The Myth of Unique Suffering

1. The Myth of Unique Suffering A polemic, by Colin Bower

2. The narrative – true or false? “What is this colonial and apartheid heritage? … colonialism and apartheid have meant …(so much) … the imperialist and colonial reality was accompanied and sustained by forcible and exclusive white minority rule … It is therefore obvious that the ANC … had no choice but to strive for the reconstruction of South Africa away from the paradigm of South African colonial reality … colonialism of a special type…” Thabo Mbeki, Sunday Times Oct 21 2012

3. Definitions: • Strong people: people who are intelligent and energetic • Weak People: people who are unintelligent and slothful • “There are only two human virtues – intelligence and energy” • Prince Nikolai Andreyevich Bolkonsky, War and Peace • Assumptions: • It is impossible for strong people not to outperform and dominate weak people. • The historical method deals in general and in comparative truth. • The enslaved, the conquered and the exploited are not, by virtue of their enslavement or exploitation necessarily morally superior to the enslavers, the conquerors or the exploiters.

4. Conclusions: In a global and a historical context the 350 years that have elapsed since the arrival of Jan van Riebeek in South Africa has been a period of peace and tranquility. In a global and a historical context, democracy and the constitutional state in South Africa has been easily and peacefully achieved. The potential for human cruelty is not determined by prejudices of any kind, and prejudice is not the prime human evil. Apartheid was not a consequence of racial prejudice. • Recommendations: • Humanity’s best protection against cruel behaviour and the best hope of the weak for protection against unfair domination by the strong lies in the ameliorating effects of the constitutional state. • The best way of ameliorating the effects of past injustice is not by remembering and commemorating it, but by forgetting it.

5. The Human Condition The history of humanity is the history of human suffering. Suffering as a general condition of life ends only with the establishment of the constitutional state. The perpetration of cruelty requires no “rationalising” principle of gender, class, age, skin colour, religious or national difference. “For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder” Sir Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

6. Firstly, facts no-one can argue with War In Europe • Thirty Five wars and rebellions were still to take place in Europe in the 48 years of the 17th Century after Van Riebeeck arrived in Cape Town. Alliances and enmities shifted endlessly for short term gain. • The conflicts include: • The Anglo Dutch War that broke out in the same year that Van Riebeeck arrived in South Africa, and the two subsequent Anglo Dutch Wars • The Hapsburg-Ottoman War that lasted for 16 years (1683-1699) • The War of the Grand Alliance (1688-1697)

8. There were 36 wars and rebellions in the 18th Century • There were 20 wars and rebellions in the period 1789 -1815 • 14 wars and rebellions in the 19th Century • In the Siege of Paris, over 60 000 Parisians died of starvation and disease, the death toll being particularly heavy among the very old and the very young. All of the horses in Paris were eaten, as well as most of the dogs and cats, and the shops were eventually selling rat paté.

9. Outside of Europe Wars between nations and within them were of course not confined to Europe. Global War • First World War – 37-million fatalities – 16-million dead, 20 million wounded

11. Second World War – 60 million dead, or 2.5% of the global population

12. Rebellion and civil conflict Search for an underlying cause and all you will find is the collision between the strong, the less strong and the weak. Totalitarian Terror During the short four years of its rule in Cambodia, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government killed over 31 percent of the entire Cambodian population. Genocides

13. Judicial Punishments

15. Social injustice

16. The Irish potato famine

17. Child labour and industrialising Britain

18. Cultural Practices and the gentle art of foot binding

19. Slavery

20. Life in the Cape • “The Slave Code of 1754 prescribed how owners should treat slaves, and the slave owners could only administer the type of punishment a man could apply to his wife and children.” (Grape) • “… this colony (the Cape) … after 1795 legally became increasingly non-racial, liberal and egalitarian…” (New History) • “When the oceanic slave trade was abolished in 1807, 40% of the farmers in the Drakenstein and Stellenbosch districts relied exclusively on slave labour …” (Grape) • 1808: Slave trade banned by the British, followed by Ordinance 50 – theoretical right of free people of colour and Khoi to own land.

21. The 1809 Hottentot Proclamation protected the Khoi from gross abuse. • In 1813 the number of lashes a slave could receive were limited. • In 1826 a Guardian of Slaves was appointed. • 1834: Emancipation of the slaves. • In terms of The Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1841, there was no racial categorisation. • 1853 – representative non-racial government in the Cape

22. Now, Interpretation Prejudice and the origin of injustice, cruelty and warfare

23. Learning to forget “I was abused as a child on a very regular basis for four years, in my own home by someone I knew. Someone known to my family, someone who many will feel has ‘got away with it’, for I chose not to report it. I chose instead to render the abuse an irrelevance in my life. This has taken time and effort, but it has been achieved. It is for me to decide whether or not my life has been blighted. It hasn’t, believe it or not … It is for me to decide whether the trauma of child abuse is to stay with me for the rest of my adult life. It won’t, thankfully … And it is for me to decide whether I want forever to be a victim. I don’t, actually. I realised that the abuse had lost its hold; its power had indeed diminished with time. I saw no reason to dig it all up again, to define myself as damaged goods.”

24. Apartheid Might we not be able to say that, just as Hitler’s anti-semitism was simply a cover for his murderous proclivities and his will to power, so colour prejudice became the justifying cover for the murderous proclivities and the will to power of a group of people who discovered, to their considerable delight, that they could create a system of oppression based on the visible marker of their skin colour? If so, this would make it not so much a crime of racial prejudice as a crime of oppression and the will to power.

25. " ...we're now beginning to understand the flexible nature of our ingroup favoritism—it doesn't have to be carved along bloodlines, or race lines, or ethnic lines. Psychological experiments reveal a whole range of criteria for ingroup bias. For example, test subjects have been shown to award higher payoffs to arbitrary ingroups, like people who just happen to share the same birthday as the test subject."

26. Conclusion • Humanity’s best protection against cruel behaviour and the best hope of the weak for protection against unfair domination by the strong, lies in the ameliorating effects of the constitutional state. • We should stop worrying about the existence of prejudice. • The best way of ameliorating the effects of past injustice is not by remembering and commemorating it, but by forgetting it.