Expecting the unexpected: UK leaving the EU

For the past few weeks I’ve been reading stuff people have written about the pros and cons of the UK staying in the EU, but I get the impression that few people thought about the real meaning of leaving until it suddenly became a real possibility after the referendum.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, so if I were a Brit voter I would have been undecided, at least on the merits of the question.

On factors quite unrelated to the merits of the question, however, the poisonous rhetoric of the advocates of leaving might have inclined me to the “remain” side. The “leave” advocates seemed to appeal to the worst motives and impulses in human nature.

Not only that, but the “leave” campaign turned out to the thoroughly dishonest, and did their best to mislead the voters with lies, and making promises they had no intention of keeping — this, for example:

A campaign promise that was repudiated the following day as a “mistake”

Now that it’s over, I see there might be a possibility for the reunification of Ireland, and for Scotland to apply to rejoin the EU on its own. Perhaps that would mean that the English would need passports to
cross the Tweed. I don’t think anyone expected those as possibilities, but they’ve suddenly appeared, like new islands after a volcanic eruption.

And it seems to me that they are quite positive possibilities.  I suppose that is the result of reading a book about 15 years ago that pointed out that it would make little difference whether Scotland or Wales became independent or remained members of the United Kingdom, because being members of the EU would give them just as many, if not more advantages than belonging to the UK. I can’t remember whether the author envisaged England as not belonging to the EU, but if you are interested, the book is The Isles: a history by Norman Davies.

But that is rather academic and detached; looking at this from 10 000 kilometres away is being hopelessly out of touch. Fifty years ago I went to the UK to study theology at St Chad’s College in Durham. I’m still in touch with some of my friends from there, and I asked some of them for their thoughts on the topic. This is what some of them had to say:

What dark place does Britain for the British take us to?

Catastrophe. Britain has broken apart. An uprising of resentment by the left-behind has torn us in two, a country wrecked by a yawning class divide stretched wider by recession and austerity. Anger against a London establishment was deftly diverted by the Tory right and Ukip towards foreigners – enemies in Brussels and aliens in our midst. Wherever we went, the Guardian reported that same fury among those without education and opportunity, a country served right for its gross inequality. Day after day the Sun, Mail, Express, Sunday Times and Telegraph injected poison into the nation’s bloodstream with tales of foreign criminals, jihadists and scroungers. How Murdoch and Dacre will revel in their power. What of the false hopes raised for poorly paid, insecure, badly housed Brexit voters? Expecting something better, they will get much worse. “Controlling our borders”, they will expect immigrants, new and old, to be gone. They were told more housing, GP appointments and school places would be freed up from migrants. But as treasury receipts fall, there will be less of everything. Will the next call be to expel foreigners already here? What dark place does Britain for the British take us to?

Farage’s victory speech about the decent ordinary people taking back control “without a bullet fired” was unthinkably crass with an MP shot and stabbed to death in the heat of the campaign. Cameron  will no doubt be replaced by worse as the country is taken over by Tory extremists and fantasists, wild free-marketeer romantics experimenting with other people’s lives, alongside Ukip’s pernicious racism.

Ahead lie years of fractious negotiation, turning the EU into Britain’s number one enemy. The more these populist leaders need to prove this wasn’t a fatal error, the more they will blame all home-grown woes on our close neighbours. Britain has turned its back on the world. ~ Polly Toynbee

That from my friend Bob Gallagher, now a retired Anglican priest in Liverpool.

Another college friend, Frank Cranmer, who has spent most of his life in the fields of law and politics, writes:

Whatever the defects of the EU – and they are many – to leave just strikes us as barmy. Apart from anything else, London is the biggest financial centre in Europe, we depend on exporting financial services to balance our visible trade deficit and, once we leave, it’ll be much, much harder for our financial institutions to trade in Europe.

We both think that the vote went the way it did for three reasons. The first is that people outside London (and Scotland, which has its own agenda) simply haven’t experienced much in the way of the perceived economic benefits of EU membership. The second is a desire to kick politicians generally – of whatever party – in the teeth: even dedicated, lifelong Conservative and Labour voters tend increasingly to regard politicians at Westminster of whatever party as a bunch of spoilt, self-interested brats. Thirdly, as was pointed out in a very good editorial in, of all places, the Jewish Chronicle, the EU commissariat is perceived as impossibly arrogant and remote, merely telling people to shut up and take what Brussels reckons is good for them – and we’re afraid that there’s more than a grain of truth in that perception. And it wasn’t helped by a disastrous campaign on both sides. Jeremy Corbyn was particularly useless; and the level of debate rarely rose above the level of a school playground spat.

So here we are, on the way out. The likelihood is that we’ll end up as members of the EEA, still bound by almost all of the existing and future EU Directives but without any influence on their content. Alternatively, we go it alone – doing precisely what, God knows. As to passports on the Tweed, who knows? A much more serious issue is border controls in Ireland, where the border passes through people’s farms in some places.

And for a third view, here’s one from someone born in England but living in another EU country. I’ve never met her face to face, but we’ve been online friends for more than 25 years, half her lifetime and a third of mine. And I strongly recommend that you read it to the end, especially if you’re not in the UK: This is Cyprus…: Cyprus, the EU and Brexit

Well, that’s what some of my English friends think of it. As for me, I’m old enough to remember when the British wanted to join the EU (or the Common Market, as it was in those days), and President Charles de Gaulle of France blackballed them with a resounding “Non!”. This inspired the composition of the song All Gall, which is perhaps particularly poignant right now.

Eyetie, Benelux Germany and me
That’s my market recipe.

As I said, I don’t have a dog in this fight; what the Brits do is their business. Perhaps we might even gain from it, if the British are looking for new markets once Europe is closed to them, they might reinstate the system of Commonwealth preferences, and that could benefit South Africa — our wines could be much more competitive than French or German or Portuguese or Bulgarian ones. We might even be able to sell our sparking wines as champagne and our dessert wines as sherry.

That is, of course, if England doesn’t decide to hold another referendum and leave the Commonwealth as well.

And I’m not sure that Britain has much to market anywhere else since Maggie Thatcher killed their manufacturing industry and turned them into a nation of hairdressers.

 

When is bullying acceptable?

A few days ago there was a campaign to get people to wear purple to show their disapproval of bullying of gay people. I agree with the sentiments of my Facebook friend Joseph Slonović when he said Facebook (1) | Joseph Slonović:

I don’t own a single item of purple clothing. And really, I don’t want to. But do take a moment, folks, to reflect on the disgusting bullying and intolerance that has led so many gay teens to resort to suicide — especially lately. It’s terrible, and it should be taken seriously.

But I disagreed with him when he went on to say

And as my friend Lucie pointed out: “can we stop calling it ‘bullying?’ The term seems too benign. Let’s start calling it what is is – bigotry, homophobia, gay-bashing, an epidemic of hate crimes. These aren’t the actions of a few rogue ‘bullies.'”

I disagree about not calling it bullying. Bullying is bad, regardless of who the victims are, or the reason for it. By not calling it bullying you create a perception that certain kinds of bullying are socially acceptable, or at least less socially unacceptable than others.

Is calling it “bigotry” an improvement?

Bigotry is intolerance of any ideas other than ones own, especially about things like religion, race or politics.

I would say it was quite a big and serious step to pass from bigotry to bullying; from rejecting another person’s ideas to actively hurting, persecuting or indimidating them (which is what “bullying” means). In what way can that be described as “benign”?

Calling it “homophobia” rather than bullying singles out one class of victim, and makes it easier to ignore other classes. Can one have a scale of phobias? If bullying is too “benign” for homophobia, is it acceptable for xenophobia? Is it more evil to bully homosexuals than to bully illegal immigrants? Or to bully Somali immigrants just because they are immigrants, regardless of their legal status?

I think bullying is bad, no matter who the victims are. And creating a hierarchy of victims smacks of, well, bigotry.

Synchroblog on immigration

Yesterday some bloggers had a synchroblog on immigration.

A synchroblog is when a group of bloggers decide to post articles on the same topic at about the same time, with links to each other’s posts, so that you can surf through the posts and get a variety of views on the topic. Thanks to Sonja Andrews for coordinating this month’s synchroblog, and for reviving it.

• Jonathan Brink – Immigration Synchroblog
• Mike Victorino at Still A Night Owl – Being the Flag
• Liz Dyer at Grace Rules – Together We Can Make Dreams Come True
• Sonnie Swentson-Forbes at Hey Sonnie – Immigration Stories
• Matt Stone at Glocal Christianity – Is Xenophobia Ever Christlike?
• Kathy Escobar at the carnival in my head – it’s a lot easier to be against immigration when you have papers
• Steve Hayes at Khanya – Christians and the Immigration Issue
• Ellen Haroutunian – Give Me Your Tired
• Bethany Stedman – Choosing Love Instead of Fear
• Pete Houston at Peter’s Progress – Of Rape and Refuge and Eyes Wide Shut
• Joshua Seek – Loving Our Immigrant Brother
• Amanda MacInnis at Cheese Wearing Theology – Christians and Immigration
• Sonja Andrews at Calacirian – You’re Absolutely Right
• Peter Walker – Synchroblog – Immigration Reform
• Steven Calascione at Eirenikos – The Jealousy of Migration
• George Elerick at The Love Revolution – We’re Not Kings or Gods
• Beth Patterson at Virtual Tea House – What we resist not only persists but will eventually become our landlord
• K. W. Leslie at The Evening of Kent – On American Immigration

This synchroblog was specifically on Christians and the immigration issue. Why just Christians? Aren’t others concerned about it?

Well part of the answer is to be found in a blog post that isn’t part of the synchroblog, but perhaps ought to be:The New Litmus Test | Solomon Hezekiah:

All of my friends (and yes, I have a few) who used to go on and on about abortion now go on and on about immigration. The level of perjorative that used to be reserved for those favouring abortion rights or, at worst, abortion providers, are now reserved for those favouring leniency toward undocumented immigrants. In fact, if anything, it is worse. In reading around the conservative blogosphere and even in talking to individuals face-to-face (because people tend to be much less restrained in the pseudonyminous detachment of the internet), opposing views are treated with anger, aggression, and a remarkable lack of civility.

That was written by an American living in the UK, which shows that the problem is international. In South Africa immigration has been linked to xenophobia, and some South African newspapers, notably The Sun, have published articles calculated sto stir up hostility to “illegal aliens”. I’ve been told that in Australia “asylum seekers” is a dirty word.

But the dirtiest thing of all is that in America it appears that the “new litmus test” is being applied by people who like to call themselves Christians.

Illegal aliens

In September there is to be a synchroblog on Christians and the immigration issue, and here’s a foretaste, so you can start thinking about it in advance.

Teflon Christians, Refugees and an Invitation to a Christ-like Humanity | Peter’s Progress:

Let me introduce you to “Warren” (not his real name). Warren has a wife and three children. Before coming here he helped bury a friend’s wife, who had died of cholera (and was eight months pregnant). Warren slept outside for three weeks near Musina. The first day in Polokwane he approached me because he had heard that the Anglican Church helps refugees.

I said we weren’t much use, but we could give him some food. I know that people sleep down by the train station or the taxi rank and pointed him in the right direction. Warren arrived the next day having been mugged and stripped of everything except his trousers and shirt. Luckily he’d put his asylum papers (legal documents) in his pants.

“Chris” and “Fred” teamed up with Warren the next night and slept at a local garage, because it is well lit. The three of them fear the police. When they walk around town or wait on the side of the road for work, they get harassed or moved on. They’ve heard stories of our police tearing up asylum papers so they can be deported back across the border as illegals.

And its not only the police who are xenophobic, as the mob violence of a couple of years ago should remind us.

If you’d like to participate in the synchroblog, which is on 8 September 2010, there’s more information at Synchroblogging Is Back | Grace Rules Weblog.

Dear Nelson Mandela

A good tribute to Nelson Mandela on his 92nd birthday

Tinyiko Sam Maluleke’s Blog: Dear Nelson Mandela:

I know what we shall give you tata. We shall give you a country that oozes the ideal you cherished; the ideal for which you have lived for 92 years now – the ideal of freedom for all. Not freedom for the rich or freedom for the politically connected. Not freedom for comrades alone. Not freedom for men and not freedom for women. Not freedom for whites and not freedom for blacks. Freedom for all! For we know now that – as Jonas Gwangwa has sung it to us – freedom for some is freedom for none. We want to give you a democratic country. For your name and in your honour, each one of us will become freedom ambassadors, freedom foot-soldiers and freedom defenders. We shall teach it in our schools, practice it in the workplace, defend it in parliament, advocate it in our courts and nurture it in our own homes.

But is it within our power to give him all, or even any of those things? We are like children squabbling over the inheritence of their parents, and wasting it all on legal battles to contest the will.

Yesterday we planned to have a Requiem at Mamelodi to commemorate those in the parish who had died, and Father Frumenius, who was to have served it, was unable to be with us because there was an urgent meeting in Atteridgeville about xenophobia. Freedom is written into our constitution, and that is a great gain. But until it is written into the hearts of our people, we will not really be free.

On the inherent superiority of Western culture

Cultural chauvinism is alive and well, it seems. Hat-tip to The Western Confucian: The West Is the Best, But Don’t Dismiss the Rest for this:

On the inherent superiority of Western culture: Reditus: A Chronicle of Aesthetic Christianity:

Christianity is fundamentally a historical religion. If there were any way to get around that, I would have found it by now. But the fact that the Gospel was written in Greek using concepts such as “logos” that had been in formation in the Greek mind for centuries is no mere accident of history. God could have been incarnated in the context of another culture, just as He “could have” been incarnated in a pearl or an ass. But He did not do that; He came into this world at a very specific time and a very specific place, as did His Body, the Church. Even the Fathers of the Church saw this, and there will always be a superiority of the Greek and Latin tongues to all others, just as the Muslims consider Koranic Arabic sacred, or the Jews Hebrew.

Reading that kind of thing makes me despair.

Assuming that the paragraph I quoted is the premiss, and the heading is the conclusion, I wonder what went wrong. I suppose I should feel relief that this kind of cultural chauvinism isn’t confined to Orthodoxy. It’s a universal sin.

I’ve been asked to write an article on the Orthodox diaspora, and so various incidents come to mind.

One, from about 7-8 years ago, was when I went with a rather mixed group of people to be interviewed on the Greek community radio station. One of those being interviewed with us was Johannes Rakumako, a Tswana-speaking South African who was a first-year student at the Orthodox seminary in Nairobi. He had returned home briefly for his father’s funeral, and he started to say something about life in the seminary when the presenter interrupted him and asked him what had made him interested in “our Greek culture”.

He was gobsmacked, and didn’t know what to say. I doubt that he had given Greek culture much thought at all. He was being asked a question from a totally alien mindset.

A second incident from the diaspora that comes to mind is from the film My big fat Greek wedding. We bought a copy of it to show African catechumens from the townships so that they can learn something about Greek culture and Greek cultural chauvinsim. If they become Orthodox, then they are bound to meet Greeks sometime, since most of the Orthodox in South Africa have a Greek cultural background. The film was made in the USA, but in spite of that it fits South African Greek diaspora culture right down to the hairstyles, and the only difference is the accents. The film depicts the “our Greek culture” that the radio presenter was talking about, and so it is a good and good-natured humourous introduction, and in many places it pokes gentle fun at some of the foibles of Greek diaspora culture (which differs markedly from Greek culture in Greece).

But there is one part that was not intended to be humorous or ironic, and that is where the Anglo husband-to-be is baptised in the Orthodox Church, and after he is baptised he says “I’m Greek now”.

And that is tragic, and leads to the third incident: when we were in a church hall, having tea after the Divine Liturgy, and a woman announced, loudly for all to hear, “The Orthodox Church is not missionary because its purpose is to preserve Greek culture.”

So it’s interesting, and perhaps a little consoling, to see that some Western Christians are under a a similar misapprehension. Though that too goes back a long way — when Saints Cyril and Methodius evangelised the Slavs, they translated the liturgical texts and the scriptures into Slavonic, and were criticised by Rome for doing so, because of Rome’s belief that only Greek, Latin and Hebrew, the languages that Pilate used for the inscription on the cross of Christ, could be used in church.

And so I return to the the bit that I quoted at the beginning. To paraphrase another writer, there is to much magnificent truth mixed up with these appalling falsehoods that it smacks of perversity even to attack its perverseness.

Yes, Christianity is a historical religion. Yes, God chose to become incarnate in history in a particular time and place. But he chose to become incarnate in the multicultural Roman empire of a Jewish mother who probably spoke Aramaic rather than Latin or Greek.

But the title of the post says it all: Western culture is “inherently” superior. In other words, God chose to become incarnate in Western culture (actually he didn’t, but that is what the author of the post apparently believes) because it was superior to other cultures.

I’m reminded of George Orwell’s book Animal farm where the animals on a farm rebel against their human masters, and set up an ideal farm in which all animals are equal. Equality is the watchword and slogan of the revolution, but as time passes one group of animals, the pigs, claim extra privileges for themselves, and begin to lord it over the other animals as the men had done, and when the other animals question this, the pigs say, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” And so here we have the Western pigs claiming to be inherently superior. They were chosen by God for special privileges because they were better than anyone else.

Samuel Huntington, in his book The clash of civilizations and the remaking of the world order writes of this Western superiority

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

And when God became incarnate, the Romans were in Judaea because of their superiority in applying organized violence.

But this perversion is nothing new.

The history of the Church goes back to Abraham, to whom God said:

and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and be thou a blessing: and I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curseth thee will I curse: and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed (Gen 12:2-3).

seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? (Gen 18:18)

Abraham and his progeny were chosen in order that they might be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. They were not chosen because they were “inherently superior”, but rather because they were inferior, a small and weak people, of no account among the great powers of the world.

But the church of the Old Testament, the people of Israel, were often seduced by the notion that God had chosen them for a special blessing because they were inherently superior, and forgot he had chosen them in order to be a blessing to others. And when that happened, sooner or later, and with more or less pain, they learned that it was not so and were brought back to the true path.

Let us not be seduced into the same error. Belief in the “inherent superiority” of our own culture is one of the most impenetrable insulations against the Holy Spirit that exists in the world.

Invasion of the Baby-Snatchers

St. Aidan to Abbey Manor: UK Border Agency: Invasion of the Baby-Snatchers:

The thundering knock came early in the morning. It was 6.30am. Without waiting for an answer the security chain across the door was smashed from its fittings. Feet thundered up the staircase. The five children, all under the age of 10, were alarmed to be woken from their sleep by the dozen burly strangers who burst into their bedrooms, switched on the lights and shouted at them to get up.

This is not a police state. It is Manchester in supposedly civilised Britain in the 21st century. There is a clue to what this is about in the names of the children: Nardin, who is 10; Karin who is seven; the three-year-old twins Bishoy and Anastasia, and their one-year-old baby sister Angela.

Their parents, Hany and Samah Mansour, are Coptic Christians who fled to the UK after a campaign of persecution by a group of Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt whose friends in the secret police tortured Hany. But even though six Coptic Christians were shot dead by Muslim extremists only last week in a town not far from their home, the British Government has decided that it does not believe them. And so Britain’s deportation police have launched another of their terrifying dawn raids on sleeping children.

We have similar problems in South Africa. We have the notorious Lindela Repatriation Camp. We have senior people in government visiting a church that has allowed homeless refugees to sleep inside it instead of outside in the street and threatening to close the church (so much for our much-vaunted constitutional guarantee of religious freedom).

And then there is the fascist (no hyperbole — there’s no better word to describe it) Australian press, which routinely refers to “suspected asylum seekers”, as though seeking asylum was a crime. Boat carrying 30 suspected asylum seekers intercepted off Australia’s north coast | The Daily Telegraph:

YET another boat carrying suspected asylum seekers has been intercepted off Australia’s north coast, making it the 60th arrival this year.

The stationary vessel was spotted sometime before 7.30am today about 140 nautical miles (260 kilometres) north of Gove, in the Northern Territory, Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor said in a statement this afternoon.

Britain, South Africa and Australia are supposed to be democratic states, and they at least pay lip service to human rights. But this kind of behaviour is as bad as that found in totalitarian dictatorships. As far as I am aware, each of these countries is a signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, among other things, that Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

So why are the Australian media trying to portray a right as a crime by referring to “suspected” asylum seekers? That is how the Nazi propaganda press dealt with Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and other “Untermenschen”. By trying to criminalise the exercise of human rights, the Australian press fully deserves the epithet “fascist”.

Christians have just celebrated the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, and among other things we remember that our Lord Jesus Christ and his family were asylum seekers in Egypt. But many of his followers in Egypt have now become asylum seekers elsewhere. And, as we can see, they receive no better welcome.

The Times – UK ‘more violent than South Africa’

We South Africans have got used to foreign journalists like PETER HITCHENS rubbishing South Africa in their columns, but now one of the papers he writes for has had to admit that violent crime in Britain is worse than in South Africa.

The Times – UK ‘more violent than South Africa’:

The United Kingdom has overtaken South Africa as the world’s most violent country.

# UK violent crime “worse than SA” – Daily Mail

# Britain’s crime wave is nothing to be smug about (editorial)

The UK has been left with some soul searching to do after findings that Britons experienced more incidents of violent crime per 100,000 citizens than South Africa, which is often depicted as the world capital of violent crime.

Commenting on a report in UK tabloid the Daily Mail, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, Dr Johan Burger, said: “Maybe now those who have been pointing fingers at us will get their own house in order.”

The Daily Mail reported yesterday that the UK has a higher rate of violent crime than any other country, “beating” the likes of the US and South Africa.

Hat tip to Contact Online Weblog: UK ‘more violent than South Africa’.

Of course the problems that people like Hitchens writes about are here. We had a lot of electricity blackouts in January 2008, as he writes. But they have not continued. A long-term solution needs to be found, and people are whinging because they will have to pay for it (just as they do in Britain).

There was xenophobic violence between February and June 2008 — 2008 seems to have been a bad year — in which more than 60 people died — about the same number as in the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. And though the violence has dropped off, there is still racism and xenophobia. But the Brits elected two MEPs from the xenophobic BNP to the European parliament this year, so South Africa doesn’t have a monopoly on xenophobia either.

And yes, we have corrupt politicians, and we had the Travelgate scandal, but that was small beer compared with what has recently been revealed about British MPs fiddling their expense claims.

Britain swings to the rift… er… leght

The election of two members of the fascist British National Party (BNP) to the European parliament has been the cause of some concern to British church leaders.

Bishop Alan’s Blog: BNP MEP’s: bring on the clowns?:

The disconnection of the Labour party from its own roots under Blair, Sun style pop Xenophobia, and disillusionment with parliamentarians, produced this result. Politicians must listen, not only pragmatically, but in a way that reconnects with this country’s historic Christian value base, or things can only get worse.

I wonder if the UK Sun is owned by the same people as own the South African Sun, because the latter’s pop xenophobia certainly played a part in inciting the xenophobic violence that erupted at the beginning of last year, in which over 60 people were killed, and which was discussed at the Amahoro Conference this week. Part of the problem in South Africa, as noted at Amahoro, is that apartheid deliberately disconnected the country from a historic Christian value base (while claiming to be protecting “Western Christian civilization” — whatever that means).

The xenophobic violence that lasted most of the first half of last year shows that we have not yet exorcised the demons of apartheid. And the demons that have been expelled seem to have emigrated to Europe, where they found the house swept and garnished, first in the wars of the Yugoslav succession, and now in the growing xenophobia in places like the UK.

But perhaps part of the problem in the UK could be remedied by voter education, which is very much needed, if the following example is anything to go by: Cranmer: Could the BNP now be sued for discrimination?:

The far-Left BNP may have won two seats on the Elections to the European Parliament, but, while this success undoubtedly constitutes something of a political and propaganda coup, Cranmer is not so sure that Nick Griffin will consider it much of a blessing when the lawsuits start being delivered.

“Far-Left BNP”? Perhaps that is the result of a misinterpretation of our Lord Jesus Christ’s injunction not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, but it seems more likely that it is caused by not being able to tell one’s left from one’s right. What does one call that? Political dyslexia, perhaps? So if the blogger Cranmer’s view is widespread, perhaps a lot of Brit voters simply voted for the wrong party, and thought that the “HITLER” tattooed on the chest of the gentleman in the picture spells “T-R-O-T-S-K-Y”.

Outcry over Dalai Lama visa refusal

Sowetan – News:

The government has been widely condemned for refusing to allow Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, to attend a 2010 World Cup peace conference in Johannesburg on Friday.

Nobel peace laureate and former president FW de Klerk and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu have both said they would boycott the event in solidarity with the Dalai Lama.

The president’s excuse that the reason for South Africa refusing the visa was that it did not want ‘to remove the world’s attention’ from the 2010 Soccer World Cup preparations is not merely lame, but a gross abuse of executive power, and is probably unconstitutional.

We are rapidly regressing to the bad old days of the Vorster regime, when, for example, Basil d’Oliveira was refused a visa to play cricket in South Africa with the MCC cricket team in 1968. That led to South Africa being isolated from world cricket for 25 years. Perhaps we need another 25 years of isolation from world soccer, since it seems we still haven’t learnt the lesson.

Our constitution is supposed to guarantee freedom of religion, and I hope someone challenges this in the constitutional court.

It is sad to see that the ANC, which fought for 70 years to liberate us from oppression, has now fully internalised the image of the oppressor, as Paolo Freire puts it, and is coming more and more closely to resemble the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal farm. Albert Luthuli, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo must be turning in their graves.