Oom Eugene's Symbolism & ‘White Supremacy’ of Military Honour: ‘Pres. Zuma, Do you Want a Race War?’

Way back in 2002-03, I met an incredible man, in a small town in the Northern Cape. He was my boss, and we would have endless political conversations, after work. He had been in the SADF police, on the Namibian border as a sharpshooter, a member of the Presidential VIP guard who guarded P.W. Botha and a member of the AWB. He was also an assassin for hire, about one of the 14 best assassins in South Africa at the time; so good he was occassionally hired by no less than the Freemasons. He was one of the most interesting and gentlemanly men I have ever met; but he was also someone whom I would never cross. This is a common theme I have found with honourable men; they do not hide who they are, they look you in the eye -- eyeball-to-eyball as Ollie North would call it -- and tell you their opinion, to your face. The only lawyers I have ever come across who value honour, are military lawyers. Honourable men, from what I can gather, live in accordance with the principles of a military code of honour: chivalry.

But if we strip chivalry of its romantic overtones and literary hyperbole, we find a code of conduct that held currency among the military elite of the era. At the core of this code stood an ideal that was certainly not characteristic to the Middle Ages alone: ‘[c]hivalry was often no more, and no less, than the sentiment of honour in its medieval guise.’ Thus to speak of chivalry is to speak of a military code of honour, which already sounds far less archaic. Honour, moreover, has played a key role in military thinking over millenia, so it does not seem out of place to talk about it with reference to modern warfare.

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