NAZISM, CALVINISM AND APARTHEID

Over recent weeks, I have read two books that I now find to be related. The first was entitled In the Shadow of Death, the report of the killing of Jews and others in the Nazi concentration camps during World War 2.

The book focussed on the death camp built outside the Austrian town of Mauthausen where hundreds of thousands of inmates died. The inmates were Jewish and the non-people of the Slavic races.

They died as the result of the ideology of racial superiority put forward by Hitler for the Germanic people. The superior race was said to be the descendants of the tall, blond haired and blue eyed Aryans. Other races were on a lower level of humanity.

Yet today, I pulled a book at random from the library entitled The Great Trek. This was the account of the trek of the Boertrekkers of South Africa to the north to escape the irritation of the British who had come to South Africa to set up a maritime base for ships on route to India.

The Boertrekkers were certainly a tough group of people mainly from Holland, but also from Britain, Germany and France. They were very deeply religious in the Calvinist tradition and convinced that God intended the white race to be superior. They were racially above the Bantus, Hottentots and Bushmen.

I see a link between the two books. Both books were based on the view of the white races of Europe that they were intended to rule as God’s chosen superior races.

We may have all seen the old movie Zulu in which the British soldiers were attacked at Rorke’s Drift by an impi of Zulu warriors. Please click:

The Battle of Rorke's Drift - RorkesDriftVC
www.rorkesdriftvc.com/battle/battle.htm The Defence of Rorke's Drift, 
22nd and 23rd of January, 1879. A synopsis of the battle.Rorke's Drift, as it 
looks today, with the hospital in the top left and the .

The Boertrekkers were attacked in very similar ways as they trekked north with their wagons, women, children, sheep and cattle. They turned their wagons in a circle and locked the wagons together with chains.

The story of South Africa has been part of my childhood since I read the book Nada the Lily by H. Rider Haggard. It told of the life of the Zulu chief Chaka and his half brothers Dingaan and Umslopogas.

Chaka was a fierce warrior who declared war on the white races invading the land. But the book The Great Trek makes the point I have always known that the Zulus were moving south as the Boertrekkers were moving north. In the book The Great Trek, Chaka was dead and Dingaan was the chief of all Zulus.

But the Calvinism of Europe was in great conflict with the Christian beliefs of the English missionaries who came to South Africa to preach the equality of all. It also conflicted with the Catholicism of the Portuguese of South West Africa. So the Boers kept trekking north with their strong belief in God and racial superiority.

The Christian missionaries believed that all human beings were equal. That meant the white race was equal to the Hottentots, Bantus, Bushmen and Zulus. This infuriated the Boertrekkers.

The Boers believed that only the white Calvinists were equal. The remainder were to be sheepherders and servants. We are moving along to apartheid. Was apartheid a key to Calvinist Christianity?

We know that the Christian world was changed forever with the Reformation. Along with Lutheranism came Calvinism. The middle classes of northern Germany and Austria changed to Lutheranism and Calvinism while in Papua New Guinea, there were Lutheran missionaries come to convert the villagers.

But Calvinisn found a place among those Dutch and Germans who migrated to South Africa with descendants who laid the foundations of apartheid. Pass laws were in place in those days too.

Of course we have to appreciate that the attacks of the Zulus were fierce with hundreds of Boertrekkers killed and thousands of cattle and sheep stolen. Two races of people were competing for massive expanses of grasslands to the north of the Drakensberg Range.It is difficult to picture 50,000 head of cattle stolen by the Zulu.

It comes down to the fact that the Jews and Slavs were the victims of Calvinist belief in white supremacy. The Bantus, Hottentots, Bushmen, Khosa and Zulus were the inferior races of South Africa finding themselves under the domination of the Calvinist Dutch.

Famous last words: How could the British treat us like this?  We are Christian.

There is a report on Google that makes similar points on Nazism and Calvinism. Please click:

Afrikaner nationalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_nationalism.role in the development of Afrikaner
the Exodus from the British rule in Cape to ...Afrikaner nationalism and Nazism 
had common roots in religio-nationalism  ..