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Welcome to another edition of the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We have a special guest with us today, Dr. Peter Hammond. And he's coming from a long way. He's not in the United States as you can probably tell from his accent.
You can go to FrontlineMissionSA .org and find out more about him and the books he's written, but he's with Frontline Fellowship and he has some amazing stories. I've read some of them, heard some of them, and we're going to talk a little bit about the parallels that maybe he sees between what's happened in South Africa, maybe to some extent Rhodesia where he grew up, and then what's happening in the United States because some of the same ideas taking down, you know, monuments to people, the critical race theory stuff, and the list goes on, the LGBT agenda, etc. They've taken deeper roots in South Africa in some ways.
And so Dr. Peter Hammond, thank you so much for being willing to come on and explain this to American Christians. Thank you, Jonathan.
Good to be with you. It's a real privilege, honor to be with you and your country's much in our prayers right now.
Yes, we are, you know, I'm recording this on the day that Joe Biden is going to take the oath of office in Washington, most heavily guarded inauguration in the history of this country, and we're seeing just all kinds of things.
The vilification of political enemies to an extent I've never seen, shutting down a free speech, double standard on violence. It can be committed by the left. That's fine. That's justice. But if it's by the right, it's wrong.
We have the corporations and the government in bed together to sanction conservatives. And I just wanted to hear from you because I know that in South Africa, some of these same things have been going on for a long time.
So if you wouldn't mind, you can take as long as you want, maybe walk us through kind of the history in South Africa of some of these ideas and how they played out, how Marxism, we'll just call it what it is, has affected the country.
And then how have you and other Christians reacted to it?
Yes, I'm born in Africa, raised my whole life. I'm turning 61 tomorrow. So I've been African my whole life. I've lived through three revolutions and I've been involved in eight different wars, most as a missionary to the persecuted church, and I was raised in a real paradise, Rhodesia, and Rhodesia is today communist Zimbabwe.
And that was quite traumatic because Rhodesia really was a paradise. I mean, I was brought up in a country that had such high standards of everything. It had the highest standards of education and literacy in the whole continent of Africa.
The agriculture was second only to South Africa in the continent of Africa. Rhodesia was a tremendous paradise. Just to give you an idea that as a youngster, I was able to walk everywhere, actually. Now, we're in a time of war.
Our country was at war. My brother was in the army fighting on the border and yet I could disappear as a 12-year-old all day, for example, on a sudden walk out to Kami ruins, which is 14 miles out of town and back.
I'd take my hat and my bush knife and my water bottle. My parents didn't know where I was going, but you could do this. And I would see outside of town, not in a game reserve, just outside city limits, wildebeest, buffalo, zebra, giraffe, all kinds of wildlife.
And I could walk there and walk back. And my parents didn't even know where I'd been, but as long as you're home by the time the sun set, and I was probably safer in Rhodesia during time of war than we are in peacetime now in either your country or mine, just in terms of normal crime, but we were a country at war.
And when our school buses went on school outings, we went on roads endangered by landmines and there could be ambushes and schoolteachers carried machine guns and you would see mothers in the shops with machine guns slung over the shoulder or revolver on the hip.
And that didn't look unusual, pushing a baby carriage and there would be all over town. There'd be weapons. And on the farm, you'd be taught you don't turn on the light without closing the curtains. You don't open the door without switching off the light.
You never frame yourself against the light because the danger of terrorists who could take a shot at you. And I knew this even at age six, visiting my uncle's home and going to the farm and going with him on a hunting expedition, things like this.
And so I must say just as a youngster, I experienced the old Africa when we were still free and we were fighting communism and Rhodesia won spectacularly. In fact, our army has never beaten. So our Prime Minister Ian Smith, who fought all six years of the Second World War in the Royal Air Force, Royal Rhodesian Air Force, and he was shot down twice, including behind enemy lines, spent five months behind the lines in Italy, escaping enemy patrols involved with the resistance.
He is not your average Prime Minister, head of country. And he had fought in North Africa and all of that as well. So he said, never beaten by enemies. We were betrayed by our friends.
And that's the title of his book, The Great Betrayal,.
I believe. The Great Betrayal, great book, great man. I had the privilege of meeting Ian Smith as a youngster at age 14. I was in Rhodesia at the Bulaware Club. My father's running the Bulaware Club and I heard the Prime Minister's coming today.
So I'm waiting outside to see a real-life head of state. And you know, I'm expecting something exciting. And down the road comes a beat-up old Peugeot 404, about 10-year-old vehicle, and out steps the Prime Minister.
No bodyguard, no aide-de-camp, no chauffeur, not a policeman in sight, look up and down the road. We're in a time of war. He's meant to be the most hated man in Africa. No bodyguard whatsoever. He strokes my cat who's sitting on the wall, smiles at me, walks at the Bulaware Club.
I'm looking around thinking, where's the entourage? And, but that's the kind of man he was. Well, I then met him multiple times in the last 20 years of his life. He would call for me to have tea, lunch, supper.
I interviewed him on radio and I got to talk to Ian Smith quite a bit over the years. And it was extraordinary because speaking to him, he explained about the betrayal and the role of Henry Kissinger, for example, US Secretary of State, who sat him down, eyeball to eyeball, very engaging, trustworthy man.
He earned, you know, Ian Smith grew to trust him and thought Henry Kissinger really wanted what was best for Rhodesia and he's a man he could trust. So he was obviously a real slick communicator and basically he has convinced, he said, and I heard Henry Kissinger say this on TV, looking straight at the camera saying to Rhodesians, the United States government will guarantee the rule of law in Rhodesia.
You have nothing to fear from one man, one vote. We will guarantee your farms, your property will be safe. The rule of law will be safe. You'll be as safe as you were before. The United States of America guarantees it.
And if any of you want to move, which you shouldn't have to, but if you want to, we will, the United States of America will pay for your relocation and to set you up in a farm of equal living standards anywhere you want in the world.
And they promised us, well, of course, they never delivered on what they promised. And you can see over 5 ,000 farms that were owned by white commercial farmers being confiscated without any compensation and people made destitute and of course, forget the rule of law, people being tortured, murdered.
So Henry Kissinger was one of the friends who betrayed us. There were others.
Yeah, one of the fears that is going on right now in the United States is that the political party who is now gaining power wants revenge, wants reparations. They want to blame white people in general, but specifically white people who think that the election was rigged or that Donald Trump, you know, really won that, you know, they're Trump supporters.
Why would anyone think the election was rigged? I know, right?
But you know, this politics of revenge is somewhat new in a sense. I mean, there's always been, you know, bitter political parties, but you know, at the end of the day, they're Americans. Well, that's not the case anymore.
And I do see a parallel and I think many Americans think or feel like they grew up in a different country than the one that they're about to experience. And of course, you can relate to that. I think, you know, do you feel sometimes like, it sounds like you do, that you grew up in a different world, in a different place, you know, how do you process that as a Christian, that sense of loss?
It's true now, not only in the country I was raised in, Rhodesia is now communist Zimbabwe, the country I fought for in the South African army, Southwest Africa is now Namibia, and South Africa, which is my home, where my children have all been born, my grandchildren, is now run by Marxist dictators who we defeated in battle and who never won a battle.
And again, we were betrayed, in this case, by our own leaders were involved in the betrayal in South Africa and the vindictiveness of the other side. They're not satisfied with merely stealing everything.
And they're not satisfied with the fact that they've lied, stolen, murdered, backstabbed, broken every law, broken the Constitution, purging themselves. And of course, none of that matters because remember, the end justifies the means, because if you are an agnostic, an atheist, or Marxist, and you don't believe in God, and you don't believe in heaven or hell, there's no day of judgment and you came from nothing and you're going nowhere and life is meaningless, and there's no day of judgment, there's no eternal absolutes, there's no standards, there's no 10 commands.
So lying, stealing, cheating, murdering is fine, if it's for the greater good. And so that's why you could get so many tens of thousands of people. Let's face it, the steal was not done by just one or two people, or one computer programmer.
There were tens of thousands of people complicit in lying, stealing, cheating on every level of getting the dead voting, to stacking ballot boxes, to trashing others. And these things have been happening for years, but never on such an industrial level as we saw last year.
Now, these kind of thefts, I've seen it, of course, they did that in Zimbabwe, they did it in Namibia, they did it in South Africa. And so it's not like there's any conscience problems on the part of the revolutionaries, because the revolutionaries are concerned that, look, the end justifies the means, the revolution is for the highest good, and satisfied with winning.
They're not satisfied with getting the power, what they want is vengeance. And the malice is behind it. And I think to be able to understand this, I'm sure you've read some of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a Russian captain in artillery in the Red Army in the Second World War, and he ended up spending 14 years in a Soviet gulag, he gave the word gulag to the world, over being sentenced to a labor camp for saying something considered disloyal to the leader, in a private correspondence, mind you, Uncle Joe Stalin.
I mean, how dare he think that he wasn't perfect? So he experienced, as somebody who was a loyal Red Army officer, fighting in the Red Army in the Second World War, he experienced some of this vindictiveness.
And Solzhenitsyn later wrote, and bear in mind, he's the greatest Russian author of the 20th century, Nobel Literature Award winner, Gulag Archipelago Cancer Award, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and many more.
He said, the world has never known a godlessness as organized, as malicious, as that of Marxism. He says, within the philosophical ambit of Marxism, its economic and political pretensions are mere side issues.
The central pivot, the heart and soul of Marxism is hostility to God, hatred to God. And in fact, that's the only way you can really understand when you get down to it, this is why they are so pathologically pro-abortion, pro-perversion, or pro-socialism, or whatever it is, or the foreign aid, or illegal aliens being given a vote, or taking the vote away from people who are patriotic citizens.
Inverting reality, there is a hatred of God. And so either the state will express the wrath of God against sin, or it'll express the wrath of man against God, and against his people, and against his laws.
And so what we're involved in is a world war worldviews, a clash of civilizations. And whereas in the past, you could have wars, and my father was involved in the Eighth Army in the Second World War. And he said, you know, we would sing Christmas carols to one another, Afrika Korps and Eighth Army.
We would help one another's wounded. There would be an impromptu ceasefire at the end of battles, there would be our medics would be attending their wounded and so on. He said, the Afrika Korps were gentlemen, and it was a gentleman's war.
And there's a difference between, there have been wars, harsh wars, where there could still be a bit of humanity, and where you could actually even have respect for the enemy. But you won't get that with the Marxists or the revolutionaries.
There is a hatred that is, it's without any comparison in history. We've never seen anything like, not the barbarians, not the Romans, not the Babylonians, not the Assyrians. Never in history have we seen something like what communism does.
The hatred of communism. Now, I've been working now as a missionary for 38 years helping persecute church. I've worked in 38 countries, helping Christians suffering persecution in communist countries as far afield as Mozambique and Angola and the Congo, Northern Nigeria and Sudan, to behind nine curtain old East Europe days from Albania, Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany.
So I know communism. I know communism from being a missionary and I know it from ministering of the persecuted church and being a prisoner and being tortured and imprisoned as well. And some things I've learned from people I've worked amongst the persecuted church.
They said they were being tortured in Angola in a communist camp and they said to the communist guards, which included Cubans, why don't you just kill us and get it over with? And the response was most enlightening.
It was, oh no, we don't want to kill you and send you to heaven with God. No, we want you to curse Christ and come to hell with us for all eternity. Now that is at the heart of what we're dealing with.
We're dealing with a hatred towards God and Karl Marx said new gods will have to be installed and Vladimir Lenin said we are snatching the earth from the capitalists and we are pulling God down from heaven and we are snatching believers from God.
And you can see in the Soviet Union, there was a malice towards God. For example, they did everything they could to undermine churches. There were 50 ,000 church buildings, congregations, parishes in the old Russian Empire in 1917.
By 1941, there were not even 200 congregations still operational in the whole of the Soviet Union, not 200 out of 50 ,000 left. The rest have been barred, altered, burned, destroyed, dynamited in the case of the largest Christ the Savior Cathedral.
And so that kind of malice. Now, you've noticed though in 2020, the Marxists have found a new way of closing churches. It's not in the name of communism, it's the name of a virus. That's right. And churches are now non-essential.
And so in this last year, 2020, we saw more churches closed over Easter than even Mao Tse Tung and Stalin could close in the heyday of the Cold War in the Soviet Union, Red China and the Warsaw Pact. So just see how things have changed now.
They found a new way of state control, and it's a name of combating a virus. And this is quite clever. So what I found is, yes, one of the first things what the Marxists did when they took over is they had to change the names of everything in Rhodesia.
Salisbury became Arari, Amtali became Mutari, Grelo became Gweru. They just had to change, change, change, change names all over the place. And then the statues had to go. And now why did they have to pull down the statues?
Well, because those monuments remind you of people actually achieved something. And that's a slap in the face of people haven't achieved anything themselves. And people who built the country and actually sacrificed and were noble are an affront to people who want to now raise up new gods.
And so to make way for the idols of Lenin and Stalin and Marx and all the rest of it, they pulled down the old statues. And so that's an important part is taking down statues. You'd be astounded to know that when the Iron Curtain fell in 1991 in Russia when Soviet Union dismantled, they had 28 ,000 statues of Lenin and Marx to dismantle.
28 ,000. I mean, just every little village had their own Marx and Lenin statue. So the idolatry industry is beyond comprehension. But they pulled down the ones of the Czar and whatever else. And of course Rhodesia, Cecil John Rhodes and whatever else they could pull down.
And we've seen it in South Africa. They've got to rename streets. They've got to rename roads and towns and airports and whatever it is. And I think part of the hatred of history is the fact that they don't actually have much achievements themselves.
But it's also to change allegiance. The best way to destroy a people, said George Orwell in his book 1994, is to obliterate the understanding of their own history. And so, for example, if you go to the average library in South Africa today, you will struggle to find any of our great old historical books.
You won't even find something like Livingston's Travels. In fact, we've got copies of them, which were thrown in the trash can. You can go to some of our finest bookshops in this country. I'm talking about secondhand bookshops.
And I remember going to one, Hemingsway's and said, where did you get these books? Well, this is incredible. He said, you would weep. We got a tip that Central Library in Cape Town was throwing out all the old books.
And we came over with our biggest buckies we could of pickup trucks and we load from the dumpsters. They were going to be incinerated or popped and they saved thousands of books, but said we couldn't save them all.
Up at the Fortrecker Monument, which is privately owned in South Africa, it's a heritage place. They've got a library. And again, they told me, the books we've got here, thousands of these priceless books, some of which leather-bound first editions, things like this.
They rescued them from the back of Pretoria Library, where the government was tossing all the old books into the dumpsters to go out and be popped. And they rescued as many as they could with the trucks.
But they had an inside warning that this was going to happen. You will see book burning, book pulping, replacing of library. They take whole shelves and you think, why would you want to get rid of these great historic books?
The Marxists say the first battlefield is the rewriting of history. And so, of course, online they use Wikipedia and they rewrite and distort and twist things. But there's still those people who use the hard copy.
So they'll want to wage war on the school libraries and the universities. And now I've got, for example, at my mission here, this is Livingston House, David Livingston's greatest mission in African history.
I've got a book here that is Livingston's Travels, first edition, and it's got in the front a stamp, University of Tennessee library discarded. And somebody picked it up for $2 on a secondhand bookshop table in America and shipped it to me.
I checked online. Amazon sells the first edition Livingston Travel in that condition for $2 ,000. $2 ,000. It was sold for $2. University of Tennessee threw it out. I've got another one that came from an American university that's a first edition of Livingston, but it was the American edition.
And that was also sent to me just recently. Somebody found discarded. Some college university tossed out the library book. But here we saw it done industry. They take the entire library and throw it all in the big bins, just gone like a dumpster truck.
That's the kind of thing they're going to try and trash your history, rename everything, and it's going to be absolutely important to preserve all your history that you possibly can.
Wow. Wow, that's that's so interesting because it reads like what we're starting to see even Christians talking about diversifying libraries to get rid of white authors to get rid of their perspective.
I hear Christians saying when we talk about persecution, some of them will say, oh, no, that's fine. The church is going to do better under persecution, which obviously you just I think correctly pointed out is not necessarily the case, but there will still be Christians in persecution.
So I want to hear from you a little bit about how you've reacted to all this. I know you said you were tortured at one point, you know, how is the church done? How is how is your mission functioning in this environment?
Oh, and then and then also, can I ask also ask this question? Maybe this is a question I should have asked first. How do you respond to that narrative? Because in South Africa, I'm sure, you know, white people are vilified.
Christians are vilified as the ones who were behind apartheid, etc. So so how do.
You respond to all that? Well, the first thing is you mustn't give them an inch because their whole narrative is to try and bully you. So there's nothing Marxist respect more than strength. There's nothing they despise more than weakness.
And if you give them if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. You give them a finger, they'll take your alarm. You cannot bow to Marxist bullying tactics. And the way that they try to work is to intimidate and to threaten.
And if you show any fear, they will come like vultures, hyenas, like a pack and bullies. Well, bullies love cowardice. And a smell of fear and cowardice just feeds them on. It becomes like a shark feeding frenzy.
So you cannot, cannot. When I saw the BLM riots and these people thinking that by bowing to the mob and brushing their boots or kissing their boots or washing their feet, they couldn't anyway make things better.
I thought they don't understand the Marxist one. But so, for example, well, we fought a long, hard war here. And at the end, we had a negotiated settlement. And I thought we had, of course, I did not support the negotiated settlement with the ANC.
I thought that you should not negotiate with terrorists, but the majority of white South African voters chose that way. I was amongst the minority voted against it. Still, it's my country. So at one point, President Nelson Mandela, who had been arrested and locked up for terrorism, in fact, even pleaded guilty to 156 acts of public violence and terrorism.
And he was trained by the Cubans, including by Che Guevara, no less, in Algeria. He was involved in bombings which killed grandmothers and kids, including the petrol bombing in Joburg station, which incinerated a grandmother in the 80s.
And little girl was scarred for life from the petrol bombing. So Nelson Mandela is no political prisoner. He was in there for violence and being trained as a lawyer and pleading guilty. He knew what that meant.
But anyway, now he's president. And I had marched 30 ,000 people to Parliament in South Africa to protest his policies. He was seeking to legalize abortion, pornography, homosexuality, the whole deal.
So we marched under the banner of Christian voice, constitution must be based upon God's law, back to the Bible and a whole lot of other things, you know, against the secular state, right to life and so on.
So next thing is I am summoned. We marched on Tuesday. I'm summoned on Thursday to come to the president's mansion and I meet Nelson Mandela in person. And the first thing Nelson Mandela said to me is, so Mr. Hammond, what were you doing in the years of struggle?
I said, I was fighting people like you, sir. And he slapped his knee and he laughed and he stood up and he walked over and he shook my hand again and went back to the sofa. And he said, I'm so glad to meet an honest white man because all the whites I've met said they all support me and all opposed apartheid.
I wondered how the National Party stayed in power 44 years if all the whites actually supported me. I said, well, make no mistake, Mr. President, we were not fighting for apartheid. We were fighting against communism and we're fighting against terrorism.
So the president responded, said apartheid was the greatest evil in the history of the world. I said, I cannot agree, Mr. President, that prize must go to your friends and supporters of the communists.
They have left the 20th century with over 160 million corpses, not people killed in war, not foreigners killed in war by foreign armies, but civilians killed by their own government. 69 million killed in Red China by Mao Zedong.
Now he's still silent, so I continued through Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam, Mengistu's Ethiopia, and he just received Mengistu just shortly before that. And I went through all the way, ending up with Fidel Castro's Cuba, and he had just received an honoured Fidel Castro with the biggest award he could give in South Africa and the privilege of speaking to the joint houses of our parliament.
When I finished, Nelson Mandela leans back in his chair and he stares at the ceiling like he's going into a drip down memory lane. He said, when I was a prisoner of the Boers on Robben Island, they would not allow me to wear sunglasses.
Now that's an interesting comment because we've got a picture of Nelson Mandela leaning on his shovel in his vegetable garden on Robben Island wearing sunglasses and that's a famous picture. It's a big, huge picture.
It's at the Robben Island Museum and so on. So obviously he was given sunglasses at some stage, but maybe initially he wasn't. Anyway, I said, Mr. President, my eyes are also very sensitive and I can appreciate how unpleasant and uncomfortable it must have been, but I'm sure you'll agree that hardly compares with the atrocities documented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago.
And he came out with, I'm surprised, there was a woman with us, I'm surprised you're here speaking out against women's right to have an abortion. Why are you against the right to choose? I said, Mr. President, you are questioning the Christianity of people who legalized apartheid 40 years ago.
It won't be 40 years from now, people question your humanity for legalizing abortion because you have replaced discrimination on the basis of race with discrimination on the basis of age. And this is not merely placing babies in a separate voters role and restricting which areas they live in or which home pool they can use.
This is taking away their right to life. The worst of apartheid is that which separates a mother from her unborn baby and the baby from its life support at its most crucial stage in development. So we had this ongoing back and forth, but I never gave an inch in the one hour.
And at the end, Nelson Mandela stood up and said, you may now take your photographs. Now, I really didn't mean to be rude, but I did not cross my mind about camera photographs. I mean, it's 1995. What would I do with a picture of Nelson Mandela?
But so I said, no, thank you. His mouth dropped and he looked in shock and maybe we were the first people who met President Mandela who didn't want the pictures taken with him. But anyway, I said, but we would like to pray with you, Mr. President.
And he said, no, no, that's very private. I acted like I had no, put a hand on his shoulder. Dominique Stevenson, who's another minister of me, put his hand on the other shoulder and we prayed. Lord God, may you not give Mr. Mandela any peace until he does what he knows is right until he enacts legislation to protect the most innocent and helpless citizens of all pre-born babies from the violence and injustice of abortion.
Lord, may you lead Nelson Mandela to bow the knee to you and to submit to you and to your Lordship and receive salvation, peace from you. And so we prayed along this line and he must have been steaming, but he kept his composure.
I'm always responsive to the concerns of your constituency. My door is always open to you, Mr. Hammond. And now that was Thursday. We marched on Tuesday. Thursday, we met him. Monday morning, Inland Revenue Service senior investigators began a seven-year audit.
They went back six years. They continued for seven years. So we had a 13-year audit of our senior investigators of our Inland Revenue Service. And you can imagine that that could have put us in jail.
But for the fact that my first pastor and chairman of the board of our mission, Doc Watson, was a chartered accountant and he insisted that we set very strict financial controls. And in fact, we got an accountant who looked and said, wow, you know, this is quite impressive, but I've never seen anything so petty in my life.
You're a small operation. Senior investigators of the Revenue Service normally deal with massive corporations with hundreds of millions in budget. This is ridiculous. But the pettiness of this, they tried to intimidate us financially.
Well, shortly after that, actually it was in the same year, I was in Parliament and I was giving a submission against the attempt to legalize pornography. And after my submission, we were actually sitting in the Parliament and there's about 50 members of the subcommittee there, all parliamentarians, and I was on the other side as one of the people giving submission representing our Christian Action Group.
And one African National Congress member said to me, under question time, have you apologized for what you did in the South African Defence Force? So I said, you want me to apologize for what I did in the South African Defence Force?
He said, yes. So I said, I'm sorry we didn't kill all of you. You were not freedom fighters. You were terrorists. You didn't attack us soldiers. You attacked civilians, black civilians. You laid landmines in dirt roads.
You blew up school buses en route to school. You blew up trucks of farm workers on the way to work or on the way back from work. You kidnap children from school. You rape the girls. You brutalize the boys.
You took them across the border. You brutalized them to be your terrorists. You burned down churches. You planted landmines in schools. You threw hand grenades into the homes of black policemen. You burned alive black town councillors.
Don't call yourself freedom fighters. You people are hypocrites. You never fought for freedom. No freedoms ever come from what you've done. I said, I'm sorry we stopped the war before we eradicated every last one of you communists.
And there was this very awkward silence for a moment and then the chairman said right and he moved on to another point and they never came back there. Now, that's the only way you can deal with Marxists.
You don't give them an inch. And you know, to be honest, I think the communists respect a person who opposes them, but they'll never respect cowardly, craven, groveling. And if people think bowing the knee and raising the fist and mouthing a BLM mantra is going to.
Help, it won't. That's a very good point. And that's mostly what we're seeing here. People who think that the revolution won't bother them as long as they somehow feign support for it. And your approach is not something we've seen modeled very many times, which is why I'm glad we're talking to you.
You had mentioned, you're telling just stories that are just amazing to me, but you had mentioned earlier that you had been tortured.
This wasn't in South Africa, was it? No, no. As a missionary to persecute churches back in 1987, I was smuggling Bibles across Zambia, which was then run as a socialist one-party dictatorship and a Marxist base of terrorist operations from Zambia that were sending terrorists across into every neighboring country, doing hideous things.
And but I was just en route across Zambia to get to Malawi and from Malawi we were deploying into Mozambique to help the persecuted churches there. In fact, we're going to be working with the resistance movement, but we got attacked, grabbed arrested at Kazangulu Ferry in Zambia.
And just as I crossed the border, and that was quite a few weeks of torment and abuse and started with Livingston police cell overnight when, you know, they stripped our clothes from us, they stripped us, threw us into filthy, we're talking about cells covered in human filth from corner to corner.
At the end of the first night, I could count 60 something different mosquito bites on one foot, no need to count the whole body. Angry relief map and of course malaria and all that comes with us. Well in Lusaka, we got blindfolded, we got chained, we got shackled, got driven off to the airstrip, put into a plane and flown to Lusaka and every time tried to raise the blindfold, whacked with rifle butts or prodded with bayonets and smacked around the head.
When we got to Lusaka they took off the blindfold, paraded us barefoot, shackled through the streets, smacking us, prodding us to show, you know, these are our captors. Now, that's just a missionary, but nevertheless as white South African, I mean, that's good enough.
So we were never charged with anything. We were thrown to Lusaka Central Prison, a prison that the British built for 80 people and there were 1 ,200 in there. And the British had one person in a cell.
When Kenneth Goinda, the dictator, had been locked up by the British, he had one cell to himself with linen and bedding and gramophone and desk and access to the library and cooked meals brought in three times a day.
We were 60 to 65 people in a cell, 15 feet by 25 feet, 15 feet by 25 feet, 60 odd people put in that area. No bedding, no, obviously no bunks, no sheets, no pillows, nothing like that. And no real air to breathe, just a hole in the door where the bars were.
There was no ventilation. So it was stiflingly hot, corrugated iron roofs and people died and were dragged out in the mornings. People died while we were in those cells. And in there I was dragged off for interrogation six different times.
Interrogations varied. The heads in buckets of water, heads in buckets of filth and urine, suffocated, brought around, things like that. They would say, look, you've got a foreign passport, we'll have to release you at some stage, but we can't do to you what we do to our own citizens, but we know how to get you.
And of course, then you had to do things in ways that didn't leave bruises and permanent marks and suffocation. What you call waterboarding, would it be nice? I must say, if we'd had water, to ingest water is not as bad as ingesting urine and filth and suffocating in that kind of bucket of filth.
So you can't call it waterboarding, but they had different forms of torture, including that. And in our cell were people who had red hot pokers from the fire put into their bodies. So their bodies are full of pussy sores, but they were black Zambians.
So, you know, no foreigner is going to care about them. So they could do to their own people worse than they did to us, who had a foreign passport, who would at some stage have to be released. So in that condition, I was in cell 11, Lusaka Central Prison, and little did I know that in my cell would be the next government of Zambia, because many of the people there, people who later became leaders in the new Zambia, when they overthrew the Marxists and Zambia became an officially Christian country.
So General Godfrey Meander, for example, was a friend that made, because of us both being locked up in Lusaka Central Prison. I didn't meet him at the time, but President Frederick Choluba had been locked up in Lusaka Central at the same time I was, not that I'm aware of having actually seen him, which is a big prison.
But Frederick Choluba became president and General Godfrey Meander became vice president of Zambia. So I went from being a prohibited immigrant, presidential detainee in Lusaka Central to being a VIP whist in when Zambia became a Christian country in 91.
And the government had me ministering on radio and TV and schools and military bases and things like that. So that was an interesting change. So another prison experience was back in 89. I was captured in Mozambique.
I was working with renowned resistance controlled people seeking to help them take in paramedics, people to help with medical care in the resistance controlled areas. I was flown to Tet where we were interrogated and flown Antonov 126s all the way down to Mapudu.
We were put in Meshava Security Prison and there we were put in solitary confinement, rat infested cells where I would wake up to rats nibbling on me. And we talked about, you know, serious filth, serious degradation.
And the first words from my interrogator was, I am the devil. I said, you're not the devil? And he said, oh, I'm the devil. I'm not only a Marxist and a Leninist, I'm a Stalinist. I was trained in Czechoslovakia.
And my response was, well, I'm a Christian. And the man exploded and he spat out the words, I hate Christians. And that was the beginning of a several hour interrogation you can imagine. So yes, I've experienced what the Marxists can do and their way of thinking.
And there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that never groveling, never begging, always resisting, standing up to them, things work out better for you than the ones who grovel. Because I think there's something in a bully that just revels in when they find a coward shrieking for mercy.
That's when their real malice.
Comes out. All I have to say is, wow, that is such a story. You have been in the thick of it. And I mean, it just lends so much authenticity to everything you've been saying. Tell us about the church.
I know you have a mission there. You're trying to help people who live in all sorts of countries to resist, but to do it in Jesus name, to receive the gospel, trying to convert Marxists. I'm sure you have stories.
Maybe you have some advice for people in my country who are just about to get a full dose of Marxism. How does the church continue to.
Function in this? Right. Well, you can imagine in any of these Marxist countries now having worked throughout Eastern Europe and all the way across Africa, I have seen that the biggest churches suffer the most in that they're the easiest to just either buy or intimidate the pastor or to replace the leadership.
And so what you saw is the big churches in Russia, for example, well, they just took out the patriarch. They replaced with a KGB man, the head of the Orthodox Church, and they can kind of control them.
And mega churches in Zimbabwe, I've seen that the top leaders just get bought out by the government. And before you know it, they've espoused the party line. The smaller churches are harder to control.
And so in Eastern Europe, what we found is the house churches became the backbone of the resistance. And, you know, in Red China, for example, you've got the three self-churches, which are much of Eastern Europe as well.
Some parts were different. Sometimes there's a different way of dealing with things. So, for example, and normally the Protestants would be severely persecuted. But in Poland, they didn't persecute the Protestants because they saw Catholicism was the real threat in Poland.
So the Protestants got phenomenal freedoms in Poland because they weren't seen as a threat. They were just a few thousand people, whereas the Catholics were millions. So the Protestants were even allowed to have a Bible society and Bible translation because anything that the Catholics didn't want.
So that's very rare. But most places the Protestants got hammered, no Bible society, no Bibles and so on. But the house churches is where most of the work went on because you can imagine how easy it is to just close down a big building or to take out the key leader.
And then you've got thousands of church leaders who are suddenly without leadership. But the house churches and the home cell groups and decentralized groups and the ones who meet in this farm and around about they're very hard to control.
And so we've generally found those are the ones that become the most dynamic churches. And of course, they grow and then they've got to sort of keep splitting because if they don't, they're going to be too big and then they attract too much attention.
So generally speaking, in any multistate situation, you'll find the biggest churches will either get the most opposition or they will just cave and they will compromise and they've got so much at stake and there's so much money involved and there's different ways the Marxist can come after churches.
There's audits like what they did with us. There's also technical infringements like the building codes being in China. They demolished churches regularly because the cross was too big or too high or too prominent or the church was too close to a major road or had too much exposure.
So they find different reasons and they can demolish a 13 million dollar church building in China. Just demolished the whole thing because they said it was too prominent or it's overlooked a school or something dumb like that.
So you've got all and then it's not persecution. It was a building code. It's a local municipal provincial type of thing. So Marxists have different ways of going after you. They'll say well, you know, they didn't declare all the income or there was an income tax problem.
But here's where the real nasty side comes. I've got a book on the psychiatric hospitals in Russia. In the Soviet Union, they started to target some ministers, many, in fact, many thousands. They called them in for psychiatric analysis and came to conclusion they're insane because hey, they don't believe in scientific socialism and atheism and evolution.
So they're obviously mentally deranged. And so they put them in padded cells and these straitjackets, drugged them up and shoved them into psychiatric prisons. And this is well documented that in the name of medicine, they locked up some of the most vocal opponents of the church in the Soviet Union.
So thousands, in fact, it was tens of thousands of Christians were locked up in psychiatric prisons in the Soviet Union under the guise of mental health. Now, of course, now they've got other things that they can go for.
They can say we think they've got COVID -19 or something like this. And so in the name of a pandemic, you could get isolated. Here's something else that was done in the old Soviet Union. You'd be called on to go in for a routine medical checkup and a routine medical checkup.
Frequently, the pastor was perfectly healthy, went in for a routine medical checkup. Next thing, his family's called, said, oh, he died. Come and collect his body. And they must have just injected him with something.
He dies in the hospital, medical execution. And, well, who's going to do the autopsy? And, you know, they just inject something in. How can you tell? And these testimonies are rife. Throughout Eastern Europe, the communists used all kinds of dirty tactics like that.
So you've got to be cautious and aware now. When our country, South Africa, was falling to communism, being betrayed to communism back in 1993, a good friend of mine, Paul Negrut in Romania, said to me, and he had gone through the whole Romanian persecution of Ceausescu.
He said, Peter, whatever you do, don't disappear into the shadows. You can't. You're too vocal, you're too visible anyway. Your only safety now is more exposure. You need to be more public and the more overseas contacts and the more you're known, the better, the less likely they are to get rid of you.
Because people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, they had to exile. People like George Vins had to exile. People like Richard Wurmbrandt, they had to exile because they were too well known to just get rid of.
There were other people less known that could just disappear. Psychiatric hospital, kill, whatever. And of course, car crashes. They're organized regularly. It should be a truck, truck driver wearing full shoulder harness, smashes into the car of the pastor or something.
He dies in a car accident. The person trucks unharmed and it's called a motor vehicle accident and it's obviously a hit. And well, I think we had something like that happened with General George Patton at the end of his career.
And so these are known not just by the other side. So yes, I would say you've got to be very careful. But while there's some people who might be better just keeping a low profile, others would be better off keeping a very high vocal profile.
The Marxists don't mind a certain amount of vocal opposition. They've got to allow a certain amount because they need to, they need the counter revolutionaries as the bogeyman to blame everything on. And they've also got to give the impression of freedom of religion.
So the Soviets always allowed St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square. They closed all the other churches, but there was one church open mosque and that was one Red Square. Tourists could go to and say, you see, we've got some religious freedom.
So Marxists won't go for closing everything, but they'll be selective and they'll, they'll, they'll test the waters. You've got to, I think that's why I've gone as much publications as possible. I publish hordes of books, lots of things on the internet, lots of things on YouTube, our website, we're busy speaking to us, because the Marxists know if they do anything to me, they'll just increase my circulation and make people know more of what we do.
So I've got the approach of being as openly attacking the Marxists as possible. And I found that kept me alive and safe for a long time. I've lived 26 years now under a Marxist government that I fought and I'm living under the enemy.
And you can imagine that's, that's a bit nerve-wracking, but I've taken a very public approach. Other people need to take a quieter approach, but there's no choice for somebody like you who's got a public radio ministry.
You know, there's no point in you going quiet. You might as well just amp up the volume and increase.
What you can do. Yeah, I think I'm going to take that advice. That's good. And I have been, people have attempted to cancel me and vilify me and and that's something that I have tried to just stand up to.
I'm not going to take it. It's, you know, hypocrisy. And the main thing I think I'm concerned with, though, is that Christians, so many of them seem to be ingratiating themselves, so-called Christians, to the Marxist narrative or trying to say that it's not really Marxism.
It's something else. It's social justice. And and it's, I think many Christians are missing the point that you're making, which is that Marxists are subversive. They, you know, they lie to you. They're, we can't take them at their word.
We must try to to figure out kind of, you know, understand their mission and figure out how they're trying to move the needle for their own cause. So I appreciate that. That's a wake-up call. And, you know, what other advice, closing thoughts would you have?
And then please plug your books because because, you know, I want people to go to your website, you know, tell them what books would be good for them at frontline .org .za or frontlinemission .org.
Yes, actually, my father-in-law, Reverend Bill Bathman, spent 67 years working amongst communists, working behind the Iron Curtain. He was good friends with Brother Andrew Richard von Bruns. He knew the whole, from one side of the communist world, the other.
He ministered throughout the Eastern Europe, throughout the whole time of the Cold War and afterwards. And Bill Bathman's written two excellent books. One's going through, the other's going on. And these two books are an insight into communism and the persecuted church and how to how to support them.
Now, I've written In the Killing Fields of Mozambique and Holocaust in Rwanda. I walk knee-deep in corpses and churches in Rwanda and give firsthand accounts of the role of gun control, disarming the people, the role of the United Nations and liberal church leaders in the Holocaust in Rwanda.
And that's important for people to know. I've also written Security and Survival Handbook on how to survive in the Bush case studies. Also, when the communists attacked the St. James Church and one of our missionaries was then shot back and injured one of the attackers and broke off the attack and they fled with just one man with a .38 revolver.
And you got all these terrorists with assault rifles and grenades and they flee because one man's shooting back with a snub-nosed .38 revolver in a congregation of 1 ,400. It just shows just a little bit of resistance can make a huge difference.
These guys are bullies. And we've met some of the people involved in the attack and they said, we'd never have attacked St. James if we knew there was someone there who would have shot back. And I mean, not like everybody, just one person.
When one member of the congregation of 1 ,000 wanted to shot back, they broke off the attack and fled. It's just extraordinary. So that's quite a story shooting back as well. So people go to FrontlineMissionSA .org.
You can see my books and articles and some documentation because I've been doing this for 38 years, but my father-in-law did this for 67 years working amongst the persecuted. There's so much we can learn from the persecuted.
I think the first thing is you fear God and when you fear God, you're freed from the fear of man. The other thing is Bible memorization. The more of the Word of God we store up in our heart and soul, the better.
Richard Von Braun's wife, Sabina Von Braun, she was locked up and she said before I was put in a woman's labor camp in Romania, I was very poor. But when they arrested me, I became very rich because I had the only currency of any value in prison, the Word of God.
She said I could enrich many other people in prison. And then the other thing that Von Braun told us is be careful who you trust. So for example, after she had been released after just five years as a slave laborer in women's concentration camp digging canals in Romania, somebody came claiming to have a message for the underground church from her husband who is still locked up.
He is locked up for many more years. And so Sabina Von Braun said before we go any further, would you just lead us in prayer? And the man stuttered and stumbled and she then looked up and said there now, aren't you ashamed of yourself?
Wouldn't you like to have me tell you how you can be a real Christian? And you know, you need wisdom in the persecuted church. You need to be careful who you trust. And this is the thing every persecuted church gets infiltrated.
You have to be so careful even in your prayers not to identify someone who could be targeted. And so you have to be very circumspect how you give a testimony or pray without revealing something that evil ears might be looking for to get.
So we've got to start thinking security.
That's good. So memorize scripture. Don't give them an inch and pray. And so I want to just encourage people go to your website frontline .org .za. You can find Dr. Peter Hammond's books there. Dr. Peter Hammond, it's been a pleasure hearing from you.
Just kind of sitting at your feet and getting these kernels of wisdom. I really appreciate you taking your.
Time. Thank you so much. And bear in mind communism always fails. The revolution always fails. And that's why right now in Russia, the Soviet Union is gone. The red flags gone. The rebuilding churches at a spectacular rate.
And same thing you could say all over East Europe. Communism can only survive for a while. They parasitic. And so at a certain point they will run out of body to lethal and the people can overthrow them.
And of course, I've seen this in Zambia. I've seen it in Romania. I've seen this in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Australia. So don't give up. The fact is communism can be beaten. It must be beaten. It can only survive as long as it can intimidate and doctorate.
We must never let them take a heart, a soul, a mind. We fear God. We fear God alone. And the day will come when communism will fail and every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
Amen.
Amen. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Peter Hammond. God bless you. Thank you.