We no longer live in a Cold War world where ideological lines are clearly drawn — where one could point and say “This is left” or “That is right” and be sure the values followed accordingly.
The binaries that once governed our thinking — democracy vs dictatorship, socialism vs capitalism, West vs East — have collapsed under the weight of global interconnectedness and the constant collision of values in our digital and political spaces.
In this world, everything is entangled. What we once understood as fixed moral compasses — human rights, nonracialism, nonsexism, anti-authoritarianism — are now tested, twisted and sometimes broken in the most extreme contradictions. We are left bewildered, trying to anchor ourselves while the coordinates that once defined our ethical landscape now spin unpredictably.
A profound example of this ethical turbulence is the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Here, the universal values of human rights, dignity and non-discrimination are pitted against a militarised state, Israel, backed by a coalition of global powers whose rhetoric and actions expose a deeply entrenched hierarchy of whose humanity is worth defending. As the Palestinian people are massacred, displaced and dehumanised, the world watches, split, distracted and divided by propaganda and geopolitical interest.
South Africa, rightly, has stepped forward on the international stage to call out Israel’s actions at the International Court of Justice. It is a moment of moral clarity, a necessary act rooted in our historical struggle against apartheid.
But just beneath this act of international solidarity lies a disturbing domestic contradiction that tears at the very fabric of our nation’s ethical foundation.
While South Africa condemns the genocide in Palestine, it has orchestrated its own mass killing in the Buffelsfontein mine at Stilfontein of at least 87 poor, working-class men — many of them migrants — starved to death, in what amounts to state custody, in the name of “cleaning up crime” and enforcing immigration laws.
These actions, couched in xenophobic tropes of illegality and criminality, carry the stench of the same logic used by fascist regimes to justify genocide. And yet they are perpetrated by a state that claims to stand for justice, equality and human rights.
Values fall apart
This contradiction forces us into a painful confrontation with ourselves. The values we champion in one context fall apart when we fail to apply them with the same vigour at home. The result is cognitive dissonance — the same dissonance that feeds the binary moralism we claim to reject in others. We oppose the Israeli state’s dehumanisation of Palestinians, yet fall silent or confused when our state dehumanises the poor, the black migrant, the working class.
We are living in a time during which political categories such as “left” and “right” no longer help us understand the world. In South Africa, supposedly progressive movements have shown themselves capable of authoritarian brutality. Around the globe, ideologies shift and merge unpredictably, challenging the idea that political morality can be boxed into predictable camps.
In a hyper-connected world shaped by artificial intelligence, algorithmic thinking and virtual reality, we are more entangled than ever before. Yet, just like any ship at sea or spacecraft in orbit, we still need an anchor — a North Star — to navigate by. This does not mean returning to rigid binaries. Instead, it demands a constant reassessment of where we are, where we’re going, and whether we have drifted off course.
Our challenge is not just to move left or right, forward or back, but to constantly recalibrate our journey according to values we hold dear. These values, if they are to be real, must be applied universally and without exception. That means having the moral clarity to both support the South African state when it challenges genocidal violence abroad and to fiercely condemn it when it perpetrates the same violence at home.
This is not easy. It requires a deep reckoning with the illusions we hold about ourselves and the movements we align with. But without this reckoning, we risk becoming the very thing we fight against. We risk allowing the ontology of our liberation struggle, the thing that gave it life and meaning, to be hijacked, perverted and turned into a tool of oppression.
If we are to build a future rooted in justice, we must abandon the comforting simplicity of binary thinking. We must embrace the uncomfortable truth that sometimes, the enemy is not only out there but also within our ranks. Only then can we truly move, not just forward, but toward something better.
Silence is betrayal
We cannot do this in silence. Values without action are meaningless. It is incumbent on all of us — those who are ideological prisoners, those economically dependent on the state and the status quo, those who keep the system running, who oil the mechanics of the state, and those whose role is to hold the state accountable — to confront their complicity in perpetuating the very injustices we claim to oppose.
Silence, in the face of this duplicity, is not neutrality. It is betrayal.
South Africa, as it stands, has no ethical anchor. The institutions that should be the moral compass of our democracy — the media, the judiciary, the civil society elite, the political opposition — are so deeply ensconced in their own economic privilege that they no longer understand the meaning or extent of poverty. Living in secure, insular bubbles, they are shielded from the realities of hunger, violence and systemic neglect, realities borne by the same people they claim to represent.
This is the true danger: not just that we lose our way, but that we stop noticing we are lost. If our national psyche becomes comfortable with double standards, if we denounce genocide abroad while justifying or ignoring it at home, then the foundations of our liberation struggle have been perverted. And in that perversion lies the seed of fascism, disguised as freedom.
To reclaim our future, we must first confront the illusions that cloud our present. And that requires a fierce, unflinching commitment to truth — even when it indicts the very movements, parties or institutions we once believed in.
Because only then can we truly begin the journey forward, not in a straight line, but in constant motion, anchored in purpose, guided by principle. DM