In the aftermath of the Charleston church massacre, US “news” media have been depicting the Old South African and Rhodesian flags as some kind of Nazi insignia, their display always and everywhere a predictor of a disturbed mind. Dr. Dan Roodt, director of PRAAG, for Afrikaner activism, sends this corrective comment:

“The orange, white and blue flag is based on the original European republican flag: It was first hoisted in 1572, after the first Dutch town called Den Briel was liberated from the Spanish Empire. To this day, and in homage to that flag, most European countries, including the Netherlands, France, Germany, Belgium, Russia, etc., all have tricolor flags. Are they then all “white-supremacist” flags?

The orange, white and blue flag was used by the South African Army in World War II when we fought on the Allied side against Nazi Germany. Ian Smith, who later adopted the Rhodesian flag together with the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as its national anthem, was a fighter pilot for Britain during the Second World War. Both South Africa and Rhodesia fought valiantly against Soviet- and Chinese-supported terrorist movements. The policy they practiced towards their black populations, while controversial, was distorted many fold by Marxist intellectuals and left-wing media types.

The Christian and humane principles on which both the old South Africa and Rhodesia were founded, prohibited any form of ethnic massacre. In fact, during Afrikaner history we were mostly the victims of such massacres by either foreigners of other ethnic groups, so we understand the pain and suffering associated with such mass killings.

My immediate reaction was to associate Dylann Roof’s actions with the acts of ANC or PAC terrorists committed in our country, such as the cowardly massacre of church-goers at the St. James Church in Cape Town on 25 July 1993, when the Azanian People’s Liberation Army or APLA burst into the church during a service with automatic weapons and massacred 11 people. If a member of the congregation, Charl van Wyk, had not returned fire with his .38 Special, many more people would have died.

We have a proud military tradition, associated with our flag. We have always abided by the Geneva Conventions. Unlike our enemies who practiced terror against us and who still attack our own civilians on farms and in our homes, we would never think of attacking civilians, let alone in a church while praying to God.”

Regards,

Dr. Dan Roodt
Direkteur, PRAAG