or, "Bush, Caligula and DF Malan"
Andre Brink writes this, near the end of
Before I Forget. I thought some of you stinking pinko liberal types might enjoy it:
Quote:
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There was little Mr Bush with his gimlet eyes, striding out like one of those sad, bad, late-Roman emperors who ruled the world while in secret they shat themselves with fear of all the barbarians lurking in the dark. (The Roman reference is not entirely out of place. If the Emperor Caligula could appoint his horse as a consul of the empire, perhaps America's choice, in the period of its own decadence, of an ass as president, need not be surprising.)
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Separately I've been wondering, with no great consequence, about possible parallels between the rise of the religious right in America and the rise of the National Party, bearers of
apartheid, in South Africa.
To refresh your memory: the second Boer War of 1899-1903 or thereabouts saw the invention of guerilla warfare by the Boers (Afrikaners) and of concentration camps and "scorched earth" tactics by the British. I don't think the enmity has been forgotten, but during the 1930s the National Party (Afrikaner) and Jan Smuts' South African Party forged an alliance and all was going to be rosy and cooperative. But this alliance broke when SA entered WWII as in support of the UK. The Nats actively supported Nazi Germany and wanted to support them militarily. During and after the war the split became permanent and hostile.
Anyway, to get to the weak parallels, the Nats narrowly won the election in 1948 - although they lost the popular vote - and began setting up the apparatus of apartheid under Prime Minister DF Malan (his name has recently been removed from one of the Johannesburg main access roads). Some of their supporters later claimed they didn't know how far it was going to go, but can we really believe them? They set about dividing the country all in the name of national pride and extreme religion (the Gereformeerde Kerk is afaik Dutch Calvinist in background). They didn't need to fly enemies of the state to Guantanamo or Romania (
allegedly) - they were quite happy to use city jails to torture and eliminate them. But they were hostile to supranational organisations, rather like the US administration, and were almost proud of the isolation of anti-apartheid sanctions (which of course came much later).
(btw I'm not suggesting a parallel with the state of South African blacks. They were treated more like foreigners or illegal immigrants and currently I'm not aware of anything that gross a violation of civil liberties in the US. But the Republican-Democrat tension is a little like the Nationalist Afrikaner - liberal whites tension.)
It lasted for 40 years before it began to seriously collapse in the late 1980s. Of course that won't happen in the US.
Now back to your regular, serious political discussion.
The Republican Party, the National Party and the Roman Empire
Linear Mode
