I have just come across a story published on the ‘Big Picture’ website, where news stories are presented through the visual media of photography – this article provides pictures of poverty-stricken Afrikaner folk living in South Africa.

I have previously read stories about the hardship facing poor South Africans of European descent, but I have never viewed images of the situation;  I found these images to be oddly disturbing. If you are asked to visualise, or even draw, a family living in poverty, most westerners would conjure up images of skeletal ethnic-Africans/Indians/Asians etc. In other words, non-whites.

Why did these images provoke such a feeling of pity? I think that maybe I am desensitised to images and footage of non-white poverty, we, in the west, are often so bombarded with this imagery that the shock factor has worn off, at best, the regular images of poverty evoke only numbness – partly because we’re so overwhelmed with a feeling of helplessness when we realise the shear scale of poverty in undeveloped nations.

However, when viewing these images of white poverty, there is quite a different reaction. These people look like me. They probably speak my language. Do these pictures awaken the subliminal racial bond within the psyche of richer Ethnic Europeans? Maybe it provokes fear – the fear that Europeans having come so far, yet they can still end up rolling around in the dirt like every other race: perhaps it’s an uncomfortable reminder that we’re nothing special.

Some American observers stated that these photos could have been taken at any ‘trailer park’ in the United States. There is an interesting parallel to be drawn regarding this comment. What are rich ethnic-European South Africans doing to help their people in South Africa and what are rich ethnic-European Americans doing to help their people in the United States? Not much, judging by this admittedly superficial glance. European Americans need to pay attention to the situation in South Africa, as they’re soon to be in a similar ‘crisis’ – a minority in the country they developed, and there will be similarly little pity garnered for the circumstances of the once dominant ethnicity.

I would rather European nations (particularly the Netherlands) gave asylum status to these poor Afrikaners, instead bestowing privileges on bogus economic migrants from the third-world nations. Why? Because European nations have a responsibility to their people who stayed behind on the dark continent when the imperial powers pulled out – more so, considering that certain nations helped set South Africa on a rail-road towards the genocide of its creator-class.

(Pictures below, courtesy of Boston.com/Reuters/Finbarr O’Reilly)

Related Posts :

Nationalist Civil Disobedience or Separatism