Racism

Last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the group Youth for Western Civilization hosted a panel with anti-immigrant activist Bay Buchanan, former congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO), former congressman Virgil Goode (R-VA) and Pennsylvania congressman Lou Barletta (R-PA) which focused on the purported persecution and marginalization of white Americans due to what Tancredo called “the cult of multiculturalism” that is a “dagger pointed at the heart of Western Civilization.” It appeared that Republican leaders and CPAC had no problem giving credence to an extremist group with ties to European neo-fascists whose founder, Marcus Epstein, was arrested and pled guilty to a hate crime after karate chopping a black woman on a street while calling her a “nigger,” in fact, Youth for Western Civilization is a co-sponsor of CPAC 2012.

On Monday, Youth for Western Civilization announced a new campaign called, “Stop the Boer Genocide,” which claims that black South Africans and the South African government have “orchestrated the systematic slaughter of the white community.”

The group paints a rosy picture of the Apartheid system that was in place between 1948 and 1994 where a tiny white elite controlled the government and economy and violently repressed the country’s black majority, praising the racist government for efforts “against rampant gambling and homosexuality stopped the spread of moral decay” and for “promoting the family” and “strong Christian values.”

Youth for Western Civilization called Nelson Mandela, the first president of a democratic South Africa who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-Apartheid activism, a “terrorist” who “has far more in common with the thugs behind the Rwandan genocide than the heroic freedom fighter he is touted to be.” “At the hands of mobs led by the ANC and murderers like Nelson Mandela who are hell bent on the rape and murder of every white in South Africa,” the group writes, “the Afrikaners are at a crossroads.”

While there are legitimate concerns about racial violence in post-Apartheid South Africa, Youth for Western Civilization is accusing the South African government of pushing the “extermination” against whites and applauding the old Apartheid system, which the group claims “gave an honest chance to the black majority to help build a republic that respected all human rights.” With such blatant nostalgia for the violent racist system, why are Republicans and CPAC continuing to give this group a platform to spew their nostalgia for apartheid?