The Republican Party is a disgrace. The ANC is a disgrace

 People who believe in democracy as a principle have viewed the United States as an example of how a diverse country can benefit from the institution of democracy. The country stood out as a beacon of freedom and the application of real democratic principles in a world of fraudulent democracies, such as the ‘Democratic’ East Germany, the ‘Democratic’ North Korea, the ‘Democratic’ Republic of the Congo. For a while, a very brief while, unfortunately, South Africa took a place alongside the United States in the august body of countries in which the government apparently considered itself to be representative of the people, and responsible to the people. In the case of South Africa, that experiment failed when the governing Party found that democracy did not put money in the pockets of its members, and, at the same time, its Marxist policies were beginning to show their incapability of operating in the real world. In retrospect, it seems that the principle of democracy was starting to fail in the United States, helped along by a growing coterie of ‘strong men’ who believed that their thoughts were better, more effective, than those of the common man, and their pockets more deserving, and they started to corrupt the two Parties at the heart pf the American political system. Those people included politicians, big-businessmen and Church leaders, all of whom saw the potential for themselves in misleading the voters, in order to gain huge wealth for themselves. Initially, their moves were made surreptitiously, as part of a long plan to subvert the principles they professed to support, but the drive for massive wealth was too great to resist for long, and the program was accelerated. Side players were brought in as the opportunities developed, players such as Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and their ilk, and then the more reckless players came to accept the moral negatives of conspiring with foreign governments, particularly dictators like Vladimir Putin, to subvert the democracy that is so important to their people. Many of these politicians did this as an act of desperation, in the knowledge that their own abilities would not carry the day in the face of more honest, more moral or simply more competent opponents. In many cases, this move to what, in a more normal society would be viewed with a feeling akin to horror at what seemed to be close to treason, was only a small step for men who lived their business and political existences in an environment of deceit, fraud and convenient lies, and the Church leaders who followed and supported them saw it as only a small deviation from their existence in a world of hidden depravity, sexual excess and pornography. In short, the ‘leaders’ of the community were willing to lead their unthinking and brainwashed followers down a road that has, at its end, the extinction of democracy.

 Recent events testify to the acceleration of this trend. The Senate Hearing in the appointment of Brett Cavanaugh to the Supreme Court was a denial of justice. The Senate had no desire to hear the facts, but, instead, they attacked the witness who was the subject of an attempted rape by the candidate, an act repeated and encouraged by the President. Yet many of the America women remain steadfast in their support of Donald Trump, a demonstrated womaniser and user of prostitutes. The Senate Republicans, during the Impeachment Hearing, had no desire to hear the facts on which Donald Trump stood accused pf grievous misconduct, with only one of them voting against the Republican majority, which acquitted him against the overwhelming evidence. In both of these cases, the Republican Senators, the supposed Representatives of the People, flagrantly and arrogantly supported a man whose entire life has been a lie, a man who demonstrated his cowardice by dodging the draft on the basis of ‘spurs’ in one foot, although he is unable to remember which foot, a man who as President has been shown to have told more than 20 000 outright lies. They have chosen to support a man who has exercised his right to pardon criminals in ways never contemplated by those who wrote that right into law, who has estranged the United States from virtually every democratic ally and so brought world peace into a state of extreme jeopardy, who has shown his incapability to lead by sanctioning actions which have resulted in 170 000 American deaths.

The comparison with South Africa is apt. Donald Trump treats African countries as unworthy of respect or attention, as having no ability to display his supposed ideal of American democracy. In some ways he is right. Virtually no African country lives real democracy. It seems that the system of tribal and traditional leadership is antithetical to democracy. He is also wrong. No true democrat, African or otherwise, would want his country to adopt the current American version of democracy. The American example has disappointed them. People like Trump have removed the American model of democratic governance, leading to a moral vacuum in the part of the world that used to believe in the United States as a shining example to which nations such as the South Africans could aspire. That vacuum has been partly filled by Angela Merkel, a quiet-spoken but remarkably effective leader, and Emmanuel Macron, a man still trying to find his footing after a period of sucking up to Donald Trump, but those examples have been largely neutralized by Boris Johnson, a Trump-acolyte leading his country into an economic abyss on a basis of false promises and outright lies. That leaves the world in the condition of acute vulnerability to leaders of Russia and China, both of whom are considerably more competent than the man leading America.

And that brings us back to South Africa, a country reborn in 1994, amid promises of a Rainbow Nation that would harness the best qualities of all its citizens to march confidently into a bright new future. Instead, President after President has misled the people into an ever-darkening failure of the State, based on Marxist-Leninist policies which have failed wherever they have been applied, which has adopted a New Apartheid, another discredited policy, in order to ensure that the ANC will have the ability to gain control of the economic might of its businesses, which saw the country grow strongly even during the dark days of the previous regime.

Perhaps the voters of the United States should have heeded the warnings given by Trump’s multiple business failures and bankruptcies in the years before his election as President. Perhaps the voters in South Africa should have heeded the warning given by Cyril Ramaphosa during the negotiations on the new Constitution, when he declared that his, and supposedly the ANC’s, aim was to heat the water slowly so that the frog in the water, representing the Whites who were keen to assist their Black brothers to make the country one to aspire to, would remain unsuspecting and unaware of the intention to dispossess them of their assets and their rights until the feat was complete. Perhaps the voters, White and Black, should have considered that the principle of democracy, or which they overwhelmingly voted in 1994, would be eroded by a crooked and incompetent government within less than thirty years, leaving most of them in poverty and desperation, while the chosen few amassed wealth that would have been unimaginable only a few short years before. Perhaps the voters in South Africa, as in the United States, should have understood that the election promises made to them were no more than political lies to permit the men and women making them access to the unlimited wealth of their countries.

One can only hope that, in the electoral process, the voters will come to their senses, that they will have the wit to understand what these anti-democratic processes have cost them and their countries, and will choose to vote for a government that will set the countries back on the road to a good future. One can only hope that citizens everywhere will heed the warnings given by the United States and South Africa, and take steps to ensure that their governments are led by people who believe in real democracy, not in the version that leads to wealth for the leaders and poverty for the citizens. One can only hope that the citizens of the world will understand that their liberty and their future can only be ensured by eternal vigilance over the doings of their leaders.