LETTER: Whose tune does SA dance to?

Prof A. C. Grayling produced Democracy And Its Crisis in 2017. A few hundred years earlier Ned Burke produced many tracts about democracy, including his monumental Reflections on the Revolution in France, about the crimes committed by the “swinish multitude” in the name of progress.

Both Burke and Grayling correctly assessed that the weakness of democracy is the sophistication required of the parties in a democratic state to make the concessions that make a democracy work.

Burke in particular emphasised the role played by the established church in subjecting the Roman Catholic majority of Ireland to landlessness through the Papal or Penal Laws, which may align with the SA Group Areas Act. However, the Papal or Penal Laws only pertained to real property, and those able among the Roman Catholic majority of Ireland established their financially secure businesses, like the Guinness and Hennessy families did.

The essence of the Burke concept was the immortal sovereignty of Ireland, with the ignoring or downplaying of the foreign influence emanating from Rome. We in SA today face the same vexed problem: are we a sovereign country acting in our own interests? Or, are we a subject country dancing to the whims of Rome or its present day equivalent, Moscow?

As in Ireland where there was a considerable unthinking proportion who would willingly dance to the beat of the crosier, so too in SA there is a considerable unthinking section prepared to dance to the swinish multitude of France or the bloodstained hands of Putin.

The famous Duke of Wellington correctly enunciated the quandary of many SA Caucasians: “just because a man is born in a stable; does that make him a horse? The answer lies in morality and ethics.

Errol Callaghan, Goodwood

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