Johannesburg — THE slaying of Eugene TerreBlanche is a call to arms, but precisely not the call to arms that either he or his mirror image, Julius Malema, would ever issue. His death is a call to arms for the rest of us, the people who are not seduced by their darkest suspicions, the people who still believe in a future that will be not defined first and foremost by race, the people who feel themselves to be the minority but who are actually the majority.

It's a typical South African irony that TerreBlanche, the quintessential Boer, should be killed at the precise time when Malema is trying to whip up Zanu (PF)-style hatred about people he describes as "Boers" - in Zimbabwe. Malema's endorsement of the "Ayesab' Amagwala" song will strike TerreBlanche's benighted supporters not as a historical artefact but as an explicit endorsement of farm killings. It's not, of course. It's just the normal, usual, run-of-the-mill Malema politics at its most typical - pressing into a grey zone with all the delicacy of an elephant intent on gaining notoriety.

The deeper irony is that TerreBlanche and Malema are flip sides of the same coin: their techniques, their style, their general ham-fistedness, their faux-populism, their carefully constructed "outrageousness", their bizarre media appeal, all come from the same political copybook.

The difference is that TerreBlanche's bubble had long ago been pricked, and Malema's appears to be inflating at extraordinary speed, with the bewildered and stunned assistance of the African National Congress's (ANC's) chronic do-nothing culture.

There was a time when TerreBlanche was as feared at Malema is today. He was recognised as "extreme", yet he was also given credence as a tip of the iceberg - a symbol of what Afrikaners would be if they gave in to their fears.

TerreBlanche always styled himself as a "boer", a farmer, but I once visited a real farmer whose farm in the Ventersdorp area neighboured that of TerreBlanche. He told me TerreBlanche was a terrible farmer, and that he generally farmed nothing.

He also noted with a grin that TerreBlanche did not even study agriculture. "Hy was a drama student," he revealed.

Far from representing Afrikaners, TerreBlanche was in fact the opposite of the "nation" he sought to represent; flamboyant, immodest, arrogant, and generally a klutz - all terrible sins among ever-capable, ever-modest, ever-resilient, God-fearing farmers. He even struggled to ride a horse.

It's interesting to recall how TerreBlanche collapsed under the weight of his own falsities. Perhaps this is Malema's ultimate fate. TerreBlanche was caught having an affair with an attractive, blonde journalist, Jani Allan. Within his own movement, the affair was a terrible betrayal; he was married, she was English. So he denied the affair, despite Allan's gushing admission in her Sunday Times column that, "Right now I've got to remind myself to breathe ... I'm impaled on the blue flames of his blowtorch eyes."

His denial rebounded on him, and TerreBlanche's extremism came to be recognised for what it was, a giant paper tiger. TerreBlanche was peddling hatred, and ordinary people may be intrigued, they may attend his meetings. The weak-minded might even be inspired. But it takes special circumstances for hatred to work as political ideology.

One of the things we may have to get used to over the next week or so is the repeated use of that old Marx quote, "history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce". The problem is that although Terre-Blanche's death is a personal tragedy, it is not a political tragedy. It's symbolic not of an attack on farmers, it's an attack on the vulnerable and the isolated everywhere.

Neither is Malema's repetition of the TerreBlanche methodology a farce. It's dangerous because the ANC is so scared of itself that it cannot represent ordinary South Africans who now generally joke about their racial differences. Racial problems and inequalities exist, but race hatred is an indulgence of the extremes that belongs to TerreBlanche's generation. He would do his country its greatest service if he took it with him to his grave.

Cohen is a freelance writer.