The Power Of Christ Compels Me...Wait, What??

What does being a man of God, overthrowing a government, and murdering thousands of Black people have in common? Nothing, as it turns out.

I don’t know about you, but when I see the word “Pastor” in front of someone’s name, I think of someone dedicated to peace, spreading the word of God, and making the world a better place. I think of someone committed to living a Christ-like life and ministering to the spiritual needs of others.

What most definitely doesn’t come to mind is a man who’s plotted to overthrow a government and kill thousands of Black people because he hates them and sees them as a threat to White hegemony. That seems, at the very least, very unChristian.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A South African court has convicted a pastor of plotting to overthrow the government and to kill thousands of Black people in the country.

Harry Johannes Knoesen, 61, a leader of the National Christian Resistance Movement, was on Monday found guilty of high treason, incitement to carry out violent attacks, and recruiting people to commit attacks.

Knoesen’s group explored the possibility of using a biological weapon to infect and kill Black people, including the poisoning of water reservoirs supplying Black communities, according to the prosecution.

Knoesen was also found guilty of unlawful possession of firearms by the Middelburg High Court. Weapons and ammunition were found when he was arrested in Middelburg, a small town in the eastern Mpumalanga province.

Call me cynical, but it’s odd that a man of God would conspire to overthrow the South African government and kill thousands of Black people. I don’t remember learning about that flavor of political violence and genocide in the New OR Old Testament during my Sunday School years.

Yes, I’m an atheist, but even I know that “turn the other cheek” didn’t mean exploring “the possibility of using a biological weapon to infect and kill Black people.”

And since when do “highly racial views” and “religious grounds” belong in the same sentence?

The state alleged that Knoesen’s plot was motivated by his “highly racial views” and that he sought to justify his beliefs on religious grounds, claiming that he was ordained to “reclaim South Africa for white people.”

“To further this end, he planned to attack government institutions and more specifically police and military institutions,” Monica Nyuswa, a spokeswoman for the National Prosecuting Authority, told The Associated Press.

Knoesen had allegedly identified targets- townships and communities inhabited by Blacks- where he and his group could poison water supplies and kill large numbers.

His plan also involved attacking government institutions to overturn South Africa’s democratic system and restore White rule.

Knoesen allegedly used social media platform Facebook to incite violence against Black people and to recruit former members of South Africa’s military to join his movement and to carry out the planned attacks. These were foiled when he was arrested in November 2019 and the cells in various parts of the country were dismantled.

In his testimony, Knoesen admitted to sharing “recipes” to manufacture explosives with his followers on Facebook, according to the Middelburg Observer newspaper.

Did Knoesen not understand that Facebook is a public forum and that anything shared on social media never disappears?

I don’t think this is what Mark Zuckerberg had in mind as he was sitting in his Harvard dorm room working on what would eventually morph into what we now know as Facebook.

Unsurprisingly, Pastor Knoesen’s National Christian Resistance Movement is hardly the first movement intended to bring down South African democracy and restore apartheid.

In 2013, 20 members of the right-wing white supremacy group known as the Boeremag were sentenced to prison for plotting to kill South Africa’s first Black president Nelson Mandela, overthrow the government and kill thousands of Black people.

They were handed sentences ranging from five to 35 years following a 10-year treason trial, one of the longest in the country’s history.

That group, like Knoesen’s, was opposed to South Africa’s democracy which brought an end to apartheid, the country’s regime of white minority rule that ended with the first democratic elections in 1994 which elected Mandela president.

Here in America, we don’t get a lot of news about South Africa, and if you ask people what they know about the country, you’ll get a lot of blank stares. That’s understandable; South African affairs have long been considered irrelevant to our own experience.

Outside of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, South Africa, being far away in the Southern Hemisphere, may as well be a world away. Its politics and history don’t impact us directly, but it has a rich history that long predates our own. And the vast majority of that history is Black, something that Pastor Harry Knoesen wishes to erase.

South Africa is where virtually everything the White man possesses was stolen from the Black man. Pastor Harry Knoesen believes that to be the proper order of things, even if it requires violence and genocide to restore apartheid.

Even 28 years after Nelson Mandela was elected President, some whites still resent having lost their stranglehold on power. Even though they were and remain a pronounced minority, they continue to believe they were and, by rights, should remain the rightful rulers of South Africa. If they have to commit genocide and overthrow a government for that to happen, so be it.

When you view Black people as subhuman and unworthy of ruling South Africa, you can do that.

That an ordained minister, a man of God and someone allegedly committed to leading a Christ-like life, was leading the movement seems hypocritical. But, if you’re willing to commit genocide “in the name of God and South Africa,” you have problems far more significant than your relationship with God.

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