By Alec Hogg
Andreas Kluth, a columnist for our partners at Bloomberg, yesterday issued a warning to his global readership — and to Elon Musk in particular — about the potential repercussions of allowing Putin to have his way in Ukraine (read here). To drive home his point, Kluth referenced history, going back precisely 85 years, urging indecisive democrats to engage in second-level thinking.
However, the argument becomes even more compelling when we extend the historical lens to include America’s past, specifically the famous Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 (pic above). Delivered at a pivotal moment in the Civil War — a conflict rooted in slavery and the belief that all men are created equal — Lincoln’s words emphasised that the very experiment of democracy was hanging in the balance.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___At that juncture, democracy was a fragile and frequently attacked endeavour. The pinnacle of Lincoln’s speech came at its conclusion, where he delivered the immortal words: “…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
For centuries before the American Revolution, a select group of elites had been in power, perpetuating the belief in their own superiority — a conviction so strong that they thought they ‘knew better’ than the populace they governed. Modern autocrats like Putin, Hitler, Mao and Xi, as well as numerous African dictators, belong to this ‘know better’ category, providing legacies fraught with misery.
America’s sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of young lives in its own Civil War, as well as in World War I and II — conflicts fought far from American soil — was primarily to safeguard an experiment in democracy that has granted humanity unprecedented freedoms and prosperity.
Today, democracy remains the most significant threat to Putin and others who are members of the ‘know better’ club — a club that the ANC appears to embrace. Perhaps this is because the ANC, once a liberation movement, has devolved into a form of elitist autocracy at its core. Xuma, Luthuli and Mandela must be turning in their graves.
Sterkte
Alec
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