John Elsegood can always be relied upon to entertain us with his trademark mix of sheer stupidity and complete lack of knowledge about the Boer War, and I was greatly amused when a friend shared a blast-from-the-past from the buffoon with me – needless to say, pretty much everything he writes is his normal mix of lies, ignorance and extreme pro-Kruger bias, and hardly worth reading… but I had a good chuckle at Elsegood’s desperate / pathetic attempt at using Orwellian Newspeak to rebrand an invasion:
Yes – I am not making it up – Elsegood really wants us to believe that the war was caused by ‘speeches and actions of British politicians’, rather than the inconvenient fact that the Boers declared war and invaded. And yes – this prize idiot really does describe the invasion of someone else’s territory as ‘a cross border defensive move’.
To highlight just what a self-serving, lunatic claim this is, here is a map showing the extent of Kruger’s (ahem) ‘cross border defensive move’:
The reality is that tens of thousands of square miles of British territory were annexed by the invading Boers, towns and farms were looted and torched, bridges were destroyed, railways sabotaged, and Loyalist civilians suffered bombardment, starvation, and displacement as refugees / ethnic cleansing, while thousands of non-white civilians were forced to perform slave labour.
As much as it upsets Kruger fanboys like Elsegood – who seemingly idolises his deeply racist, antisemitic, expansionist regime – pretending that the Boers did not start the war by invading British territory is every bit as stupid as trying to deny that Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, that North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, that Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982, or that Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Indeed, Elsegood’s desperate and pathetic re-branding of Kruger’s attack on the British Empire as a ‘cross border defensive move’ makes Putin’s attempt to sell his invasion of Ukraine as a ‘special military operation’ actually seem rather quaint.
Add Comment