So only hang 'em if they're black?

Saturday, 23 August 1997

Political morality is still quite simple. On the one side is the high ground of righteousness. On the other is the abyss of turpitude. Dividing them sit those with each cheek on either side of the fence...

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, wrote Samuel Johnson. I would add that those scoundrels who waved the flag of majority opinion have been most guilty of vicious excesses.

So it was that Madame la Guillotine dropped her sharp kiss upon the necks of all that the French revolutionary majority declared to be aristos.

So it was that the scythe of Mao TseTung's cultural revolution reaped a bloody harvest of those who were not of the Chinese peasant majority.

So it was that Indian settlers abandoned their possessions and fled in terror before the plundering hordes of the Ugandan majority.

And even today, you need only look at the lives of Tamils in Sri Lanka or infidels in Iran to realise that human rights can never be subverted to the whim of majority opinion.

Indeed, human rights were drawn up over the course of history by those astute men and women who recognised that only by fundamentally guaranteeing the rights of all individuals could their own rights be protected.

No opinion of any majority should be accorded the opportunity of denying any individual a right that has been guaranteed equally to all.

After all, each of us is at the end a minority of one.

This is why the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1943: "The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities. One's right to life, liberty, and property may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no election."

And now we return to the incessant whining of those who would have our government reinstate the death penalty. Fellow columnist William Saunderson-Meyer restated his support for this position last week, dismissing my opposition "though very proper and philosophically pretty", as "ultimately a load of horseshit".

His current justification is that opinion polls show the majority of our population are in favour of returning control of whether we live or die to the whims of a judge.

No doubt, he will similarly express support of the majority opinion prevailing on this continent that genital mutilation of women is a culturally justifiable practice.

Similarly, he will condemn the minority of United States inhabitants who believe that the Earth orbits the Sun while praising the majority who supported the war against Iraq because they believed Americans were protecting democracy in Kuwait.

I attended the South African National Defence Force annual formal dinner this week. I warmly shook hands with generals of the apartheid era while recoiling inwardly at the display of medals, each of which translated into deaths of my fellow South Africans. William does not call for their heads.

I shuddered at the testimony of the killers of Griffiths Mxenge, remembering how calmly he had told me — an impressionable young writer of 19 years — a week before his death that the security branch had threatened him. William does not call for their heads.

I look at Janus Waluz, imagining his neck dangling at the end of a rope, eyeballs strained in terror, for the callous murder of a smiling Chris Hani. William does not call for his head.

But the barbarians are at the gate. They are faceless. And they are black. And William would have them die.

Pathetic.