TOM EATON | Government lining up more offshore fun ... this time it’s war-games

By inviting Russia and China to stage war-games off Durban, South Africa has sent a clear and bold message to the world: we will do literally anything for money.

For some, the planned war-games are a hideous moral failing on the part of our government, which is obviously not true: for your morals to fail you first need to have some, and the ANC has made it clear for many years that it will always put ideology above the people being crushed by that ideology, whether they be Zimbabweans beaten to death by Robert Mugabe’s election riggers, Sudanese being genocided by Omar al-Bashir, Ukrainians being murdered in their apartment blocks by long-range Russian bombardments, or anyone interested in democracy in China.

Of course, for many South Africans, those horrors are rendered irrelevant by the West’s own crimes. That new moral calculus was laid out very clearly when Russia invaded Ukraine last year: because the US and UK killed countless civilians in its illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because the West as a bloc continues to ignore Israel’s violent repression of Palestinians, the anti-western bloc is forever blameless. Indeed, when Vladimir Putin murders a building full of Ukrainian civilians, you will be told that it’s all Nato’s fault.

All of which is why, when the war-games happen, we will no doubt find ourselves yet again deafened by a binary, polarised shouting match, with both sides presenting airbrushed versions of history and neither understanding why the other can be so stupid or callous.

Yes, when the shouting starts next month, perhaps the best approach is to try to remember how we got here.

This week I’ve heard the ANC described as a hypocritical teenager, happy to keep getting fed and housed by its capitalist parents even as it denounces them as fascist oppressors.

But that’s not really the case; and when the shouting starts, I’m going to try to remember the more complex, and perhaps more accurate version of that analogy.

Because the truth is that this teenager has two parents. One lives in London, the other in Moscow. The former abused the child in the most monstrous ways but is now rich and powerful, which means there are nice goodies to be got from it if you can stomach its conviction that it never did anything wrong. The latter stood by it during some very dark days, but it’s never been the sort of parent you want to move in with, what with all the summary executions and, until recently, the violent discouragement of personal ownership and wealth.

Having been raised in a profoundly unsafe environment, the teenager knows how to tell each parent what they need to hear (the one likes to talk money, the other, loyalty and righteousness) but it also knows that both parents would sell it in a heartbeat if they found a willing buyer. And so it’s done what any sensible adolescent with rich, dangerous parents would: it’s tried to tap them for cash so it can build of its own fat stack and then get the hell out.

The only problem, however, is that it’s a teenager, which means it’s blown it all on a weekend of whisky and blow with its friends at a tacky beach club. And that means it’s back to playing nice with Daddy Warbucks and Mommy Motherland, no matter who they’re rounding up or killing this week.

Yes, when the shouting starts next month, perhaps the best approach is to try to remember how we got here.

But if that’s not good enough for you, and you want people to get punished for so cynical a display, remind yourself that any Russian, Chinese or South African sailor who falls overboard is going to face one of the harshest punishments imaginable: getting Durban seawater in their mouths.