TRAWLING about on Facebook late one evening recently I came across a meme posted by some digital anarchist collective which featured this notable quote from the writer and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti:
"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."
Despite being a closet introvert and a person who is instinctively wary of any form of collectivism, anarchist or otherwise, I sort of warmed to this and duly hit the "Like" and "Share" buttons without further thought.
Silly me. It wasn't long before, wholly unbidden, other Facebookers were on my case with their alarmingly regressive thoughts on the matter. One of them was Rhoda Kadalie, the noted newspaper columnist and executive director at the Impumelelo Social Innovations Centre, a Cape Town non-profit organisation that promotes, among other things, "public-problem solving".
"What crap," Kadalie posted, in what I regarded as an exceptionally violent response to some innocuous pacifist whimsy. "The challenge is to love and live across divisions with those divisions. I am coloured, married a German, have a half-breed daughter who married Jewish. My grandchild and I are real mongrels and love it. Those borders are what intrigue and enrich."
Two minutes later she added a second posting: "And by the way my paternal grandfather was Malawian who married a Malay woman; my maternal grandparents are white and coloured. So I am thoroughly colourful rather than coloured - I can be what I want to be provided others allow me as we should allow others."
This was, I thought, quite a bit of family history. Perhaps too much. It could be that is how they intrigue and enrich one another at Impumelelo but, in my experience, such narcissistic oversharing is usually only welcome as an "early warning" system to identify the blowsy bore at the dinner party.
To be fair to Kadalie though, it was late at night, a time when she should have been resting up perhaps rather than calling members of her family names.
This, then, is the great danger with social media - whether texting, tweeting or commenting on Facebook. The easier it is to post an online comment, the more knee-jerk and doltish that comment. The bile and rage just pours out.
In the days of pen and paper, there was a measured civility to our moaning. "Dear Sir," our letters to the editor would begin. "It is with dismay that we learn that the City of Cape Town is proposing. . ."
Nowadays, it's like, "Patricia?!! WTF???" or some such grunting texted from a smart phone.
Not everyone has forgotten their manners. On Tuesday, for example, Anton Harber, journalism professor at the University of Witwatersrand, apologised for mistakenly linking me to an online petition protesting Israel's military actions in Gaza. "I think I just pressed the wrong button," he wrote, "and made you an honorary Jew. Sorry."
Harber, incidentally, has expressed concern at the vile hate speech dominating social media discussion on the Israel-Palestine situation. "The ease with which criticism of Israel can turn to anti-Semitism is terrifying," he wrote in Business Day on Thursday, "but as chilling is the onslaught by Jews on Jews who express even the mildest doubt about the wisdom of the occupation. Intolerant extremists on both sides are destroying the possibility for meaningful exchange on how to end the conflict. It is a sad day when a tool for people to connect becomes another weapon."
But the point I wish to make here is that on Thursday, August 7, I do become an honorary Jew.
That is the deadline that Cosatu's Western Cape provincial secretary, Tony Ehrenreich, has given the SA Jewish Board of Deputies to "stop their Zionist propaganda in Cape Town, failing which we will boycott and call strikes at all of their member- and supporting companies and organisations."
If, as our little corporal claims, the JBD supports "a Zionist agenda", they do so with the protection of the constitution. To suggest they must leave the country, as Ehrenreich did, should they continue with that agenda is absurd. But to threaten and bully the broader community of Jewish businesses and employers with labour action because of what the JBD believes?
What is this, Tony? Kristallnacht redux?
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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