Quote of the week
Mr Zuma is no ordinary litigant. He is the former President of the Republic, who remains a public figure and continues to wield significant political influence, while acting as an example to his supporters… He has a great deal of power to incite others to similarly defy court orders because his actions and any consequences, or lack thereof, are being closely observed by the public. If his conduct is met with impunity, he will do significant damage to the rule of law. As this Court noted in Mamabolo, “[n]o one familiar with our history can be unaware of the very special need to preserve the integrity of the rule of law”. Mr Zuma is subject to the laws of the Republic. No person enjoys exclusion or exemption from the sovereignty of our laws… It would be antithetical to the value of accountability if those who once held high office are not bound by the law.
Secretary of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, Corruption and Fraud in the Public Sector including Organs of State v Zuma and Others (CCT 52/21) [2021] ZACC 18
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.
