When Liberals are Called ‘Racists’

I suppose it happens everywhere. A famous liberal stays politically correct, blames whites for all the ills of the world, and lavishes praise on all who seek to destroy Europe or the West — only to become the next victim of a PC witch-hunt.

We have just seen such a case in South Africa. Liberal politician and premier of the Western Cape province, Helen Zille, dared to say in a tweet that colonialism was not all bad. Somewhere during flights between Cape Town and Singapore, she tweeted:

For those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc.

— Helen Zille (@helenzille) March 16, 2017

Would we have had a transition into specialised health care and medication without colonial influence? Just be honest, please.

— Helen Zille (@helenzille) March 16, 2017

Miss Zille used to be quite the darling of South Africa’s politically correct mainstream media. She led the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, before appointing a token black leader, Mmusi Maimane. At one time, she had one million Twitter followers. However, the above two tweets sent the country’s “Black Twitter” into a frenzy of hurt and outrage, supported by white liberals who thought these things should not be said even if they are true.

Miss Zille saw fit to repudiate herself:

I apologise unreservedly for a tweet that may have come across as a defence of colonialism. It was not.

— Helen Zille (@helenzille) March 16, 2017

Not long after, her former protégé and now leader of the party, Mr. Maimane, officially repudiated her himself:

Let’s make this clear: Colonialism, like Apartheid, was a system of oppression and subjugation. It can never be justified.

— Mmusi Maimane (@MmusiMaimane) March 16, 2017

In under 140 characters, Miss Zille had committed political suicide — or so thought Peter Bruce, editor-in-chief of South African Business Day, the country’s main business paper. He called his column on the issue, “Colonialism tweet will end Helen Zille’s career.” Behind a paywall, he added:

White people in SA need fundamentally to change the way they think. There is absolutely nothing, apart from the heroism in the face of threat of a very few whites over the centuries we have been here, to be proud of. We need to crush our sense of achievement and success and see those things for what they really are. Nowhere in the world is there a population quite so privileged as white South Africa. We came, we saw, we conquered, and we lived like kings.

On radio stations and in discussion programs, outraged blacks and coloureds (SA parlance for mixed-race people) claimed that Miss Zille had revealed her “inner racism” and should be expelled from her own party. According to reports, she will indeed be subjected to a disciplinary hearing for having violated the Democratic Alliance’s “social media policy.” On the radio, I happened to catch one Karima Brown (a coloured “political commentator” as she calls herself) vehemently equating Miss Zille’s tweet with racism and fascism, and urging the party to get rid of her.

Another black media personality and former editor of the Sunday Times, Mondli Makanya, said the tweets revealed Miss Zille’s inner racism or her “concealed beliefs,” which he compared to those of notorious right-wing racists, such as Patrick Buchanan, the young French politician Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, and Afrikaner singer Steve Hofmeyr. He too, urged Mmusi Maimane to get rid of the “white madam” who had elevated him to his current status:

This week, in the weirdest of ironies, the person who is said to be his mentor and sponsor has given him the opportunity to prove his mettle by chopping off her head. He now has to show he has cojones. And big ones at that.

Avenging oneself on white benefactors is a familiar theme in black thought, and probably Mr. Makanya thinks blacks should assert final control over a party that once pretended to care about the interests of the white minority.

But the whole episode demonstrates once more that South African blacks and whites, even if they are required to mix socially and politically, live in such different mental worlds that no amount of PC ideology could ever bring them together. Helen Zille made the mistake of thinking she could be both a liberal and more or less rational. No, the two just do not go together anymore. Either you subscribe to the whole set of Afrocentric myths — Africans would have been the first on the moon if only racist Europeans had left them to their own devices — or you find yourself in the accused’s box as a “racist.”

Soon, we will have to pity white liberals. They will be subjected to the same insults and persecutions that the rest of us have accepted as part of public life, but they lack the background to understand the problem. No doubt, Helen Zille still believes that “all people are the same,” despite having called attention to the very different cultural and scientific traditions that prevailed for centuries on the European and African continents.

Like a child wandering into a minefield, she sank deeper and deeper into the problem without understanding the essence of it. In an attempt to deflect criticism, she has now published a comparison between Singapore and South Africa on one of the most left-wing, anti-white websites in the country, the Daily Maverick. The idea that South Africa’s black population could start behaving like Singapore’s ethnic-Chinese majority is so farfetched that only a liberal like Miss Zille could think of it. South Africa’s only hope lies in restoring at least some semblance of white or Afrikaner influence.

The hysteria of Black Twitter may be a good thing. When whites are exposed to a good dose of mob-like hatred, it represents a kind of reality check, like getting mugged or carjacked while you were innocently playing tourist in an inner-city slum. Somewhere in Miss Zille’s mind, a thinking white person is hammering away at the padded walls. Towards the end of her musings on how our blacks could adopt the Singaporean work ethic, she admits that:

In reality, every opinion is judged on the basis of the colour of the person who expresses it. ‘Speaking while white’ is considered the ultimate sin, in terms of the increasingly popular ideology called ‘critical race theory.’

The real danger is that the DA [Democratic Alliance Party], in its quest for votes, may start to swallow every tenet, myth and shibboleth of African racial-nationalist propaganda, including the scapegoating of minorities, populist mobilisation and political patronage. Then the institutionalisation of corruption will only be a matter of time.

She is admitting that the current system is pushing South Africa towards becoming just another African banana republic. Sometimes, being called a “racist” can restore perspective to the average white brain, and Miss Zille might just be the latest example of forced therapy.