Zapiro on new Mbeki Biography....
The "settler media" = 1: Suresh Roberts = 0
This blog deals with political and social issues in South Africa, mostly from the perspective of Constitutional Law.
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- Pierre de Vos
- Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- Professor of Law, University of Western Cape
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Makes one think, ne?
"We are all perpetually smoothing and rearranging reality to conform to our wishes; we lie to others and to ourselves constantly, unthinkingly. When, occasionally - and not by dint of our own efforts but under the pressure of external events - we are forced to see things as they are, we are like naked people in a storm. There are a few among us - psychoanalysts have encountered them - who are blessed or cursed with a strange imperviousness to the unpleasantness of self-knowledge. Their lies to themselves are so convincing that they are never unmasked. These are the people who never feel in the wrong, who are always able to justify their conduct, and who in the end - human nature being what it is - cause their fallible fellow-men to turn away from them,"
- Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives.
5 comments:
This drawing only makes Robert's point that the soft-left’s preferred satirist is an over-rated purveyor of puerile high school humour. As for Roberts himself, I count him a brilliant polemicist and contrararian. South Africa’s impoverished public discourse could do with more of his ilk. And can we not allow the President one public advocate who is not a semi-literate goon?
Robert’s performance at the Cape Town book fair last Sunday was a rare treat. Love him or loath him, you have to admire the man’s chutzpah. Who else would mount a platform in a lion’s den of left/liberal assuredness to defend Mbeki’s HIV/Aids and Zimbabwe stance -- and hurl vituperative abuse at icons like Edwin Cameron and Zackie Achmat?
I thought our unlikable carpetbagger quite effective in puncturing some of the more facile criticisms of Mbeki. (The latter’s HIV/AIDS stance is more nuanced than some of his fiercest critics would have it.) Where Roberts comes unstuck is in his dogged effort to defend the indefensible. He was challenged from the floor about Mbeki’s notorious Washington Post claim that he had known no-one who had perished of the disease. Robert’s response: It was unlikely that any given Tuynhuys tea guest would casually let slip that he was desperately ill with a horribly stigmatized affliction. To that I can only say that Roberts would be a more effective advocate for his patron and hero if he could bring himself to admit that some of his pronouncements have been, shall we say, ill-advised.
Roberts remains an unlikeable carpetbagger. Zapiro is not someone I admire, but this time he has got it right.
I also think we need more contrarians in South Africa. The problem with Roberts and this book in particular is that it is less based on ideas than on slating opponents. And defending the President's stance on HIV is a bit rich.
oh the bickering - what difference does it make when the state media is such an easy mouthpiece....?
What we say - makes the connected - what they say makes National Media!
eg : “donors receive value for the funds donated”
One Book vs One Nationally funded media machine!
One Cartoon vs Nationally funded media machine!
etc etc vs Nationally funded media machine!
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