During the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans distributed a propaganda poster with the picture of a dead child in front of group of bombers. The slogan read, “If you tolerate this, your children will be next.” That situation now applies to South Africa, as the fate of white people around the world is linked to that of the Afrikaners.

Last month, the black-majority South African parliament voted overwhelmingly for the confiscation of white land without compensation. The motion was brought by radical racialist Julius “Kiddie Amin” Malema of the Marxist EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) party, who has threatened to “cut the throat of whiteness,” among other things. Whites, already under siege in a deteriorating, dangerous country, are staring down the barrel of massive, legally sanctioned theft which could set off even greater conflict.

The obvious comparison is to Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe undertook a similar effort. Productive white farms were expropriated and given to blacks who didn’t know how to run them. Whites fled, the economy tanked, the currency hyperinflated, and the “breadbasket of Africa” became one of Africa’s worst basket cases. Mr. Mugabe is out of power thanks to a recent coup, but the country may never recover. Rather than serving as an example of black self-sufficiency, Zimbabwe today is dependent on China and may become a de facto colony.

Yet Zimbabwe, with a population around 16 million, is small enough to be kept on life support by injections of food aid and foreign currency. South Africa, with 60 million people, is a different story. If whites go, there will be no one capable of feeding the hungry multitudes. South Africa already faces massive power outages, collapsing infrastructure, and now a severe water shortage, with Cape Town poised to run out of water next month. All of this is due to two decades of destructive decisions by an incompetent looter government. Does the African National Congress/EFF coalition think that manna will rain from heaven for the Xhosa and Zulu once the productive white farmers are gone?

Indeed, the white farmers are already going. Farm murders, a fact of life since F.W. de Klerk and his jelly-spined negotiators awarded power to Nelson Mandela’s racial Marxists, are driving out the Boers. The murder rate for white farmers is higher than for any other segment of the population. Many of the whites who can leave have already done so. They are professionals, doctors, scientists, and accountants, or those who married an Australian girl or got an ancestry passport thanks to an English grandmother.

The whites who cannot get out are the descendants of the original Voortrekkers — the pioneers who laid the foundations of South Africa. They are speakers of Afrikaans, a child of the Old Dutch spoken by the original colonists like Jan van Riebeeck. It is a wonderful, robust language full of earthly beauty, tied to the veld and the vast skies and spaces of South Africa. Heroes sprang forth from the Afrikaner nation: illustrious names such as Trigardt, Pretorius, Smuts, Botha, De Wet, and De La Rey.

The fighting spirit of their ancestors must be stirred again if the whites are to survive. Their forefathers surmounted odds no less fearful. Now the wheel of destiny has turned to them. I know of no better folk; the South African epitomizes the best of whiteness, from the tough, resourceful, rugby-playing manhood to the guileless yet intelligent pioneers, similar to their colonial cousins in Australia and New Zealand. The womenfolk are steely, resolute, protective and beautiful, many boasting clear blue eyes and golden hair. This tribe, surely, must not pass from the Earth.

Yet though whites are being targeted, it is blacks who may lose the most once food production collapses, as the resulting outflows of refugees will destabilize already shaky states like Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique. While it is important to avoid sensationalism, there is now a realistic chance that southern Africa could descend into chaos.

The Afrikaners are not the only tribe which will be lost if the region turns to anarchy. There are other South African tribes worth fighting for. There are the Coloureds, a mixed-race nation concentrated around Cape Town. Afrikaans-speaking, their history stretches back to a time before the white man’s entry, when the Khoi hunted the empty lands alongside the San (Bushmen). There are the Indians of the Eastern Cape, descendants of South Asian immigrants. There are the kingdoms of Swaziland and Lesotho. All stand to lose, and quite likely perish, if the ANC project is taken to its ultimate conclusion.

“What is to be done?” to quote Lenin. What can whites around the world do for their South African brethren? For starters, dismiss any romantic ideas of International Brigades or Western military intervention. After all, no European nation helped Zimbabwe’s whites, and media pressure against such moves would be immense. Many South Africans have floated the idea of a breakaway majority-white state in the Western Cape, but such a state is unlikely to have any international backing and does not (yet) have much domestic support.

Despite this pessimistic outlook, however, there are concrete steps which can be taken:

1) Put grassroots pressure on Western governments and politicians to respond to the humanitarian crisis. Australia’s home affairs minister Peter Dutton is already entertaining giving South Africa’s white farmers access to fast-track visas on humanitarian grounds. Advocating for white South African farmers is well within the realm of practical politics. Writing letters, sending emails, and making phone calls to senators, congressmen, presidents, and ministers costs little, and is proven to be a highly effective tactic, as shown by organizations such as Numbers USA. Whites need to overcome their apathy and speak out.

2) Spread the word to other whites. Many whites are simply unaware of what is happening in South Africa. They have been fed a diet of misinformation and media lies for decades. However, thanks largely to the internet, more information is available today than in the 1980s, when a handful of media outlets could broadcast nonstop calumnies against the Afrikaners. Independent journalist Lauren Southern has done some sterling recent work on South Africa this year with her important “Farmlands” documentary. Her work should be shared and supported and is ideal for reaching those who don’t know what is happening in the country. Whites outside South Africa must be made to realize that what is happening to whites in that country could soon be happening to them if current trends continue.

3) Provide financial and material support to whites in South Africa. Few of us can be big-money billionaire donors like Sheldon Adelson, or command vast armies and resources like Vladimir Putin. But even the poorest among us can pledge a few dollars a month to an organization like the Suidlanders. Every dollar counts, and this kind of tangible support makes a real difference. We need to demonstrate our solidarity with more than just words.

The gravity of the situation in South African cannot be overstated, and not just whites, but all people in the region are at risk. The specter of genocide is very real, as the hate and dehumanization campaign against whites is extreme. It may begin with the expropriation of property and hateful rhetoric, but it may culminate in mass violence or the flight of an entire people.

South African whites need “a friend that sticketh closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24). The Afrikaner has always been marked by a devout, fundamentalist, Biblical Christian faith, which sustained him in the darkest of times. May God be with him — and us — in our struggle together.