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Letter of the President
9 November, 2007
South Africa - the problem of being new!
South Africa confronts a problem which only time can solve, perhaps with a little help from its friends. The problem is that the new South Africa is new. It therefore faces the challenge to solve problems and respond to questions to which it has never been exposed.
One of the most fundamental and central of the questions that the new South Africa must answer is - what shall we do with our freedom, the liberty we enjoy, our emancipation from many centuries of oppression, repression, regimentation and state terror?
The attendant questions that the South Africans ask, perhaps not frontally and in express language, but certainly in their actions are:
The Mask of Anarchy
Near enough two centuries ago, the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, composed the famous poem, "The Mask of Anarchy", to denounce the massacre of working people at Peterloo, England, in 1819. In part he wrote:
I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim...Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Lord Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.
And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, and spies.Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'
In many instances, the answering of the questions we have listed has produced the ghastly masquerade of which Shelley wrote. This is a masquerade of canards paraded by people who disguise their purposes by wearing ermined gowns, by weeping crocodile tears, by pretending to be as holy as the Bible, and by giving themselves a cloak of majesty even to the point of clothing this in pretensions of divinity.
A ghastly masquerade of canards
The word 'canard' is not regularly used in our country's conversational English. We use it here in its dictionary meaning - 'a piece of news/a story that is false and is told to people deliberately in order to harm someone'.
The canards that constitute the ghastly masquerade of which Shelley wrote are told to advance particular, partisan interests. This practice derives from a definition of the possibilities created by the gift of freedom in terms of which freedom is interpreted as the freedom to falsify reality.
In practice, this constitutes an assertion that freedom means the liberty to peddle canards, claiming that this is a manifestation both of the excellent and unchallengeable exercise of the constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech and the robust debate that constitutes the very essence of democracy!
The resort to the potent weapon of the canard is a consequence of a determination that freedom means the right and possibility for any individual or group to use all means and methods to advance their particular interests, regardless of what happens to the rest of the society to which they belong.
We will now cite some of the canards that have been visited on all of us by those in our society whose definition of the meaning of freedom allows them to consider treating the truth and ethical imperatives with contempt as a legitimate exercise of the right to freedom of speech.
The threat of dictatorship?
During the 1999 General Election campaign especially, the canard was marketed with great vigour that our movement, the ANC, sought to win the elections gaining a parliamentary two-thirds majority because we wanted to change our Constitution to entrench ourselves as our country's permanent ruling party.
So fervently was this canard paraded that some in the international community, including and especially some in the British and US media, joined in its propagation, convinced that obviously it represented the truth. The readiness to believe this canard was driven by the entrenched and insulting stereotype of Africa and the Africans that we have no capacity to be democrats.
The canard was peddled by self-serving politicians and their acolytes who believe that they have a right to govern and have anointed themselves as the guardians of our democracy. To achieve their goals they were quite ready to pervert honest democratic debate by propagating pure canards, all for the supposed purpose of saving democracy from imminent danger!
Media freedom in danger?
Or take another more recent example, this being an attempt to legitimise canards by claiming that press freedom is under threat. A newspaper receives and keeps stolen property, namely, private medical records. It then proceeds to publish articles it claims are based on these records.
In this regard we must bear in mind a number of facts. Theft is a crime.
Receipt of stolen goods is a crime. Unauthorised ownership of private medical records is a crime. Publication of such records without the consent of the person concerned is a crime.
For these reasons, the police institute an investigation to respond to the crimes of theft and receipt of stolen property. The newspaper in question then publishes entirely false reports that some among its staff are about to be arrested, that our government has instructed the law-enforcement agencies to find as much 'dirt' as they can about some of the journalists working for the newspaper, and that these agencies are now 'spying' on these journalists.
To justify criminal misconduct of all sorts and dissuade the law-enforcement agencies from doing their work mandated by the Constitution and the law, the newspaper cries out in a loud voice - the constitutionally guaranteed media freedom is under threat!
In this instance the freedom we have achieved is obviously interpreted as the freedom to do anything and everything the media chooses to do to advance its agenda, with no regard to our Constitution and our laws - including the right to peddle canards all in the interest of entrenching democracy in our country! And once again, this strange claim has its adherents among some in the international community, including and especially some in the British and US media.
An ANC gone astray?
Or take other canards that emanate from people who are supposedly members of our democratic movement. These range from the absurd assertion that the masses of our people are poorer now than they were during the apartheid period, that our movement, the ANC, does not allow open democratic debate in its ranks, that there is a 'centralisation of power' in the Government Presidency, resulting in the disempowerment of the ANC and its allies, and so on.
Once again these canards are approvingly amplified by some in the international community, including and especially some in the British and US media.
All these claims are patently false. Those who make them know very well that they have no facts of any kind to substantiate them because none exist. Why then do some who claim to be revolutionaries resort to a practice to which all revolutions, including our own, have always been firmly opposed - the practice of deliberately peddling canards to achieve particular objectives?
For these, the freedom we have achieved means the freedom to falsify reality, claiming that this is their democratic right, with the objective to realise their openly stated goal of taking over the leadership of our movement. And thus does freedom introduce us to a practice to which we are not accustomed - a strange struggle among supposed comrades for power - power one over the other!
Many years ago, our late President, OR Tambo, warned against the danger posed by the struggle among the powerless for power over one another. The potential danger we face today, which we must defeat, is a struggle among revolutionaries for power over one another. No genuine revolutionary can accept the perverse notion that the freedom we won at great cost means the freedom to engage in a power struggle among revolutionaries!
The angry masses?
To proceed beyond the realm of canards, there are yet others in our society, who define the meaning of freedom as freedom to break the law and engage in acts of anarchy to advance their goals.
These are people who, in pursuit of one goal or another, burn down private homes, kill and assault workers, destroy public property, loot shops, insult people in vile language, and engage in other acts of thuggish behaviour to achieve their goals. Strangely, some who apportion to themselves the role of watchdogs, which are ever on guard to protect the freedom and democracy we now enjoy, consistently seek to justify these acts of thuggery by describing them as a legitimate expression of 'the anger of the masses'!
Almost two centuries ago, Shelley strongly denounced the murder of workers by the then British ruling class, which claimed to be acting in the interest of 'God, and King, and Law!'
He argued that however well the act of murder of the workers might seek to disguise itself, hiding behind masks and ermined gowns and the darkness of night, carrying a Bible in its hands, weeping crocodile tears, it could not but have as its partners, fraud, hypocrisy, anarchy and destruction.
Le Canard enchainé
I do not know if we have the poets to compose their own version of Shelley's Mask of Anarchy, to unmask the ghastly masquerade of fraud, hypocrisy, anarchy and destruction, which seek to legitimise themselves by claiming to be the sentinels who are standing on guard to protect our freedom and democracy!
There is a famous French satirical newspaper, founded in 1915, Le Canard enchainé - "the chained duck" - and accordingly carries two ducks on its masthead. But as we have seen the word canard also means - 'a piece of news/a story that is false and is told to people deliberately in order to harm someone'. These are the canards we must chain, by speaking truth to falsehood, in defence of our freedom and democracy, and leave the ducks to walk freely.
This page was last updated on Friday 9 November, 2007