BUMBLING LEADERSHIP
While Zuma’s sins drag down SA, Trump’s follies resound worldwide
In an age of increasing intolerance it is worth recalling that Voltaire did not say, "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The oft-repeated phrase was coined, it seems, by a biographer in 1906 to summarise the general drift of his approach. But Voltaire did say, "Tolerance has never provoked a civil war; intolerance has covered the world in carnage." A Voltairian of our time, the late American writer Gore Vidal, constantly inveighed against the US’s endless conflicts, internal and external, from the McCarthy witch-hunts in the US to the Cold War. Since the end of the Second World War, he wrote, "we have been engaged in what the great historian Charles Beard called ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’." In the late 1970s, when reporting from Rome, I sometimes met Vidal socially and he used to predict, "When the Cold War ends, the American Empire will have to find something else to fight. It’ll probably be a war on drugs." And it came to p...
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