‘Genocide and Catastrophe!’

I was recently made aware of an exchange on one of the Facebook Boer War discussion groups, where an especially ignorant True Believer was making made a complete fool of himself once again. To get a bit of context of just what an utter clown, and wide-eyed fanatic, Hennie Bester / Larsen Bjørn[1] is, take a look at a previous article:

https://www.chrisash.co.za/2023/12/01/hapless-hennie-hopelessly-humiliates-himself/

Anyway, Bester / Bjørn is back again, spouting more entertaining rubbish. This is what he spewed out when Colin Ross – one of South Africa’s leading battlefield guides – pointed out that people dying from measles is not the normal definition of ‘genocide’:

It is telling that Bester claims to be totally unaware of the fact that the vast majority of people (including all those with functioning brains) do not equate deaths which happened during a measles epidemic with ‘genocide’. Indeed, his resolutely closed-minded ignorance on the matter shows that he must exist entirely in an echo chamber of similarly uneducated fanatics. The inconvenient reality for Bester is that no international body describes the deaths in the Boer War concentration camps to have been a ‘genocide’ – nor, even, does the High Priest of Boer War myths – so old ‘Hapless Hennie’[2] really is very much in an extremist miniscule minority on this. And, I suspect, on pretty much everything else.

The rest of his rant shows that poor old Bester really is desperately in need of some sort of emotional crutch, thus it pleases him to pretend that ‘a simple pastoral militia set in motion the decline of a once mighty empire’. Though this is something those on the lunatic fringe of the AWB like to tell one another, it is – of course – utter nonsense.

The simple reality is that the British Empire did not even reach its zenith until over 20 years after victory over the Boer republics, and, indeed, until after victory in the really-rather-more-significant First World War[3]. In reality, it would then still take another generation, and another victory in another World War – and, much to the chagrin of those on the extreme-Right of Afrikanerdom (including, perhaps, Bester?) the defeat of Hitler – before the sun finally started to set on the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. It was not until the decades after WW2, that London – saddled with crippling debt incurred while defeating the most evil regime in history – started granting independence to huge swathes of territory across Africa and Asia, a steady process which continued through the 1960s and into the 1970s.

Of course, the process of granting colonies self-governing status, and then – ultimately – Dominion status (essentially, independence) had long been Britain’s preferred way of running her Empire. Basically, London took a ‘hands off’ approach, and wanted as little trouble and expense from her colonies as possible – which is why responsible rule had first been granted to Nova Scotia as far back as 1848. Most of the territories in New Zealand and Australia had been granted responsible rule by 1860, and both the Cape Colony and Natal were self-governing before Kruger’s forces invaded them in October 1899. None of this ‘scaling back of direct control’, therefore had anything to do with the British army defeating a ‘simple pastoral militia’ in the Boer War – even if that comforting fantasy helps poor old insecure Hennie sleep at night.

After a few others pointed out his abject ignorance, Bester doubled-down on his nonsense, spitting out this utter gobbledygook:

I have read and re-read this post several times, and it still makes little sense, presumably having been written after Bester had drunk a bottle of Klippies. What we can glean from Bester’s badly-written gibberish, however, is that he seems to have cherry-picked a single sentence, not provided any sort of context, and not even included which ‘British Colonies’ the quote referred to… and then – with the supreme arrogance of the stupid – triumphantly announced that this somehow proves some sort of (unspecified) point.

In fact, all it really proves is that Bester (as if there were any doubt) is totally incapable of critical thought, as it doesn’t seem to occur to him to wonder exactly how winning the Boer War can possibly have been ‘the greatest catastrophe’ the Empire endured ‘since the loss of the British Colonies’ (?).

If there was any sort of (ahem) ‘catastrophe’ in the Boer War, then it was a high level failure of military intelligence / planning, and of complacently being caught napping by Kruger’s invasions; of turning a blind eye to his empire-building aims in the decades prior to the old troglodyte starting the war; of penny-pinching on the defence of Natal; of ignoring the clear and present danger which was brewing in the region; of having no plan in place for war in South Africa[4], and of keeping an insufficient garrison in theatre.

But being unprepared for the Boer invasions was far from being a ‘catastrophe’. It wasn’t even a ‘disaster’. It was more on the scale of a simple ‘cock-up’, really, for, as soon as the British army mobilised a reasonable number of troops to the theatre, the Boer invasions (which had not even been able to take the likes of Mafeking or Ladysmith, let alone Cape Town) were brought to a juddering halt, and then quickly driven back from whence they had come. Once the tide turned, thousands of burghers surrendered en masse, or simply threw in the towel and headed home, their pie-in-the-sky dreams of looting their way to the coast, and eating bananas in Durban, shattered. The Boer republics were then swiftly annexed and Kruger, who had started the whole thing, shamelessly ran away.

Despite the British army enjoying no clear technological advantage, the guerrilla phase of the war was then won with less troops than modern military doctrine declares to be required[5], and in less than a quarter of the average length of a 20^th century counter-insurgency[6]. Furthermore, Imperial casualties were hardly ‘catastrophic’ – especially when compared with those sustained in other wars of the age, like the Franco-Prussian War[7], or the Russo-Japanese War[8] – with the Tommies twice as likely to die from disease than to be shot by a Boer[9]. And, despite what various National Party myth-enthusiasts like to tell one another, the cost of the war barely registers as a blip in terms of London’s expenditure on HM Forces over the centuries.[10]

So what ‘great catastrophe’ is the laughable Bester / Bjørn crowing about, exactly?

On the contrary, victory in the Boer War added considerable territory to the Empire, with the two Boer republics being annexed. It also ended the Apartheid-like discrimination against the Johannesburg Uitlanders, meaning they – along with Jews and Catholics – finally got the democratic representation they should have had all along[11]. The Boer War also shattered the Kruger-clique’s long-held dreams of replacing Britain as the preeminent power in the region, ending their plans of building an empire ‘from the Zambesi to the Cape’, and thus – most importantly of all – removing the threat to the strategically critical Royal Navy base at Simon’s Town. What is more, the war showed that the bonds between the various scattered colonies and Dominions of the Empire were strong, with contingents of volunteers rushing to defend Natal and the Cape from all over the globe. British victory over the Boers also directly led to the creation of the Union of South Africa, a nation which stood loyally by Britain’s side in two World Wars[12].

If that was the ‘greatest catastrophe’ the Empire endured since (presumably?) the American War of Independence, it was a pretty minor one – indeed, actually rather a beneficial one.

NOTES:

[1] So desperate was this buffoon to submit negative reviews of my books on Amazon, that he took to submitting others under a false name

[2] Or is he ‘Blundering Bjørn’ today?

[3] It was not until 29 September 1923, that the British Empire reached its greatest extent, covering a quarter of the World’s landmass, and with stewardship over 460 million people. For more details, read ‘One Fine Day’ by Matthew Parker

[4] Pakenham, The Boer War, p.71

[5] The figure of a 10:1 advantage being required for success in a guerrilla war is quoted in both:
Brown, Coté Jr., Lynn-Jones & Miller, Offense, Defense and War, p. 360, and
U.S. Army / Department of Defense, Counterinsurgency Handbook, pp. 1–13.

[6] Ricks, Fiasco, p.433

[7] Lasting only 6 months, the Franco-Prussian War nevertheless claimed the lives of over 138,000 Frenchmen, and 44,000 Prussians. Additionally, over 470,000 French troops (ie. more than the number of British / Empire troops that served throughout the Boer War) were captured. Suddenly the c.22,000 Imperial troops who died (overwhelmingly of disease) during the roughly-two-and-a-half years of the Boer War looks anything but ‘catastrophic’

[8] Though only lasting about half as long as the Boer War, Russia lost some 70,000 men killed, while Japan – though victorious – lost around 80,000

[9] Hall, Handbook of the Anglo-Boer War, p.187

[10] https://www.chrisash.co.za/2024/04/24/british-military-expenditure/

[11] Alas, in the former republics, and as a sop to the defeated Boers, this liberalisation of the franchise laws did not extend to non-whites

[12] Aside from – surprise, surprise – a few pro-Nazis on the extreme-Right of Afrikanerdom