Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
Bush’s favourite historian
It is scary to read that Bush’s favourite historian justifies concentration camps as used during the Anglo Boer war. Money quote:
His [Roberts’s] political hero is Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister who, during the Boer War, constructed concentration camps in South Africa that, a generation later, inspired Hermann Goering. Under Salisbury, the British burned Boer civilians out of their homes and farms and drove them into concentration camps. The result was that about 34,000 people–some 15 percent of the entire Boer population–died in the camps, mainly of disease and starvation.
Roberts presents a very different picture for Bush. Drawing obvious parallels with Iraq, he says the British introduced “regime change” in Pretoria out of a concern “for human rights.” They bravely fought on against an insurgency campaign that led many weak-willed liberals back home to believe the war was lost, until victory was finally achieved. (It wouldn’t be surprising to see him claim the Boers had a stash of WMD.)
In his most radical piece of revisionism, Roberts argues that, far from being a “war crime,” the concentration camps “were set up for the Boers’ protection.” Mike Davis of the University of California, Irvine, author of Late Victorian Holocausts, says bluntly: “This is tantamount to Holocaust-denial. His arguments about the Boer concentration camps are similar to the arguments of the Nazi apologists about those camps.”
Must say, if I had to choose between Zuma or Bush for President of South Africa, I’ll choose Mr Umshiniwam anyday.
