Boer Refugees

 

A boer family, circa 1910

Don Lemon has objected to taking in South African Boers as refugees because they own land and are relatively well off. So how can they be considered refugees?

This is a Marxist misconception. Groups that are poor may be oppressed, but they are not necessarily poor because they are oppressed, and they are not necessarily oppressed because they are poor. And when it comes to genocide, it is a conspicuously successful minority who are most at risk. Few feel driven to kill someone else because they are poor.

This is of course the eternal story of the Jews. In Weimar Germany, they were more successful than the average German. They were too prominent in business and the professions. So were the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, leading up to the Armenian genocide. So were the kulaks wiped out by the Soviets, causing the Ukrainian genocide, the Holodomir. So were the “bourgeois” and “intellectuals” targeted by the Red Guards in Maoist China, and by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It is why the Knights Templar were massacred in the Middle Ages. It is why South Asians were dispossessed and expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. 

It is profoundly dangerous to be a recognizable minority materially more successful than the majority.

First, it is an obvious temptation to take your stuff. Especially if you are a recognizable minority, the majority can do this without supposing their own property might be at risk. That said, raising taxes on “the rich” to make them pay their “fair share” is invariably a winning slogan in a democracy. The rich are ready scapegoats. 

Second, this is the deadly sin of envy. No other sin is more dangerous to society.

Guilty because their ancestors practiced apartheid? That's "blood guilt." The Jews know something about that too.

The South African Boers have a greater claim on our sympathy and our sanctuary than perhaps any other group in the world today. More broadly, “whites” are in danger almost everywhere for this reason: they have been too successful. We ought to be alert to the danger—and act before the Holocaust begins.