Another visit to Planet Pretorius

After being entertained by his utter rubbish yesterday (https://www.chrisash.co.za/2024/07/17/o-canada/) I thought it would be fun to pay another visit to the wacky world that is Planet Pretorius. It is clearly a place completely devoid of all intelligent life, judging by the utter rubbish that continues to spew forth from that barren land.

This is his latest, mind-bogglingly ignorant, response to someone who dared to point out the highly inconvenient fact that the Boer republics started the Boer War by invading British territory:

As is only to be expected from a proudly thick-headed True Believer, Pretorius’ response is the usual mixture of lies, rubbish, and self-pitying Apartheid-era propaganda. But let’s have a bit of fun and examine his nonsense.

Firstly, of course the republics started the war, so his denial of this simple, basic fact is a bare-faced lie. No state of war existed between the parties until the republics – with matchless stupidity – declared war on Great Britain, and foolishly invaded the Imperial territories of Natal and the Cape Colony. That is how the war started, no matter what National Party rubbish Pretorius spews out.

No other invasion in history would be frantically swept under the carpet in a desperate – and pathetic – attempt to paint the aggressor as the victim: but people like Pretorius simply cannot face-up to historical reality, and instead thrive on pretending to be the poor, innocent victim of the nasty British bully.

Wiping away his crocodile tears, Pretorius then attempts to down-play these invasions as merely ‘pre-emptive cross border strikes’ – which is another blatant lie.

But don’t take my word for it, this is what Jan Smuts – ie. the man who finalised the invasion plans – told his son (and biographer): he envisaged ‘the Boers to strike down swiftly at Durban and the other ports upon the outbreak of hostilities, in order to prevent the British landing reinforcements. That phase completed, the mopping up of troops in the country would begin’.^[i]

And if you don’t want to believe the word of Jan Smuts, even Pakenham – the arch-apologist for Boer expansionism – grudgingly admits:
‘Smuts… launched into a feverish plan for a military offensive. Its keynote was a blitzkrieg against Natal before any reinforcements could arrive. The numerical advantage would then lie in their favour by nearly three to one that is, forty thousand Boers against fifteen thousand British troops. By throwing all their troops against Natal, they could capture Durban before the first ships brought British reinforcements. In this way they would capture artillery and stores ‘in enormous quantities’. They would also encourage the Cape Afrikaners in the interior to ‘form themselves into a third great republic’.’^[ii]

As noted above, and as much as it pains the True Believers, the Boer invasions did not ‘pre-empt’ anything, and were instead squarely aimed at capturing Durban and the other ports in British South Africa, and driving the British from the region. As part of their crack-pot Crusade, Kruger’s invaders pushed hundreds of miles into British territory, looting and laying siege to several towns. Only the clinically-insane could possibly consider the capture of these huge swathes of land as (ahem) ‘cross border strikes’:

Furthermore, Pretorius’ risible attempt to justify the aggression of the republics by putting all the blame on Great Britain – because London dared to reject Kruger’s ridiculously impudent ultimatum – is utterly laughable.

Let’s look at his assertion in another way, just to show how completely stupid someone would have to be to make such a claim. Imagine Great Britain sent an ultimatum to Norway tomorrow, giving them 48 hours to hand over all their North Sea oilfields, or HM forces would seize them. If Norway were to reject such an ultimatum (as they would be absolutely right to), surely that would mean – in the frazzled mind of Pretorius, at least – that Norway would be entirely at fault when British forces attacked / launched (ahem) ‘preemptive cross-border strikes’ to snatch the oilfields. I mean, ‘the state of war would already exist’ at that point, so it can only be Norway’s fault, right?

Of course, only a complete moron would take that line… and yet this is precisely the insanity Pretorius treats us to when it comes to the Boer ultimatum against Britain in 1899, and Kruger’s invasions.

We are then sagely informed by this blundering buffoon that the British army of the period numbered 227,992, ‘in addition to the “Garrison” of 22,104’ men in South Africa. Quite why Pretorius thinks that HM forces holding British colonial territory need to be labeled as a “Garrison” (in inverted commas) is anyone’s guess: because that’s exactly what they were. Just as all the other penny packets of British army forces scattered around the rest of the Empire were garrisons too.

And – as it to be expected – Pretorius treats us to yet another falsehood, this time about the numbers. The standing British army of the period was indeed just under 230,000 strong[iii], but that was not ‘in addition’ to the garrison in South Africa – Pretorius just made that bit up, in his never-ending attempt to play the victim. Now, whether this was actually a lie, or just more ocean-going ignorance his part, you will have to decide for yourself.

Speaking of Pretorius’ ocean-going ignorance, does he really think that the entirety of the British army was available to deploy for operations in South Africa? Does it not occur to this blithering idiot that men were needed to defend the homeland, and to hold territory in, for example, India – where no less than 68,000 of these 230,000 British troops were stationed[iv]?

Most laughably of all, Pretorius completely fails to understand that the other Colonies of the Empire rushed to help Natal and the Cape in their hour of need, not because of a pressing ‘operational exigency’, but because it was the right thing to do. Britain’s other Colonies quite rightly regarded Natal and the Cape Colony as ‘brothers’ which had been attacked and invaded by a hostile force. Furthermore, the Colonial troops quickly earned impressive reputations, and their light horse units were highly valued by the infantry-heavy British army, which was always short of such troops.

This is similar to the way that, in more modern-times, the massive US army nevertheless valued the support of relatively small units of British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealander Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan – these units added specialist skills which were in short supply.

Some of the contingents which were raised around the Empire were tiny –  ‘a 200-strong contingent of mounted infantry drawn from the white planter community in Ceylon’^[v] – and thus, as much as good horsemen were always appreciated, unlikely to make a difference strategically. But even the smallest of colonial contingents were an important statement that aggression would not be tolerated against the extended family of Empire, or against freedom in general.

To put it in a way that even one as dim-witted as Pretorius might (possibly) understand, there was also no ‘operational exigency’ for the 1^st South African Brigade to deploy to the Western Front in the Great War. If Pretorius thinks the South Africans who fought and died at Delville Wood were guilty of ‘brownnosing their colonial masters’, he is even more stupid and disrespectful than I thought.  Numerically, a brigade (even one as valiant as the South African Brigade) was insignificant when compared to the vast British and French armies[vi], but these South Africans volunteered to serve – and the nation sent them – because it was the right thing to do. Decent, fair-minded people in South Africa wanted show that the German invasions of Belgium and France would not be allowed to stand.

Pretorius is seemingly unaware that, during the Korean War, as well as the enormous forces committed by the United States and the British Commonwealth, many other nations (including those as disparate as Ethiopia, France, Columbia, Luxembourg, and Thailand) also sent contingents to oppose North Korean aggression – because it was the right thing to do. Though some of these deployments were largely symbolic, they nevertheless served to show that the invasions of another country would never just be accepted by the Free World.

Though such an honourable act is clearly alien to Pretorius, that is also the main reason why thousands of young men from Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and elsewhere from across the Empire) volunteered to serve in South Africa to fight against Kruger’s invaders. Their own nations were not under threat, but they could understand something that Pretorius is pathetically determined not to: ie. that the Boer invasions of Natal and the Cape were not going be tolerated by decent people. Furthermore, these brave young men were prepared to risk their lives to help defend their kith and kin, and to free them from Kruger’s tender mercies.

With his trademark mixture of breath-taking arrogance and utter ignorance, Pretorius dismisses their courage and sense of duty as ‘brown-nosing’ – but he is not fit to polish their boots.

NOTES:

[i] Jan Christian Smuts by his son, p. 90, quoted in O’Connor, A Short Guide to the History of South Africa, 1652-1902

[ii] Pakenham, The Boer War, p.102

[iii] The Army Handbook of the British Empire, 1893, p.15

[iv] Carver, The National Army Museum book of the Boer War, p.13

[v] Lowry, The South African War Reappraised, p.189

[vi] When it shipped to England in 1915, the 1^st South African Brigade comprised 4 battalions – or a little over 5000 officers and men. This should be compared to the British army which eventually reached 3,820,000 men in 70 Divisions, or the French army, which fielded over 9,000,000 men throughout the conflict