I fact-checked Michael Schmidt’s autobiography, and it’s worse than we thought…
Who’s dreaming of a white genocide?
by Alexander Reid Ross
Confirmation Bias
In an expose published across five installments in October, Joshua Stephens and I provided evidence revealing South African anarchist writer Michael Schmidt as a closet white nationalist and racist with a grab-bag of tropes ranging from “white genocide” to a “proper Boerestaat.” Schmidt, a popular radical author who has sold some 4,000 copies of his book, Black Flame, co-authored by Lucien van der Walt, fired back by saying we had “confirmation bias,” and were cherry picking the bad pieces, rather than weighing his entire oeuvre. He provided an extended autobiography, some 55 pages in length, in which he attempted to bury the evidence we provided in a mountain of largely irrelevant material, bolstered by a mind-numbing list of his own prior works. Once you strip away the distracting noise, though, Schmidt’s defense relies on two main points: 1) He has written many anarchist articles and 2) much of his mainstream journalism makes use of the decade’s worth of “research” he allegedly conducted among fascists and white nationalists.
I addressed his first defense in my last article on the topic. His anarchist writings were never in question: the problem is that, in the usual style of National Anarchists, third positionists, and other neo-fascists, he has sought to combine anarchist ideas with those of fascists and white supremacists. It is the right-wing side of this equation that matters. So the pages of his defense that are devoted to his anarchist pedigree — including the long list of related articles — are mostly beside the point.
What I am now interested in, and what I will deal with here, is his second defense: namely, he provided a list of some 144 articles, reports, interviews, and documents that he says are anti-racist and make obvious use of the information he gathered while supposedly “posing” as a fascist on various right-wing bulletin boards, blogs, and social media pages. This claim is patently, almost pathetically, untrue.
Providing too much detail is a tell-tale sign that someone is lying. It serves to confuse people, but it is also one of the liar’s greatest weaknesses, because those details can be checked. In this case, I decided to do precisely what Schmidt hoped no one would bother doing: I looked up the articles he so compulsively listed to see if they proved what he said they do. They do not.
Schmidt arranged his list of articles (most without links) in two broad categories: 1) “my journalistic writings on the white far right and the overlapping milieu of former apartheid security forces apparatchiks,” which he said were all “very unsympathetic” and 2) “my anarchist writings.” Again, I will be concerned mainly with the first, but I will also consider some of his anarchist material when I think it sheds additional light the subject of Schmidt’s real motives.
Schmidt listed 77 mainstream articles in his defense. Of these, I was able to track down 36, or almost half. First of all, many of these concern what he refers to as the “overlapping milieu” of former apartheid government and security officials. While these people are certainly right-wing in a certain sense, none of Schmidt’s articles about them rely on any research of the white nationalist fringes within which he immersed himself. Schmidt’s argument here would be like an American journalist claiming that he went undercover in the Wolves of Vinland or the Asatru Folk Assembly in order to write objective, run-of-the-mill journalistic articles about the CIA and court cases involving former government officials. None of these articles justify Schmidt’s claims — they utilize no research among the far right, nor are they even particularly “unsympathetic.”
Here is a sample. Judge for yourself if any of them required creating an alter ego on Stormfront, or a white nationalist organization:
2005, “Easy money lures SA men to work as mercenaries in Iraq”
2005, “Scorpions waiting for freed mercenaries”
2007, “Charge me if you dare” says FW de Klerk on his apartheid past”
2007, “Adriaan Vlok denies he drew up apartheid death squad hit-list”
Other articles that Schmidt lists are even more dubious, mainly because they seem to express sympathy for racist whites in South Africa.
In “‘Vigilante’ farmers expose Zim refugees,” which is about white paramilitaries scouring the countryside for Zimbabwean refugees, Schmidt rejects the notion that they are racist “vigilantes.” Although most of the media, as well as organizations like South African Human Rights Commission, claimed that these white farmers were, in fact, “hunting” black Zimbabweans, Schmidt writes warmly of their motives, saying that they “expressed not only their concern about stock theft and fence-cutting, which they attributed to the influx of refugees, but also emphasized that a humanitarian crisis was snowballing in the region.” The article takes such a warm tone toward the South African equivalent of the Minutemen that it was published in full on Stormfront by a South African white nationalist curiously named “Michellemans.”
In another equally telling example called “Lion Killer Phones Mother,” published in April 2007, Schmidt’s autobiography presents with this synopsis: “Scott-Crossley, the man who threw a black worker to be eaten by lions, languishes in jail.” While Schmidt implies that his article tackles, and presumably condemns, such a heinous racist act, the reality is almost the opposite. He has produced a fairly sympathetic “human-interest” story that is not about that act and contains no mention of the far right. It is not about the white murderer languishing in jail, but about the fact that the body of the man’s sister (who was abducted years ago) may have been found, and how he and his family are hoping for closure.
Remember, Schmidt has offered these as proof of his antiracism and of the reason he rubbed shoulders with fascists for ten years. Nothing I saw justified such claims. The articles were generally tame, superficial, and not particularly good journalism. A significant number held racist positions explicitly sympathetic to conservative or even fascist whites. There was, for instance, the article that Schmidt, in his autobiography, claimed was about the fact that “after a long battle, an AWB farmer finally agrees to sell farm to his black neighbours.” It sounds almost heart-warming. Since the AWB is a fascist group, Schmidt is implying that he has written something sympathetic to black South Africans who are standing up to the legacy of white supremacy. Yet read the article, “Farmer sells land to black neighbors,” and you will discover that the fascist is described as an “elderly farmer” who is “old and sickly,” and unable to stand up to the threatened violence of the blacks who demanded he vacate his land “or be forced off.”
Only one of the 36 articles in question was about the post-apartheid white far right that Schmidt claimed to be researching with his Stormfront account. That particular article is telling, and it’s worth taking a moment to examine it in closer detail.
Schmidt’s article, “SA Faces Thug Threat at 2010 World Cup,” is about the possibility of white supremacist and neo-nazi soccer hooligans descending on South Africa for the World Cup. He warns against this occurrence, and notes that police will be on the lookout. On his Stormfront profile, KarelianBlue, he also writes about the World Cup, but there, he encourages white supremacists to descend on South Africa, openly rejecting the implementation of a boycott proposed by David Duke. He declares, “I agree with Dr. Duke on most things, but as a white South African… I suggest that instead, white nationalists flood the SA during the World Cup in order to: 1. Experience the country first-hand; 2. Meet fellow white nationalists and establish lifelong personal relationships; 3 Demonstrate your support for the whites at the games by wearing white nationalist gear and flying Boer, Lebensrune and other white nationalist flags[.]” If Schmidt had been using his Stormfront page for research, he would have reported that white nationalists were actually planning to boycott the World Cup. Instead, he used his Stormfront page to compel white nationalists to reject the David Duke-supported boycott and “flood the SA.”
Reverse Racism and Genocide
While Schmidt did not use his mainstream reporting to convey the secrets of the post-apartheid white far right in South Africa that he had allegedly been researching on Stormfront since 2006, he did spill an immense amount of ink over the perceived crisis of reverse racism. In fact, close to one third of his published mainstream articles foreground “genocide” carried out by black people or explicitly denounce “black racism” or “Bantu racism,” going so far as to compare the African National Congress to the Nazis. Here’s a sample:
2004, “Refugees escape to a hell of our making,” chock full of claims of “black racism.”
2006, “Attacks on Somalis are put down to jealousy and racism,” he writes that “there is a strong sense of Bantu racism behind the murders” of Somalis in South Africa.
2007, “Echo of Pol Pot in Mugabe’s wasteland”
2009, “Massacre as a Tool of the African State”
2011, “Keeping the Public’s Interest at Heart,” compares the ANC to the Nazis
2013, “Nelson Mandela: Reappraisal of an Icon,” beware the “de facto racist strain within the ANC”
2015, “It’s not a phobia, the crime is genocide,” claims that the xenophobic riots were carried out by mobs of black “génocidaires” in South Africa
He seems particularly fixated on anti-immigrant riots that swept South Africa in 2008, calling them “pogroms.” The normal human rights narrative explains that these riots were caused by black South Africans taking their frustration about an economic crisis out on perceived economic competition embodied by immigrants from Somalia, Kenya, and Mozambique, among other places. However, Schmidt goes so far as to call the perpetrators “génocidaires” in an op-ed for the Daily Star, insisting that they be tried on charges of “terrorism.” The same language calling black South Africans “génocidaires” can be found in his Stormfront posts about the same “xenophobic pogroms,” as well as the killing of fascist leader Eugene Terre’Blanche of the AWB, revealing the fact that Schmidt’s Stormfront profile in no way deviates from his publicly held opinions — even in his most mainstream articles.
Articles in Radical Publications
Since so many of Schmidt’s mainstream articles are, in fact, sympathetic to white farmers, providing the opposite of anti-racist analysis in several key places, it is difficult to see how Schmidt’s public reputation could pass for anything approximating anti-racism. It is worthwhile, then, to take an eye to his radical works, of which he has presented some 67 articles. Of those 67 articles, I was able to locate and examine 44: roughly 66 percent, or two thirds.
Of this larger sample, perhaps unsurprisingly since his audience is more radical, a smaller number of articles noticeably foreground accusations of “reverse racism” or genocide committed by black people. Only 7 of the 44, or 16 percent. On the other hand, the number of radical articles dealing with the white far right that he allegedly had researched through Stormfront is a similarly miniscule proportion: only two. The first instance of a connection is more indirect; the definition of national anarchism in the review of Maia Ramnath’s work, “South Asian Paths to Praxis,” in which he denies that national anarchism is fascist. The second instance is even more indirect than that.
In an article called “The Neo-Makhnovist Revolutionary Project in Ukraine,” published last December about a Ukrainian Makhnovist group Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists — “N.I. Makhno” (RKAS), Schmidt defends a martial arts expert and faction leader who goes by the name “Samurai” against charges of national anarchism:
The nameless IWA correspondent [who made the claim] went further in their accusations, however, reporting that public debates took place between RKAS militants and ‘neo-fascists’ in the city of Voronezh, adding the news of the “participation of its [RKAS] representatives [in the] Kiev Congress of National-‘Communists’ and National-‘Anarchists’ in the summer of 2012.’ But this may merely demonstrate that RKAS was unafraid to debate its positions with all political factions in order to win the battle of ideas and create militants — in its Programme, the RKAS position was explicit, that its militants undertook to ‘fight against nationalism in all its manifestations, against fascism, militarism, clericalism and other anti-human movements and phenomena.’ Hardly the position of an organisation friendly to national-Bolshevism or national-anarchism.
So, Schmidt claims that participation in a fascist conference can be chalked up to fighting against nationalism. In a comment to the article, someone calling themselves “granarchist” links to another comment thread on an interview with “Samurai,” where a person going by the name “akai” who claims to have been close friends with Samurai states that the RKAS “has vertical elements and acts like a cult.”
Granarchist notes that that “Several other anarchists who know the organisations and struggles in the area well have observations similar to akai’s about the machismo and creeping nationalism inherent in RKAS.” Granarchist goes on to challenge Schmidt further, asking, “Also, why is it that this author circles around national anarchism, ‘clanism’ and the like so often? Even the National Anarchism page on Wikipedia cites him favourably, and his review of Maia Ramnath’s book, also published on this site, speaks in almost glowing terms of national anarchists… a bit sketchy if you ask me!”
Schmidt responds to Granarchist, stating that, while akai is able to read cyrillic and travel through the area, “what I *have* done that Akai has not is to cite RKAS texts from very recent times that in their detailed content describe a movement that is clearly and unequivocably [sic] anarchist, and that is totally opposed to capitalism and nationalism. If those text [sic] are a true reflection of RKAS’s ideology but in practice RKAS acts as Akai and the IWA writer describe, then I’d have to agree the organisation has a split personality and is deeply problematic. But I have taken the opportunity to play devil’s advocate here in defence of a sister organisation; I hope I am not proven wrong.”
In this case, Schmidt awkwardly defends “Samurai,” an activist clearly engaged in a militantly hierarchical organization and involved in the fascist movement, by pointing simply to doctrine against the lived experience of real people. That he ironically points to the possibility of a “split personality” at the same time as he was engaged with Stormfront illustrates the kind of extreme duplicity involved.
The only other article pointing to the white far right in Schmidt’s radical repertoire is an earlier article called “Collective Bargaining by Riot” from December 2006, which holds a neutral, if not positive, view of the extremist Freedom Front Plus Party. Written about rioting taking place around election time, the article presents Afrikaner separatism as an alternative to violence and corruption associated with black people. “From Houghton, I drove north-east to the small diamond-mine and prison town of Cullinan to the east of Pretoria,” Schmidt reports. “There, the local Freedom Front Plus branch — Afrikaner seperatists [sic] — was hoping to oust the incumbent Democratic Alliance neo-liberals from the Nokeng tsa Taemane Municipality. The ANC won, but the only real excitement on the day was when Afrikaner singer Valiant Swart happened to pass through town.” This strangely ambivalent comment about conservative Afrikaner separatism providing the backdrop to an exciting and fun alternative to rioting elsewhere marks a strange divergence in the article that highlights his history voting for the Freedom Front Plus Party and advocating a “proper Boerestaat.”
Conclusion
So, reviewing the 80 or so articles that I was able to locate and examine out of the 145 presented by Schmidt (with some repetition), I could not confirm or corroborate his statements to the effect that his articles were “all very unsympathetic.” The evidence did not show that Michael Schmidt’s Stormfront account had been used for research purposes. In fact, the evidence further confirmed that Schmidt is a white nationalist, due to repeated emphasis on “reverse racism” and “genocidaires,” as well as sympathetic articles on white paramilitaries, racist white farmers, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, and the Freedom Front Plus Party.
Why is this worse than we thought? My co-author and I believed that Schmidt used his mainstream press credentials to promote himself as an anti-racist journalist, while seeding his white nationalist ideas in a radical counterculture more vulnerable to his clever insinuations. After weighing 80 articles by Schmidt for both mainstream and radical press, I found that his articles consistently advanced perceived threats of “reverse racism” and black-led genocide where it served his own well-publicized fear of a coming “Boer genocide” and the necessity for a “proper Boerestaat.” In short, he was far more open and public about his racism than we initially suspected. His autobiography, then, served not as some kind of exculpation, but as a chilling self-indictment, and confirmation of our worst fears.
