By indulging in a broadside of invective against the DA and its leader, Mushtak Parker squanders any hope of credibility because, while most of what he asserts is false, his entire perspective blithely ignores the ANC’s corruption and destruction of South Africa (The Mercury, July 10).
Despite the clearly expounded fact that Deputy Minister Andrew Whitfield’s excursion in the US was cleared with the President and paid for by the DA, Parker repeats the lie that it was an ‘act of defiance.’ He then insists that John Steenhuisen’s defence of the truth regarding Ramaphosa’s sacking of Whitfield was ‘puerile.’ Really? Whatever response Steenhuisen might have made would be deprecated by the bilious likes of Parker.
Parker’s subjective diagnosis is again displayed by his claim that Steenhuisen showed ‘coyness’ in the Oval Office despite his warranted and relevant remark concerning the dangers posed by the EFF and MKP. Yet Parker found Ramaphosa’s smiling discomfort and failed attempt to pass a remark to Trump as ‘stoical and dignified.’
Character assassination is a favourite tool of the Left in attempting to divert attention from scrutiny of its own failings. Parker’s disparagement of Steenhuisen for ‘petulance of self-entitlement, psychological trauma for the loss of privileges under apartheid’ is laughable because Steenhuisen was a school-going teenager in the last decade of apartheid.
Switching from his pseudo psychoanalysis to pseudo political anthropology, Parker diagnoses its ‘genes’ as being the DA’s fundamental problem. Apparently, the DA is an ‘incestuous’ amalgam of relics of the past devoted to ‘serving the interests of the white constituency.’ Of course, if Parker examined the demographics of the DA, he would note that whites constitute a minority in its representation and that its policies are substantially endorsed by all races.
If he endeavoured to analyse the ‘genes’ of the ANC, he would find that its bourgeois roots were cast off and replaced by Marxism to the extent that, since the 1950s, the ANC has been controlled by communists. And that’s the reason for the only truthful line in Parker’s column, where he states that the country is beset by ‘intractable socio-economic woes’ but fails to question why that is so.
If Parker offered a solution to the socio-economic woes, his column might earn some redemption. But he castigates the free market as being the preserve of ‘the hegemony of the private sector’ and the minimalist state intervention of economic liberalism. Yet if he did some historical research, he would note that what he castigates has a proven track record of socio-economic upliftment.
John Steenhuisen and the DA are not responsible for the ‘intractable socio-economic woes’ of South Africa. Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC are. That is where Parker should devote his pseudo-political and psychoanalysis.
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