Malema’s Contradictory Assertions

For its hilarity, hyperbole and hypocrisy, the front-page report of Julius Malema’s rant at the weekend claiming Trump poses a danger to global stability would have been more appropriate if featured on page 2 in The Idler’s Column (The Mercury, August 4).

Since his debut on the world stage when Trump screened the little demagogue exhorting the slaughter of whites, Malema’s opinion of himself has challenged the size of his red beret. Fancying himself as a mentor on the world stage, his advocacy that ties with imperialist powers must be cut is laughable given his solid siding with the imperialism of Marxism-Leninism. Simultaneously, it is also contradictory to assert that the EFF is positioned “as an enemy of global imperialism.”

In a word salad of “isms” between imperialism, capitalism and socialism, Malema seems confused about when capitalism is the enemy. It appears to bother him that Trump might destroy capitalism “inadvertently” because his approach to it is “illiterate.” Grand stuff, indeed, from Limpopo province’s sage in adjudicating America’s highly successful capitalist president.

Just how Malema’s goal of socialism is supposed to bestow its enlightenment on the world is also fuzzy. He says if Trump destroys capitalism, that “will kill any and all possibilities of socialist economic order.” Of course, it is common knowledge, as Joe Slovo once conceded, that for the top order of socialists to live in grand style, it is necessary to exploit the pillars of capitalism. Cuba’s billionaire socialist Fidel Castro exemplified that magnificently.

The ultimate contradiction of Malema’s entire muddled broadside against capitalism is that he is a major beneficiary of it and, as such, a hypocrite of note.