The War in South Africa

John Atkinson Hobson's prophetic book, first published in 1900, describes in clinical detail the lies, deception, underhanded maneuverings, false propaganda which lay behind the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1889.

Hobson's book reveals the trail of lies in the build-up to that war. These included faked "atrocity" propaganda, faked allegations of Boer barbarity, corruption, maladministration, and the deliberate distortions and double-crossing in the "negotiations" which preceded the war.

Hobson even shows how the lies also included fake stories of "Boer armament build-ups" which were portrayed as evidence of the "Boer threat" to British interests.

He also spends time explaining how these allegations were spread across the English-speaking world. They were generated, he proves, in the newsrooms of the anti-Boer "newspapers" in Johannesburg, and sent by telex to London, from where they were fed into the major English language newspapers, conservative and liberal-aligned alike, where they were faithfully repeated without question.

In this way, Hobson proves, an atmosphere of hatred against the Boer Republics was engendered, and the British public were incited into supporting armed intervention in a nation on another continent which posed no threat to Britain at all.

Finally, Hobson reveals the true source behind the anti-Boer agitation and incitement to war: the powerful Jewish lobby in South Africa, who he openly calls the "Jew-Imperialists." This Jewish lobby, Hobson shows, owned not only the mineral and trading wealth of the Transvaal Boer republic, but also the major media outlets in Johannesburg, which generated the false propaganda against Paul Kruger's isolated and ultimately inoffensive state.

He is also biting about South Africa's racial policies, pointing out that the reliance on nonwhite labor would ultimately cause the death of white rule in that country.

This brand-new edition has been completely reset and updated with annotations to inform present-day readers of all references to persons and events mentioned in the book. In addition, it also contains a new short history of the course of the Second Anglo-Boer war as a backgrounder.