Echoes 0
Writing at the Guardian, David Smith, a white South African, remembers attending a recruiting meeting for the AWB, a pro-apartheid militia-style group, during the dying days of South African apartheid. He was 14 at the time and went with his father. They never went back.
His description of the meeting sounds as if it could have come from the contemporary US. Here’s a bit of it:
All of which was absurd rubbish, racist alarmist bunkum. But for so many people in that room, it made sense. Somehow, when they weighed up their options, the lunacy of a preacher with a handgun and a racist army of fat blokes in khaki seemed like a credible path forward. And that is scary. The same kind of scary that leads people to join all sorts of extremist groups. Whether it be the AWB, the KKK or the BNP. Their strategy is perfectly simple. Find the panic button and hit it as hard as you can.
