimate. Memory is important. Setting up monuments is important,

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I think. At least something to invoke an identity, a memory of the past, especially things that are,

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I mean, I think the example in the Old Testament of the bricks or the rocks that were piled high was an example of an event.

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And it was what God had done to give grace to the Jewish people, to the nation of Israel.

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It's important to remember. However, whenever we remember, as the

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Old Testament gives us a history, there are always going to be bad things and there's gonna be good things.

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And Paul knew that. Paul knew the history of his people as bad as some of the things they did were.

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What brought them into captivity? And yet he looks at them and he loves them.

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He would be even willing to be accursed for them. There's a love there. And I think because of the way that Marxists use history in South Africa is a prime example of this.

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They focus on one thing. They focus on a wedge that they can use to separate people groups and to promote strife of some kind, to agitate.

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They promote a situation where they can gain control. They can destroy identity.

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They can try to make people ashamed of their country and ashamed of their family even perhaps by telling a very one -sided story and placing all the blame on a certain particular people group.

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It's a very black and white retelling. And because they are operating out of a secular paradigm, there's no original sin here.

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It's not like people are evil. It's white people are evil or you fill in the blank, whatever class or designation.

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Well, there's so much more I could say about this. I don't wanna wax along about it, but this is happening in Africa, in South Africa.

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It has happened for a long time, just like it's happening here. And in some ways they're further on down the track.

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And I think the lesson is where does that track lead? And that's what we're gonna talk about a little bit.

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So I believe in giving a full account of history as much as you can't teach everything with limited time, but you're not serving, you're not trying to serve a particular political agenda by massaging facts, by leaving certain things out.

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You want paradigms that make sense of all the available facts. That should be the goal, to understand what happened.

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Do we always have a complete understanding? No, because we're not there for everything. We don't see from every angle,

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God does. But we do have, I mean, that's why there's four gospels too, in a way.

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And God uses that. But we do have, from the information we do have, as limited as it is, we can understand, we have access into objective reality.

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We can understand the past. And the attempt should be to reconstruct what happened, what actually took place.

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And then I think a second part of that is, when you are teaching, let's say, break this down into family history.

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When you're teaching family history, this is what your great -grandpa did. This is what your grandpa did. This is what I did. This is who we were, et cetera.

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You're also seeking to impart an identity. You're saying, I'm part of this. This is where I belong. These stories also, in some sense, belong to me.

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And so that identity factor is what the

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Marxists like to destroy. And they wanna build up identity along different lines. A very abstract, kind of, your identity is connected to these abstract principles of some kind.

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Or you just find your identity in the party. That kind of thing. But I digress.

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We need to move on here. So we'll talk about history more and historiography in a future episode.

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But let's talk about South Africa's history. For those of you who don't know the basic gist of South African history, here it is.

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In 1652, the Dutch East Indian Company settled South Africa's western coast while the rest of the country was inhabited by the nomadic

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Koshan people, or Khoisan people. The Dutch maintained primarily peaceful relationships with the

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Khoisan by purchasing land, trading, and even marrying, in some cases, as they expanded into the interior of the region.

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Like the United States, many of the original settlers were indentured servants and lived under economic hardship as they cultivated their new home.

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The Trekboer and the Voortrekkers were frontiersmen who settled north beyond the Dutch colony and are known today as Afrikaners, with their own language and culture.

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And Afrikaans is very similar to Dutch. It's actually, it is basically Dutch that's kind of evolved and changed and morphed in Africa among the people there.

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As the Voortrekkers entered the area, Bantu tribes who lived to their north were at war.

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Shaka, the king of the Zulu tribe, defeated most of the other tribes, but it did not result in stability.

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In 1823, a rebellion resulted in the deaths of between one and two million people, leaving the area mostly completely depopulated.

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So this is the area that's kind of right to the north of where these Voortrekkers are. At war, there's violence, it's depopulated, and then several of the tribes flee to the south toward the

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Voortrekkers. Their sudden arrival created tension and signaled a new, more violent relationship between Dutch settlers and Bantu tribes.

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So here you're now seeing sort of the beginnings of this kind of conflict along racial lines.

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Now, I wanna say this, there's so many parallels here. You think of the frontier of the

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United States, how settlers came, which is not to be confused with immigrants.

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Settlers and immigrants are actually different things, but settlers came and in many cases, found lands that were open.

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You think of the pilgrims, right, coming. You think of even, I was actually just in Savannah, Georgia, and Oglethorpe comes, and he actually makes quick friends with Tamachichi, the chief there.

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And Tamachichi and Oglethorpe were such good friends that Tamachichi was buried.

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He actually wanted to be buried in the cemetery in Savannah with the quote -unquote white people, with the

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English. He even, I believe he went to England and met the queen, but they had really good relationship.

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And so it's very similar to a lot of what happened in the early days with the Dutch coming over, mostly uninhabited, uncultivated land.

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The nomadic people who were there, they cultivated a good relationship with them. Then though, as people start, pioneers, frontiersmen, start going into the interior and there starts to become conflict, resentment sets in.

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And this is what happened. So in 1838,

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Zulu, the Zulu king, Dingane, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, heinously beat

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Voortrek leader Piet Retief and 100 of his men, or Piet Retief, I'm not sure exactly how you pronounce his name either, and 100 of his men in a surprise attack meant or disguised as a friendly gathering.

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They then destroyed his entire camp, including women, children, and Khoisan people who lived with the

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Voortrekers in what became known as the Weenan Massacre. The Union of South Africa then formed in 1910 after the

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British defeated the Dutch farmers, the Boers they call them, Boer just means farmer. Though separation between blacks and whites was a social convention, it eventually became law after the election of the

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National Party in 1948, which banned interracial marriages, racial registration, and relocation of many

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Bantu tribes to tribal homelands. Now, I'm sure there's a lot more that can be said about this.

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I know a little bit about why this came about.

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I don't feel right at this point that I am probably the best person to try to represent those perspectives publicly online.

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I think I'll get there at some point, but that's the story at least, that this is how the racial resentment kind of started, and then when the

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National Party took over, they legalized a lot of the social conventions that were there.

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I will say this, so the line that you would have been given probably during the apartheid era if you had gone to South Africa is this was for protection of some kind.

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Now, I'm not saying that it necessarily was for protection or that, or I shouldn't say that.

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That might've been one of the main motives, I'm not saying it accomplished that goal necessarily, but that was apparently, that was the justification.

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Now, in 1961, fast forward, Nelson Mandela, a member of the

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South African Communist Party helped found the Spear of the Nation, which was a forerunner to today's

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African National Congress. They announced their existence with 57 bombings in one day.

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As Mandela served his 27 -year prison sentence, the anti -apartheid movement became more radical as cruel and unusual methods like necklacing became popular to punish even black people who were thought to be collaborating with the government.

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Necklacing is, I didn't know what that was probably about a year, year and a half ago. I think

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I had heard about it once, I never looked it up, and I'm almost sorry I did. It's unfathomable, it's just so cruel and unusual, and I'm not even gonna describe it here, but there's some sick people out there.

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Just to remind you, there's some really sick people out there. In the 1970s and 80s, internal and external pressure caused instability in the country.

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Eventually, the National Party negotiated with the African National Congress to end apartheid, and that was in 1991.

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And I remember, odd that I remember, I think it was a movie.

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Now, I wasn't probably remembering things from 91, so I would have seen this later. I was a kid, though.

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I just remember on TV, there was, I think, a lethal weapon movie, and it was some South African thing, and they made out the

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National Party members were Nazis. I vaguely remember this from when

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I was young. So this would have been right when, I guess, they probably made the movie right when this was a debated topic or right after apartheid ended.

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But anyway, in 1994, Mandela became president. In 1996, the government legalized abortion and adopted a new constitution emphasizing positive rights, such as the right to education and a universal basic income.

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Now, this is super important. This is one of the big differences between a place like South Africa and a place like the

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United States, at least it used to be. There is no right to healthcare or to universal basic income or having a car or having really anything, education, at least our founding, the founding principles weren't that.

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Founding principles were rights were actually negative rights. So you have a right to defend yourself.

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You have a right to worship, to speak freely, to freedom of conscience. These are the kinds of things that are negative rights.

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So they're things that the government cannot infringe upon. These are responsibilities. They're actually tethered to that.

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Responsibilities you have before God to do certain things. And I did an episode on the founding fathers' rights and responsibilities.

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You can go check it out or talk about this more. In South Africa though, and in many other socialist countries, it's positive rights.

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It's the government. It's not telling the government what they can't do, what they can't infringe upon. It's telling the government what they need to do to help you.

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It's things that you are owed from the government. So this is a classic hallmark, but this is one of the fundamental things that changed.

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In 2000, firearm ownership was restricted. And now it's severely restricted from what

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I understand. It's very hard to get a firearm, at least to be qualified to have one, et cetera. In 2003, the broad -based

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Black Economic Empowerment Act attempted to compensate black people for being victims during a history of systemic racism by regulating private hiring policies.

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The South African preferential procurement regulations further regulate government industries and government contracts by adjusting for racial victimhood.

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Same -sex marriage became legal in 2006. So you can see the road.

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You can see where it's traveling and the direction. And it's very similar to what's happening in the

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United States. And I'll talk more about this, but the broad -based

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Black Economic Empowerment Act is interesting because up until recently, I think they've changed it somewhat, not for the better necessarily, but maybe for the better in some ways.

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But it used to be that a lot of white business owners in South Africa would have to get someone who was black to own 51 % of their business or whatever, and they would pay them.

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This was a commonly done thing because it would enable them to have contracts with the government,

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I guess, or other businesses, or even just to, I guess, be in business. And I'm not sure all the particulars of that, but it's changed from what

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I understand. I think it changed in 2017, and now it's solely based on this kind of this point system.

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So think intersectionality a little bit here, but your businesses will get certain points for hiring at certain positions in their company, hiring minorities, hiring black people, and that will qualify them for things.

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And so we'll talk a little more later about an example of this and where it's been very negative, but it has been very bad for their economy.

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And this is all under the guise of some kind of reparations for systemic racism, by the way.

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This is adjusting for some kind of systemic issue that happened in the past, and we're gonna take care of it now by doing this.

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And it's, of course, wreaking havoc. Though the similarities are not exact, the position of the

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Dutch in South Africa bears a striking resemblance to the American situation. Not only did

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European settlers in present -day United States clash with tribal peoples on the frontier, but they also struggled against the

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British, resettled tribal peoples, and experienced civil unrest during times of racial integration.

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Though the political establishments in both countries envisioned peaceful race relations after altering legal policies in order to foster integration, in both countries these dreams have been temporary at best.

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That's true for the United States. That's true for South Africa. The present -day Black Lives Matter movement echoes the policies and attitudes of South African political groups, like the

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African National Congress, Black First, Land First, and the economic freedom fighters who are known for calling for the deaths of white farmers at their rallies.

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The land issue has become a major source of controversy over the past few years, a rising tide of murders of rural white farmers has been accompanied by a political narrative calling for the redistribution of white -owned farms.

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Now, between 2012 and 2016, the attacks on farms increased 72 .9%.

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So there's kind of like this delay. You have the end of apartheid, and I'm not saying you have peace during this whole entire time up until 2012 or 2010, but you have a spike, and it's probably tied to economic factors and other things, realizing that apartheid's ended and we've put in all these procedures that are supposed to bring about equity, and where's all the equity?

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The disparities are worse than ever. That kind of thing is probably what's causing a lot of this.

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So, and I don't mean they're worse than ever necessarily, but they're still bad, is the point. And so,

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I mean, that's remarkable. I mean, it's a four -year period, 73 % spike in crimes.

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These statistics are both undocumented and unreported by the government and news organizations. We Can't Stop the

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Genocide, a group advocating for rural white farmers, reports that there have been 168 ,164 farm attacks and 22 ,786 farm murders since 2010.

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That's why some people call it a genocide. The Blood Sisters believe that 90 % of the increase is connected to resentment caused by racial discrimination and unemployment, which is around 50%.

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Recently, the London Times reported that youth unemployment between the ages of 15 and 24 is at 75%.

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While 16 .3 million people are on social grants, only 3 .1 million serve as an income tax base.

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Now, these problems are worse than the problems in the United States as far as these things but we're going in that direction, is the point that I'm trying to make here.

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And if we enact the policies that social justice advocates want, if we have the universal basic income, yeah,

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South Africa is trying that. If we try the reparations thing, yeah, South Africa is trying that and redistribution.

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We're gonna come up with the same kind of thing. And then the areas in the United States where this has been tried on the local level more, think of Portland, think of San Francisco.

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I encourage people, go to those areas, check them out, see what kind of violence is there.

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I was just in Portland recently. An area where there were food trucks had to have concrete wall around it with barbed wire on top.

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That was like 15 feet high. It was incredibly, or 10 feet at least, it was high.

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This is unheard of where I live. There's people in the area where I live currently and I haven't always lived here and it's actually not right where I live.

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I know people that are probably 15 miles away who leave their keys in their car.

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I wouldn't do that right where I live right here. But the point is that I'm not worried about break -ins right this second where I live.

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We don't have those policies. And I'm not saying policies are the only factor involved in this, but the places that have tried to raise minimum wage to exorbitant highs have seen horrible economic results.

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And it's also had a moral result. Places become, and these are the places they're most on board with environmentalism and yet they're the trashiest places in the country, some of them.

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Comparing apples with apples is important as much as we possibly can to see what the results of these policies are.

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And we've done the experiments and we can see one of them in South Africa and it's not working well. All of the farm massacres

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Southern discovered included what felt like twisted elements resulting from a depraved mind.

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The drowning of a 12 -year -old in boiling hot water. An elderly man ambushed and shot execution style in the head six times in his own home.

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And an elderly woman strangled and her eyes gouged out with a kitchen fork are just a few of the incidents.

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Unfortunately, the government offers little assistance and rural farmers have to coordinate their own protection.

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One interviewee told Southern that when white South Africans did hold a mass protest against farm murders on Black Monday, the minister of defense threatened a civil war if it were ever done again.

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So you have a people group that are being killed, surprise attacks, sneak attacks in their own homes.

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They try to protest it. They try to get help from the government. The government withdraws help. I know someone very close to me who lived in South Africa for a while.

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He said, it's a joke to call the police in most areas. It's just a joke. They might show up an hour later and they don't do anything.

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It's just someone who told me crime is so bad. I mean, he had to chase. He wasn't even there that long. He was there on short -term missions.

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He had to chase people out of a home he was watching because they do that. If you go on vacation, if you leave, someone needs to be there to watch your home, even if it's got walls.

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And anyway, I mean, I know it's a big country. There's different places. I think this was in Johannesburg or around there, but anyway, this is the situation.

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And then if you protest this peacefully, the government says, hey, we're gonna start a civil war if you do that again, a race war.

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It's incredibly scary. Though the rise in anti -white violent crime is most potent in rural areas, the situation does not only impact rural farmers.

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Southern also interviewed a paintball shop outside of Port Elizabeth that experienced over 100 break -ins some of which were violent in a 10 -year period forcing the shop to close.

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A lot of people there buy paintballs because they can't get a gun because guns are so regulated. So they buy a paintball gun to try to protect themselves.

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And even they have to close down the shop. Unfortunately, the most charitable reading that can be made by ANC party officials is that they are unconcerned about the plight of white farmers, which mainly is a creation of their own making.

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Thabo Mkwena, a member of the ANC's Provincial Executive Committee characterized the policy of the government forcibly taking land from white farmers without compensation as a good objective.

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Even without forced resettlement, the black economic empowerment policy has led to the destruction of many farms as utility companies forced to lay off most of their white workers are unable to respond to drought conditions.

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And they had to reduce their white workers down to 8%, less than 10%.

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And it's just created havoc. You can't even handle a drought. Southern also interviewed lower class whites living in squatter camps, who were denied jobs and healthcare because of the color of their skin.

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And these conditions exist under the guidance of the ANC, who compared to other organizations are, get this, the moderates.

33:56

Southern interviewed the deputy president of the Black First Land First organization, who told her that because black people's lived experience had not improved since the ending of apartheid, her organization aimed to put the land and economy back in the hands of black

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South Africans. It should be noted she said this even as her country's government is overwhelmingly controlled by parties that claim to be affiliated and promoting black interests.

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Yet this political situation has somehow been unable to obtain freedom for the black majority.

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Because white people have stolen black people's land, as the story goes, it is up to black

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South Africans to go to war at farms and take everything that white people own. This is what the

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Black First Land First organization believes not much different than Black Lives Matter.

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Maybe some of their, I mean, Black Lives Matter has some radical views. They have some radical views. They might be a little farther down the radical road, but what's to keep

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Black Lives Matter from going there if they get their demands met. Such ultimatums are so absolute that white

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South Africans are left without any ability to negotiate. Some have left the country of their birth, but that costs around the equivalent of $300 ,000.

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Others, like the Sudlanders, are preparing for the possibility of a civil war along racial lines.

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One exclusively white community called Oriana is an attempt to maintain white

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South African culture and tradition. While they do enjoy an almost non -existent crime rate, their own currency and security, they only have a little over 5 ,000 people.

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None of these solutions are desirable for most white South African farmers who simply want to work their land and enjoy the fruit of their labors without interference.

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As people and organizations in the United States wrestle with questions of critical race theory, intersectionality, and all that comes from them, including deconstructing history and considering reparations,

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I hope they will remember what is happening in South Africa. They are farther down the road of a similar path, and it is one leading to the destruction of their country, not only economically, but also morally.

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Last summer, as cities burned and rioters threatened to take their path of destruction to the suburbs in order to supposedly fight against racial injustice, no one aware of the situation plaguing

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South Africa was confused. They had seen it before. They understood the

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Marxist thinking behind it. As neighborhoods form watch groups, funding is cut for police, and children are short -circuited by a simplified retelling of history to hate their family and country instead of love them.

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Will we learn their lesson? And you can go to the info section if you want a link to that particular piece.

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And I think I've actually gone long enough. I was gonna read another short piece that I wrote, but I think

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I'm gonna save that. I will also link to the documentary that Laura Southern made, which

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I'm grateful for, called Farmlands. I wish I had seen it sooner, but it doesn't give you necessarily everything, but it certainly shows you a lot of what

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I just talked about. And you can associate images with what

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I'm referring to. Ultimately, the issues plaguing South Africa and the issues now that are plaguing the

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United States at their core are moral issues. It is the justified hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge against a particular people group by another people group.

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And this can happen, doesn't really matter what shade of skin someone is, this can happen along any line.

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Anyone is capable of this because we have sin in our heart. And that is the message of Christianity, that there's sin in people's hearts.

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That's the first part of the message of Christianity. The real message of Christianity, the most important part of it is that obviously

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Christ, Jesus came to change our hearts, to bring us back into a relationship with God if we repent and trust him for forgiveness of those sins that we have committed as a result of our evil, wicked hearts.

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And that's the only worldview and it's the only religion that makes sense of the situation going on in South Africa.

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I think that's the shocking thing for me, that there are people in these rural areas who are being attacked randomly sometimes in the middle of the day by, in the most brutal and grotesque ways possible.

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Yeah, they're being robbed, but there's more than just robbery. There's more than just, you know, people don't blame a thief when he wants to steal bread, right?

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In general, people understand that. They don't expect that someone comes in and steals from them, and also their grandmother is hanging in the living room and her eyes are poked out because of utensils taken from the kitchen.

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These are the kinds of things that are happening and there's no conscience. There's no remorse.

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There's one of the stories that Laura Southern told about this elderly man who was murdered and they eventually caught the guy years later, let him go.

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There was no justice really done. And this particular individual showed no remorse for what he had done.

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He probably did it, those kinds of things multiple times. Who knows? And it's a hardened heart, hardened to sin.

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This is what post -Christianity also is gonna look like. This is a return to paganism and all bets are off.

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The reason that Marxists right now in the United States and in South Africa want to make race the big thing, that racism fracture the society along the lines of racism, it's because it's the narrative that works the best in that particular situation.

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If it worked better to make class the defining thing or some other external factor, they would do that.

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And then they do do that. And in the past, their most successful projects have been usually along the lines of class.

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But right now, they're having the most success in this way. And it is an attempt to show, to demonstrate that there's some kind of innate fundamental wickedness in certain civilizations, white,

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Western, Christian, et cetera, civilizations that justifies completely destroying, eradicating and stealing from them.

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That's the purpose of the narrative. And so compared to everything that they're doing, it's all justified.

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Everything is justified because in comparison to racism, it's not as bad.

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And in fact, it's not bad because it's anti -racism. If you wanna know where the work of anti -racism is going, where it leads logically, look to South Africa.

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Yeah, Kendi's not going out there and killing people. Kendi just thinks we should discriminate. He says that. We should discriminate because of past discrimination.

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So we should discriminate now. This is the logical conclusion of that.

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If there was violence committed against black people in the past, there should be violence committed against white people in the present.

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That's how that logic would go, wouldn't it? According to Kendi, I don't know what would prevent them from going there. That's what we have to put a stop to.

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That's what we have to stand up and say. We have a morality. And where do you justify your morality?

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How come, you know, one of the things that shocks people, and I tend to shock people sometimes,

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I guess, is I used to ask this sometimes on college campuses when I was doing evangelistic ministry, when someone would say, you know, the

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Bible supports slavery and racism and hatred against women and killing homosexuals and whatever they brought up.

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Those are the people that burn the witches. Those are the people that did the crusades. Every problem with history, the

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Holocaust, it's always, it's gotta somehow root back to it's Christianity somehow. And Christians are people.

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Christians, people who call themselves Christians, sometimes they're not even Christians, but Christians can do bad things that can happen.

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But in general, people that have a standard, this comes from God, and they believe in that standard and seek to live by that standard, in general, they're going to have a better society than someone who doesn't, and a society not built around those things and the truths of God's word.

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You can even see the difference between like a tribal -based society and a family -based society. It's one of the geniuses of the great things of Western civilization, is that the energy that men naturally have, we all have the energy, we all wanna go, the dominion mandate, right, is one of the things that God has not only given us, but it's something that we're kind of designed to do.

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In fact, you even see this today with people who are not doing anything productive, they'll play video games, they're out dominating empires and building castles in a fantasy world, but I digress.

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That dominion mandate is meant, it's meant to find its fulfillment in the raising of families.

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And in raising families, traditions and habits are formed, architectures put up, all these kinds of things happen.

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That's civilization. That's culture. And that's what creates civilization.

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What's happening now is what Romans 1 warned about.

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The fundamentals of civilization are breaking down. The idea that families are important and should be protected, the idea that marriage is important and should be protected, the normalization of deviancies, this is a complete breakdown.

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It's not just postmodern deconstruction. It's been there for thousands of years.

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It's half God really said. That's what we're fighting. Paul talked about it in Romans 1, but you can go back to the very beginning.

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When the devil tempted Eve, what did the devil want to communicate to her?

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You shall be like God, knowing good and evil. It was a fantasy world that didn't exist that he sold to her.

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It had some partial truths in it. And some of the things that the

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Marxists are putting out there, some of the dreams that they have, some of them sound pretty good at face value, some of the things they wanna bring about.

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But it's a fantasy world. It does not take into account the real world that we live in, the institutions

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God has set up, the reality of sin now. It seeks to remake what

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God has already made. And because we live in his world, it's not gonna work. And it's not working in South Africa.

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And it's not working here. And I just hope we learned the lesson. I hope that was somewhat helpful.

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Hopefully a break that many of you needed from SBC politics and stuff like that, but sobering nonetheless.

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I hope you go watch that documentary, When You Get a Chance, Laura Southern, Farmlands. And God bless.