DS: [AFRIKAANS:5800] Liberaliste en ander wesens
---------- Van: Reinier de Vos[SMTP:...@aqua.ccwr.ac.za] Verzonden: vrijdag 26 januari 1996 9:59 Aan: Multiple recipients of list Onderwerp: [AFRIKAANS:5800] Liberaliste en ander wesens Na aanleiding van die bespreking van wat 'n liberalis nou eintlik is, het ek hierdie uitstekende artikel nou pas in die hande gekry. Dis geskryf deur Andrew Kenny, en het in "Frontiers of Freedom", wat deur die Instituut vir Rasseverhoudings uitgegee is, verskyn. Die artikel is helaas in Engels, maar ek hoop ek sal die heiligskennis vergewe word nadat mense die artikel gelees het. Kenny sê alles wat ek graag sou wou sê, net beter. :-) ------------------------------------------------------------ -------- What Labels Really Mean ----------------------- by Andrew Kenny What do the terms "left-wing" and "right-wing" mean? Tell me whether the following people are left or right: Fidel Castro who has suspended elections in Cuba for 35 years, banned trade unions prosecuted homosexuals and is arranging to hand over power to his brother; Mother Teresa, who is an extreme opponent of abortion; Louis Farrakahn, the anti-semitic black American leader, who believes men are superior to women; Oswald Mosley, British fascist leader, who proposed a revolutionary universal national health scheme; Bernard Shaw, socialist Irish playwright, who admired Hitler; Winnie Mandela, an ANC politician who drives around in a large Mercedes; and Ayatollah Khomeini, the fundamentalist Islamic leader. Is nationalism left-wing or right-wing? Most communist governments, including those of Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's China and communist North Korea, are extremely nationalist. On the other hand the capitalist multi-national companies are completely internationalist: they care nothing for nation and simply move where wages are lowest and profits are highest. Does this mean communism is right-wing and multi-national capitalism left-wing? Or does it mean it is left- wing to be nationalist and right-wing to be internationalist? How about racism? Is racial discrimination left-wing or right-wing? If a government believes that a minority race, say the Jews in Nazi Germany or the whites in South Africa today, have wealth and power in disproportion to their numbers, is it left-wing or right-wing to have institutional racism against them, such as affirmative action with racial quotas? Of course Hitler's measures were immeasurably more extreme. Does this mean he was an extreme left-winger or an extreme right-winger? Who is more right-wing, the working classes or the privileged classes? In 1922 the South African Communist Party staged a workers' rebellion against the capitalist mining houses under the slogan "Workers of the World Unite Behind a White South Africa!" The capitalists wanted to open mining jobs to blacks; the communists wanted to keep them for whites only. Should a left-winger have backed the workers or the bosses? After 1948, the white workers were overwhelmingiy in favour of apartheid and white opposition to it came almost entirely from the bourgeoisie. Does this mean workers are right-wing and the bourgeoisie is left-wing? Or does it mean that if you supported apartheid you were left-wing and if you opposed it you were right-wing? Take art and literature. Nadine Gordimer's novels have a tiny readership of middle-class, mainly white people; Wilbur Smith's novels are read by a huge number of people of all races and classes. Only the bourgeoisie attend film festivals which feature foreign (that is, non-American) films showing sensitive portrayals of the human dilemma - the workers like action-packed American films starring dinosaurs or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Does this make Gordimer and cerebral foreign films right-wing and Wilbur Smith and Arnold Schwarzenegger left-wing? Or are the artistic tastes of the toiling masses right-wing and of the privileged classes left-wing? Does a left-winger believe that decisions affecting everybody should be taken by all people or just by a small elite? Consider, for example, capital punishment. Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that the majority of people of all races are in favour of the death penalty but in South Africa it has been abolished by the decision of a handful of highly paid lawyers in the Constitutional Court. Does a left-winger believe that this decision should have been taken instead by the masses in a referendum? Take censorship. Is it left-wing or right-wing to be in favour of censorship? Feminists and religious fundamentalists believe girlie magazines should be banned. Are they left or right? Take the problem of drugs. Some people believe in harsh laws against suppliers and dealers; others, such as the champion of the free market, Milton Friedman, believe that all drugs should be legalised. Does this make Friedman a left-winger? Consider attitudes towards different cultures. Is it the left or the right that believes European culture must be imposed on Africa? Take the examples of female circumcision and polygamy. Does a left-winger believe that whites must respect these African practices or condemn them and persuade blacks to stop them? If so, is it characteristic of the left to belleve that white culture is superior to black and of the right to believe they are equal? The point about all of these questions is that nobody can answer them. The terms "left-wing" and "right-wing" are meaningless. I once tried to find such meaning from a Christian fundamentalist who proudly described himself as right-wing. I asked him to classify Hitler and Mother Teresa. He replied that Hitler was a left-winger and Mother Teresa a right-winger. His superficial reason was that Hitler was godless and revolutionary, and Mother Teresa was devout and apolitical. His deeper reason was that he did not like Hitler and he did like Mother Teresa, and for him "right" was good and "left" was bad. This is the heart of the matter. "Left" and "right" are not terms of political category but of approval or disapproval. When a sociology lecturer at Wits University calls you a right-winger or a white boilermaker at Vanderbijlpark calls you a left-winger, what both really mean is "You bastard!" Silly inventions like "the New Left" and "the New Right" mean nothing more than "Fat- head" or "Baldy". On the other hand when a lecturer calls himself a left-winger and the boilermaker calls himself a right-winger, what both mean is "Hurray for me!" The former wants to be regarded as intellectually superior, the latter as macho. If you want to find consistent political categories, the first step is to disregard all claims of noble intention: every tyrant in history claimed to be acting for the good of the people and so does every evil ideology ever devised. The next step is to recognise that facism and communism do not represent opposite ends of the political spectrum but the same end. They are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Fascism, or National Socialism, is a derivative of Marxism, and apartheid is a derivative of National Socialism. Stalin and Hitler resembled each other, admired each other, used the same methods of state terror and made a deal for the invasion of Poland that started the Second World War; both hated capitalism, trampled on human rights and slaughtered millions of people. The most important question in politics is over the size of the state (By the "state" I mean the monopoly powers of government). And here the political categories are clear. On one end of the range are anarchists, who believe there should be no state at all. Then come liberals, who hold liberty as the highest political good and believe the state should be as small as possible to ensure rule of law. Then come socialists, who believe the state should be large: the mild socialists, the Social Democrats, believe in democracy and a degree of liberty; the extreme socialists, the fascists and communists, despise democracy and seek to destroy liberty. A crucial difference between the liberal and the socialist is that the liberal is always suspicious of power and the socialist admires it. Capitalism is just liberalism with warts. Then there are other clear categories between nationalists and internationalists, between countries with open borders and countries with closed borders, and between conservatives who wish things to stay as they are (things like the British monarchy, African culture and Amazon rain forests) and revolutionaries who wish to overthrow them. But all of these categories overlap in complicated ways because individual people are unpredictable and inconsistent in their political and aesthetic preferences. No man is all of a piece. What we need to do is recognise this variety and uncertainty. In South Africa, unfortunately, there is a tendency to tribalise political ideas. We do not ask a man what he thinks about this or that issue but what ideological tribe he belongs to. We use labels like "left" and "right" because it saves us from having to think and comforts us by dividing people into friends and enemies. But this is the mentality of the kindergarten, and we are actually adults in a complicated society of changing ideas. If you simply refuse to use the terms "left" and "right" in a political discussion, you will see that you begin to think about real political divisions and to reason like an adult. -- Reinier de Vos Internet: de...@aqua.ccwr.ac.za Computing Centre for Water Research Tel: Int+27 331 260-5179 c/o University of Natal, P/Bag X01 Fax: Int+27 331 61896 Scottsville, South Africa, 3200 http://www.ccwr.ac.za/ ------------------------------------------------------------ ----------- Ons spaar die duiwel baie moeite - C J Langenhoven
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