Judgment is being given at last but it is perhaps not the looming sentences that will cut most deeply.

For it is clear that the Boeremag accused – charged with treason, murder and attempted murder, among other offences – are outcasts from their people. Far from having carved a niche in the pantheon of boer heroes, their stupidity has come to define the “dom” in Afrikanerdom.

The critical flaw was the assumption that Afrikaners would rally, much as the embattled boers did around the revered Koos de la Rey during the Boer War. The anniversary of De La Rey’s death was chosen for the planned 2002 uprising that would establish a boer republiek and at least one accused claimed for himself the rank of generaal.

It was all a massive miscalculation. It quickly became apparent there was zero  support from Afrikaners who, though they have plenty of gripes with the ANC, savvily realise that peace, economic growth and the end to their polecat status in the world are preferable to ill-fated insurrections based on the prophecies of a boer Nostradamus of almost a century ago.

When approached for recruitment, Afrikaners serving in the new SANDF fell over themselves to report the planned insurrection. The Boeremag was quickly infiltrated with police spies. Afrikaner spies.

Such  scepticism meant the Boeremag was all officers and no soldiers. A young mechanic recounted how his boss, now one of the accused, one day bustled in, ordered him to raise his right hand and repeat a garbled oath, and then informed him that he was now a solider in the Boeremag. No, he was not, the young man decided, and made himself scarce.

The Boeremag’s goals were incendiary, verging on genocidal. They would trigger the uprising with a calamitous event of 9/11 proportions, following which blacks would be indiscriminately bombed and mowed down.

However crazy, these were not idle fantasies. The  firearms had been collected, the shrapnel-packed bombs assembled, vehicles procured and packed with explosives.

But Boeremag strategies were doomed not only by the indifference of the volk, but by the staggering naiveté of its leaders.

Government fighter planes would be shot down with hunting rifles;  blacks would be herded up the N1 into Zimbabwe, Indians down the N3 to Durban and thence to India; recalcitrant whites would clean up the empty townships or be shot; and draftees were to report for insurrection with firearm, Bible, hymnal, and suntan lotion.

The uprising was to be internally financed. When arrested, all they had rung up was a R30 000 donation from one of the generaals, and promises of revenue from the sale of 40ha of sunflowers and 200 sheep.

This kind of delusional behaviour echoes plans for right-wing insurrection elsewhere in the world. It is brew of racist paranoia, laced with anti-Semitism, peppered with apocalyptic semi-religious visions and leavened by societal misfits with Messianic delusions.

It is a bitter pill then for the Boeremag, that God’s Chosen People of the African veld, in whose name it planned genocide, declined to be rescued. De La Rey, an honourable  warrior, would be pleased.