The moral hole at the centre of political discourse grows ever deeper and darker. Even in democracies, the primary drive of political parties seems to be to make us less human, less empathetic, and more consumed with a hatred of each other.
Take the recent actions of the DA’s Cilliers Brink who, as part of his election campaign for Tshwane mayor, decided to stage a raid on suspected hijacked premises in search of undocumented migrants. And stage, of course, is the right word for this sort of performative nonsense. The raid itself was the usual bullyboy cruelty we’ve come to expect of politicians striving for relevance in a political mess of their own making, offering parodies of action to distract voters from the fact that they’ve failed us miserably for the past few decades. But it was one off-hand comment from Brink that should really horrify you.
This is what he said to News24. “We get complaints about hijacked properties where it’s either an absentee landlord or the landlord has been effectively driven off their property, and then there’s drug dealing, noise and all sorts of urban blight. But I don’t really see what is controversial. I suppose if the hijackers of the property want to write a strongly worded letter to me, they’re welcome to do so.”
The casual cruelty of that. For Brink, the powerlessness of poor, dispossessed people is a cause for humour. For him, they literally are a joke. “I suppose if the hijackers of the property want to write a strongly worded letter to me, they’re welcome to do so.”
Oh, how I laughed! Good one, Cilliers! Are we supposed to be impressed by the fact that this representative of the DA — and in this example, representative of all that is reprehensible in grubbing politicians — is lording it over some of the weakest of the weak?
Let’s not get too bleeding-hearted here, though. If you’ve hijacked a house, and if you are in fact engaged in criminal activities, then you are a legitimate concern for law enforcement. What you aren’t, though, is something less than human, subject to different laws and standards to South African citizens. Unfortunately, this is the next step in the Populism for Dummies instruction manual: the claim that we need to loosen the strictures of our laws so that we have one law for us and another one for “them”.
Here is Brink recycling this tired trope on his Facebook page as an excuse for taking the law into his own hands: “Too often in South Africa, it feels as though the law is used more effectively to protect criminals than to protect the honest, law-abiding residents who live with the consequences of crime.” He does also say “the law must protect everyone’s rights”, but some will infer another point: we need to loosen our laws up so that we can operate extra-judiciously on those we have decided are the enemy. And perhaps even worse, so that we can operate without humanity.
Brink’s campaign manager, Crezane Bosch, posted a picture of herself with March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma last month, so perhaps Brink picked up a couple of populist tips there.
It is amusing to note how huffy ActionSA is about the DA straying into its anti-migrant territory. In a statement, the party said: “ActionSA welcomes the fact that other political parties are finally recognising the seriousness of illegal immigration and the need for decisive enforcement. What is less convincing is the timing of this newfound conviction on the eve of an election and then turning raids into political point scoring.”
Normalising inhumanity
Everywhere, politicians are trying to trample on our humanity. The most egregious example of this is the fact that the US has now decided executions should become entertainment. The US department of state’s 2024 Iran report (issued by the Trump regime) condemned public executions as a cruel and inhumane practice, but here we are.
Iran is ahead of the entertainment curve with public hangings by cranes, “in which prisoners were lifted from the ground by their necks and died slowly by asphyxiation” (and here you will detect echoes of the botched execution of Christa Pike in the US at the end of September). But never fear. Pete Hegseth, the head of the US’s War is Fun department, has come up with his own twist: the first execution by firing squad since 1945.
We can draw a line between Brink’s (and March and March’s) callous dismissal of undocumented migrants as less than human and the US’s successful attempts to impose its own caste system on its citizens. It suits politicians to make us less human, to make us hate the other. Normalising this inhumanity gives them the leeway to do increasingly evil things to people, ostensibly in the service of a greater good, but actually in the service of political posturing.
