Any South African who only has access to mainstream news right now will have, at best, an entirely distorted picture of what is happening between its government and the government of the United States of America. Signs are that most of the people I encounter during my week are still living in a dream spun by legacy media in collusion with liberal and communist politicians. And yet, as I’ll show by reading certain aspects of recent events with the help of Sophocles and René Girard, a significant shift in consciousness is possible if we read the bible rather than the news.
In addition to noting the South African government’s aggressive stance towards the USA and its allies, Donald Trump’s executive order about South Africa, published by the White House on 7 February 2025, points to the “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights” evident especially, but not exclusively, in the “recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 (Act), to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” I know very well—and many have been eager to point out—that this is not a ‘high-resolution’ take. Even in the introduction of the executive order, some of the details aren’t exactly correct. In this and the rest of Trump’s order, issues and problems are conflated and combined somewhat messily. And yet, what is unavoidable is this: South Africa’s severely overweight elites are vocally anti-American. This antagonism makes no geopolitical and economic sense but the masochistic woke propaganda machine that has held America in its grip for so long still has a hold on South Africa.
In quibbling over minutiae, Trump’s South African critics are wrong to conclude that his claims can be dismissed. When one tries to look at what’s going on dispassionately, which is the only way to look at what’s going on if one wants to make any sense of it, it is not so easy to say that the low-resolution nature of the executive order isn’t also right. I mean “right” in the moral sense. One way to tell this is to simply pay attention to what’s being said by South African leftists. They are now locked in a rather strange display of defending the indefensible.
For one thing, they now find themselves defending the place of 142 racist laws that discriminate especially against white South Africans. They have nuanced reasons because they have been well-trained in the art of resentment and self-deception. But all of their supposedly delicate arguments are reducible to the fact that they are defending racist laws. All talk of fairness and equality makes no moral sense when you have laws that actively seek to beat down less than 8% of your population. Still, amazingly, they want the laws to stay.
Also, they support the Expropriation Act mentioned by Trump even though the Act, which promises exactly zero compensation for property taken, does not limit what property the government might expropriate or the reasons why they might take it. In concrete application, this will be bad for all South Africans and not just the racial minority. But the libs enjoy shooting themselves in the foot for ideological reasons, so they welcome this further move in favour of turning South Africa into the next Leninist dystopia.
Also worth paying attention to—and this will be the main focus in my Sophoclean-Girardian reading of what’s happening—is the overwhelming response from several leftists of all races and nations on social media to Trump’s decision to grant white Afrikaners refugee status. Their response has not been to say, “But, Donnie, there’s no need for that because they are most welcome here in South Africa.” No, the response from leftists of various stripes has been something else: “Get out! There’s the door!” The most vocal in expressing their desire to chase Afrikaners and other white people away have been prominent politicians. No South African politician I know of has contradicted this stance and extended their arms in affirmation and welcome. And this has, of course, only confirmed that Trump must be right.
In particular, the Afrikaner organisation Afriforum has been utterly slandered. For those who don’t know, Afriforum has been tirelessly fighting against the racist laws of the country for a while now and they were certainly instrumental in alerting the world, and America in particular, about what has been happening in South Africa. (You can support them here.) But it is madness to slander and accuse them, as some have, of both racism and treason. It’s a bit like accusing the doctor who diagnoses your disease of being its cause or blaming the boy who tells the emperor he’s naked for being the cause of the emperor’s nakedness. Afriforum is very clear that what was wrong in the past—namely racial discrimination—does not suddenly become right in the present simply because your team is in charge.
It is this phenomenon of directing false accusations at a marginalised group that I want to examine more closely. But to explain myself properly, I’d like to take a two-thousand-odd-year detour. This past weekend, I read Sophocles’s play Oedipus the King, in a wonderful collection edited by Mark Anspach under the title, The Oedipus Casebook: Reading Sophocles' Oedipus the King (Michigan State University Press, 2020). Sophocles’s play begins with the city of Thebes suffering from a terrible plague. King Oedipus, the city’s ruler, sends his brother-in-law Creo, to get advice on ending the plague from the Oracle at Delphi. The Oracle explains that the plague will end only when the murderer of the previous king, Laius, is found and punished. Oedipus doesn’t question this. He very enthusiastically vows to solve the mystery.
Such enthusiasm is misplaced, though. Soon, the blind prophet Tiresias reveals, albeit reluctantly, that Oedipus is the murderer. Oedipus can’t believe his ears and is understandably enraged. He accuses Tiresias and Creon of conspiring against him. In response, Creon warns Oedipus that his insults are misplaced and will backfire on him. Various pieces of a large puzzle start to fall into place, starting with Oedipus’s wife Jocasta’s revelations about an old prophecy that Laius, her deceased husband, would be killed by his son. To avoid this fate, Laius and Jocasta decided to abandon their baby to the cold.
Then, a messenger from Corinth arrives to tell Oedipus that his supposed father Polybus has died and that Oedipus is not truly Polybus’s son but a foundling. Finally, it comes out that Oedipus must be—although this is not proven beyond reasonable doubt, in my view—the infant son of Laius and Jocasta, abandoned to die to prevent the prophecy. He killed Laius in a dispute on the road years before and later married his mother, Jocasta. Jocasta is so distressed that she commits suicide. Oedipus is so overcome with despair that he blinds himself with the pins from her dress and insists that he bear the full punishment for all that has happened. He is exiled. Creon takes charge of the city temporarily and Oedipus's daughters, Antigone and Ismene, grieve over their father's fate.
Of course, the play has been read in many and various ways. It is a drama, not a treatise. But I want to focus on the most basic structural feature of the story because it echoes many myths told to confirm the guilt of someone accused of a crime.
In the absence of a fair and careful judicial process, especially during a time of tremendous instability and uncertainty, a troubled group of people wants not facts and truth but consensus.
One of the strange features of Oedipus’s story is that he is absolutely in agreement with his doom. He sees himself as undeniably guilty. This is what makes his exile seem reasonable. This is what makes it look like justice really has been done. But we should slow down for a minute and take a much closer look at the evidence. If only our politicians here in South Africa, blind false prophets, the lot of them, would do the same.
Let’s start at the beginning. There is a plague. This is Thebes’s fate. René Girard refers to plagues as symbols of mimetic crisis; that is, of perpetual discord in a group of people. Mimetic crisis is a situation where the social structures, hierarchies, and values that normally mediate and control mimetic desire (or imitation) break down. Because of this mimetic chaos, conflict escalates and so does violence. In stable societies, mimetic desire, referring to our natural capacity for emulation, helps to generate meaning and purpose in society, and thus also steers clear of potential conflicts (or, at least, keeps all conflicts to a minimum). When these ordinary, harmonising mediating structures fail or are weakened, desires become undifferentiated. Everyone starts to want what everyone else wants, pretty much at random. There is a lot of flip-flopping as minds are changed and actions become increasingly haphazard.
Without clear social distinctions or rules to manage these desires, mimetic desire spirals out of control. This is the significance of the term crisis in Girard’s phrase mimetic crisis. A decision must be made to counteract the erosion of social differentiation, which leads everyone to become both a model and a rival. However, the inability to make a decision is one of the defining features of this situation of undifferentiated desire. The vortex of imitation and rivalry will not be easily calmed.
It will not be calmed, that is, unless the community can direct all of its wild and wasted energy—its collective violence—onto something other: a scapegoat. If we read the myth of Oedipus in light of all of this, it makes existential (if not quite philosophical) sense: Oedipus is designated as the culprit behind the plague by Creon’s accusation, following the Oracle at Delphi. Scapegoating him by exiling him from the city thus serves as the indication that justice is done at last. At last, Laius’s murderer has been found and punished! Remember the Oracle’s prophecy: all will be well if Laius’s murderer can be found.
And yet, at the heart of Sophocles’s play is a series of facts that make this conclusion worrying. Most obviously, there is no causal link between the murder of Laius and the plague. Not even a tiny link. How, honestly, can something completely unrelated to the plague be the solution to the plague itself? But then, beyond this, there are ambiguities around Laius’s death that make designating Oedipus as his killer uncertain. Of course, this latter fact is one of the things that scholars debate. Many agree that Oedipus is guilty and many don’t. But even this fact suggests something at the heart of the entire non-Freudian Oedipal complex. What we have is a mental connection, not a factual, causal connection. We are looking at the selection of a scapegoat based on a denial of the truth. Vibes have been confused with thinking.
There is an ancient wisdom in separating accusation from guilt that is lost in Sophocles’s play, although Sophocles retrieves this wisdom somewhat, as Girard points out, in his play Antigone. Everyone in the Oedipus story is at the mercy of the drug of immediacy. Everyone must have an answer, even if it is the wrong answer. They clutch their answer so tightly that they don’t take a moment to open their hands and look at it to determine whether it is the answer they need.
Here’s the crucial detail that relates to the South African situation. We have a group of people on the margins who have, among other things, pointed out that it is wrong to have racist laws. They have also noted the many obvious and many less obvious crimes of the ruling party, the African National Congress. And yet they have been accused of being racists, of being treasonous, and even of wanting to be in power again. When you just look at the bare facts, none of the accusations make sense.
But—and this is the crucial bit—the accusations keep coming. Again: In the absence of a fair and careful judicial process, especially during a time of tremendous instability and uncertainty, a troubled group of people wants not facts and truth but consensus. The accusations are attempts to generate a mimetic consensus. They are attempting to manufacture, through social pressure, a sense—a false sense—of unanimity. In the absence of justice, illusory justice becomes the goal. They think that if everyone can just agree that the Afrikaners and Afriforum (and other white people) are to blame for the country’s woes, for instance, rather than the constant theft, waste, and incompetence of the people in power, then everything will be okay.
The magnificent enemy of this consensus is found in one of the most surprising features of the South African nation. It is still, in its majority, a Christian country. Of course, this Christianity is thoroughly syncretistic—a blend of liberal ideology and consumerism and ancestral religion and image-curation and hype but also with definite hints of something older and truer. If the victimage mechanism we find in the Oedipus story is to be obliterated, it is the older and truer story that needs to intensify and take root to infiltrate every corner of this nation. It needs to find new life if we are to transcend the current slide into totalitarianism.
As René Girard argues in his work, we cannot but notice that Oedipus is innocent because of the revelation of the Christian Gospels, which are at work in us even if we are not consciously aware of it. Christianity draws attention to the fact that we aren’t getting justice when we create victims. In the Gospel story, we follow the life of the Word Made Flesh, God-Incarnate, the most perfect man to have ever walked the face of this planet. And in the end, he is crucified—deemed guilty even though he is innocent. He is innocent and yet he takes on the sins of the world. He submits to be the one to absorb and overcome all that is evil in all of us. As the saviour of the world he is victimised, of course, but he refuses to play the part of the victim and instead plays the only part he can play, which is to live out what he is as true God and true man.
Throughout his story, we see this pattern. Everything he touches, or that touches him, is healed and made whole. When the woman with a severe illness that has affected her for over a decade touches the hem of his coat, she is immediately healed. When he touches where a Roman soldier’s ear has been cut off, the soldier’s ear grows back. He casts out demons and teaches what is true, good, and beautiful against lies and hypocrisy. Even the words in his mouth are more whole than those in anyone else’s. His words heal too. Even Jesus’s baptism is, as St. John Chrysostom says, less a symbol of him being washed by water than of him washing the waters clean by his touch. In all of this, there is a deep recognition of a primary metaphysical lack in all of us that does not exist in Christ. This lack in us and the world cannot be healed by causing damage elsewhere. No plague is solved by ritual sacrifice. The power to heal must be actualised by a greater power, a more profound wholeness, and a truer actuality. Brokenness can only be fixed by what is not broken. A temporary catharsis brought about by sacrificing a victim will not fix a mimetic crisis in the long term. You can crucify Christ but what heals is not your part in his murder but his resurrection and his forgiveness.
Jesus, the scapegoat, is innocent; and so he draws our attention to the innocence of all victims who have been merely arbitrarily picked. Jesus touches death when he is executed, and then even death is transformed into that out of which life can erupt. Even that unfathomable horror becomes a home for the lost, the last, the least, the little, and the dead. Jesus takes the sin of the world upon himself and thus exposes the very mechanism that many trust to restore unity in a time of division and mimetic crisis. He shows us that when you pick on someone or some group of people for no other reason than that you can find no other way to direct your life, you do not create the unity and harmony you seek. You only deepen the mimetic crisis. You make things worse. You further division and you escalate violence.
Oedipus, in contrast, shows us a mythic consciousness. It is the consciousness that would seek to blame a man who got caught up in a very nasty business through no plan of his own. Against this, Christianity shows us that this mythic consciousness can fall to pieces simply when you expose the malice, envy, and rivalry that drives it. You can disarm the scapegoating mechanism by refusing self-serving unanimity and favouring truth.
This all suggests the primary way to resist propaganda. First, notice who is getting scapegoated. Second, assume that the scapegoat has been arbitrarily selected simply for standing out a little too much. Third, point out that the scapegoat is innocent. Fourth, seek out truth and justice. Name actual causes. It helps to have a story front and centre that does not capitulate to the usual way things work. “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified,” says St. Paul (1 Corinthians 2:2). In reality, scapegoating propaganda simply cannot work if unanimity is not achievable. And so it should be the mission of every truth seeker, both in South Africa and where others are concerned about what’s happening in South Africa, to help the mythic consciousness die. The myth needs to give way to something far better: a realisation that you cannot achieve anything higher without the help of what is higher. There is no transcending the human condition without God.
South Africa certainly is in the midst of a mimetic crisis. It is obvious that in the midst of this, many of low character are trying to re-institute the ancient violent sacred order—much as Hitler tried to do when he scapegoated the Jews and much as Stalin tried to do when he scapegoated those who weren’t in line with his views. My advice to my friends in South Africa, even the atheists, would be to remind people of the Christian story that destroys the hold of the mythic. The victimisation of the Afrikaner and white minority, in particular, is likely to continue. But, so far, there are signs that this story is already losing its grip. What Jesus did is model the right approach for all of us, aware that the cost of going against the crowd is often the same as when you agree with what they’re doing to you. You might get killed. But Jesus did not act like a victim. Not once. The king of the world refused to act like a victim. If you are maltreated, you can conquer simply by not agreeing with those who mistreat you. You can conquer even if you are defeated.