A few years back, several of us here at TPOL had the opportunity to work with a number of Boer farmers. In Eastern Colorado, of all places.

The Boers, of course, are descendants of Dutch settlers in what is now Sued Afrika: better known today as Afrikaaners in part for how their dialect of Dutch has drifted in almost 400 years. Many of them, like British colonials in the 1600s and 1700s, and Australian “immigrants” in the 1700s and 1800s, fled from persecution in the Netherlands (as British-American and British-Australians fled from Britain). Or were “transported” as criminals.

Today, we see that potential again, as the EU authorizes/orders the Dutch government to forcibly buy out 3,000 Dutch farmers and eliminate their livestock production, together with milk and cheese and everything else. Why? To prevent/reverse air pollution, or so we are told. Indeed, Her Majesty’s Netherlands government is determined to slash the country’s livestock population by 30% — to meet European Union targets for nitrogen-oxide pollution.

You may have heard that Dutch farmers staged huge protests last summer… but apparently to no effect. After all, even in the Netherlands, farmers are a very, very small percentage of the electorate. And everyone knows that meat and milk and cheese come from the grocery store – which must import it from third-world countries! But the EU this week approved the Rotterdam’s plans to spend over $1.6 billion to buy out as many as those 3,000 farms. People who support farmers (gee, you think they like to eat?) say the farmers will have no choice but to sell, as are being taxed and regulated so severely.

Is that not crazy? This is a nation that experienced a famine toward the end of the 2nd World War. Today (at least for now) the Netherlands (despite its size) ranks second only to the United States in the value of its farm exports. Many Dutch are incredible farmers who will be welcomed when they emigrate to the UK or the US. (The EU will not let these people go to another EU country to farm.)

Which brings us back to Eastern Colorado. A large family farm operation in the Eastern Plains of Colorado had problems for years finding good, dependable farm workers. Not seasonal fruit pickers like TX or AZ or CA, but for all the things that thousands of acres of cropland and hundreds of head of livestock need. They tried hiring people in Denver and literally some of the hires were out on a highway after the first day of work hitchhiking to get back to Denver and their comfortable lives as welfare parasites.

So the American farmers had a brainstorm, and they started hiring Afrikaaner farmers from South Africa, going through the entire green-card process and all the rest. Afrikaaners are, of course, by definition white people – descendants of the original Boer colonists who settled in the Cape and later Orange State well before any of the modern Black South African tribes (Zulu, especially) migrated south. There were a few nomadic natives in the area, but it was mostly unsettled. Much like Kentucky before the 1760s; lots of tribes might go through and hunt there, but no one lived there for various reasons. Later, the British took over South Africa and conquered both the Boers and the relative newcomers like the Zulu and groups that established kingdoms like Swaziland. So you also have white English people, and of course, mixed-race and a growing number of Indian/Pakistani people.

Since the end of the apartheid White regime, South Africa has quickly deteriorated from a multiracial democracy into a black-ruled “democratic” tyranny. South Africa (like Zimbabwe to the north and apparently the former Portuguese colonies to the east and west have been fighting an internal war against their white populations, particularly the farmers. Farms are confiscated, farmers and families killed, land and other property stolen. It is growing steadily worse.

As a result, many Afrikaaners and English South Africans are seeking places of refuge for themselves and their families. The ones in Eastern Colorado are there to make money both to send home to families and friends but ALSO to buy farmland in Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska to which they can bring their families. Before, they told us, the government and the urban masses kill them to steal what they have left.

It sounds very familiar – and is what the Boers faced, not just with the Great Trek and the Boer War against the British Imperial forces, but also what many of them fled from in Spanish- and Catholic-ruled Low Countries of Europe (today Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as parts of northwestern Germany).

Now it seems that those who did not join their escape to the Cape colonies (and now to the States) will be joining their cousins. The EU is as much a tyranny as British colonial administrations, South Africa’s black rulers (and for that matter, the black rulers of MANY African counries), and even the once-powerful Spanish Empire.