I’ve often wondered who decides what day should be allocated to what fashionable cause. Is there, for example, a secret committee who meet and decide that every February 12th should be ‘International Drink a Litre of Water Day’? And what happens when we run out of days? With so many worthy causes to rend our garments over it seems probable that we could be celebrating ‘Heart Care Day’ at the same time as ‘Eat More Fatty Meat Day’.
One way around the problem is to get smart and declare ‘16 days of activism against gender-based violence’ which means you can block off more than two weeks of the calendar and keep less-worthy causes out. I suspect this particular period has been rebranded and that it used to be cumbersomely called ‘16 days of activism for non-violence against women and children’. Presumably someone pointed out that some of those children could be toxic males and would inevitably grow up to be rapists and wife beaters, hence the new woke label. When you’re dealing with male toxicity, it’s a good thing to nip the problem in the bud. Rather like getting rid of the greenfly as soon as they land on your rose bushes.
Thanks to our wonderfully woke mainstream media, we all know that there is a ‘scourge’ of gender-based violence, but very little mention is ever made of non-gender-based violence and whether it has also become a scourge. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m still very hazy on the definition of gender-based violence as opposed to pure thuggery, domestic violence, rape, common assault and murder. Presumably if a person murders somebody of the same gender it’s nowhere near as bad as murdering somebody of a different gender?
But with so many genders to choose from, the non-binary possibilities are limitless. So, for example a transman could murder a genderfluid man and that would qualify as gender-based violence. Presumably, during the trial the accused would be allowed to inform the prosecuting counsel and the bench of his/her/its preferred pronouns. Maybe I’m getting old and curmudgeonly (surely not?) but I can’t help thinking that sugar-coating violent crime in a woolly-sounding euphemism such as ‘gender-based violence’ exacerbates the problem rather than addresses it.
Maybe the FW de Klerk Foundation should refer to apartheid as ‘melanin-based repression’ from now on?
So, last week was ‘National Everyone Must Apologise for Something Week’ in SA, and what an apolfest it was. The FW de Klerk Foundation apologised to the nation for failing to notice that apartheid was a crime against humanity, Juju apologised to Cyril, Boy apologised to Cyril and Juju, Cyril apologised to Mrs Juju and the nation, and by Thursday the apologies were flying so thick and fast it looked like a doubles match at Wimbledon.
This would all be fine and dandy if things were that simple but, as so often in our troubled land, things are never simple. I’m not sure what it was that prompted the usually respected FW de Klerk Foundation to declare that apartheid wasn’t a crime against humanity, but I would think that even the dullest of minds might have known that one wouldn’t fly. A quick look at the demographics of the country and the lines of unemployed people would suggest that there are an awful lot of folk out there who could disagree with that sentiment.
Not all would accuse FW of being a murderer but at least 45 million people would have some lived experience of apartheid or its aftermath and probably wouldn’t shrug it off as just one of those things. But the FW de Klerk Foundation quickly apologised which set in motion the next part of the process.
In this joyless and woke world in which we increasingly find ourselves, an apology is regarded as an admission of guilt, which gives the baying, cyber-bully mob the go-ahead to pull on their Doc Marten bovver boots and continue to kick the hapless victim. Years ago, when the Sunday Times decided to dispense with my services and label me a racist, I was advised by Peter Bruce to write an apology which he would publish in Business Day. It was well-meant advice and Peter very decently wrote an editorial supporting me and saying that he didn’t think I was a racist. The idea of the apology was that it would draw a line under the whole affair and we could all move on. Anybody who knows anything about the Brits know that we love apologising and we even apologise when somebody else steps on our toes. So I duly wrote an apology to anybody who was genuinely offended by the column in question and thought that was that. Not so.
The South African rule of apology is for those to whom the apology is directed to reject it as insincere and to insist that the apologiser still holds whatever vile opinions were being apologised for. You really can’t win by apologising to the woke left, as Helen Zille has discovered so many times. In fact, it’s the worst thing you can possibly do, because some group of social justice warriors with nothing better to occupy their time will start baying for your blood and demand that you be sacked from your job or stripped of a Nobel Peace prize. Countless leading intellectuals and academics in the US and the UK have been hounded out of their jobs by the baying mob and their common mistake was to apologise, which is what decent-minded people do. Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with yob culture which is far from decent-minded then you’re digging your own grave.
Rather than apologise you should learn from the masters and follow the shining example of the ANC, which is to spin, lie and deny. If the FW de Klerk Foundation had denied ever saying that apartheid wasn’t a crime against humanity and claimed that their website had been hacked by the sort of people who wanted to see SA fail, they would have been home and dry. But you live and learn.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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