Needless to say, this week’s column in The Daily Maverick was about Egypt, North Africa and the Middle East: Liberty is more than mere democracy. Now complete with angry and/or incoherent comments.

In Joburg, it’s that time of year again. The cyclists invaded, took over the city, banned everyone else from the road, and had their private lycra-fetish party. Here’s what I think of that.

South Africa’s Freedom Day is just past, and World Press Freedom Day is just around the corner. An opportune time, then, to highlight some troubling developments on the continent in The darkness of Africa. Governments are naturally at odds with a free press, but their attempts to control it are a danger to liberty and prosperity.

After a conversation with me about an (ironically) unpublished column of mine, Phillip de Wet wrote what amounted to a reply, which was published here. I wrote the column early in March, before the Equality Court judgement involving Julius Malema. I wholeheartedly agree with the newly appointed Sunday Times editor, Ray Hartley, on that ruling: Hate speech ruling against Malema a blow to free expression.

Since his column was, in effect, a response, I thought it worth publishing my original column here. Is it provocative? Yes. Will it rile up people who don’t read past the headline? Probably. Does it condone hate speech? Not at all. But there’s a long way between disapproving of speech and asking the government to ban it.

Why Holocaust denial should be legal

Because an ideal, a thought, once caused the Holocaust, and remains deeply offensive to all reasonable people, expressing it is now illegal. This is dangerous.

Laws against hate speech rob a society of essential liberty. If offensive speech is not protected, what is the point of protecting speech at all? Who needs protection for speech with which everyone agrees?

Take, for example, laws that forbid what is known as “holocaust denial”. This takes many forms, from questioning the numbers of deaths in Nazi death camps, to denying that the Nazis did anything wrong at all.

Such ideas are, by all accounts, factually wrong. Moreover, they are deeply offensive not only to survivors of the Holocaust, but to all reasonable people who despise oppression and murder. Despite their offensive nature, however, expressing them should be legal.

Let’s consider some more cases.

Even if you overlook the suffering of poverty and starvation, and count only direct deaths resulting from incarceration, torture, and executions, Stalin killed more people than Hitler did. One does not have to have suffered under the yoke of Stalinism to consider the communist ideology that drove him reprehensible and dangerous. Stalin was not an anomaly who misunderstood communism. History has shown time and again that if you impose a system in which people are required to work for the benefit of others, the only logical consequence must be coercion, imposed by state violence. Dictatorship and revolutionary “purges” are natural consequences of the communist ideal.

Would you ban communism?

Some people believe that lesbianism is a deviant condition which can be “cured” by introducing misguided souls to intercourse with men. As a consequence, women get raped just for being lesbian. This crime is truly awful. It is more than just discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It violates every standard of decency. The crime should be punished severely by society.

However, should it be illegal to express the deluded opinion that encourages the crime?

Some people believe that their religion is the only true religion, and that their god has commanded them to convert others, by force if necessary. Non-believers who refuse to repent and follow religious strictures may be punished by ostracism or even death. This view is current in parts of the Muslim world, and is not unknown to history in other religions either. Remember the fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, fanatical devotion to the pope, and all the other attributes of the Spanish Inquisition.

Should the state ban Christianity? Islam?

Blasphemy is deeply offensive to many millions of people. It has been criminalised in many societies throughout history, and even into modern times.

Should blasphemy be a crime? And if religious doctrine holds that the Earth is the centre of the universe and man was created from dust, should we declare our Galileos and our Darwins to be blasphemous for expressing unpopular and offensive ideas?

Many people would be inconsistent in their answers to these questions. This raises the question: is there a line where freedom of expression ends, and criminal speech begins?

I could not draw such a line. Could you? Can anyone?

Is advocacy of violence a bad thing? Well, that depends. Is it wrong to denounce religion in general, or a particular manifestation of it? Is it wrong to preach a religion when some consider it to be intolerant, backward, offensive or outright dangerous? Is it wrong to claim homosexuality is sinful, a physical or psychological deviance, when your perfectly legal religion says it is? Is it wrong to advocate communism or socialism? Is it wrong to denounce fascism? Or to advocate it?

Offensive speech is often worthy of our contempt. But isn’t it even more contemptible to jail someone for expressing a thought, an idea, however offensive it might seem?
John Stuart Mill, in his 1859 treatise On Liberty, wrote: “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”

He elaborated: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collusion with error.”

The only form of censorship that is morally justifiable is the right not to listen. Have you ever heard someone say, “That should be banned, because it might be harmful to me?”

If a questionable book or speech or idea prompts someone to commit a criminal act, surely the crime is already prohibited and punishable? How can you hold someone responsible for expressing an idea that may or may not, depending on interpretation, have led someone else to commit a crime, when that person was free to make up his own mind?

There is a temptation to argue that the crime might have been prevented, and if it was not, that it is too late to act against the criminal after the fact. But in what conception of liberty does one punish someone before a crime has been committed (or one can be certain that it is imminent)? Where do you draw the line in that case?

The only person whom society can be sure will not commit a crime is a dead person – or, equivalently, a man in chains. Would we agree to incarcerate a poor man because he might steal, or an angry man because he might commit assault, or a lonely man because he might rape? So why punish a deluded man for speaking delusions, on the flimsy premise that someone might hear him, believe him, and act upon the delusional thought? That way lies a nightmare of Orwellian proportions.

Noam Chomsky once said: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

Why protect inoffensive speech, after all? Denying the right to express a thought, however offensive, takes us into dangerous territory where authoritarianism and fascism take root.

Our constitution forbids, among other forms of expression, hate speech and advocacy of war. Is it wrong to express hateful views about hateful people? Is it wrong to call for war to defend one’s own country, or come to the aid of an allied victim of aggression?

Who is to say what constitutes hateful speech or warmongering? A government?

Governments – most particularly authoritarian regimes that in fact practice censorship – have been guilty of permitting and promoting the most awful ideas of all. Apartheid, for example, was declared noble and good by a government. Advocating discrimination, theft, assault or even murder against Jews, or intellectuals, or capitalists, or Christians, or heathens, or homosexuals, have all been condoned at one time or another by governments.

So who then? Society?

Anyone is, of course, free to denounce Holocaust denial, racism, warmongering, advocacy of crime, or any other ideas that seem offensive and wrong to their mind. As Mill explained, countering bad ideas with good ones is the path to progress and wisdom.

However, social censorship can be just as dangerous and corrosive as government censorship. Self-censorship creates a stultifying atmosphere in which ideas that do not conform to the norms and ideals of majority opinion are suppressed. It imposes strictures of political correctness, in which mindless optimism becomes the only acceptable form of expression. It makes ideas – and the media – servants of the political aims of society, and ultimately of government itself. It rejects critical thought by denouncing it as unpatriotic, negative, anti-social, or injurious to whatever political notions are in vogue at a particular time. Ultimately, it suborns speech to the dictatorship of the proletariat no less than if it had been suppressed by an authoritarian government.

Criminalising offensive speech – even in the hope of preventing consequent crimes – sacrifices an essential liberty of society. Worse, since it cannot suppress the unspoken idea that underlies the expression, it purchases only an illusion of safety.

Instead of making victims and oppressed saints out of those who hold offensive views, they should be encouraged to express them. Creating laws that suppress offensive ideas not only causes them to fester in secrecy, but it creates the perception of credibility. If the idea is false, why would society lack the confidence and conviction to counter them in the broad light of day?

Let people speak their minds, and let their ideas stand or fall in the open. Let the encounter with reason, logic and moral conviction remove the poisonous sting of hate speech.

Here’s a great little piece by Jeffrey A. Tucker, the editor of Mises.org, on the delusional and self-serving habit of politicians, journalists and dinner party guests to declare that this or that price movement is a problem, or worse, that it is “unfair”.

I’ll extract the most salient sections from the article:

What kind of theory of the world insists that houses and stocks always go up in price, whereas gas and grain prices always go down? That doesn’t really make sense. A price is not set by natural law, nor are price movements intended to follow a preset pattern like the movements of stars. Prices are nothing but exchange ratios — points of agreement between buyer and seller. They reflect many factors, none of them fixed parts of the universe.

So why do we expect some to rise and some to fall? It all depends on whether you are in the position of a producer or a consumer. As homeowners, we are in fact “producers” of our homes; that is to say, we are holding them with the expectation of someday offering them for sale. The same is true of our stocks. We already own them, so of course we want the price to go up. Then we can sell them at a profit.

On the other hand, on things we intend to buy, things like gas and grain, we want the price to be as low as possible. We want their prices to fall. That way we save resources.

So what’s at work here is self-interest. Think of the same situation from the point of view of someone who is a first-time homebuyer. Does this person want high prices or low prices? Of course the answer is obvious. This person wants the lowest price possible, so for this person this “housing bust” is not a bust at all. It is a boon. But once this person becomes a homeowner, matters change. Now he wants prices to rise.

Now think of the gas station owner. If it didn’t affect how much he sold, would this person want prices to rise or fall? Of course, he wants the highest prices possible.

[…]

It’s the same in all markets. We can see that it is perfectly absurd to attempt to fashion national policy around the interests of only one party to an exchange. To try to keep house prices high and rising cheats the first-time buyer. To keep them low cheats the current owner. To keep grain prices high helps grain producers but hurts grain consumers. Some gas companies might like high gas prices, but consumers hate them. On the other hand, gas prices forced lower by dictate might thrill consumers but producers might end up hurting so much that they shut down. That helps no one.

[…]

There is no way to observe an existing price and declare it just or unjust. As St. Bernardino — a shrewd observer of economic affairs — said,

Water is usually cheap where it is abundant. But it can happen that on a mountain or in another place, water is scarce, not abundant. It may well happen that water is more highly esteemed than gold, because gold is more abundant in this place than water.

The Late Scholastics, followers of St. Thomas Aquinas, all agreed that the just price has no fixed position. It all depends on the common estimation of traders. Luis de Molina summed up the point:

A price is considered just or unjust not because of the nature of the things themselves — this would lead us to value them according to their nobility or perfection — but due to their ability to serve human utility. But this is the way in which they are appreciated by men, they therefore command a price in the market and in exchanges.

[…]

Now, there are ways for a price to become a matter of injustice. It can mask fraud. The prices can result from or be influenced by some act of force, such as price controls or taxation or restrictions on supply and demand. Behind each of these, we find coercion, a body of people who are mandating or restricting in a way that is incompatible with free choice. Arguably, this is not just.

We can conclude, then, that to the extent we complain about unjust gasoline prices, we need to look at the restrictions on refineries or exploration or drilling, or examine the role that high gas taxes have in pushing up prices beyond what they would be under conditions of free exchange.

And as for those who believe that all prices should move in ways that benefit their own particular economic interests at the expense of everyone else, don’t confuse your agenda with a matter of justice. […]

This article makes a nice introduction for the coming week’s project: poking holes in last week’s Financial Mail cover story, Spillover: SA’s response to soaring global oil prices.

The last fortnight has seen a disgusting display of inhumanity, targeted against foreigners living in South Africa. Whether or not they’re illegal, whether or not they’re fleeing repression in Zimbabwe, whether or not they have jobs, local scum who think they’re superior have attacked anyone who is not like them, in the most brutal fashion. Our streets resemble the worst days of apartheid, and the pogroms continue.

We should be ashamed.

That foreigners flock to South Africa is a compliment. Do we really want the sort of country that isn’t attractive to foreigners? Perhaps one in which the government has to fence people in? After the decades of succour foreign countries gave our liberation leaders, are we returning the favour by slaughtering them like animals?

The problem is deep. Much of it is appears to be simple tribalism, racism and xenophobia, yes. But that’s not the cause. The cause is two-fold: the failure of government to improve the lot of our own people, and a widespread misunderstanding of the economic issues raised by immigration.

Foreigners strengthen a country. Yes, there are criminals among them, who steal out of need or opportunity. But the majority — even the poor, the jobless and the refugees — on balance contribute to an economy over time. They’d have to, or they’d starve. The notion that they “steal jobs” is mistaken. They do take jobs, yes, but every new job created adds more value to the economy than it costs. They contribute to production, and to consumption, and as a result create new jobs in turn.

Many foreigners, both in South Africa and elsewhere in the world, have become successful business people. They’re often entrepreneurs who create companies (and jobs) that locals haven’t created, to supply products or services locals haven’t (or won’t) supply. Obviously, they do compete against South African workers and businesses, but if they do so successfully, one has to ask why every consumer should pay the price for a local’s inefficiency or rapaciousness. Protectionism might help the protected, but it does so at a heavy price to consumers. Is it really fair to expect our people — many of whom are themselves poor — to subsidise inefficiency in the name of nationalism?

The most notable example of success that rests heavily on free immigration is the United States. It grew strong and prosperous on the hard work, the energy, and the entrepreneurism of immigrants. It didn’t let in only “skilled” immigrants. It recognised that free people, working for themselves in free markets, develop skills. That free people create prosperity and an economic vitality that is both deep and wide, and reaches far beyond just the immigrant communities themselves.

We demanded our freedom, and celebrated it when it was won, yet we refuse to grant others the same freedom? Why protest the pass laws, but demand that our borders be closed? Why ignore the biggest benefit of liberty: the ability to prosper without the dead hand of government holding us down?

True, immigration has its problems. Most notably, it’s a problem in welfare states. When taxpayers cough up to support people without the means to support themselves, it stands to reason that they don’t want bums arriving who leech off the system. This is the reason why modern America is no longer as welcoming as it once was, and why European countries have even bigger immigration problems. The problem isn’t immigration, it’s economic policy at home.

The obvious solution is simply not to offer foreigners any welfare beyond what the common decency of a civilised country requires. An even better solution is not to delude ourselves that a welfare state is a good idea in the first place. It sounds nice, but it is counter-productive. Let people invest their capital and spend their money as they see fit. Income is, after all, the incentive to be productive, so letting people keep their income seems smart if productivity and economic growth is what you’re after. Capitalism isn’t what makes people poor. You can’t sell stuff to poor people. What makes people poor is when free economic activity is strangled by state control. When markets are prevented from thriving unencumbered by regulation. When government discourages or even bans individuals from seeking profitable and sustainable ways to offer other people the things they need or want.

Liberation shouldn’t be a halfway measure. If liberation is to mean anything, it should carry both its political and economic meaning. Letting free people engage in free markets is how you create a wealthy, job-creating economy — something our government has singularly failed to do. For all its stated intentions and campaign slogans, it has not created jobs. It has not delivered a better life for all. And that’s not because of an “implementation crisis”. It’s because of a policy crisis. It’s because it cannot deliver a better life for all, even if it wanted to. All a government can deliver is the justice and liberty that permits each of us to pursue our own better life, however we define it.

Our economic growth lags even the global average, let alone the growth of other emerging markets. Our government takes almost a third of our GDP in taxes, yet what have ordinary South Africans received for this sacrifice? Very little indeed. No wonder they’re angry.

But making scapegoats of foreigners is misdirected anger. If the government seems reluctant to say so clearly, it is only because it knows the anger should really be directed at the socialist policies, the bureaucratic incompetence and the crony corruption of the ruling ANC. It deserves a great deal of credit for liberating our people. However, as a government, the ANC has failed the people.

We should recognise that economics, job creation and prosperity is not a zero-sum game. Every participant in our economy on average produces more than he consumes. Therefore, we should welcome every participant in our economy, because their work makes all of us more prosperous. Their work delivers the services and goods that make all of us better off. A government can’t make a better life for all, but people can. Where they’re from is immaterial.

Our government has not only failed the people, but it has failed even to speak up against the oppression on our doorstep. The result? Many of the victims of Zimbabwe’s tyrant now need the safety of our country, as many of our own people once needed the safety of theirs. We should take them in. We owe it to them.

Taking our anger at government failures out on foreigners is misguided and counter-productive. It not only hurts our own prosperity and progress, but how is it different from the white redneck who went and shot hisself some kaffirs in Skielik? Or the scum that degraded black staff at their university? Do we all want to be like that? How can we condemn those acts, or blame people for calling us racists and violent third-world savages, when all they see on TV is racism and violent third-world savagery?

We, of all people, should welcome immigrants. We should thank them for thinking our country worth making a new life in. We are the rainbow nation. Or aren’t we?

PS. Tomorrow, Saturday 24 May, a march will be held in Johannesburg to protest the rising xenophobia in South Africa. Despite the participation of many confused socialists who misunderstand the economics of free immigration but instinctively realise this wave of violence is evil, this march is worth supporting. I will be there, marching for the first time since the liberation of South Africa. Join us. Meet at Marks Park, on Empire Road, near Hillbrow, at 9 am. From there, we’ll head to the Library Gardens, via the Department of Home Affairs.

David Bullard has been fired by the Sunday Times. Ostensibly, it was over last Sunday’s column, in which he envisioned what South Africa would look like had it not been colonised by the Dutch and the English. His vision isn’t exactly complimentary.

The column is condescending at best, and probably racist. But so what? It stokes debate, and that debate should not be about freedom of speech.

Before I talk about that debate, the obvious question is why fire Bullard for being offensive now? Hadn’t the Sunday Times’s editor, Mondli Makhanya, read him before? Doesn’t an editor who once bravely put “Manto: a drunk and a thief” on the front page agree with Salman Rushdie that without the freedom to offend, freedom of speech ceases to exist? Maybe he does. But Bullard made the fatal mistake of offending his paymasters. For that, of course, they have every right to tell him to sod off and exercise his freedom of speech elsewhere.

Except that his paymasters deny that’s why they’re firing him. Makhanya says his 19th century views are unacceptable in the newspaper. Yet Bullard has been cultivating that persona in the very same newspaper for years. He unapologetically trades on his arrogance, his Victorian superciliousness, and his ability to provoke outrage. If he steps over lines, it’s because with his dandy sartorial style, his whisky-drinking tastes and his cigar-smoking condescension, he consciously — and self-consciously — stations himself above arbitrary lines drawn by the hoi polloi.

It is certainly not the first time Bullard has been racist or offensive. Why didn’t he get fired before? The only other possibility that springs to mind is that the political class strongarmed the newspaper by threatening to pull advertising. That is, of course, their right, but it would genuinely surprise me if Makhanya, who stood firm in the face of far heavier political pressure caved over something as inconsequential as a column by a known stirrer. My bet is Makhanya was just waiting for an excuse to fire Bullard after the latter’s scathing attack on his bosses in the recently-launched media magazine Empire — an attack he has exploited on several public occasions to arouse shock and mirth. Sarah Britten speculates along the same lines, and reckons his axing can only be good for Empire. Bullard himself agrees. (I share Britten’s wish that Empire would get around to discovering these newfangled intarweb tube things. On the other hand, we all know what Bullard thinks of the internet. And in the interest of full disclosure: I too write for Empire.)

For my part, I agree with Rushdie. If Bullard’s column is racist, or offensive, or contains 19th century views, so what? You’re free to disagree. In fact, it’s far better for racism to be declared openly and discussed freely than to be suppressed. Just because it’s taboo in public discourse doesn’t mean it’s not flourishing in pub discourse. Or should that read “festering”?

What will get lost in the noise is the debate Bullard appeared to be trying to stir. Not very well, in my view. He expressed the argument in an offensive, condescending way, but there is a valid debate to be had about the modern tendency to dismiss colonialism as mere racist oppression and exploitation. It definitely was, in many cases, mercenary and ruthless. The degree of depravity differed from one colonialist to the next, and the English were far from the worst.

Many writers take the line that colonialism in India, for example, had substantial benefits, in addition to the well-known drawbacks and injustices. Those writers are not only Western apologists for racist oppression, but also Indian economists, historians, and prominent politicians, writing about their own country. For all the harm colonialism did, they argue, it also brought with it civil institutions and infrastructure. India can thank Britain, they say, for its liberal education, modern jurisprudence, and functioning civil service bureaucracy. Once liberated, it was on these institutions that economic progress could be built.

Reasonable arguments can be made on both sides of this issue. As Bullard shows, the same goes for unreasonable arguments. But that his column was grating and offensive does not mean it’s not a debate worth stirring. Yes, it means suspending conventions about what is politically correct. It means challenging well-established orthodox thinking on issues of history. It means treading sensitively around, and not being over-sensitive to, issues of race and oppression. It means rejecting the victim complex to which Bullard refers in his final paragraph, as well as the instinctive slam-dunk defense offered by perceptions of racism. But is it a debate worth suppressing?

I don’t think so. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, once expressed the 19th-century view that “[t]hose who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.”

It appears that view is also too 19th-century for Mondli Makhanya’s Sunday Times.

Update at 21:00 on 11 April 2008: If you’re interested in David Bullard’s columns, I hope you have bookmarks. Because you aren’t going to find them — not even previously published ones — at The Times website. They appear to have been orphaned. They still exist. For now. The link to his column in the copy above still works, and so do the links from that page, but without an article ID number, David Bullard is just a bad memory for the Sunday Times.

Update at 22:00 on 11 April 2008: Bullard responds, inserted in the copy above.

Update at 13:00 on 12 April 2008: The Saturday Star was quick to exploit this competitive opportunity, and published a page three article on Bullard in today’s first edition. It isn’t yet available online, but an image of the page is here. In it, he is quoted as saying that the column was merely an excuse for Makhanya to get rid of him, after he refused to apologise for claiming, in his Empire column that standards at the Sunday Times and other Avusa publications were in decline. After all, he says, his brief was to be “controversial” and “outrageous” and “to upset people” on a Sunday. “I was found guilty in the kangaroo court of Mondli Makhanya,” the piece quotes. Marvellously in character, he is pictured in a flashy pin-stripe suit and tie at the opulent Rand Club. “Wait until you see the next article in Empire,” he promises, “because now I don’t have to hold back at all.”

Update at 12:00 on 13 April 2008: Prompted by my response to Dawn in the comments section, I posted a short follow-up piece on the debate I believe Bullard was trying to stir: In defence of colonialism.

Update at 15:00 on 13 April 2008: Bullard’s Empire column, along with a full complimentary issue, has been published online. I noted it here. The direct link to his column is here.

In the US presidential election, candidates pay millions to flight campaign spots in states where primaries or elections are to be held. Each is tailored to the region in question. Though they’re often banal, promising the undeliverable, pandering to prejudice or exploiting economic illitaracy, the idea of targeting your limited campaign funds seems sensible. It is also possible in a free and fair society.

There is, therefore, a terrible irony in the fact that candidates standing in opposition to Zimbabwe’s brutal dictator, Robert Mugabe, in tomorrow’s election there, are buying advertising in newspapers and on prime-time TV in neighbouring South Africa. Both Simba Mokoni, the outcast from Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, and Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change, have spent a lot of money here.

There are several reasons for this. One is that a large number of Zimbabweans are in South Africa, legally or otherwise, and may be inclined to return to vote tomorrow. (Expats are no longer permitted to vote abroad.) They’re here because they cannot survive with the hyperinflation, empty grocery shelves and political violence — the legacy of Mugabe’s long rule and failed policies — so one hardly needs a survey to tell you that about 100% of them would want to see political change. NGOs are urging the two million or more expatriate Zimbabweans in South Africa — many of whom will risk arrest and deportation in South Africa, or worse in Zimbabwe — to go home and vote.

The more sinister reason is restrictions on free speech and repression of opposition campaigns in Zimbabwe itself. The picture alongside, tellingly named “Policeviolenceagainstanoppo.jpg” was taken last year, and republished on This is Zimbabwe, the must-read blog if you’re following events in Zimbabwe. Its “election watch” series gives a good impression of how free and fair elections are likely to be. Voting districts have been gerrymandered, voter rolls are being tampered with, and election laws have just been amended, contrary to pre-election agreements with opposition parties, to permit police to enter polling stations to “assist illiterate voters” to vote, for example. (In South Africa’s historic 1994 election, there were dozens of parties on the ballot, most voters had never voted before, and illiteracy was a major concern. So the ballot came with pictures of party logos and photos of their leaders, and extensive voter education campaigns were run by the Independent Electoral Commission and a myriad NGOs, explaining how the ballot would work. This elegantly solved the problem. No apartheid-era police officers were needed at polling stations to “help” people vote.)

It is no surprise that Zimbabwe has banned most foreign media. Among broadcasters, the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation is one of only two networks permitted a bureau in Zimbabwe (the other is Al Jazeera). SABC rival e-tv says it will be reporting the election diligently, from the Beit Bridge border post. As I was on the Burma issue, and often am on issues of foreign policy, I’m ashamed to call myself a South African, considering the tacit and overt support my country gives to nationalist dictators, communist despots and murderous tyrants, such as that geriatric scum, Mugabe.

For tomorrow, election observers are not permitted, except for the South African Development Community delegation led by South Africa. Why them? Because they were the only bunch of reprehensible clowns to declare the previous election free and fair. The simpering idiots will do so again this year. South Africa’s highest officials have already laid the groundwork for a conclusion that panders to ogre of Harare, as has SADC itself. Human rights campaigners are not so sure.

So political parties are turning to non-traditional means of getting their messages of change out, and those means include campaign advertisements in countries other than where the election is being held.

In words that make him sound like the biggest bully on the school playground (”Just dare try it. We don’t play around while you try to please your British allies. Just try it and you will see.”), Robert Mugabe has threatened dire consequences for anyone who dares dispute the outcome of the election. After all, it’s already rigged, so the outcome is almost a foregone conclusion.

The sad fact is that Mugabe’s sham elections are unlikely to restore freedom to Zimbabweans. They’re unlikely to reverse the economic disaster that Mugabe shamelessly blames on Western sanctions and colonial plots, but are actually the result of wholesale expropriation of land and assets, price controls, cronyism and outright kleptocracy.

Perhaps nothing short of violent revolt will reverse the disaster. I can’t possibly make a case for such a revolt by the people of Zimbabwe, since South Africa’s constitution limits my freedom of speech when it comes to “propaganda for war”, but at Commentary South Africa, John makes a good case, using Tibet as a case in point, why the superficial nobility of peaceful opposition against violent repression masks the fact that it seldom, if ever, produces a free and fair outcome.

That Zimbabwean political candidates are campaigning in South Africa against an 84-year-old ogre merely underscores the limits of “quiet diplomacy” and “peaceful opposition”. While Zimbabweans try to vote themselves a better future tomorrow, I will spend the day mourning the empty breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa. I will spend tomorrow remembering why free people and free markets (to pilfer a tagline) are the “basis” of “basic human rights”. Why political and economic liberty are prerequisites for a fair, prosperous future.

I wish you well, Zimbabwe. But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

One of my favourite writers, William F. Buckley Jr, died yesterday at the age of 82. The founder, more than half a century ago, of the National Review, Buckley was a cheerful wit, an astute intellectual, a shrewd commentator and an articulate writer. The scourge of leftish sympathies in academia, elite society and the mainstream media, Buckley was a thinking conservative in the classical liberal tradition. He shunned the lunatic fringes of isolationism and protectionism, abhorred communism and totalitarianism, and espoused individual liberty and economic freedom. His passion and popularity made him perhaps the most influential post-war conservative of all, building an intellectual basis that would find its apogee only in the 1980s.

Ronald Reagan once asked Buckley what position he might like in the administration. Deadpan, he replied, “ventriloquist”. I think he got the job.

Other than the original announcement in the National Review, linked to above, notable obituaries and reactions include:

Up from Liberalism, on the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page.

William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82, by Douglas Martin at the New York Times.

William F. Buckley Jr., in The Times Online.

Conrad Black on William F. Buckley Jr., by, ahem, Conrad Black, in the National Post.

A remarkable man, by Joe Lieberman.

Shades of gray and Blackie, by Mark Steyn.

Bill was a great American, by John McCain.

But perhaps he is best remembered in his own words:

“Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”

“The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.”

“I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”

“Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.”

“Government can’t do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.”

And finally, what more can a mere mortal say about Buckley, when he said it all himself in a New York Times Book Review article on writing speedily? “I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition,” he declared modestly. “I asked myself the other day, ‘Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?’ I couldn’t think of anyone.”

And neither can I. As the WSJ said, Ave atque vale, Bill Buckley. Hail and farewell.

The 14th edition of The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom has been released. Though its methodology is slightly different, it confirms the results of a similar project run by the Cato Institute and Fraser Institute.

There’s a good first-dip commentary on it by Mary Anastasia O-Grady over at the Wall Street Journal, which includes this table:

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Since the pre-9/11 threat of American isolationism and its reversal on that fateful day, American politics has been a bit of a preoccupation in my thinking. In this election cycle, however, I find myself far from sure whom I’d prefer to see stand for election less than a year from now. Seems I’m not alone. Tyler Cowen, over at Marginal Revolution, has the same problem, as he muses in this interesting take on Ron Paul’s candidacy.

It’s true I’m broadly speaking libertarian, and Ron Paul in many ways approximates libertarian positions, but there’s a lot about him that I find discomfiting. Not least among them are his unrealistic stance on the Iraq war (principled though it is), the nationalistic undertone in his talk, and the odds against his winning even a primary, which raises the spectre of splitting votes away from another putative small-government individual-liberty candidate.

It’s true, however, that his Austrian views, and particularly his classical libertarian view on central banking and sound money make him a very interesting candidate to watch. He was on CNN yesterday, talking to Wolf Blitzer, who (some would say appropriately) got to stand in for the faux-news show hosted by starving-and-striking Jon Stewart. It’s not often you hear someone trying to explain sound money versus inflationary currency on CNN.

To lighten the mood before departing to meet his destiny at the ANC conference in Polokwane, South African president Thabo Mbeki signed an absurd law you’d expect to find in a Monty Python farce.

The new Sexual Offences Act says that teenagers under the age of 16 caught kissing, petting, touching or even hugging each other can be criminally charged. It bans any sexual behaviour, from touching on down, among teenagers, even if it is consensual. The law doesn’t specify whether being in possession of teenage hormones will constitute a crime, or whether you’ll have to prove they were for personal use only. Either way, if you’re not 16 and you’re horny, be careful you don’t earn yourself a spanking.

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