There is a serious problem in our national discourse when it comes to international relations. If you are critical of the West and the military, economic and cultural power it exercises over much of the world, you are often immediately taken to be a supporter of authoritarian regimes in the Global South.
This is not only becoming tiresome. It is also increasingly troubling. Some clarification is in order.
The first point that must be clearly understood is that all interlocutors with integrity must accept the reality of the West’s history of colonialism and its ongoing devastation of parts of the world. It was the West that destroyed Iraq at the cost of a million and a half lives. It is the West that is arming and backing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
It is incumbent on all credible public intellectuals to acknowledge this and to take it seriously. Uncritical celebration of the West is just not a credible position. White liberals who cheerlead for the West as if it is a force for global good need to wise up and nuance their positions.
The second point is that many of the regimes opposed to the West in the Global South are odious. This is true of a long list of regimes in countries such as Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran and, of course, Russia. Any failure to acknowledge this is equally lacking in credibility. The authoritarian nationalists in the Global South who refuse to critique these kinds of regimes also need to wake up and develop some kind of moral integrity.
The third point is that we need to move past the commonly held view that providing nuance and acknowledging the complexity of political situations is complicity with problematic actors in those situations. The uncritical celebration of the almost certainly murdered Russian activist Alexei Navalny in our media is a good example of why we need to be open to nuance and complexity. On one hand Navalny bravely stood up to a corrupt and brutal regime. On the other, he called Muslims “cockroaches” who should be “exterminated”. This cannot be ignored and saying that it cannot be ignored does not mean that one supports Putin or his government’s habit of regularly having its critics murdered.
There are similar complexities with the war in Ukraine. It is true that the 2014 “Maiden Revolution” in Ukraine was a US-backed coup. Even the best US academics support this view and it's hardly controversial. It is also true that the US government was repeatedly warned that arming Ukraine and encouraging it to join Nato risked a war with Russian but that it recklessly ignored these warnings.
But it is simultaneously true that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was an appalling act that must be vigorously opposed. But in our national discourse it is extremely difficult to acknowledge all these complexities without immediately being accused of being pro-Putin. Space must be made for nuance and complexity.
A fourth point is that liberals frequently treat all people on the left as cheerleaders for authoritarian regimes in the Global South. I do not know a single leftist who thinks that Putin is anything other than a vicious dictator. The Russian left is at the forefront of opposing Putin, and many leftists in Russia have been jailed.
It is true that there is a tiny, nutty fringe of the international left that is more about authoritarian nationalism than actual leftism and that it has supported dictators in countries like Zimbabwe, Syria and Russia but it is minuscule, and all political tendencies have their lunatic fringe. It is simply not true that the bulk of the left supports dictatorial regimes.
Anyone who doubts this needs to read the leading publications of the left such as The Jacobin, New Left Review and so on and they will see that the overwhelming majority of the left is critical of both the West and the authoritarian regimes in the Global South. Speaking as though a tiny, nutty fringe element of any political tradition — left or right — is that tradition is just not a serious or credible form of engagement.
The fourth point is that we need to be clear about the political character of the ANC. It includes opportunists, liberals and authoritarian nationalists, as well as a few principled people of the left such as Naledi Pandor, along with buffoons like Fikile Mbalula. The ANC is not one thing. Speaking as though it is nothing but a bunch of corrupt thugs makes it impossible to really understand why it takes the positions that it does on international affairs.
As I have argued elsewhere, it is not acceptable to make claims about the ANC’s motivations and actions for which there is no evidence. Nobody should say that weapons were loaded onto the Lady R or that the ANC chose to approach the ICJ to oppose the genocide in Gaza because they were paid to do so by Iran if they have no evidence to support these claims. We need to engage the ANC and its action with nuance, complexity and evidence.
A fifth point is that it is not intellectually or ethically credible to aggressively inquire about the funding and motivation of political actors as well as civil society and media organisations to whom we are opposed but to deem similar inquiries about the actors that we support as illegitimate. The source of funding and political orientation of all political parties, civil society organisations and media organisations should be open to public scrutiny and debate. We should know who funds the new parties headed by Jacob Zuma and Roger Jardine, and why. We should know who funds the Institute for Race Relations and the Institute for Economic Justice, and why.
Right now our national conversation often has the character of a playground spat, especially when it comes to international issues. Insulting people, demeaning their integrity, making statements for which there is no evidence, misrepresenting nuance as unethical and assuming that people who make a critique of one side in the new Cold War are patsies for the other side is juvenile. We need to do a lot better. We need to grow up.
Engaging international politics should not be like following your favourite football team. It should be guided by evidence and a commitment to human rights rather than “a side”. If a war crime is committed, or disinformation is circulated, we must call it out irrespective of whether the offending state is the US, Israel, Russian, Zimbabwe or any other state.
