‘When I was a child, the Matabele came, they swept over us like the wind and we bowed before them like the long white grass on the plains. They left us and we stood upright again. The Boers came and we bowed ourselves under them in like manner...
I am always amused by the way Defenders of the Myth approach the Boer War with a very fixed notion of what they want to have happened – ie. that the Boers were helpless, innocent victims of a nasty British bully, but, at the same time, also the...
There are a couple of Facebook Boer War groups where many who pretend to be interested in the Boer War hang out. I say ‘pretend’, as it would seem most do not actually want to learn about the Boer War at all, or discuss what really...
As I have noted previously, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine has put today’s True Believers in a rather awkward spot. The great panjandrum of National Party Myth, poor old Prof Pretorius, was forced to engage in some hilarious mental...
Peter Dickens recently posted another excellent, detailed, and well-researched article on his blog: War is Cruelty In this, almost as a passing comment, Dickens noted that the guerrilla phase of the Boer War lasted about two years – meaning it...
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at...
A friend recently sent me this brilliant quote from the late, great Iron Lady herself: “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single...
The title of an article in today’s Sunday Telegraph caught my eye, ‘Kitchener camp refugees remembered’. Interestingly, however, the article was not yet another rehash of the tired old myths about ‘the camps’ of the...
I recently read the following passage, in Captain Sidney Jary’s excellent book, ’18 Platoon’: “It has become the custom for some of our younger military writers to extol the professional ability of the Wehrmacht whilst decrying that of our own...
More excellent stuff from Peter Dickens: The 500,000 British vs. 20,000 Boers myth Of course, the ‘fact’ that it took ‘half a million Brits’ to defeat a ‘handful’ of Boers is just something that everyone...
‘The Transvaal was in no way a democracy. No Catholic or Jew was allowed to vote or hold office. Every Boer was compelled to own a rifle; no non-Boer was allowed to. Johannesburg, with 50,000 mainly uitlander inhabitants, was not even allowed an...
Ignoring the inconvenient fact that they lost the Boer War, those on the lunatic-fringe of Far-Right Afrikanerdom love to claim that their ‘heroes’ were all amazing Generals, and I was recently asked if I bought into the myths around Christiaan...
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