A wise German thinker once suggested that it was rather foolish to ask someone’s views about themselves.
They would always tell only the good things about themselves.
That is, of course, if they admit to their own erroneous ways in the first place.
One great tactic of what I call the switch of morality – where the villain assumes victimhood – is to create a distraction.
Sometimes they do this with great eloquence, and sometimes it’s just plain pitiful.
Like the time when Brian Molefe, the former chief executive officer of Eskom, shed a tear in public when it was suggested that he might have had his hand in the cookie jar.
Shedding a tear will, always, tug at the heart of even the greatest of stoics.
Politicians, are, of course quite adept at making themselves look like victims.
For instance, last week the US buried one of its war heroes, John McCain.
The speeches at his funeral were generally sentimental and remembered McCain’s bravery and courage. This may be true, but the war in which he fought – and killed many innocent people – was an illegal and unjust war.
The Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini was the most outstanding exemplar of his time.
He tried to have people remember (or, at least, never forget) that the Italians were the “virtuous victims” of the era.
There are some powerful echoes of this scramble for victimhood in South Africa today, especially among the functional intellectuals battling to retain their privileges. Enormous logical fallacies are erected with scant regard for the weakness of the original starting point of most arguments.
When I listen to the eloquence of some arguments, I am reminded of an observation by one of the great 20th century economists, John Maynard Keynes, who said it was extraordinary “how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam”.
And so, when one listens to the daily protestations – the elegant and the pitiful – one wonders if the speaker had ever considered the way their starting positions were based on lies, and actual injustice.
The most recent example of this is among people who seem to have short memories, and who have assumed an eternal innocence and present themselves as virtuous victims of affirmative action, black economic empowerment, land reform and general transformation of South Africa’s power structures from a settler colony to a full democracy.
The point, here, is that democracy is not like the magician’s “abracadabra”. Repeat it again and again, and all is well.
This is especially apposite where the exclusion of millions of people was structurally established over centuries.
The most odious of the new virtuous victims are the folk who would have us believe that “free markets” and liberal economics would, at the flick of a switch, somehow, and most naturally, allocate justice.
Pulling up the rear are the ethno-nationalists who want to “protect their culture”, strive for “purity” and spread fears of genocide and multi-culturalism. These are the innocents of our time. Innocence is a good thing, right? Just add a few tears, and the morality switch is complete.
The first bunch, the liberals (this does not include all liberals; only those given to paramnesia or confabulation), sprinkle their language with words like “freedom” or “choice”.
They minimise historical racism, have somehow traded places and now believe they, themselves, are the victims.
Again, this is not to say that there are not people genuinely disaffected. It’s just that any suggestion that our iniquitous past created structural privilege and advantage, and that these endure, is met with the most sanctimonious blather about reverse-racism and subtle claims about virtuous victimhood.
Reverse racism is possible. We would have to start with centuries of conquest of “others”, establish structures of dominance and control, wipe out indigenous communities like, say, the Europeans did in North America, and establish attendant hierarchies based on skin colour.
The point here is that structural racism did not start with apartheid in 1948. These structures did not evaporate in 1994.
It’s always amusing that even Hendrik Verwoerd remains sanitised. Some of us have deeper knowledge of the man’s bigotry, and how it was part of Nazism’s appeal (to some folk) during the 1930s, when he was editor of Die Transvaler.
Like Hitler, Verwoerd was not too pleased that, as he explained, Jews enjoyed a “disproportionate share” of certain industries. After World War 2, he turned his attention more directly to “non-whites” in South Africa – or, more correctly, to “non-Europeans”.
As for the virtuous victims, the one thing that we cannot accuse them of is racism. We live in a country which the World Bank has described as the most unequal – and with race being the defining feature.
Black people are simply not getting ahead. In the meantime, functional intellectuals, starting from Keynes’ mistake, have turned the tables on everyone. They are, now, the persecuted.