‘2.5k? Boers and decades of repression’

It always amuses me that ‘Kruger’s War’ can still enrage the True Believers, so many years after it came out. I was recently made aware that someone had dared to recommend it on a British and Commonwealth Forces Facebook Group:

Needless to say, this got the normal slack-jawed apologists all revved up, and out they came, squealing and squawking:

A well-reasoned, exhaustively-referenced rebuttal from Meneer Brits there… it really is an admission that it’s all they have, as there is no way they can actually explain where I am incorrect.

Amusingly, the next clown off the block admitted his hatred of the book was based on not actually having read it at all. It would be like me jumping on social media to tell the world I hate a restaurant that I have never eaten at:

Of course, Meneer Lambert doesn’t trouble to explain why he hasn’t bothered to read the book – but he is happy to declare that I am ‘as bad as extreme right Africaners in SA’. Quite why, is unclear.

But if the panic-stricken offerings by Lambert and Brits are bad enough, the next buffoon was even more entertaining, as up stepped Adrian von Cretin:

A better ‘summary’ would be: Adrian von Cretin has never read a single book on the Boer War, but clings to National Party myth as it makes him feel better about himself.

I have heard a lot of highly entertaining excuses for the Boer defeat over the years, but none have been as utterly deranged as von Cretin’s claim that there were only 2½k Boers. In reality, the Boers fielded some 87,365 men (not counting the tens of thousands of blacks who were forced to perform rear echelon tasks), broken down as follows:

‘…the Transvaal raised 26,871 men initially, to which 14,779 were added later, while the Free State raised 21,345, to which 6,264 were added. Both states had a small regular force manning artillery, 800 men in the Transvaal, manning twelve fortress guns, 13 obsolete mountain guns and 21 Maxim ‘pom-poms’ (quick-firing 1-pounders), and 375 men in the Free State, manning nineteen field guns, four mountain guns and three Maxims … in addition 13,300 ‘rebels’ from the colonies of Natal and the Cape joined the commandos, as did 800 foreigners. There was also a Foreign Corps of 2,120, including 500 Irish, 320 Dutch, 200 Germans, 100 Scandinavians, 75 Italians, 50 French, 50 Americans, and 25 Russians. The Boer forces eventually totalled 87,365.’^[i]

As over 4,000 Boers were captured at Paardeberg, and another 4,000 plus at Brandwater Basin, it really takes a special kind of stupid to announce that there were only ever 2,500. Where does he think the other 85,000 disappeared to?

And onto von Cretin’s next claim: the Boers did not kill ‘25k soldiers’. That’s another blatant lie. British / Empire deaths in the Boer War were 21,942 – of whom 13,250 died of disease (yes, you read it here first: disease killed people who weren’t in concentration camps too), 798 died in accidents and another 102 died in Boer captivity[ii] (note, I didn’t say ‘were murdered’ in Boer captivity – because that would be every bit as stupid as the things the True Believers claim).

So, von Cretin was wrong by a factor of about three, as the Boers only managed to kill 7,792 British / Imperial officers and men. So why did he lie? Well, I think we all know the answer to that.

And as for his next piece of Ocean-going stupidity: the British certainly didn’t kill 20k civilians – unless von Cretin thinks that anyone who died from disease was killed by the British. Again, he is just unthinkingly spewing out NP myth and propaganda, and hoping to get away with his lies.

In a final flourish of abject ignorance, von Cretin then splendidly proclaims that ‘the repression continued for decades after’. Again, this is utter rubbish: the former Boer republics were both granted self-rule within a few years of British victory, and South Africa was United as – for all intents a purposes – an independent nation in 1910. The only ‘repression that continued for decades’ was done by the Apartheid Government, which came into power in 1948 – some 46 years after the Boer War.

Indeed, it is the myths of this repressive regime which von Cretin so loyally treated us to.

Von Cretin got one thing right in his lunatic outburst, though: we will certainly laugh at his post. Not because we are British, though – but because he is a deluded fool.

NOTES:

[i] Carver, The National Army Museum book of the Boer War, p.14

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