Calls for Appeasement and Status Quo Patriotism are growing louder and bolder

President Cyril Ramaphosa seems to have accepted the dismissal of Ebrahim Rasool without question, and seems to suffers from the same fear of Trump affliction that has debilitated CEOs in the USA, and driven them into what has been described cowardice.

The dismissal of South Africa’s ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, from Washington is brightening the light that some of us have shone on global change and transformation and the shift from West to East in world affairs for most of the past three decades. It has also kept in focus the way that status quo patriotism, unflinching loyalty to anything and everything the West represents, remains firmly in place in South Africa, emboldened, now, by the arrival of Donald Trump’s second term as president of the United States and, of course, by the second or third coming of Helen Zille and Tony Leon, and the rise of John Steenhuisen.

I proceed with caution. Foreign affairs is not my beat on these pages. There are better placed people who write about these things, and for whom intellectual trespassing is a tantamount to oppression. It suffices to say only that I have raised these matters previously. It is probably helpful, at this early juncture, to make the point that some of the most ardent supporters of liberal capitalist internationalism have written about the decline of the West, and of liberalism. See, for instance, Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism; William Galston’s Anti-Pluralism, and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. See, also, Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alexander Zevin

Roger Cohen wrote the following in the New York Times more than eight years ago. 

“Triumphant a quarter-century ago, when liberal democracy appeared to have prevailed definitively over the totalitarian utopias that exacted such a toll in blood, it is now under siege from without and within. Nationalism and authoritarianism, reinforced by technology, have come together to exercise new forms of control and manipulation over human beings whose susceptibility to greed, prejudice, ignorance, domination, subservience and fear was not, after all, swept away by the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

All of that should pacify anyone who harbours knee-jerk rejection of anyone who dares touch them on their white privilege, political economic liberalism or their West…. All of these are related, in the broad scheme, and only the discontinuous mind would ignore it all. Let’s get back on topic.

The Rasool Affair and The Great Divide

The Rasool Affair, has pointed, again, to a divide in South Africa that reflects the global transition, the end times of the West, and emergence of a new order led by countries outside Western Europe North America and Oceania. The latter are generally considered to make up “the West,” or what we have referred to as WENAO for most of the past three decades. 

Anyway, leadership of the opposite end of the WENAO, has started to take shape steadily organisationally, and cohere institutionally and intellectually. On one side of the divide there are public intellectuals in academia, the media, and in think tanks who have spent four decades or more shaping their outlook on life on an anvil of Western dominance and white privilege which had been normalised. Zapiro’s cartoon of 17 March correctly identifies the government, analysts and the media as complicit in the abandonment of Rasool as part of the appeasement of Trump and his allies.

The other side is relatively quiet, even the senior partner in the government of national unity (led by President Cyril Ramaphosa), seems to have accepted the dismissal of Rasool. Perhaps Ramaphosa suffers from the same affliction that has debilitated CEOs in the USA, and driven them into what has been described as cowardice. There are CEOs who “worry [that] public criticism will make them a target of the president’s bully pulpit,” and which to self-censorship, where “Institution after institution – both political parties, the media, the academy – continue to surrender to Trump despite expressing private concerns about the dangers of his policy”.  This is somewhat consistent with Zapiro’s identification of government, analysis and media. I do not assume that Zapiro shares my views on anything discussed in this column. Nonetheless, this fear and cowardice echoes on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. See, also, here and here. 

On this Rive Droite of the divide, are sat self-described social activists or civil rights groups like the Middle East Africa Research Institute or Afriforum, and “think tanks” like the Centre for Development Enterprise, and the Institute for Security Studies. The latter two have added colour to their blend, and demonstrate that money is the best means with which to create docile bodies.  

This loose affiliation, share ideological solidarities shaped by a global status quo patriotism, and represent “the West” in South Africa. With this framing, what a minority of white South Africans deem to be important is necessarily important, and eternally valid. Of course, anyone who disagrees is a “race-baiter” or they are “anti-American,” or they hate what RF Kennedy, Donald Trump’s nominee for United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, described as the United States’ “beachhead in the Middle East”. It’s perhaps unsurprising that people who “do not see race,” are among the historical beneficiaries of racist policies, and remain ideologically affiliated to the WENAO, and the status quo that it represents.

Appeasement is Better than Standing by Your Principles

In South Africa, the status quo patriots would insist on appeasement. They believe it is necessary for South Africa to not “lose the West,” and to prevent any such loss, the government should simply fall in line with what Washington wants. This much is evident from the responses to the Rasool Affair. The responses, in the mainstream (which, in all honesty, is just the catastrophism of disaffected white people and bittereinders in South Africa) have been rather one-dimensional, and predictable, actually. In this frame of status quopatriotism the US has to be appeased, at all times – if South Africa wants itself to be taken seriously. 

These patriots have created a crude for-against binary. You either do what Washington wants you to do, or you’re supping with the devils (“America’s enemies”), and you hate peace and “freedom”. Almost every single commentator has come out on the side of Marco Rubio and Donald Trump directly or indirectly. Responses have been framed as pragmatic, or as insightful and based on deep knowledge of US foreign policy towards South Africa, and terribly predictable hum-drum stenography. Some of these commentators have already put forward (white) people like Ernie Els (one commentator suggested Tony Leon), as the next ambassador to Washington. I guess if you opposed Els or Leon you hate whites or whomever the is approved by the US, and its closest allies.

Rasool is blamed, or at least singled-out, for speaking his mind against a leadership cadre in the USA that is slowly dragging that country closer to authoritarianism. See here, here and here. In variation of the imagined catastrophe, “losing the west,” there remains insistence that South Africa should be “serious” about mending fences with the US, by abandoning its independent foreign policies, and fall in line with Washington. This particular commentary, by Benji Shulman, Executive Director of the Middle East Africa Research Institute, singles out South Africa’s relations with Washington’s enemies, Russia, China, Cuba, Iran and The Hague Group. Shulman’s recommendations are largely based on the Washington-Tel Aviv playbook, which insists that the global status quo has to be protected – and that South Africa’s foreign policies should, necessarily, be shaped by Washington. 

It is disconcerting that there is relatively little opposition to this push by the minority white, Old Volksraad Mense, to return the country to the interests and expectations and the demands of white people. One South African who now lives in the USA said, recently, with reference to Elon Musk, that she never envisaged living in a country (again) where white South African men made the rules and policed them. The white men are back, within South Africa, the white men from both sides of the Old Volksraad, are continuing to fight back against black/African governance in South Africa. If the appointment of Steenhuisen, and the re-emergence of Zille and Leon, set South Africa back three decades, responses to the Rasool Affair, has shown that the white minority now wants the Republic to fall in line and behave according to the whims of Trump. 

What is more disturbing is that these people will hold black South Africans to ransom while uttering sweet words of “democracy” or “freedom” – and dissent is dismissed or silenced. We either do as they say, or we will “lose the West,” and be condemned as unserious people, averse to pragmatism, as irrational, unreasonable, and which, in the case of the Rasool Affair, is simply a call for appeasement of the USA and its allies, at a time when the Trump regime is snapping back against anyone/everyone it does not like, from universities to the Voice of America. This is the man whom white South Africans celebrate, and expect the rest of us to appease.