HELEN ZILLE CONTROVERSY
Colonial baby turfed out with bath water
‘There is no moral justification for imposing a taboo, especially where an anticolonial (and antiwhite) discourse is now dominating the public square’, writes Glen Heneck
What started out as an anti-Helen Zille rant by an artless undergrad has grown, or metastasised, into something far more unsettling. In the month or so since the Western Cape premier roiled the "twitterverse", an array of worldly adults have taken to punting the idea of an (immoral) equivalence between European colonialism and the Nazi holocaust, at least insofar as insisting that decent people find it repugnant, or impossible to say anything good about either. It is now plain that this meme has currency far beyond the lower reaches of student social media, so it is probably time for an open, robust discussion. I am no professional moralist, but here is my (secular, liberal, white, affluent, male, Jewish) take. • What made the Nazi project unique was not its chauvinism or expansionism or aggression, it was the "final solution". The victims — Jews especially, but also "gypsies", homosexuals and others — were marked not for exploitation but for outright extermination. "Untermenschen" ...
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