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Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Zuma's Country of God - The Sequel

This is an appendix to my previous post in which I pointed out that Jacob Zuma is an idiot.

My lovely and talented wife pointed me to a series of articles on a Democratic Alliance blog, 'The Real ANC Today', going into much greater detail on the attitude towards religion of the ANC in general and Zuma in particular. Paying specific attention to the inherent contradiction between nationalist and religious absolutism and a democratic government.

Here's a highlight:
[T]he notion of governing by divine right is intricately linked to the idea that, ultimately, physical force will be used to impose that ‘right’ - if not by the respective deity, then by those who supposedly represent its will on earth. In South Africa today, we are faced with a position where those aligned to Jacob Zuma have threatened to take up arms in his name - indeed for him - a comment Zuma has failed to condemn.
Chilling. 

Here's another:
Thus, as the apartheid state has been dismantled and its edifice diluted and washed away, so the ANC has been forced to re-invent ‘the demon’ of racism as a central and eminent threat to our democracy, and the evil against which it must both fight and justify its existence. It has simply substituted, exaggerated and conflated the one, generic racism, for the other, apartheid. For, as its Constitution illustrates, central to its ‘historic mission’ is the struggle against apartheid. Remove that, and the ANC’s core mission is denuded. Just as religion needs evil to exist, so the ANC needs racism.

Good, eh?

Here are the links:
One thing caused me to grimace and make sceptical noises while reading these, and that was the author's continued assertion that objective reality is a myth, as opposed to simply being partially hidden by the veil of subjective experience, and therefore unavaible to anyone for the purpuses of full understanding.

But I'm happy overlook that small quibble due to the otherwise highly rational argument presented - it's only a tangential point anyway.




2 comments:

  1. Kinda sounds a little like George Dubya, doesn't it?

    And would you believe George was awarded an international medal of peace? AND he has been nominated for the nobel peace prize! Check out www.bio-medicine.org/.../President-George-W--Bush-Receives-International-Medal-of-PEACE-That-Coincides-With-PEPFAR-... and wonkette.com/374421/george-w-bush-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize

    We live in a crazy, crazy world.

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  2. It sounds a lot like Dubya, indeed. He, too, is a religious fundamentalist with dominionist tendencies.

    How he managed to win a peace medal escapes me... hopefully the Nobel committee will have better alternatives to choose from.

    Incidentally, Adolf Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize in 1939. Of course, he didn't win it either.

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