Call for death penalty is dangerous
THE letter “Riots the result of perfect storm of joblessness, lawlessness”, contains nothing new other than the usual lies, distortions, generalisations, contradictions, oversimplifications and desperate insults to instil fear into a fearful nation.
It seems the writer and his cohorts will not rest until this country goes up in flames or when they can take it over.
One of his many letters to this paper, on June 17, exposes his mischievous and contradictory distortion of events.
How can one attack racial politics and, at the same time, call for something as racist as the death penalty?
What is even more disturbing in his recent letter is one word – the pronoun “we” – when he says: “One day when ‘we’ reintroduce the death penalty”.Who are these “we”?
Aren’t gangsters, drug lords, terrorists, taxi folks, yes even politicians, doing the same: getting rid of those in their way?
When Edmund Burke coined his famous warning, “evil prevails when good men do nothing”, it must have been a stern warning for sane people to be aware of the threats that will eventually engulf us all.
When the wise writer of the Proverbs book in verse 14:12, and repeated in 16:25, warned “there is a way which seems straight before a man, but its end is the ways of death”, did he have these folks in mind?
The unionist and apartheid regimes hanged people by the dozens, altogether 4110 since 1910. Unaccounted numbers were even beheaded in the colonial era. More than 90% of these were Black people. Seven could be hanged in one go in Pretoria.
In 1989, only Iran and possibly China (which does not reveal statistics) executed more people than this country.
As had been seen with the looting and lawlessness that shocked us all, there is always a forerunner to such devastation.
When Christ started his ministry on Earth, evil folks conspired with all sorts of trumped-up charges against him, eventually killing him.
When the Nazis started their mayhem in the ’30s, few people had foreseen what was awaiting the world: the decimation of close to 100million lives.
When ordinary evil-minded folks started their cruel hate-filled campaign against minorities in Rwanda, in the same way the lovers of death penalty are doing now, who would have foreseen that almost a million unfortunate humans would lose their lives?
Politicians who openly flash their evil intentions of how the lowly, the “unter-mensch”, the “human weeds”, as the Nazis called those they sought to exterminate, should be dealt with, are playing with fire.
To spit venom like this in our volatile society amid a devastating pandemic that has claimed more than 60000 lives, is extremely reckless and dangerous.