When it comes to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, our position is crystal clear: according to President Cyril Ramaphosa SA is “firmly on the side of peace”, which I assume is about a kilometre inside the Polish border because God knows there’s very little peace east of that.
In a newsletter published on Monday Ramaphosa explained that SA had abstained from voting on the UN’s resolution calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine because the resolution “did not foreground the call for meaningful engagement”. In other words, we should never stop or even protest a violent act until both the perpetrator and the victim have checked their diaries and agreed on a date to start a process of restorative justice.
To Ramaphosa’s credit, he didn’t indulge in the whataboutery galvanising the less cerebral parts of SA’s left, where it is now commonly agreed that the continued existence of political hypocrisy in general, and the US in particular, have made international borders illegitimate. Well, except SA’s: here, Auslanders still need to raus.
However, Ramaphosa’s “both sides” approach was telling in another way, revealing yet again the ANC’s longstanding hesitancy to denounce abusers while simultaneously urging the victim of abuse to stop getting abused. After all, this is a country in which “gender-based violence” is perpetrated by, well, er, someone, and schoolgirls just “fall pregnant”, as if being clumsy can trigger parthenogenesis.
However, at the weekend those tendencies took a wild lurch towards geopolitics in a nasty little parable posted to Facebook by former ANC MP and current Armscor director Phillip Dexter. In this parable a husband and wife are discussing the war. The wife is denouncing Russia, insisting that Ukraine should be allowed to join Nato if it wants. The husband promptly goes to the kitchen, fetches a large knife, then says it’s time for bed.
The wife is horrified. Why is he bringing a knife to bed? He tells her it’s none of her business, but she needn’t worry, he’s just protecting his freedom. When she demands further explanation, he tells her: “You don’t even trust your own husband. How can you expect Russia to trust Ukraine? Me sleeping with a knife is like Ukraine joining Nato.”
The post was met with the sort of applause Stalin used to demand, suggesting that its profoundly regressive gender politics either hadn’t registered or hadn’t alarmed any of the little online apparatchiks who stood and cheered.
Certainly, none of them seemed to have a problem with Russian imperial interests being defended in Dexter’s parable by a clear-thinking man, or Ukrainian interests being represented by an emotional woman who needs to be taught a scary lesson.
They also didn’t seem to mind that the two were portrayed not as neighbours sharing a fence but as husband and wife — according to most traditionalists, a couple bound together not only by the law but by God.
They definitely weren’t interested in applying the parable to anything resembling historical fact, where this “marriage” turns into something else entirely: a ghastly history of abuse, in which a “husband” slowly, deliberately and often violently, cuts a “wife” off from her family, her past and her identity.
When she tries to leave him in 1917, he forcibly drags her back, and in 1922 tells the world she has no right to exist outside his home. In 1933 he tries to starve her to death. By 1937, he’s murdering any of her friends who even whisper about her leaving him.
Admittedly, some of Dexter’s audience seemed to know that the “husband” had had a severe heart attack in 1991, but none were particularly interested in why his “wife” had left him as soon as she could, or why she immediately sought the company of people who’d disliked him (including Nato), or why, 30 years after their separation, he was still insisting that she didn’t really exist without him.
But sure. Let’s keep pretending they’re still married, and that he’s the one who needs to sleep with a knife in his bed. Dexter’s parable was obviously dishonest, but the problem with manipulations of this kind is that they make all of us somewhat dishonest. In the face of such obvious violence and such glaring imbalances in power, it is difficult to hold important nuances.
Many of those who are outraged by Russia’s aggression have begun to reimagine Ukraine as a kind of eastern Sweden, which it absolutely isn’t. Transparency International suggests it is considerably more corrupt than SA. Antisemitism and pro-Nazi sentiments continue to fester there, as they do across most of Eastern Europe and Russia.
However, there are societal blights that must be cured through education, integration and contact with modernity, not through invasion, and certainly not invasion by the cynical love-child of gangster capitalism and the ghost of Stalin.
Deep down Ramaphosa must surely know that the tanks need to leave. Perhaps he even tried to say it, insisting in his newsletter that “another war is something the world does not need”.
But he can’t, because he, like Vladimir Putin, is the leader of a disgraced state that equivocates between abuser and victim; and which may yet take a knife to bed and tell us it is simply protecting itself from us.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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