by Albert Brenner
It is always so amusing to witness the blatant hypocrisy on display when (the) Slave becomes Master. The Enlightenment philosopher Friedrich Hegel`s masterful little piece, the Master-Slave dialectic, has been the fons et origo of all the various discourses by the Other to claim/gain power.
From Simone de Beauvoir`s First Wave Feminism, Frantz Fanon’s Black Consciousness Movement to the modern Gay and Lesbian Movement, all call on Hegel. It was even the inspiration behind Francis Fukuyama’s rather dull neo-liberal utopianism in his international best-seller The End of History and the Last Man. It is rather trite, but it needs elucidation… especially if one wants to understand the pseudo-intellectual madness underpinning Mandelatopia.
According to Hegel, the Slave first becomes just like the (hated) Master s/he has overthrown. I.e. the former institutes the exact same regime that supported the latter. In subsequent stages, the consciousness of these two antagonists are suppose to fuse – bringing about a “higher plane of Reality” through the synthesis of the thesis (i.e. The Master) and the antithesis (i.e. The Slave).
It suffices to say that this synthesis has never happened. Hegel was a typical German idealist… always dreaming of Utopia. Yet, his dialectic, in itself, exists – and is evident in many spheres of reality, e.g. Anthony Giddens’s Third Way (socialism), as a synthesis between capitalism and communism. As to Hegel’s overt utopianism; Sir Karl Popper dealt it the death-blow with his fantastic book The Poverty of Historicism.
Be that as it may; we can clearly see that the new Master of South Africa, the ANC/SACP/COSATU alliance, has instituted the exact same discriminatory regime as the old NP Apartheid government. Affirmative action, Black Economic Empowerment, race quotas in sport teams, race quotas at universities, et cetera, are the hallmarks of the new Master’s claim to the moral high ground. Like Master, like Slave.
In order to legitimise his/her overt discriminatory regime – the exact same overt discriminatory regime the (hitherto Slave) fought against – s/he must couch it in terms and concepts that deny his/her blatant inherent hypocrisy.
Sigmund Freud sees the above need as a form of guilt assuagement; in terms of the Oedipus recriminations experienced by the Brother Clan once they have killed the Great Patriarch (nudge nudge, Groot Krokodil PW Botha). I mean seriously, one ought to feel guilty, especially as an academic, when one (morally) justifies a regime that is exactly the same as the one that was overthrown… in the name of freeing the oppressed from the oppressor!
The above guilt assuagement in Mandelatopia comes in three forms. Firstly; “re-dressing the wrongs of the past”. The silliness of such an endeavour is obvious. How can one, for example, accurately weigh what needs to be “re-dressed” when the scales were not even to start off with. Blacks in South Africa do have a “default burden”, to borrow a term from artist and activist Steve Hofmeyer. It is a fact that they were pretty much pre-Neolithic in culture till recently. Add to this a (black) population that doubles in size every 30 years then it is physically impossible to “re-dress” anything, even in a remotely fair and just manner.
The second form of guilt assuagement is “healing the wounds of the past”. This nonsense even outshines Scientology… for one can only heal something that was healed in the first place. Never in the history of South Africa has there ever been a “healed” body (politic). The Boers fought the Brits, the Brits fought the Zulus, the Zulus the Shangaans, the Brits the Zulus, et cetera, et cetera. Meaning that endeavouring to “heal” something that was not “whole/healed” in the first place is physically impossible and intellectually dishonest, to say the least.
The third form of guilt assuagement is (the) propagation of, and adherence to, “Whiteness Studies” theory. This has become the intellectual instrument of choice of anti-Afrikaner Afrikaner academics like Piet Croucamp, Anton van Niekerk, Christi van der Westhuizen, Amanda Gouws, et cetera.
It suffices to say that this pseudo-intellectual guano is just a feel-good academic disguise for stripping the (heterosexual) Pale Male of his power… as called for by the father of this nonsense, Noel Ignatiev. His call to “abolish the white race” is nothing but a call for the Master (the heterosexual Pale Male) to be killed by the Slave (the Other), globally.
Okay, enough theory; let us examine how Hegel and Freud’s theories work in practice. Enter the half-wit, Dr Piet Croucamp. Peester Piet (henceforth, PP) first rose to prominence when he threw his lot in with the (hitherto) Slave during a speech by Mandela at the University of Stellenbosch in 1991. According to an article (see picture, click to enlarge) in the Vrye Weekblad of Max du Preez (a useful idiot of George Soros), PP had brawled with some “right-wing” students because they were being “intolerant”.
- “But I get seriously pissed off when people are intolerant…when people don`t want to listen and just pay attention to their own boring rhetoric.”
- “I do not have specific political views and beliefs. It is just that I cannot tolerate intolerance. Here it concerns the nice old classic Socratic idea of (an) open-ended debate.”
- “I would have hit lefties as well if they had screamed down speakers and displayed such intolerance. It is, at the end of the day, (the) participation that counts – whether somebody is a fascist, a racist or a liberal, is irrelevant.”
Now, what tolerance, in terms of his much-professed “open-ended Socratic style of debate”, did PP display towards Dr Louise Mabille when she published her article, Die vreemde veraad van feministe teenoor die Weste, on Praag? What “participation” did he allow her… given the fact that he said even “racists” must be allowed to “say their say” without hindrance? Why did he not hit himself, seeing that he had said he would hit “lefties” as well if they displayed such intolerance?
The answer to all these questions can be summed up in one sentence. PP is the Master now… and the Master, by his/her very nature, is always intolerant! Like, for example, the previous regime’s use of state coercion to silence Steve Biko, so PP used the power of state instruments (in this case, the UP senate and SAHRC) to silence Dr Mabille… even before she had the opportunity to “say her say”!
That PP, is too dumb to understand that he has become that hated Master he so loathed as (champion of the) Slave way back then, must be due to the fact that he did his doctorate in minbus-taxi berths, or something equally academically frivolous.
And not only is PP intellectually under-endowed, he is also a lying sack of guano. He lied in public when he said that Dr Mabille wrote that blacks had a genetic “inclination” to commit baby rape. She said no such thing! She said it was a cultural phenomenon among black ethnic groups. This is an empirical fact confirmed by leading medical professionals, top ANC leaders, black social workers, et cetera.
Now why didn’t PP lodge a complaint against the above-mentioned persons and institutions as well? And why hasn’t the SAHRC laid “hate speech” charges against all the above-mentioned international news agencies and their reporters? Well, they, like PP, are all (still) part and parcel of the same thuggish being, the Master.
But one day, soon, some Slave, like my recalcitrant self, will rise up and hit Master PP full in the face, for it is foreordained by Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic. How exciting, how boring…
PS. Hey Peester Piet, jammer, Meester Piet… wat het van jou Simsonhare geword?!