Joseph Conrad – praag.org

Truth

What a subject, you may say. Yes indeed.

The best minds on earth from Socrates to Solzhenitsyn have applied themselves to the question of truth. The Oxford Dictionary defines truth as « the quality or state of being true.» Not very helpful one may think, but can one blame them? Not all the philosophy and all the art of this world, are able to represent the truth adequately. Everything in heaven and on earth point towards determining what truth is. And when everything has been said, it still leaves us with infinity. Hegel said, “truth is All” . Defining the truth is simply an impossible task. But if we are to use the word at all and whatever we discuss it is difficult to avoid it, we had better have some idea of what we are talking about .

Christ, when He appeared before Pontius Pilate was asked what was the meaning of truth. He did not answer. Why? It cannot be that He did not know. It cannot be that He sensed a trap, as is sometimes suggested, because at that moment He knew that He was already trapped. It could be that Pilate did not give Him the opportunity to answer. If he was given the opportunity He could have answered: I am the way and the truth, as he had done on another occasion, but he knew that the Roman functionary, steeped as he was in Greek rationalism, was not equipped to understand this. He could have answered that the totality of His teaching and the example of His life constituted the Truth, but would there have been any point? Pilate was not familiar with the totality of His life and teaching.

So, there was no answer. And then, on the other hand, there was, and Pontius Pilate provided it himself. After he had finished the questioning he went outside and said to the mob gathered there: “I find no guilt in him”. This was the truth. He was innocent. In the circumstances no other definition of the truth was required. And yet, in the interest of political expediency, he delivered Him to be flogged and crucified, cheaply washing his hands of all guilt. If Christ was to say in his deepest suffering: “Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing”, who are we to judge, we, the hollow men, the straw men.

There is more than one way of looking at the truth. One way is to see it as Truth (T), that is to say, the truth in an absolute , universal sense, the abstract concept of truth. Socrates was of the opinion that “the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth”. But Socrates was a philosopher in the Greek tradition of rational scepticism, which did not function in a framework of absolutes, but rather more in terms of questioning accepted truths, doctrines and beliefs.

And then there is truth (t). While truth(t) as a concept is divisible, Truth (T) is not. One can speak of truth or truths. The judge who swears in a witness to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not interested in Truth (T). He is merely interested in the truth as it relates to the facts of the particular case before him. It is not possible to speak in this way of The Truth, let alone “the whole truth”.

We, as human beings are capable of uttering and understanding truths and untruths as well. Are we however capable of uttering absolute Truth (T)? Perhaps, although it is not certain that when we do so, we fully understand what we are saying. “God is love” would be an absolute truth. We can use the expression, even believe it, but can we really grasp its true meaning?

Truth (t) is determined by circumstance. In the course of the past century, thinking people have become less prepared to accept, as truth, the notions adhered to by their church or their community or their society as had been the case over centuries. Truth for them became more personal and individual and less dependent on the more absolutist claims of religion and church. Does this mean that truth has become totally subjective and that one can fabricate truths as seems fit and advantageous from case to case? Surely not.

It is furthermore an important feature of modern society that “truth” is being determined to a large extent by mass indoctrination through the media. However in this case we are not dealing with the efforts of fully functioning minds seeking to determine what is right and good and true, but with the conditioned responses of man as a phenomenon of mass, reacting not from a basis of knowledge or reflection, but purely as an automaton. (See Pavlov’s dog dribbling when he’s expected to).

There is a school of thought which would have it that the notion of truth is determined purely by one’s education or point of view or one’s social class. In the case above, the social class to which Pontius Pilate belonged and the education he had received may have determined his decision, but ultimately he bears a personal responsibility for the dishonest and cowardly way he dealt with the truth. So, perhaps we can say that our understanding of life is composed of many different truths, but the truths to which we adhere, should all answer to the greater principle of The Truth. Subjective truths which are mere rationalizations for doing as one pleases, or what is expedient can hardly be seen as truthful at all.

Friedrich Nietzsche refuted the existence of any objective reality. (God is dead”). Hence all truths are relative. But if like Friedrich Nietzsche and his post-modern disciples, we refute the notion of absolute reality we run the risk of being driven to distraction by paradoxes of our own making as was the case with Nietzsche in fact. Because, if there is no objective reality, no absolute truth against which to measure the truth of our propositions, we end up with the problem of explaining what then is the validity of our own assertions. If God is dead and there is no objective truth and all thought is socially and culturally determined fiction, then our own assertions would be worthless also. Thus when Nietzsche states “there is no truth”, or “there are no facts”, that would include his own statements. A Nietzsche critic (Scruto: An intelligent person’s guide) wrote: “Don’t come down this path for this way madness lies.” Nietzsche chose to travel that road and madness was precisely the result.

If a simple and straightforward definition of truth is beyond our reach we can understand that a lie cannot be the truth and that already helps. There can be as many untruths as there can be truths. There can be half truths, distortions, evasions. There can be the situation of knowing the truth but failing to act accordingly (Pilate). At the same time we sense that the concept of truth is associated with what is positive, noble, inspiring.

The frightening thing is that when people are at their worst, they may think they are doing the right thing. The (Holy) Inquisitors, probably thought so too when they were torturing people to confess just about everything they wanted, (such as, for example, owning, reading, translating or printing a Bible), so that they could burn them alive. (The live burnings, incidentally, were called Auto da Fe, which is Spanish for Act of Faith!). Did Mr Blair and Mr Bush, when they were “informing” the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq also believe they were doing the right thing or did they simply lie to us for purposes of sordid self-interest? You remember? “…tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length without disturbing a single blade of grass”.

Joseph Conrad (him again!) in Heart of Darkness: “There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting in something rotten would do.”

And what better testimony than Aleksandr Solszhenytsin, who spent his life in the shadow of lies and cheating and persecution, that is to say the part of his life he did not spend in jail: “The first step of a courageous man is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world”.

There will be those who would counter: How do you know that your particular truth is more true than the truths of others? And they would be right in asking that. The only possible answer would be that if my adversary presents a case that is convincing and makes sense, I would have to give him credit even if continued to disagree. And if I disagreed, I would have to make sense also. To make sense in a way is to be truthful. What we encounter so often in our world is that the ones on the side of the popular and therefore official doctrines and dogmas do not even credit their opponents with the minimum of respect and courtesy of trying to make sense. Much of what passes for argument or fact or sense merely goes towards expressing prejudice and bias and hatred and is therefore antagonistic to the truth.

Modern man has not been through the pangs and pains of dismantling the foundations of truth and meaning for nothing. Truth is therefore the last thing most people of influence in politics and the media want to hear. They react to it with insult or invective or by simply ignoring it. Many are those who will only admit “truths” that are prefabricated by the mass media. In some western countries there are laws against commenting on certain aspects of history and even current politics. Where is democracy? Where is freedom of expression? Socrates’ motto that “ a life unexamined is not a life worth living”, clearly implies that a truth unexamined is not a truth worth believing either.

Truth (T) can be a universal and unalterable reality or it can be a highly personal conclusion forged in the crucible of self-search and suffering. Truth (T) and truth (t) probably come close together in a statement like the one by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, made towards the middle of the Nineteenth century:

“I must find a truth which is true for me…I must find that idea for which I can live or die… something which reaches to the deepest roots of my existence and wherein I am connected into the divine and held fast to it, even if the whole world falls apart.”

Perhaps we are not all capable and willing to make this sort of commitment, but we must surely all agree, the sentiments are noble and profound.

Mistah Kurtz

In previous contributions to Praag, mention was made of the modern tendency to career helter skelter after all manner of doctrines and ideologies, mostly peddled by the fashionable media and their muftis, the “opinion formers”. In the paragraphs that follow a few brief remarks will be made about interesting and influential figures of the modern era who reacted against, what one may call, the popinjay syndrome. ( a popinjay is a parrot!)

The intellectual and cultural climate of the Twentieth Century was marked, above all, by an ever increasing sense of absurdity and senselessness, arising not only from a loss of faith, encapsulated in Friedrich Nietszche’s famous announcement that God was dead, but also from a general and growing awareness of the ultimate futility of man’s best and worst endeavours.

On the road towards nihilism no small role was played by the church itself, including the (Holy!) Inquisition and the wars of religion, with as its glorious climax, the infamous Bartholomew night when the flower of French protestantism was massacred Dingaan style by a crazed and fanatical Catholic mob. The great blood-letting of the French Revolution was as much a revolt against a corrupt and self-serving religious establishment as it was against the aristocracy. The colonial experience and the unspeakable barbarity of the two world wars in the last century gave the coup de grâce to what little was left of modern man’s belief in our civilization and its values. Were the forces of evil then to be victorious in the end? Was the heart of man the “Heart of Darkness” after all?

The Irish poet and mystic William Butler Yeats wrote these lines in 1921, three years after the end of the First World War:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Wherever we look around us we can recognise what Yeats is talking about. Societies in decay, family life disintegrating, marriage cheapened, nations abandoning their identity and their birthright, culture becoming more and more vulgar and superficial, language corrupted and perverted to serve some or other obscure political agenda, economies in tatters. And then, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” What can be more real and more true than that? One simply has to open a newspaper.

(The fact that Yeats ascribed the situation of our world largely to the growth of democracy, we shall leave aside for the moment.)

Closer to our time there is the ideologically-driven obsession of the churches with social justice and racial equality which alienated millions more. Since the social gospel preached by the churches can be served so much better by politicians, academics and the media, why trouble oneself with warming the hard church benches for a watered down version of Karl Marx?

In a letter to a friend Joseph Conrad wrote: “Faith is but a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow. In this world – as I have known it – we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause, or of guilt. There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves, which drives us about a world that is always but a vain and floating appearance.” Conrad must have been in a particularly dark mood when he wrote this, because, if he consistently held these views, it is difficult to see how he could have written anything at all. As he says himself in the novel, Victory: “woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put his trust in life”. But are the two statements contradictory or do they merely illustrate the ambivalence of the modern psyche?

It is clear that the spiritual, existential, call it what you will, crisis of our age is first and foremost a crisis of faith and a loss of a sense of direction. Estranged from God, from nature, from our age-old values and rituals, from each other, from ourselves,

“We are the hollow men
We are the straw men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. “ (T.S. Eliot)

Note the head filled with straw.

We are witnessing at present the astounding spectacle of thousands of Western youths leaving their countries to go and fight for an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. Absurd? Yes probably absurd, but made possible by a spiritually and morally bankrupt society no longer capable of offering young people the sense of purpose they need in order to exist.

Consciousness of the precariousness of our civilisation and the relativity of its values have become deeply engraved in the soul of modern man. What is right in one place is wrong in another, what is good for you, is bad for me, what is true today is false tomorrow.

Which brings us to Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche is a landmark figure which cannot be avoided if one is to say anything about the modern age without burying one’s head in the sand. He was enough of a genius to see the impossibility of his statement that God was dead”: If God exists He cannot die and if He does not exist He cannot die either. No, Nietszche’s quarrel was not as much with God as it was with a society for whom Christianity had become an empty shell to which no more than lip service was paid, in search of respectability and a comfortable conscience, or even worse, for political and ideological expediency. (To borrow a phrase from Conrad: One of the dead cats of civilization). Then rather get rid of the shell as well and found a new ethic on different grounds. A full blooded atheist is to be preferred to a phoney Christian.

Was Nietszche therefore a nihilist? To a certain extent yes he was. But on the other hand he did not create nihilism. As someone put it somewhere, to describe nihilism is not exactly the same as being a nihilist. Nietszche is certainly not a nihilist in the sense that he rejects all traditional moral principles out of hand. His doctrine, if one may call it that, was rather that every man should create his own values or rediscover existing ones and stand by them, live them.

There is a lot about Nietzsche that we can disagree with. The last thing that he would probably have expected, is to be followed blindly. But we can learn lot from him too, above all to have the courage of one’s convictions, to say no, to disagree, to refuse to conform, to refuse to follow slavishly the prescriptions of ideology. For the greatest enemy of a meaningful existence is to subscribe, to agree, to conform and to obey.

Another landmark figure then is Joseph Conrad. On the 3rd of August, the Polish author, Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) died ninety years ago in Bishopsbourne, England. After a career at sea he started writing and produced a long series of novels, and novellas, among others Almeyer’s Folly, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness which served as the scenario for Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.

In his novel, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad describes two company officials: “… leaning forward side by side, they seemed to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length, that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without bending a single blade”. One may be entitled to ask, was it they who were dragging their shadows or their shadows that were dragging them? But, whatever the case may be, it is certain that neither way did they manage to disturb the grass.

Elsewhere in the same novel Conrad talks about one of the same company officials: “….it seemed to me that if I tried, I could poke my forefinger through him, and encounter nothing but a little loose dirt.”

From the despair of his spiritual vacuity modern man clutches at all manner of straws (straw again!) whether it be materialism , “social justice”, democracy, egalitarianism or heart breaks over the oppression of (black) minorities. In South Africa a clique of black oligarchs have enriched themselves horrendously in the space of twenty years, mostly through nepotism, fraud, straight embezzlement and corruption, while millions of others have remained poor or have become poorer. But to this the human rightists, the egalitarians, the social “justicers”, the prayer groups and the media remain oblivious and impotent, ever so reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s ineffectual fops.

When man had thrown off what he considered to be his moral and religious fetters and shackles he could have been expected to feel liberated and relieved. At last he had fulfilled the ideal of Adam and Eve and become the centre of the universe. Yet never before has man seemed more confused, forlorn and empty than since the “ death “ of God. Hence when the character Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness senses the end approaching, he can only hiss “The Horror, the horror” – the horror of a life and death without meaning.

Shortly afterwards when the manager’s servant announces: “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” the effect is: so what, he has been dead all along.

What room does all this leave for trust and confidence in the future? Not much. But do we have any other choice but to keep trying? As the Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett said somewhere: “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter, try again, fail again, fail better”.

‘SA’ is for Sadists’ Apocalypse

by Dan Roodt

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In a recent article in the Sunday Independent, Gillian Schutte mistakenly blames so-called “white conservative narratives” for the appalling sexual violence that is sweeping South Africa at present. As rape is notoriously underreported, most estimates put the number of such crimes at more than a million per year or approximately three thousand per day.

The macabre forms of dehumanising torture during farm murders provide another clue to the societal breakdown that is occurring in our country. Even calling it “our country” might be a malapropism in that Afrikaners like myself are no longer considered full citizens in an Afro-Saxon state that is slouching towards some incarnation of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or, better still, Charles Taylor’s Liberia. This week, Taylor’s conviction as a war criminal was confirmed by an international court, the first head of state to be jailed for such crimes committed in Sierra Leone while he was in office.

South Africa has become a sadists’ apocalypse. No amount of “reframing”, circumlocution or leftist pseudo-intellectualism can disguise it any longer. Nor can the seemingly desperate massaging of the crime statistics. In the age of social media, people communicate their horror and despair at being captives in this, our “paradise of cruelty”. Policing our language as in the cowardly attack upon Louise Mabille is a poor substitute for the lack of policing elsewhere.

As the twentieth century has shown, utopias are always dangerous, be they fascist or communist. Every utopia has turned into its mirror image, a dystopia replete with genocide. South Africa’s pursuit of a racial biopolitics known as “transformation”, as well as extreme forms of cultural relativism, have unleashed hitherto unknown social consequences. In the domain of sexual violence at least, the country has earned the dubious title of “rape capital of the world” and it regularly tops international murder tables too.

Understanding the causes of this immense violence, unknown in peacetime, represents a rare analytical challenge. None of the usual explanations actually fit. The same people denouncing “colonialism” are the most accomplished colonialists in their slavish subordination to US or British racial discourse and political correctness.

However, neither Britain nor America has absorbed any significant African cultural influence so it is of no use applying the sociology of New York or London to an outbreak of sadistic violence in Limpopo province. It is risible to see ostensibly educated people constantly blaming either “apartheid” or “poverty” for the horrors and cruelties afflicting this society.

The retreat of Afrikaner power in South Africa has been coterminous with the resurgence of African belief systems, including witchcraft and ritual murders. In the early nineties South Africa experienced hundreds of killings associated with witchcraft and occult beliefs, leading to the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders. We still do not understand the role that occult beliefs played during the revolution, especially in establishing hegemonic black politics and racial nationalism. The necklace, that symbol of revolution, is pregnant with ethnographic and cultural meaning. There is also evidence that young “comrades” intimidated traditional healers to extract money from clients and that the accusation of being a witch was used to eliminate political opponents.

Mrs. Winnie Madikizala-Mandela, that international heroine and former wife of Nelson Mandela, subscribed to the Maoist doctrine – ‘kill one, scare a thousand’ – that support is gained through terror and horror. She notoriously stated in 1986:

…with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.

A necklace killing whereby a tyre is placed around the victim's neck, filled with petrol and then set alight — A necklace killing whereby a tyre is placed around the victim’s neck, filled with petrol and then set alight

Child and even baby rape is another ghastly phenomenon indicating that South Africa has navigated to a new, alien moral code. Stating that white men sometimes do it in some other country too, hardly mitigates the particular horror that it has assumed here.

The British Guardian ran an article on 12 March 2009 entitled, “Raped and killed for being a lesbian: South Africa ignores ‘corrective’ attacks“. The Guardian’s website contains an accompanying video interview with lesbian rape victims, as well as young black men who are outspoken in their support of “corrective rape”. One of them says:

Me, I have no time to rape them, but if there are some of the other guys who want to teach them the way, they must rape them, they must rock them.

But perhaps white conservatives are a bigger problem: they might go to church or caution their children against drugs and sexual promiscuity, which would undermine the libertine morals that so many have advocated for so long in South Africa. In Hillbrow, as recounted to me by a former policeman, young white female drug addicts are employed as prostitutes by Nigerian gangsters. When they are no longer useful to their pimps, they simply get injected with heroine and pushed off highrise buildings in what gets officially recorded by the police as “suicides”. In South Africa, the crime reality show is so much better than the fiction.

The country’s academics are all but ignoring the scourge of rape, including infant rape, judging from the paucity of published articles in the field. To some extent they have acculturated to the witch-hunting culture in persecuting dissidents in their own ranks. Otherwise they engage in repetitive denunciations of “patriarchy” as if there were still a father left somewhere that has not been killed.

South Africa’s “transformed” universities have been turned into the “armed brothels” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn spoke about when he said:

Rousseau is the grandfather of the concentration camps and also of those armed brothels that we continue to call universities. We have with us on one hand the Old Left, a finished product of L’éducation sentimentale, with its bent for social engineering and its tendency to identify its own plans and policies with the volonté générale; on the other the New Left which has taken up the slogan Retournons à la nature! exemplified in the rabble of unwashed, unkempt, debauched, unbridled ignoble savages who look to the Third World of the underdeveloped for inspiration. Its heroes are Chairman Mao with his Little Red Book, Ché Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Holden Roberto, the Harlem criminals and the pistol-packing priests.*

That is why leftist university intellectuals find any form of criticism of traditional African culture to be inherently “racist” and eschew references to practices such as ukuthwala (the kidnapping and forced marriage of young maidens). Recent legislation has placed about 18 million black South Africans under so-called customary law in which such practices are legal.

Everybody in South Africa, whether white or black, fears a witch-hunt in some or other form. Especially the kind of witch-hunt whereby you are called a “racist”, lose your tenured university job and spend the rest of your life in ignominy. Therefore white academics are completely silent on ukuthwala or the so-called “virgin cleansing myth” if the professors do not actually deny in writing that such phenomena exist!

Here and there information filters through the iron curtain of political correctness. The only academic article worth reading on the “virgin cleansing myth” is that by Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala which appeared in The African Journal of AIDS Research in 2002 under the title, “On The Virgin Cleansing Myth: Gendered Bodies, AIDS and Ethnomedicine“. It provides a fascinating glimpse into the psycho-sexual paradigm in which, as she puts it, “virgin cleansing is believed to have both a therapeutic and a prophylactic effect” (against HIV-AIDS). Raping a child or a disabled person is therefore seen as a form of AIDS prevention or cure.

But even the virgin cleansing myth obliquely alluded to by Dr. Mabille in her critique of insipid Western feminism does not go far enough in explaining South Africa’s journey upriver into the heart of darkness. We really lack the concepts to understand the enormity of what we are faced with.

Much of what passes for analysis of sex and culture in South Africa consists of rehashed hippie or New Left thinking from 1960s America. Get liberated, man, is more or less the gist of it. Call it Marcuse on Durban Poison. Repression or any form of “holding back” is invariably seen as “bad”. But sometimes repression might be desirable, even imperative. Freud was old-fashioned enough to advocate a balance between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.

The old Afrikaner government, while encouraging African ethnic identities, saw fit to suppress witchcraft and ritual murder by making it a criminal offence. Prior to becoming the first president of a united South African republic, Charles Robberts Swart introduced the Suppression of Witchcraft Act 3 of 1957. To the principled cultural relativist, the act – which is still on the statute books – is an affront and he would probably agree with the Marquis de Sade that “morality is just geography misapplied”, meaning that a crime in one culture is a harmless pastime in another.

One could even argue that the very structure of the South African political system is tending towards sado-masochism. Last Sunday the new CEO of the liberal Institute of Race Relations, Dr Frans Cronjé, argued in Rapport that whites should assume a far more submissive role in South Africa, lest they expose themselves to some form of collective revenge during a Second Revolution. According to Cronjé, such a revolution will be

…a violent, racist and destructive transition from a reconciling democratic state to a hostile, black nationalist state… After the Second Revolution, white South Africans will lose their homes, their jobs and their businesses.

Apart from exhortations to submissiveness, white guilt and even “vows of silence” à la Samantha Vice of Rhodes University, South Africa’s academic sycophants contribute little to our grasp of contemporary violence. In this respect, French literature is more instructive. Sade’s amoral theory of nature, of course. But also his notion of the sovereignty of sexual instincts that should not be tamed by any man-made law or religious scruple.

The Marquis de Sade had a disciple in the surrealist author Georges Bataille who espoused a theory of “transgression”. He took an interest in violence, punishment and eroticism. Bataille also collected photographs of Chinese executions which included horrific torture.

South Africa’s army of sadists regularly commit acts that shock a weaker Eurocentric sensibility. At the same time they are creating a world without limits, revelling in a new-found innocence that to them must represent the perfect freedom, the sovereignty of Sade’s libertine who pursues excess in celebration of pristine nature, a nature that punishes the weak and rewards the strong. To impose one’s will on a woman is also a gift of nature to all men. As Sade writes in Philosophy in the Bedroom:

If then it becomes incontestable that we have received from Nature the right indiscriminately to express our wishes to all women, it likewise becomes incontestable that we have the right to compel their submission, not exclusively, for I should then be contradicting myself, but temporarily. It cannot be denied that we have the right to decree laws that compel woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her; violence itself being one of that right’s effects, we can employ it lawfully. Indeed! has Nature not proven that we have that right, by bestowing upon us the strength to bend women to our will?**

Human rights or even a puritanical code such as feminism is not incompatible with sadism. As Bataille would argue, morality is needed for transgression to take place.

Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem “Daddy” that “Every woman adores a Fascist”. She was wrong. Every woman adores a sadist. Especially if she happens to be a feminist.

* Erik van Kuehnelt-Leddihn. “The Western Dilemma: Calvin or Rousseau?” in Modern Age, Winter 1971, p. 55.

** The Marquis de Sade. The complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and other writings, transl. RIchard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1965, p. 319.

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The Left wouldn’t mind seeing South Africa destroyed

by Dan Roodt

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In my last column, I went to the trouble of explaining what happened on 16 June 1976 and that none of the six rioting Soweto high schools had actually been forced to learn anything in Afrikaans, whereas a seventh studied only the subject of history by medium of Afrikaans.

However, the motley collection of so-called English-liberal whites do not like to be “bored with the facts”. Just today I read on the website of the leftist Mail & Guardian: “The issue of language has been a sensitive one since June 16 1976, when Soweto pupils rose up against Afrikaans as a primary language in schools.” No, the issue of language has been moot since 1806 when the British permanently set foot in South Africa and embarked on a drawn-out attempt to stamp out, first Dutch, and then its inveterate spoken variety, Afrikaans, a policy that continues to this day under the ANC regime.

There always seems to be one newspaper in Johannesburg that is vehemently anti-Afrikaans. A century ago it was The Star. When the first Afrikaans high school opened in the city in 1921 (my old school called Helpmekaar), The Star opined: “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.” In the 1960s and early 1970s it was the Rand Daily Mail where Helen Zille cut her teeth. The late journalist Chris Louw once overheard the editor of that paper, Alistair Sparks, during an aeroplane flight raging against the “sub-human” Afrikaners and how South Africa would have been better off if Britian had “finished the job in 1902 and killed them all”. The Rand Daily Mail ultimately closed down, with its business section continuing as the current Business Day. The present Mail & Guardian was in fact started as a replacement Rand Daily Mail. It regularly vilifies Afrikaners and tells us how ugly our language is, how reactionary we are, how we should disappear forever and just how backward our music, literature and art are. For good measure it keeps a few renegade Afrikaners – mainly because they are prepared to work for lower salaries – who now and again write about their identity crises and how they felt much better when they managed to forget their Afrikaans, including their horrible conservative upbringings.

However, some of the Mail & Guardian journalists have absconded to set up an online rag or electronic wet wipe known as The Daily Maverick. This is a complete misnomer as it should have been called The Daily Conformist. After all, the term “maverick” denotes, especially in American usage, exactly the opposite of a conformist. I could copy and paste a definition from any number of online dictionaries, but let me climb onto my little wooden step ladder and fetch the Shorter Oxford Dictionary off the top shelf.

According to the dictionary, the term may be traced to one Samuel A. Maverick, a “Texas engineer who owned but did not brand cattle”. Hence its two meanings: “1. An unbranded calf or yearling. 2. An unorthodox or independent-minded person, an individualist, US, a politician who will not affiliate with a regular political party.”

Obviously, there is nothing maverick about The Daily Maverick. It keeps us corralled or herded within the enclosures of South Africa’s tedious, second-hand and stupid leftist tradition. Every academic in South Africa, as well as many a journalist, especially the kind that writes for The Daily Maverick, dreams of becoming a British Marxist and being able to kiss Terry Eagleton or E.P. Thompson’s boots. Well, E.P. Thompson is dead now, but any old pommie commie would do.

The thing to understand about English-South African leftists, is that they are something like T.S. Eliot’s “hollow men”, a notion which may be traced back, appropriately, to the character Mister Kurz in Joseph Conrad’s great novella about Africa, Heart of Darkness. You probably recall the first lines of Eliot’s poem:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Since 1994, with all the cultural Marxists in control of the media and the universities in South Africa, there is almost no debate possible. Just repeat all the tired clichés and propaganda after us.

However, as Oscar Wilde would say, there is one thing worse than a left-wing snot who fancies himself a journalist and that is a snot who writes about cricket. South Africa is a bit like Nero’s Rome: the worse it gets, the more fanatical people become about games, nonchalantly stepping over all the casualties that we learn about daily. Not sports casualties and not in The Daily Conformist a.ka. Maverick either. Just the men and women dying by the thousands every month, the human sacrifices to the god of political correctness.

Kenneth Borland is a cricket correspondent for a provincial paper, The Natal Witness, who also writes for The Daily Maverick, it appears. They are not keeping him properly corralled, for he seems to stray off the pitch sometimes, but then he keeps his comments firmly within the quasi-Soviet style of labelling any dissident or heretic on the misty horizon as a “Nazi, fascist, racist” or other imaginative terms. Oh, I left out “homophobe” and “white supremacist”.

Just yesterday Mr. Borland called me a “white supremacist” in the following passage from The Daily Maverick‘s comment section:

“As opposed to your evil, divisive, hate-filled propaganda Dan?

“As a member of the white middle-class I can safely say I am not under attack by the state, however appalled I am by Zuma, the corrupt political elite and the worrying signs of a return of oppression through state security apparatus.

“You and your shameful ilk are the biggest cause of ethnic conflict in this country. Your statement elsewhere that white South Africans are the nicest people in the world is laughable. I, for one, am extremely grateful that the majority in this country, oppressed for so long, have been able to show such magnanimous ubuntu that I do still believe there is hope for South Africa.

“You are nothing short of a white supremacist and you should be living somewhere like Nazi Germany rather than a country that is still striving for reconciliation and meaningful democracy.”

I do not intend entering into a literary analysis of this passage, which is hardly on a par with T.S. Eliot or Joseph Conrad. Nevertheless, I find it quite telling that the author admits that South Africa “is still striving for reconciliation and meaningful democracy” as no-one in his right mind would describe the current one-party state with non-existent boundaries between party and state as a “democracy” in the Western sense.

He also acknowledges that there is some kind of “ethnic conflict” going on in the country. When our “good democrats” are not assaulting or killing foreign Africans (a little “xenophobia” here and there), they are elsewhere engaged in farm murders, house robberies, hold-ups, rapes and other mayhem. Sometimes the police force join in too, in full uniform! Recently there was a case in Naboomspruit where two black policemen committed a robbery in full uniform, using their service pistols. They are out on bail but have not been suspended. Their weapons having been retained as court evidence, they have simply been issued with other pistols and are back at the station.

This is South Africa, the leftist utopia. Anything goes. From gay unions to policemen moonlighting as armed robbers.

But according to Borland – and he probably speaks for the entire pack of hounds yapping away every day at The Daily Conformist, in their pompous imitations of British-Marxist cool – “me and my shameful ilk” are somehow responsible for all the violence and lawlessness in the country, apart from relegating me to “Nazi Germany”.

I have news for these mauve Brits or would-be Brits, merrily uploading their daily wet wipe which wouldn’t even clean my screen without leaving an opaque layer of obfuscation. I don’t need to time-travel back to Germany in the thirties. This is Nazi Germany already! Except that we Afrikaners are being treated like Jews. If we are not being attacked by your daily Einsatzgruppen, torturing, killing or raping us, we are vilified, smeared, labelled and blamed as scapegoats for the mess known as the “New South Africa”, or Mbeki’s “youngest black republic”. This is a failed state and its failure was planned so that it would either drive us out of here or we would simply be eliminated during a protracted uhuru, realising Alistair Sparks’s dream of a final solution for us.

Afrikaners, as educators, engineers, administrators, farmers and founders of industries such as Sasol over which the Rand Daily Mail and “its ilk” once guffawed as “sheltered employment for stupid Afrikaners”, have always tried to bring development and stability to South Africa. Not so the destructive, know-it-all uitlander opportunist and pompous purveyor of revolution, “transformation” and other radical concepts.

The present Zimbabwe is entirely the result of Briitsh foreign policy that saw Ian Smith as just another intractable white patriot to be eliminated. Regime change was needed. Ten years later a reforming South Africa was seen as a threat to the Marxist-revolutionary ambitions of the ANC and the South African Communist Party. So we got regime change too. After us it was Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt and other countries of the so-called Arab Spring where the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood was deemed preferable to the more secular, modernist but autocratic Arab regimes. We now have civil war in Syria, another country destroyed by Anglo-American foreign policy and support for Al Kaida-type “rebels”. Among other things, the British-supported “rebels” are destroying churches, portending an end to religious freedom in Syria.

South African leftism, of which The Daily Maverick is but one of the many mouthpieces that have mushroomed and grown like weeds since the South African revolution, is also a form of fundamentalism. Its creed, like every strain of communism during the twentieth century, is “equality at all costs”. Except the very people who propagate this utterly totalitarian idea do not themselves believe that they are equal to anyone else. In Orwell’s famous phrase: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

It follows that even a low-life cricket commentator like Kenneth Borland believes himself to be far above the average middle-class Afrikaner, concerned about his children’s education and the safety of his family while revolution rages about him. Borland and his coreligionists are part of a British-Marxist nomenklatura egging their ANC storm troopers on. Go kill some Boers, go take their land! Go rape their daughters and teach them not to be “racist” in their choice of a sexual partner. After all, in Soweto “forced sex” is not considered wrong, according to opinion polls among the enlightened youth of that conurbation, so why should we conservative, Calvinist, “Nazi” Afrikaners object? “Corrective rape” already exists for lesbians in South Africa, so why not introduce it for “white-supremacist women and girls” too?

I could expatiate on the peculiar, almost racial (Nazi?!) sense of superiority that one encounters in Natal with its virulent anti-Afrikaans chauvinism. Despite Natal, or KZN as it is now known, being one of the poorest provinces in the country, its inhabitants believe that somehow the British Empire is not dead. As long as Britain can still bomb a few Iraqi children or supply weapons to Syrian Islamists, I suppose there is life in it yet. Small wonder then, that the ANC and the SA Communist Party have recruited some of their most pliable white “cadres” from that most English of South African provinces, who will serve the Bantu Empire with a zeal once reserved for the British one.

The Natal Witness cricket commentator, Kenneth Borland, hails from Pietermaritzburg, the smaller of the two KZN cities. Need one say more? Hence the pregnant “you and your shameful ilk”, implying that to be descended from the Dutch, French Huguenots, Germans and Scots as we are, is somehow beyond the pale.

Reading an e-wipe like The Daily Maverick, I sometimes get the impression that this whole tragic, violent revolution slowly consuming our country, is based not on Karl Marx – although he is in there somewhere – but on some imitation or simulacrum of English snobbery. I imagine that Baron David Owen or Lord Carrington condemned Rhodesia to death over gin and tonic while boasting about his new Jaguar. Likewise, South Africa’s demise was concocted as some act of upper-class insouciance. People were just tired of PW Botha’s hat that he wore sometimes at a time when it was no longer fashionable, whereas now it would have been perfectly à la mode.

I think author Nadine Gordimer – she got her anti-Afrikaans attitude from Lithuania, not from Natal – summed it up when she said in an interview: ““We were naive, because we focused on removing the apartheid government and never thought deeply enough about what would follow.”

Gordimer makes it sound as if she cares. However, none of the South African leftists care about this country. If it had to descend into a Zimbabwean abyss of hyperinflation and famine tomorrow, they would simply pack up and leave, with a shrug.

Besides smugness, they are also motivated by Schadenfreude. The notion that they are powerful enough to destroy and dilapidate all that Afrikaners managed to create in 360 years, gives them a tremendous sense of satisfaction.

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Apartheid is not to blame for mine violence, Cynthia Carroll

The recent comments by Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll represent an insult to everyone who still harbours some South African pride, despite our country’s slide into third-world squalor and corruption.

As reported by Sapa, Carroll said: “The violence we have seen in the mining sector this year has its seeds in the legacy of apartheid and the underlying social problems that remain.”

Now, when the National Party came to power in 1948, the entire system of migrant labour had already been in existence for decades. Since the discovery of gold, the colonial mining companies had constantly been clamouring for labour, the cheaper the better. The result was our chaotic urbanisation and immigration, with workers recruited from all over Southern Africa.

Since the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of people have died in mining accidents, the human cost of enriching a few British capitalists. Apparently Ms. Carroll has recently brought the fatality rate down in her mines, but her temerity in lecturing us about apartheid when the mines killed ten times as many people as our police riot squads in forty years is simply breath-taking.

During the 1922 strike, Smuts who by that time had become something of a British puppet, bombed miners from the air and practised a shoot-to-kill policy, killing 200 miners and injuring hundreds more.

Whereas the National Party through investments in Eskom, Transnet, Sasol, Iscor, the CSIR, HSRC, and the creation of more than twenty universities had tried to reduce our dependence on minerals, the mining companies in turn fought back by financing radical movements and propaganda.

Since the days of Rhodes and Milner, the mines have sown discord in South Africa, cynically exploiting our ethnic and political differences.

We must remember that the roots of British business may be traced back to the island’s tradition of piracy and the so-called “privateers” that received carte blanche from English monarchs to plunder the ships of other nations. The English were also the biggest slave traders in Africa, bar the Portuguese.

South Africa has hardly benefited from her mineral wealth, given that most of the profits accrue overseas. As in Joseph Conrad’s allegorical novel, Nostromo, the mines represent a curse to us, causing cycles of conflict and disaster, from the Anglo-Boer war to the current struggle between trade unions for dominance. ANC factions are likewise fighting over BEE deals involving the mines, with political assassinations in Kwazulu-Natal now almost commonplace.

As Mamphela Ramphele has suggested, the mines keep us chained to the nineteenth century and colonial forms of labour exploitation. If we stopped mining altogether and simply traded metals on world markets we would derive more benefit from platinum and gold than we do at present.