Our ideological dinosaurs stuck as world moves on

Our country is still trying to recover from the mirthless joke of the State Security Agency’s announcement it is investigating allegations that Thuli Madonsela, Julius Malema, Joseph Mathunjwa and Lindiwe Mazibuko are CIA spies.

It is a joke because only an amateurish spy outfit can make such a bizarre public announcement. Professional intelligence organisations would not announce such things.

In truth, though, the point the SSA was trying to make had little to do with Madonsela, Malema or Mathunjwa being spies; it was just to soil their names.

Even the dumbest of clowns can figure out why these South Africans are subjected to such spurious accusations – because they are regarded as enemies of the current ANC.

Spy labelling was once the best tactic of destroying the image of political foes in the ANC in exile.

Sometimes allegations would emanate from sheer boyish disputes over a girlfriend, and comrades would be murdered.

We must remember that the people who used to work for the ANC intelligence in exile are the very same comrades who are today making unfounded accusations against Madonsela and others.

Yes, there were spies under apartheid – but not everywhere in the ANC.

Now that apartheid is over, the comrades at the amateurish SSA seem to have manufactured another loathsome bogeyman: the American CIA.

There is continuity from the comrades’ old orientation to their current belief that South Africans are very anxious about the supposedly pervasive activities of the CIA.

In exile the ideological sponsor of the ANC was the Soviet Union, and thus most ANC intelligence operatives were trained by the KGB.

During the Cold War, the KGB was at war with the CIA, and the CIA worked in cahoots with apartheid’s Bureau of State Security (Boss).

The comrades who work for the SSA today are still haunted by old spy ghosts. They see the shadow of the CIA everywhere – in the EFF, Public Protector or anyone who says anything against Nkandla.

The mistake of the comrades is to believe we ordinary South Africans are equally haunted by their ghosts.

The reality is most of us pay little attention to bogeymen manufactured by spooks.

Even under apartheid, the overwhelming majority of black South Africans refused to be blackmailed by spy agencies – not by the KGB, not the CIA, not Boss.

Thus, when our amateurish SSA manufactures laughable accusations against Madonsela, Malema or Mathunjwa, South Africans wonder what kind of latest irrationality has seized the minds of the comrades.

More importantly, what our paranoid comrades don’t understand is that, while most South Africans wouldn’t collaborate with the CIA, they are not necessarily anti-West. South Africans are intellectually and culturally more sophisticated than the ideological dinosaurs that are busy manufacturing conspiracy theories at the SSA.

The overwhelming majority of our people know that communism, as practised in the Soviet Union, was a barren theory that bankrupted the entire Russian state, and made paupers of millions of people.

In 1991, Boris Yeltsin himself acknowledged this: “Our country has not been lucky. Indeed, it was decided to carry out this Marxist experiment on us ... In the end we proved there is no place for this idea.”

Aware of Yeltsin’s tormented soul, most South Africans have no time for the ignorant folk from the dark world who continue to cling to the discredited idea that “the East was good, the West is bad”.

Modern thought has long debunked the simplistic conception of social reality as a binary affair. The social universe does not evolve along “either-or” lines.

Rational human beings make practical choices on the basis of what works, from a wealth of options.

All ideologues – liberal or leftist – who freeze their consciousness around rigid ideological poles are, in the end, bound to be run over by the inexorable wheels of mankind’s ideational creativity.

Only those with the agility to adapt in an ever-changing world make progress.

This is precisely what the Meiji of Japan came to realise in the second half of the 17th century.

The Meiji fused Western science with Japanese spirit to produce the modernity that has catapulted Japanese society from a mere backwater into today’s developed economy.

Since 1978 the Chinese have also been at it. They swallowed their ideological pride, and knelt before the West for lessons – unhindered by the spectre of the CIA.

Deng Xiaoping, the intellectual mainspring behind the economic progress experienced by China in recent times, told his ideology-obsessed communist party practice must be the sole criterion for assessing truth.

Today China is the second largest economy in the world.

Here in South Africa, our task is more daunting: to cleanse the minds of our ideologically damaged comrades at the amateurish SSA so they can appreciate the new world we live in. What a task!

Prince Mashele is executive director of the Centre for Politics and Research