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.

Donald Trump’s Republicans, Jacob Zuma’s ANC and Pope Francis’ Catholic Church

The people and groups named appear to be a disparate bunch – a renegade Republican President of the United States, a renegade ‘Freedom Fighter turned plunderer of his people and a leader of one of the largest religious organizations. Yet there are many similarities that need to be looked at closely by anyone seeking to understand what is going wrong with our world.

Donald Trump is a president who is proud of his inability to understand details of situations and the nuances that have enabled the world to function effectively until recently. In his world, everything revolves around him. Even truth is what he says it is. He has captured the populist imagination of a group of people very much like him. They see everything in black and white. They do not understand the other sides to each story, and they do not want to understand them. Trump appears to be happy to lead his nation into a bigoted ignorance, maneuvering his way through the facts, blaming others for what is going wrong, ignoring what is clearly failing, in the blind belief in his own incomparable abilities to bluster and blackmail every opponent, including people who would like to help him to achieve the best for his people, into submitting to his will. It is already clear that this President has taken the international standing of his country several large steps backward. He is willing to hand over dominance over, and influence in, the Asia Pacific region to China, by backing out of trade treaties and negotiations which, in his ignorance of the wider context, he describes in his usual exaggerated and uncompromising terms as ‘the worst ever’. He is willing to alienate his country’s closest allies in Europe by his oafish words and his false claims, that ‘they must pay their share of the NATO budget, they must increase expenditure on the military’, disregarding the fact that a large part of expenditure by, for example, Germany, on elements that are not strictly military are designed to avoid the situation that could easily turn those situations into pressing military problems. Roman Herzog, the then-incoming German President, recognized that the way to peace did not necessarily involve artillery and fighter jets when he told the German nation that ‘we must take steps to resolve the problems of Africa in Africa, because, if we do not, they will become European problems.’ Trump, notoriously ignorant in matters of history, does not understand that view. In his eyes, military might is THE way to exercise influence in the world. His background as a student at a military college goes a long way to explain that shortcoming, yet other military men, such as President Jack Kennedy and Senator John McCain, did not suffer from such a defective understanding. They understood that prosperous friends will generally not be willing to sacrifice that prosperity in order to gain a military superiority, a situation which, at best, will be temporary, enduring only until the opponents, fearing the threats contained in a military build-up and working to match that military capability. They knew that a two-times overkill capability, coupled with an active support of friendly countries, and countries that might become friendly, is more than enough to maintain a status in which a potential enemy could recognize that a military adventure would be a sure loss. They knew that diplomacy, not unfounded bombast, was the only way to maintain a peaceful world. They were also able to recognize that courting the association of manifest enemies, to the detriment of proven friends, was to place their country on a slippery slope to global catastrophe.

The fact that the Republican Party has, for so long, tolerated the buffoonish antics of Donald Trump is a question that must raise the suspicions among Party supporters about the leaders of the Party, who are responsible for holding the excesses of the leading Party members in check and forming the opinions of the Party rank and file. It appears that those leaders are not willing to speak out against the most divisive and destructive man in American politics since the McCarthy era.

Strangely enough, the rule of Jacob Zuma in South Africa bears remarkable parallels to the rule of Donald Trump in the United States. Like Trump, he had no hesitation in lying outright to suit his purpose. He had no sense of shame in dividing the nation to achieve his nefarious ends. He had no sense of the damage he was doing to the nation and to those who identified themselves with him, needing only to achieve his personal objectives. Like Trump, Zuma had no understanding of history, or of how the flow of it resulted in the present and will result in the future. Like Trump, he had only the barest understanding of the interrelationship of events, of how pushing here has the potential to bring about a huge distortion there, and he has no feeling of personal responsibility for the outcome of his maneuvering, beyond the desire to achieve something for himself. Like Trump, he relies on native cunning and animal instinct, not on understanding and careful evaluation. Like Trump, he surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-men, people who are always reluctant to stand up to the perceived excesses of their chief in the interests of their personal benefit. Like Trump, he was always willing to throw those ‘dear friends and trusted confidants’ under the bus when the time came, and, like Trump, he was unable to comprehend that those people would be just as willing to throw him under the bus when that became expedient in the preservation of their own safety and comfort.

Pope Francis, on the other hand, is an organization man. The Catholic Church continues to hold onto the illusion that it is the representative of God on Earth, that it speaks the words of God and is therefor infallible in its pronunciations. It ignores at every turn the fallacy of this view, disregarding the evidence, or, at best, explaining it as a ‘human failing, excused in each case by a benevolent God. It ignores the long-held Church belief that the Earth was flat, that it was the center of the Universe, that only those baptized by itself were good enough to enter Heaven. It ignores the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition, perpetrated in the name of the Church. It ignores the constant stream of acts of inhumanity perpetrated by the representatives of the Church against children, men and women over many years. It ignores the fact that the Papacy, the very leadership of the Church, acting under the authority of God, was the subject of a competitive tender in the not-so-distant past, that favors of the Church were the subject of payments. The present tour of Ireland by the Pope has shown itself very clearly to be little more than a public relations exercise, planned to boost the flagging membership of the Church in the face of the revulsion against its actions and inactions. The Pope remains unwilling to confess the sins of which it has clearly been guilty, to make public reparation to the thousands, possibly millions of its adherents, for the gross misconduct of members of the Church. The Pope would have the members of the congregation believe that such misconduct was not known to the senior management of the Church. Such a claim is disingenuous in the extreme. At the very least, the supposedly all-knowing God which the Church claims to represent must have made the ‘indiscretions’ of the clergy known to those at the top of the Church, even if it was possible for those responsible for such a well-organized pattern of conduct to have hidden it, in the face of the policy of ‘confession and forgiveness’ exercised by the Church. It is hard to conceive of a situation in which a substantial number of senior clerics, across many countries, could have succeeded in maintaining the lie that had been exposed, over and over, by the people who had suffered at the hands of the Church.

Yet the Pope continues to uphold the fiction that the Catholic Church is the upholder of virtue and spiritual rectitude. He continues to avoid handing over to the criminal prosecution agencies every single priest and bishop suspected of sexual offences against those who entrust their spiritual guidance to the Church. He prays to God for forgiveness for the sins of the Church, yet he fails to pray to the members of the congregation for such forgiveness. Of course, it is easy to pray for forgiveness for such heinous behavior, when you, yourself, claim the right to dispense such forgiveness. If the church were a formal company, the shareholders would long since have sold their shareholding on the basis of being fed such obvious lies and disinformation by the Directors.

What are the grossly obvious similarities between these people and the organizations they represent? Some answers leap out of the facts.

None of the persons in question truly believes that they are responsible for their actions to the people they claim to represent. Every one of them has an ability to interpret the events and their actions solely in relation to themselves, twisting the facts to present a picture that they need to show themselves in the right light. They all have an ability to manipulate the views and beliefs of their constituency to their own ends. They all have enormous power, a power that could as easily be used for good as for the evil that has been their choice, and they all have a hunger for such power, to the extent that they are willing to lie and twist their story to ensure that they are able to hold onto such power, regardless of the views and advice of better people. None of them is prepared to face the world openly, to confess that what they are doing is against the interests of Humanity and of the world. None of them is willing to accept the loss of their leadership role, and the power and wealth (in their terms) that comes with it, in the interests of the greater good.

Worst of all, each of these men and the organizations they represent is willing to continue to inflict on the world the incalculable harm that they have done in the past.

Perhaps the most glaring similarity is that none of these men and their organizations have any discernible set of principles by which to measure their actions and which can truly be said to be devoid of personal interest or benefit. None of them is willing to stand up to wrong if there is any possibility that they will be harmed by such a stand.

In the words of Jo Stevens (‘Connection’ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N1XTDYD): “her dislike for Mr. Jenkins Jr. would not cause her to abandon that principle now. That was what principles were for. If one felt free to abandon them at will, it made no sense to have them at all.”

What is wrong with our world?

It seems that the crisp answer is that the people we allow to represent us do not have principles that are understood and accepted by the majority of us, and, by their example, we allow them to degrade the principles that we as people consider important for civilization to work.