Subject: A trip back into the past, curtesy of You Tube.

 



As I think I have mentioned in previous blogs that I’m an enthusiastic latecomer to ‘You Tube’.  It’s store of archival video’s are a delight, threading, you back in time to when you were a person another person living your life under very different circumstances.
It was 1961 and I had just arrived on Christmas Eve in Cape Town, in the land of Apartheid "Separate Development" and moral and ethical exactitude. I was forced into many generalised political arguments based on my assumption, growing up in England that truth was on the less totalitarian side, (sadly I wouldn’t be so sure today). 
Today on You Tube  I have been watching Mr Johann Vorster, the then prime minister of South Africa interviewed by the well known American conservative intellectual W F Buckley. You couldn’t get two individuals with greater diversity. Vorster the blunt spoken Afrikaans politician  known for his strong views and the effete Buckley, the former Doyen of the American news channels known for his forensic questioning.
Vorster was defending the indefensible , the separation into racial camps of people living in his county. In the world at large South Africa had become a detested state with few apologists and yet in many of her detractors countries a similar code of conduct was practiced without being formalised. My personal experience whilst living in 1960s CapeTown, set as it is in beautiful surroundings I willingly succumbed  to a higher standard of living than I would ever have had in England, a country which continued to pursue a different type of Separate Developmental, one in which Class did the job of Apartheid.
I argued the unfairness and the lack of any moral opportunity cost, the beastliness and the injustice but, like Isreal today, the sheer necessity was conveniently overlooked when a nations back is to the wall, in South Africa’s case the face of communist aggression, communism was becoming entrenched in African countries to the north. The ideology of communism projected by Russia was an anathema to the Western way of life  and South Africa had become a buttress to the Russian influence and the threat it imposed towards the sea route around the Cape.
This was in an age when division in the world were clear cut.
It was before 'Globalism' and 'Multiculturalism'  (a necessary Corollary to global trade) had dislodged the white mans footing in countries which had felt the yoke of colonialism. The carefully crafted propaganda issued by the South African government was clearly one side of the argument and survival, (as it always is) was paramount.
Listening to Vorster I couldn't fault his logic, the logic of who ‘represented the enemy’ of which racism bundled people into the ghetto of "them and us".
It was before perceived surety that minority voices could be brought to bear on fairness and equality, irrespective of the potential diminishing of loss your own values.
Values instead were seen as ‘universal’, part of an inherited culture all humans should have but as we increasingly see this is an illusion. It's not a case of right or wrong but rather the interpretation we place on many aspects of life and the way we wish to live it. Religion says we are all Gods children but as children are motivated by parents and the community they serve, these communities, were then representative of a area and a culture (often formulated through religious doctrine) the politics  and values disparate largely because of the local conditions and challenges which form them.
The conundrum is why then assume the ‘commonality’ which the global order demands especially when the world order is transcribed into town and village and fact that there does appear we have little in common, other than we all bleed.
Pain and sorrow, hunger and adversity we all suffer but our reasoning behind each affliction is different. Even the similarities between our so called cousins is blown away when a demigod like Donald Trump arrives on the scene and preaches a type of politics which we should all fear for its crude naivety and bully boy tactics.
I’m sure in 50 years time (if we live that long) the equivalent of You Tube, will probably be a news related psychedelic implant we receive at birth to control any impulses not presumed seemly. Conformity is the mantra, conformity of purpose and the erosion of any sense of individuality