Helen Zille, the Democratic Alliance’s federal council chairperson, has recently been castigated for tweets flagging the failures of the African National Congress’s (ANC) ‘armed struggle’ and the number of race-based laws adopted in the post-apartheid period. Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng could face investigation for advocating a more even-handed approach from the South African government to help resolve the bitter Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
As the manufactured outcry around these issues deepens, so the list of topics that are effectively ‘off limits’ to the mainstream media – and are supposed to be avoided by other commentators too – continues to expand.
The mainstream media ignores, for instance, the question whether South Africa should follow the example of wealthy Singapore in focusing more on a better future than a fractured colonial past. In addition, though the preface to South Africa’s Constitution urges ‘respect for those who have worked to build and develop our country’, there is little debate as to whether the white minority merits being dismissed as ‘colonialists of a special kind’, whose middle-class prosperity has nothing to do with skills, enterprise, or innovation but stems solely from the ruthless exploitation of the black population.
Also largely off-limits to mainstream media coverage is the question whether land now owned by white South Africans was ‘stolen’ in the colonial era – or was instead acquired by the established conquest-or-treaty methods of the time, which were also used by Zulu and other black groups. Nor is there much coverage of whether a doctrine of collective guilt should retrospectively be applied to whites alone.
Also generally absent from evaluation is the failure of the ‘armed struggle’ on which the ANC embarked in 1961, largely at the behest of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Nor is it widely acknowledged that this struggle turned from failure to success only in its last decade – and solely because it then morphed into a ruthless ‘people’s war’ during which some 20 500 people were killed. Three quarters (or some 15 000) of these killings took place in the negotiations period from 1990 to 1994.
Shot or hacked or burnt to death
Almost all of the dead were black civilians, who were shot or hacked or burnt to death not to end apartheid – which was clearly on its way out from the time of the ANC’s unbanning in February 1990 – but rather to:
• weaken and destroy the ANC’s black rivals in the Black Consciousness (BC) Movement and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP);
• use terror to bring black people into line; and
• put enough pressure on the negotiations process to secure the ‘famous victory’ of which SACP leader Joe Slovo boasted in 1993.
There is also singularly little mainstream coverage of the ANC’s role in reviving the apartheid-era racial classifications that were rightly condemned across the globe and finally abolished by the National Party government in June 1991, almost 30 years ago. Also generally ignored is the ANC’s use of this racial tagging to found a host of race-based laws requiring the fulfilment of racial ‘targets’ (quotas in all but name) in employment, management, procurement, ownership, and other spheres.
Mostly absent from debate as well is the role of race-based BEE in compromising state delivery, encouraging corruption, restricting growth, curtailing jobs, and deepening intra-black inequality between the relatively few who benefit and the many millions who do not.
Also excluded from debate in the mainstream media is the validity of the Covid-19 ‘science’ – and the credibility of the exaggerated fatality projections that helped trigger lockdown decisions right around the world. Experts opposed to the lockdown strategy were almost entirely omitted from the wall-to-wall Covid-19 coverage of the major news outlets. Instead, as The Spectator magazine in Britain reports, the media moved in ‘lockstep’ on the lockdown strategy, with ‘startlingly homogenised viewpoints espoused across the networks’.
Cajoled or bullied
Still more difficult to discuss or contest is the growing demand, fuelled by the Black Lives Matter movement, for public acquiescence in the simplistic view that all racial disparities in the United States and elsewhere result from ‘systemic racism’, rather than a host of more relevant factors. People are being cajoled or bullied into endorsing an unfounded claim that celebrates victimhood, denies individual agency, and seeks to divide and demoralise the moderate majority.
For all South Africans, the most important of the many issues ‘off-limits’ to debate in the mainstream media is the ANC’s commitment to a national democratic revolution (NDR). This is a Soviet-inspired strategy which aims to take the country from a capitalist to a socialist future by incremental steps in some 20 policy spheres.
The ANC regularly recommits itself to this revolution at each of its five-yearly national conferences. Its current key policy proposals – expropriation without compensation, National Health Insurance, prescribed asset requirements for pension funds, and the printing of money under a revised macro-economic mandate for the South African Reserve Bank – come straight out of the NDR playbook. But the mainstream media turns a blind eye to the NDR, just as it earlier ignored the ANC’s people’s war.
Many South Africans have little knowledge of the issues earlier outlined because the mainstream media routinely excludes them from its coverage. People who use alternative and social media to challenge this unofficial censorship are ignored, ‘de-platformed’, and excoriated. Some face a manufactured upsurge in ‘public’ outrage and persistent demands for their dismissal or other punishment.
Now, however, a still more insidious weapon is being honed. The Covid-19 pandemic has been used to make the publication of ‘fake news’ about both the pandemic and the government’s response to it a criminal offence. The panic around the virus has also given fresh impetus to real411.org, a ‘digital anti-disinformation platform’ established before the 2019 election and now intent on countering ‘the spread of mis- and disinformation’, particularly in the Covid-19 context.
Remit goes beyond the virus
The organisation’s remit goes beyond the virus, however, for it also seeks to counter ‘what appears to be truth [but is] sometimes propaganda being peddled to sway public opinion with the intent to cause harm’. Such ‘digital disinformation’ must now be ‘referred to platforms for removal’, swiftly countered by (supposedly) more accurate ‘narratives’, or ‘escalated to the SAPS for further action under regulations’.
According to the website, decisions on the removal of material are to be made by a ‘digital complaints committee’. Also vital is a volunteer network of ‘spotters’ whose task it is to comb through alternative and social media postings and so identify the ‘digital disinformation’ that might otherwise ‘undermine South Africa’s emerging democracy’.
In other words, the unofficial censorship that is already so effective in keeping so many key issues ‘off-limits’ to the mainstream media is now to be made more complete. This steady closing down of knowledge and debate could not be more at odds with the constitutional guarantee of media freedom and the right of every person in the country to ‘receive or impart information or ideas’.
Propaganda, falsehoods, and the silencing of dissent undermine democracy. The antidote lies in openness, free speech, vigorous public argument – and the right of all readers to be fully informed and then decide for themselves where the truth lies.
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