South Africa’s “neutral”, nudge-wink stance in the Russia-Ukraine war might be acceptable if we were indeed “neutral” in the conflict, but our barely-hidden enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin’s indiscriminate and illegal invasion of a neighbouring independent state is international diplomacy’s worst-kept secret. Do we care though?
Putin’s war against the Ukrainian people is being waged because he cannot stomach the challenge of a free and prosperous nation on his doorstep. One such as ours is meant to be, by the way. It’s as simple as that.
From his career-building interrogation sessions, Putin will no doubt be aware not a single soul was lost trying to climb the Berlin Wall to get into East Germany. Would his own people, the brightest and most forward-looking among them, not also scale the wall that would separate Russia from a free Ukraine, all the better to escape this anachronistic proletarian Tsar’s stifling grip on freedoms and the rigged economy that greatly benefits an elite, while cauterising youthful rebellion with mindless consumerism?
It’s no wonder Putin knows his authoritarian one-man democracy would compare poorly with a democratic government in Kyiv. He’d already lost the battle of ideas before the first missile was lobbed at the Ukrainians, now vilified by critics merely for resisting Russian aggression.
Now he’s got Finland to worry about, a newly minted Nato state on his border. Nato aggression, he cries, as his missiles rain down on innocent people. I’m saving you from a genocide, he tells those within Ukraine’s borders, presumably Russian settlers in what was once a Soviet colony after all. Would we be neutral if France marched back into Algeria, claiming to find it threatening?
The Soviet Union, for which Putin hankers, supported the ANC during the liberation struggle. Leaving aside that we’re talking about an entirely different political entity, Russia, are the binds of loyalty so compelling that we abandon all principle, that we too view the Ukrainian people as expendable, their sin that they are standing inconveniently somehow in the doorway of history? It appears so.
The sickening whataboutism of international relations minister Naledi Pandor, who initially called for a Russian withdrawal and then made a whole new career out of fawning for the Russians, clips the ticket to international pariahdom for South Africa. And it looks like we’re enjoying the ride getting there. Loving the attention.
Hopefully, we send a delegation to America to again explain our position, the better to survey the trench we’ve dug for ourselves. When Putin lied and then invaded Ukraine we were no doubt banking on a swift victory by the former KGB agent. Truth is his Soviet-style, top-down command, conscript army was hammered by amateurs, severely denting the myth of Russian military prowess. But it didn’t shake our faith in him, not a bit, and we’ve fallen over ourselves since, casting him as the misunderstood underdog.
The sickening whataboutism of international relations minister Naledi Pandor, who initially called for a Russian withdrawal and then made a whole new career out of fawning for the Russians, clips the ticket to international pariahdom for South Africa.
Mystery dockings and loadings of Russian ships, naval exercises with China and Russia, abstentions on UN votes, all of these in a pitiful attempt to disguise the bended knee for Putin. The ANC sent a delegation to Russia, to mingle in fraternal camaraderie with the Putin-backing United Russia, no doubt with lessons (if they are indeed needed) in mobilising thugs and cracking down on opposition generally to hold on to power.
Forward to the New Arcadia. We may only be hovering on the brink of being a failed state, but we’re working on our credentials as an outlaw state not to be trusted. We’re all for the new brand of aggressive national chauvinism, rights be damned, contemptuous for and dismissive of the freedoms of others but claiming to hold our freedoms oh so dearly.
Putin complains that the Russian way of life (defined by him, in much the same way as Adolf Hitler attempted to explain lebensraum) is threatened. By that he doesn’t mean the suppressed exuberant, youthful, cosmopolitan, democratic culture of modern Russia. No, instead it’s his own psychologically and ego-driven, age-induced nostalgia for a bygone era that perhaps never existed, an era of socialist progress and prosperity.
In the deep background, and another object of our untiring admiration, is Chinese despot Xi Jinping, who stands to gain most from Putin’s misadventure. Politically, Xi towers over Putin and sees the war as a springboard for a new world order not dominated by Washington. Read invasion of democratic Taiwan.
As a member of the Brics group of nations, we behold China as the new Camelot, on a par with the US (without jazz and Hollywood though) but overtaking it in all other respects in the foreseeable future. We want to be on the “right side of history”. None of us will want to live there though.
The US dollar is being displaced by most notably the Chinese yuan, as sure a sign as any the age of US hegemony is coming to an end. The question is what will replace it, and amid what resistance will political forms arise alongside the totalitarian behemoths that claim a lead (even solo) role on the new global stage?
It’s possible that the end of Pax Americana also marks the closing decades of a global “Prague Spring”, an era of democracy, progress and prosperity on a scale never witnessed by humankind. And it was in the culmination of this centuries-long climb out of the cave that the ideas of human liberty and constitutional government formed, and which form the basis of our own constitutional state.
And out of this too came the ideas that inspired the new nations that followed the end of World War 2 and decolonisation, and indeed even earlier the ANC itself, which now seems so eager to countenance lesser freedoms for others than those it once claimed as an inalienable right.
The ANC owes its loyalties to Russia, it seems, but it conveniently disregards the very Western nature of the freedoms under which it enjoys so much privilege, and with so little responsibility.
It’s like we’re determined to climb over the Berlin Wall backwards.
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