Goldstone V2

GOLDSTONE : A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS Ayal Rosenberg Friday, October 09, 2009

“I see a spectacle so rich in meaning and so wonderfully paradoxical to boot, that it would be enough to make all the gods of Olympus rock with immortal laughter – Caesar Borgia as Pope.” Nietzsche (The Twilight of Idols – The Anti Christ – chapter 61)

INTRODUCTION Richard Goldstone published the findings of his UN Human Rights Commission investigation into the belligerency between the parties during hostilities in the recent Gaza-Israel war (December 2008 and January 2009) to a media fan-fare – sensationalism has always been one of his characteristic calling cards. Time after time, Goldstone was introduced as an eminent South African jurist, as a man who fought against apartheid, as a paragon of international law and principle, a man of “high credibility” and “high integrity”1. Event the South African Zionist Federation joined in the Pied Piper procession singing the same tune. When, within the very cathedral of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, , Anne Bayefsky accused Goldstone of humbuggery, he flanked by Navi Pillay, the head of the Human Rights Commission, replied that he was used to abuse and that during apartheid whites had abused him for speaking out against apartheid injustices. Navi Pillay, an Indian who grew up in apartheid South Africa, a lawyer who had practices in South Africa during its darkest days, sat through this and kept a straight face mimicking Goldstone’s feigned indignation. 1

According to Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1254861899900&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

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In 1980, when Goldstone was appointed an apartheid judge, I was about to enter the Wits law school, where Goldstone himself had learned law. I was taught law by the likes Professor Dugard, Justice Edwin Cameron, Professor Van der Vyfer and Professor David Dyzenhaus to name a few. I had been taught exactly what apartheid was and who apartheid judges were. The specter of Richard Goldstone preening to the world media as a man of principle, as man demanding accountability, as a bulwark against apartheid is slap in the face to every victim of apartheid, living or dead. Goldstone claims, over and over (the scale and frequency of self adulation in itself should set off alarm bells) that his report is all about accountability for crimes against humanity and the integrity of international humanitarian law. This is a subterfuge coming from a subtle and fraudulent apartheid judge. As far as Goldstone is concerned the report, as everything else in his life, is about self: self-conceit; self-aggrandizement; self-praise; self-righteousness; selfworth; self-adulation and, most importantly, self-promotion. I would not have written this article if my sole purpose was to expose Goldstone. A man of his ilk is not worth my time of day. On the other hand, without accountability from the perpetrators of human right abuses there will never be respect for human rights. The UN Human Rights Council is the appropriate institution to demand such accountability. But if apartheid taught me anything – and I lived through it when Goldstone lived off it - it was that respected institutions can be infiltrated by ideologues. Justice is then defined and applied from the very pulpit of such institutions by the unscrupulous, the ambitious, the racist and even the psychopathic. Under apartheid the rule of law was hijacked by brutality, the courts dispensed 2 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

discrimination in the name of justice and the judge’s who applied this law, who, especially in the Appellate Division, were the spear tip in the heart of apartheid’s victims, masqueraded as paragons of virtue. When viewed from this perspective it became clear to me that it was not so much the culpability of either the Palestinians or the Israelis which was worrying but rather the obscenity of man like Richard Goldstone presiding over enquiries into crimes against humanity and at the same time demanding accountability. By shifting the focus I do not want to exonerate either the Israelis or the Palestinians for possible crimes against humanity. Indeed, such culpability should be investigated and vigorously prosecuted if there is evidence of such crimes, not only in the Israeli Palestinian conflict but in all conflicts. Human right violations should not be subject to super-power vetoes or Human Right Council majorities or political agendas. Most importantly, the investigators of such violations should at the very least be moral men and women and not moralists. Under no circumstances should an investigation into possible human rights abuses be conducted by a man who is himself guilty of the very crimes he is investigating. If a man like Goldstone can head a Human Rights Commission, if he can become a prosecutor of war crimes at the behest of the International Criminal Court, then human rights becomes a weapon in the hands of its worst abusers. I am making a few fundamental assumptions. Apartheid was a crime against humanity; like Nazism and Stalinism, it polluted language and law lending an aura of respectability to the despicable thereby facilitating willing and unwilling obedience to the criminal. The enablers of 3 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

atrocity are the banal, the ordinary, the uninspiring – drab and dull men. Alain Finkelkraut has observed: “But the true executors of the holocaust, making it possible despite its enormity, were the farthest things from perverts: they were model functionaries. Think of Eichmann or Rudolph Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz: while the Jews new barbarism only by its beastly face and still expected violent rage, these bureaucrats dispatched their victims with a ferocity that was neutral, administrative, dispassionate and routine…It was the banalization of the crime that was inconceivable: the dull, methodical and continuous terror that the Nazis were about to make them endure…In fact the most pitiless acts of inhumanity were committed by the most utterly ordinary men.”2 Lastly, the crime of apartheid would not have been possible without a willing and compliant bureaucracy; the higher up the servant of the apartheid state bureaucracy, the greater his or her contribution to perpetuating the crime. At the pinnacle of the apartheid bureaucracy, giving it the aura of legitimacy it required for its very life breath, were the judges and especially the Appellate Court judge. Time, gullibility, ignorance, sensation, political, religious and personal agenda, and, most tragic of all, abuse of Nelson Mandela’s magnanimous gesture of forgiveness, has allowed for the revision of history, indeed for its reversal. I will therefore spell out the historical evidence and the legal precedent. Given the gullibility, maybe ignorance, of no less than the like of the Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt the facts need repeating.

2

The Imaginary Jew – pg 48-9

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Before proceeding to the evidence and the law I must dispose of a seeming anomaly: the notion that a perceived champion of human rights, a man who was a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, a man who sits on the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, cannot in reality be a systematic abuser of human rights and a perpetrator of crimes against humanity. Major General Iona Timofeevich Nikitchenko presided over Stalin’s show trials during the Terror of 1936-1938. According to estimates made by Robert Conquest3 (which were subsequently vindicated by the opening of the Soviet Union archives), Nikitchenko adjudicated a process in which there were 7 million arrests, 1 million executions, 8 million banishments to camps and 2 million deaths in pensal camps. This same Nikitchenko was one of the drafters of the London Charter that set up the Nuremberg process. Moreover, Nikitchenko was an “eminent”, “respected”, “illustrious” Judge at Nuremberg with “high integrity” and “high respectability”. Tzvetan Todorov has commented: “It is true that at the Nuremberg trials Stalin’s representatives sat in judgment over Hitler’s colleagues: a particular obscene situation, since the judges were guilty of crimes as horrible as those of the accused.”4 NUREMBERG The criminal culpability for crimes against humanity of judges enforcing law within an “organized system of injustice” was established in The Justice Case of the Nuremberg Trials:

3 4

The Great Terror – pg 485 Home and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century – pg 207

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United State of America vs. Alsotter et al5. The movie Judgment At Nuremberg was based on this trial. The Justice Trial was against sixteen defendants, all judges or judicial officers who served at the behest of the Third Reich. Ten of the defendants were convicted for crimes against humanity, and four were acquitted, one died before the verdict was handed down and there was one mistrial. Relevant portions of the indictment read as follows: “Between September 1939 and April 1945 all of the defendants herein unlawfully, willfully and knowingly committed crimes against humanity as defined by Control Council Law 10, in that they were principals in, accessories to, ordered, abetted, took a consenting part in, and were connected with plans and enterprises involving the commission of atrocities and offenses, including but not limited to murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, illegal imprisonment, torture, persecution on political, racial and religious grounds, ill treatment of and other inhumane acts against German civilians and nationals of occupied countries.”

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3 TWC 1 (1948), 6 LRTWC 1 (1948), 14 Ann Dig. 278 (1948)). The entire court protocol and decision is available online at http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/03/NMT03-T0001.htm to http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/03/NMT03-T1236.htm

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“The German criminal laws through a series of additions, expansions, and perversions by the defendants became a powerful weapon for the subjugation of the German people and for the extermination of certain nationls of the occupied territories.” In his opening statement to the Court, the Prosecutor, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, said: “This case is unusual in that the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the name of the law. These men together with their deceased or fugitive colleagues were the embodiment of what passed for justice in the Third Reich.” “The defendants and their colleagues distorted, perverted and finally accomplished the overthrow of justice and law in Germany…The ‘trials’ they conducted became horrible farces, with vestigial remnants of legal procedure which only served to mock the hapless victims.” Most of the defendants raised the defense that they were only applying the law which at the time was not only legal but actually the binding law of the land. The Court dismissed this defense and held that for culpability all that was required was that each defendant “…knew or should have known that in matters of international concern he was guilty of participation in a nationally organized system of injustice and persecution shocking to the moral sense of mankind. The charge in brief is that of conscious participation in a nationwide government organized system of cruelty and injustice in violation of the laws of war and of humanity, and perpetrated in the name of the law by the authority

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of the ministry of Justice, and through the instrumentality of the courts. The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.” [Emphasis AR] The Nuremberg court distinguished between two types of defendants. There were those who “with fanatical zeal enforced the will of the Party with severity”. The guilt of these was clear and obvious. Then there were the judges who desperately tried to “retain ideals of judicial independence and who administered justice with a measure of impartiality and moderation.” The guilt of this type of judge was painstakingly difficult to determine. Such a judge was the defendant Franz Schlegelberger. Schelgelberger was born on October 1875 in Koenigsberg and appointed a judge of the District Court of Lyck in 1901, nearly 30 years before the advent of Nazism. During this period, not only did he distinguish himself as an eminent jurist but wrote a dozen internationally acclaimed books on jurisprudence. In October 1931 Shlegelberger was appointed Secretary of State in the Reich Ministry of Justice and in January 1941 he was put in charge of the Reich Ministry of Justice as Administrative Secretary of State. In August 1942 Schlegelberger resigned from the Ministry and effectively ceased being a Nazi judge. From the evidence it was clear that Schlegelberger was a reluctant Nazi. He only joined the Nazi Party in 1938 because Hitler forced him to do so but he never went to any party meetings and he discouraged his family from becoming Nazis; indeed none of them ever joined the Nazi Party. In his defense Schlegelberger claimed that he “could never have either favoured or permitted principles of violent thinking” and that, on the contrary “all of his activities were aimed at preventing or at least modifying the course set by Hitler’s dictatorship.” (This is the 8 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

exact claim that Goldstone would make when surveying his own sorry legacy.) The Court found that Schelgelberger’s factual assertions about himself were true including the claim that he resigned of his own accord because he could no longer support a system that was manifestly unjust. The Court described one of Schlegelberger’s defenses in this way: “Schlegelberger presents an interesting defense, which is also claimed in some measure by most of the defendants. He asserts that the administration of justice was under persistent assault by Himmler and other advocates of the police state. This is true. He contends that if the functions of the administration of justice were usurped by the lawless forces under Hitler and Himmler, the last state of the nation would be worse than the first. He feared that if he were to resign, a worse man would take his place. As events proved, there is much truth in this also. There seemed nothing to contradict Schlegelberger’s that he was fundamentally a decent, honest man who, through no choice of his own, found himself serving an unjust system. The Schlgelberger case was an extremely difficult one and the Court agonized in its deliberations concerning his culpability in law for crimes against humanity. In the end, the Court held: “The prostitution of the judicial system for the accomplishment of criminal ends involves an element of evil to the State which is not found in frank atrocities which do not sully judicial robes”

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“Schlegelberger resigned. The cruelties of the system which he helped to develop was too much for him, but he resigned too late. The damage was done. If the judiciary could slay their thousands, why couldn’t the police slay their tens of thousands? The consequences which Schlegelberger feared were realized. The police, aided by Thierack, prevailed. Schlegelberger had failed. His hesitant injustices no longer satisfied the demands of the hour. He retired under fire” “We are under no misapprehension. Schlegelberger is a tragic character. He loved the life of the intellect, the work of the scholar. We believe he loathed the evil he did, but he sold that intellect and that scholarship to Hitler for a mass of political pottage and for the vain hope of personal security. He is guilty under counts two and three of the indictment.” The legal principles arising from the Nuremberg Justice Case were codified in the Rome Statute which is the founding document of the International Criminal Court. The culpability of a willing judge within an inherently unjust system is covered by the Statute’s declaration that “individual criminal liability will be incurred in crimes against humanity and war crimes by a person…who knowingly aids, abets and otherwise assists, directly and substantially in commission of such a crime, including the means for its commission.”

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APARTHEID In his speech from the dock in 1962, Nelson Mandela said6: “I would say that the whole life of any thinking African in this country is driven continuously to conflict between his conscience on the one hand and the law on the other…The law as it is applied, the law as it has been developed over a long period of history, and especially the law as it is written by the Nationalist Government is a law which in our view is immoral, unjust and intolerable. Our consciences dictate that we must protest against it, that we must oppose it and that we must attempt to alter it.” Apartheid as practiced in South Africa between 1960 to 1994 was a “nationally organized system of injustice” as defined in the Nuremberg Justice Case. In fact, apartheid was definitively classified as a “crime against humanity” in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid7 which was enforced on 18 July 1976. Article 1 of the Convention declares that “apartheid is a crime against humanity and that inhuman acts resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies of racial segregation and discrimination…are crimes violating the principles of international law.” In language similar to the Rome Statute Article 3 of the Convention imputes criminal responsibility “irrespective of the motive involved, to individuals….and representatives of the State whenever they….directly

6

Most of the quotes come from the TRC Report on Legal Establishment which is part of the TRC Final Report Volume 4 Chapter 4 (pg 93-108)which available on line at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/Volume%204.pdf TRC Justice Hearing Volume 4 Chapter 4 (pg 93108) 7 UN General Assembly Resolution 3068(XXVIII) of 30 November 1973

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abet, encourage or cooperate in the commission of the crime of apartheid.” This very same wording was used to convict the Nazi judges at Nuremberg. What is the criminal liability for crimes against humanity of judges who willingly served under the apartheid regime? Nelson Mandela was clear about it: “the law as it is applied” (and it was applied by the apartheid judges) was “immoral, unjust and intolerable.” Given the Nuremberg Justice Trial precedent and the clear and unambiguous designation of apartheid as a crime against humanity, the culpability of apartheid judges in international law is obvious. The culpability of Judges appointed after July 1976, when apartheid was designated a crime against humanity, and all prospective apartheid judges had been put on notice, is even more undeniable. All apartheid era judges voluntarily chose to become judges. None of these judges were forced to assume their positions. Every one of them took an oath to apply the laws of the land. This was not the case with a Schlegelberger, for example, who was appointed judge long before the Nazi party had been established. Professor David Dyzenhaus in his oral submission to the TRC intimated that the apartheid era judges are more culpable than the Nazi judges. The apartheid judge had more of an opportunity to protest than their Nazi counterparts. A Nazi judge who would have spoken out might have been killed or sent to a concentration camp. No such fate awaited a courageous apartheid Judge. Unlike the convicted Schelgelberger no apartheid judge ever resigned for reasons of conscience. After the demise of apartheid the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up. During October 27th to 29th 1997 the TRC held its Legal Enquiry which also investigated how the apartheid judiciary buttressed, “aided” and “abetted” the crime of apartheid. The TRC 12 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

requested that the Judges, especially the apartheid era judges, appear before it in order to account to the nation for their actions during apartheid. While a few judges made a joint written submission no judge appeared before the TRC in person. The written submissions were made by the judges of the new South Africa and not by any judge from the apartheid era. Notably, the foghorn of accountability, Goldstone, did not account. The Chairman of the Commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was appalled by the contemptuous arrogance of the apartheid era Judges, which led him to remark that the judges “have shown that they have not yet changed a mindset that properly belongs to the old dispensation.” Professor Dyzenhaus, drew the logical conclusion from the judge’s behavior: “If those judges really think they have nothing to account for, that the appellate Division has nothing to account for, that the Judges have nothing to account for, then one should be worrying about the kind of judgment they are going to be delivering in the future.” Professor Hinds of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers also appeared before the TRC. To him the criminal culpability of the apartheid era judges was incontrovertible: “Just dealing with the question …as to whether or not there can be any criminal liability flowing from judicial acts. It is clear to me that in theory, just following from the Nuremberg principals, there can certainly be liability as to whether or not they are enforceable, that is the test being whether or not at the time these individuals were carrying out what they knew or ought to have known that what they were doing was 13 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

clearly in violation of basic principles of the norms of law and fundamental principles of human rights. I happen to think the case can be made. Whether or not there is any jurisdiction where they may be tried, I think that is more problematic because I am not sure that they would be able to be tried under domestic jurisdiction for what we would call complicity with the crime of apartheid. But it is clear they carried out principles where they know or ought to have known of the intrinsic race bias within the system. One had to be just blind, deaf or simply an imbecile not to have known this. ... I would argue that they either know or ought to have known and therefore they have culpability with respect to crimes that were committed by the regime, to the extent that the judiciary carried out the laws whose impact affected the victims of apartheid.” After the TRC, Dyzenhaus laboriously documented the legal and moral case against the apartheid era judges in respect of their behavior during apartheid and their subsequent brazen squandering of the opportunity afforded them to reckon with their criminal past. “Even the most liberal judge who took office under apartheid could not avoid implementing its law. He had to accept that even those laws whose content he found abhorrent and whose provenance he regarded as illegitimate had a legitimate claim on his duty to administer the law. He therefore not only made himself complicit in an injustice he recognized as such but gave the injustice an aura of legitimacy.”8 [Emphasis added AR]

8

Judging the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation and the Apartheid Legal Order (Hart 1998) – pg 164

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The TRC found that the apartheid era judges contributed to extending the life and the “legitimacy” of apartheid: “Part of the reason for the longevity of apartheid was the superficial adherence to ‘rule by law’ by the National Party (NP), whose leaders craved the aura of legitimacy that ‘the law’ bestowed on their harsh injustice. Significantly, this state of affairs was not achieved in the early stages of NP rule…It was manifestly abandoned when emergency executive decree blame the chosen medium of government towards the end of formal apartheid – from the mid 1980s – when a climate of ‘state-lawlessness’ prevailed and the pretence of adherence to the rule of law was abandoned by the Botha regime.” It was clear to the TRC that the judiciary, and especially the appellate division, actively and zealously maintained the status quo and did what it could to entrench the injustices of apartheid. The finding on the behavior of the apartheid era judges was severe in the extreme. Their past crimes were exacerbated by their contempt for public accountability. “The Commission finds that appearance before the Commission in such special circumstances would have demonstrated accountability and would not have compromised the independence of the judiciary. History will judge the judiciary harshly. Its response to the hearing has again placed the questions of what accountability and independence mean in a constitutional democracy in the public domain for debate.” APARTHEID, GOLDSTONE AND PW BOTHA 15 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

“Virtue is choked with foul ambition.” Shakespeare - II Henry VI, Act 3 SC 1 “Ambition destroys its possessor.” Talmud, Yoma, 86 In a recent book published in South Africa various South African personalities write a short piece about their mothers. After the short piece there are a dozen or so lines constituting the bio of the personality. Richard Goldstone writes about his mother emphasizing her philanthropic activities and the fact that she made him aware to injustices of apartheid during his formative years as a young man. Then Goldstone pens his own short bio. He mentions that he was elected as head of NUSAS (National Union of South African Students) in 1959, that he was nominated judge of the South African Constitutional Court in 1994 and subsequently became a prosecutor on behalf of the International Criminal Court. The period of Goldstone’s life between 1978 and 1994 is a convenient black hole; nearly thirty years have vanished from the man’s life. Stalin had political rivals air brushed from photographs with him; Goldstone airbrushed the incriminating years of his life. The chronology of Goldstone’s illustrious career in the service of apartheid is irrefutably chronicled. In 1978 Goldstone was appointed as a standing judge to the Transvaal Supreme Court by the Minister Justice Jimmy Kruger. PW Botha was Prime Minister of the Country. In 1980 the temporary appointment was made permanent by Justice Minister Alwyn Schlebush. The formative period of Goldstone’s judicial career and the most extensive period of his life as a judge dovetailed the presidency (at first prime-ministership) of PW Botha. At the time of his appointment Goldstone was one of the youngest judges on the bench and one of the very few apartheid Jewish appointees to take silk. Goldstone career under apartheid was meteoric and in 16 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

only nine years he was appointed to the Appellate Division of the South African Supreme Court, the pinnacle of apartheid injustice. In the year 2000, nearly twenty five years after he assumed office as an apartheid judge, Goldstone, from the safety of distance, in a bombastic and mind numbingly dull memoir laughably and pretentiously entitled For Humanity, justified his decision to become an apartheid judge: “The moral problems of joining the South African judiciary were manifest. Its members were obliged, by oath of their office, to enforce the laws of the land. This was of great concern to me. I decided, however, that I could play a more active role in efforts to ameliorate those laws by accepting the appointment rather than by continuing to pursue a lucrative commercial career.”9 Elsewhere, Goldstone claims that he consulted prominent anti-apartheid activists (he conveniently never mentions any of them by name) and they encouraged him to become an apartheid era judge and fight the battle from within. Leszek Kolakowski, recently deceased, lived through both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian systems. He wrote: “The art of forgetting history is crucial: people must learn that the past can be changed – from truth to truth – overnight.”10 Kolakowski analyzes the mendacity of people who serve a totalitarian system. “The vast corruption of the language” he writes “eventually produced people who were incapable of perceiving their own mendacity.”

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For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator – Richard Goldstone - Yale University 200 pg 5 Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie - Kolakowski

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History, evidence, context, common sense all conspire against Goldstone’s self righteous self justification of his inexcusable decision to serve apartheid. Only people who did not live through apartheid, who are dull to its manifest injustices and who are incapable of comprehending the enormity of the evil that was apartheid could take Goldstone’s self-serving self-praise at face value. In one of the most magnanimous gestures in the history of humanity, the victims of apartheid, led by Mandela, forgave their oppressors. But there is a price to forgiveness. Alain Besancon observed: “Forgetting is the expected consequence of forgiveness.”11 Only the mendacious can abuse forgetfulness arising from forgiveness in order to retouch the past and thereby confuse and morally obfuscate. Goldstone’s version of his own self-righteousness is nothing short of revisionism comparable in significant ways to Holocaust Denial. The Soweto riots in 1976 triggered wide spread unrest in South Africa. The Vorster government managed to suppress the popular uprising using the arsenal of brutality: mass arrests (mainly of children); murder (of women and children); torture; intimidation and censorship. Jimmy Kruger, the Himmler of apartheid, was Vorster’s Minister of Justice. The death of black conscious leader Steve Biko in police custody became the symbolic embodiment of the crime of apartheid during this dark period. Jimmy Kruger’s response to Biko’s death encapsulated in four words the barbarity of the man and the system of “law” he represented: “Dit laat may koud!” he said with chilling cynicism. (It *Biko’s murder+ left me cold.) Later in his career Goldstone would couch such callous inhumanity into well reasoned, seemingly respectable legal form. It

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A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism and the Uniqueness of Shoah – Alain Bescancon (2007) pg 73

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was this same Jimmy Kruger who appointed, Goldstone, then in his 30s, to the bench, initially as an acting judge. PW Botha took over as Prime Minister of South Africa in 1978. This is a period in South African history when all pretence of law and order was abandoned, and, in the words of the TRC “a climate of state lawlessness prevailed.” The barbarism of Vorster and Kruger finally woke the world up to the illegitimacy of apartheid. After Soweto the world designated apartheid as a crime against humanity and promulgated the Convention for the Suppression of Apartheid, putting on notice any prospective persons willing to serve apartheid as judges that they would, by this very act, become accomplices in crimes against humanity. This is precisely the time, when the majority of South Africans were reeling from the ferocity of Vorster’s onslaught, when Goldstone put forward his candidacy to serve as an apartheid judge and was appointed as such. Goldstone’s judicial career dovetailed the PW Botha era of “lawlessness”. I should point out, like Goldstone, PW Botha was one of the few perpetrators of apartheid who refused to appear before the TRC and account. In his written submission on behalf of some of the judges to the TRC, Judge Edwin Cameron wrote that appointees to the bench under apartheid were known supporters of apartheid. This was never refuted and has not been refuted to this day. The notion that the anti-Semitic Jimmy Kruger would appoint a known dissenter, who was also a Jew to the bench, is laughable. The idea beggars belief that PW Botha and his minions would not only confirm the appointment of a known anti-apartheid activist and steward such a person’s meteoric career precisely when the 19 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

raison d’être of his regime was to seek judicial compliancy and complicity in his onslaught on the last vestiges of the rule of law. When Goldstone was permanently appointed to the bench I was 19 years old and about to enter Wits University to study law. At the time, Goldstone’s father worked for my father. Goldstone the father was a frequent guest at our home. I remember clearly the father boasting of his son’s achievements and especially cooing that his son socialized with the likes of President John Vorster, PW Botha, Alwyn Schlebusch and Jimmy Kruger. Contrary to Goldstone’s decades later lie responsible and respectable members of the legal fraternity were aghast when Goldstone actively promoted himself as a candidate to serve apartheid on the judiciary, especially after the world had put people like him on notice that fulfilling such a function would constitute a crime against humanity. Reliable and honorable members of the legal fraternity who knew Goldstone up close at the time attributed his alacrity for the morally inexcusable to his vaulting ambition, which had earned him their opprobrium prior to his appointment as a judge RW Johnson, a fearsome and brave opponent of apartheid, succinctly captured the circumstances surrounding Goldstone’s appointment to the bench and the character of the man and what motivated him: “As an able lawyer, Goldstone attracted criticism within the legal profession on his way up as advocate when he had socially entertained at his home attorney’s who might bring him such cases. Such behavior, as seen as touting for custom, was greatly frowned upon. Throughout his career he had been criticized for his sheer ambition; De Klerk noted how 20 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

‘some of his colleagues criticized him for being over ambitious’ and how it was rumored that he saw himself succeeding Boutrous Boutrous Ghali one day as UN Secretary General leading to his nickname ‘Richard Richard Goldstone’. Under apartheid – unlike most other judges of the Constitutional Court [post apartheid court – AR] – he had been careful to avoid anti-apartheid activism. Indeed, his decision to take silk in 1980 had drawn criticism from liberal circles and from many anti-apartheid lawyers, who had refused promotion to the judiciary where they would have to apply apartheid laws.”12 Under PW Botha South Africa nearly became a Fuehrer State. The process of centralizing power was pursued relentlessly. Botha dismantled the Senate and created in its place the President’s Council, a de facto extension of the prime minister’s office. Then the office of prime minister was abolished and replaced with an unaccountable executive president who became the “personification of the State”. In words of Christi Van der Westhuizen, Botha had removed “the few constitutional obstacles that stood in the way of non-accountable white rule.” 13 The same author quotes Professor Boulle who wrote in 1994 that NP rule had been marked by “successive rampant executive casting aside the rule of law imperatives as they made their powers more intrusive and more discretionary, less responsible and less accountable.” Botha took this to a new level of executive lawlessness. To carry out the Fuehrerization of South Africa Botha required loyal judges to give the unspeakable a veneer of respectability. Goldstone was one of the first hand-picked to assist this Fuehrer wannabe.

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South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid – RW Johnson (2009) pg 153-4 White Power and the Rise and Fall of the National Party – pg 123

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The constitutional reforms implemented by Botha went hand in hand with repressive legislation. In 1982 the Internal Security Act was amended to provide for indefinite detention without trial. People could be held and were held for indeterminate periods while being tortured. Detention orders could not be overturned by the courts and the courts confirmed this. Countless people (women and children and elderly included) were subjected to torture and died in detention. Goldstone was silent throughout. PW Botha’s thrust to move South Africa to complete autocratic totalitarianism proved to be so controversial that his insane policies led to a further breakdown of all semblance of legitimacy and public order resulting in imposition of a state of emergency between 1985 and 1990. During this dark period thousands were killed, detained without trial, maimed and tortured. An especial favourite was the use of sexual torture. The TRC documented cases of “forcing detainees (both male and female) to undress; the deliberate targeting of genitals or breasts during torture; the threat of and, in some instances, actual rape of detainees (male and female); the insertion of objects such as batons or pistols into bodily orifices and placing detainees in cells with common law prisoners known to rape newcomers.”14 Scores were murdered in detention. In a cynical ploy to show South Africans and the world that the detentions were under legal supervision and therefore legitimate and benign, PW Botha appointed Goldstone to oversee the welfare of the detainees. In effect Goldstone was supposed to legitimate and cover up the cruelest, most criminal and brutal excesses of apartheid. Goldstone was in cahoots with PW Botha and true to himself he gave PW Botha the cloak of deceptive legitimacy that allowed PW Botha to detain more, torture more and murder more. Not once did Goldstone ever speak out 14

TRC Report – Volume 2 – paragraph 115

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against any excesses when he was the guardian of the detainees welfare; not once did he ever become a voice, not even a whisper, a murmur for the innocents languishing in the apartheid cells. It is difficult to wear a mask of dissimulation all the time; the truth has a long memory and sometimes, in spite of the dissembler, has a way of peeking out from behind the mask. In 1997, three years after the demise of apartheid, this is how Goldstone described the “good” work he carried out for PW Botha: “When we had *we meaning the apartheid establishment amongst which Goldstone included himself] tens of thousands of people in detention without trial during the three states of emergency from ’85 to ’89, I was asked, in fact by the government, by the then President Botha, to visit the detainees. That surprised everybody. But against it was his way of reassuring the international community that these people in detention were not getting beaten up and were not being ill-treated. And too I think it was a subtle way of telling the police not to beat them up.”15 Goldstone here has condemned himself in his own words. It was clear to all at the time, and subsequently it has been documented both at the TRC and elsewhere, that during the dark days of the State of Emergency detainees were getting “beaten up” – Goldstone’s euphemism for torture; that PW Botha knew about this and encouraged it; that Goldstone was used to hide the horrific truth; that Goldstone never once revealed the truth. The TRC clearly documented how PW Botha not only knew about the torture but actually ordered it creating a

15

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Goldstone/gold-con2.html Thursday 8 October 2009 9:41 pm GMT +2

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covert torture and death squad, the apartheid equivalent of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, who, in Botha’s own words “must be willing to be unpopular and even feared.”16 Schelgelberger had sold his soul to Hitler for “a mass of political pottage”; Goldstone had sold his to PW Botha. Now his career could really take off. Leap-frogging more elderly judges, who were also more qualified jurists, Goldstone was earmarked for the Appellate division – the ultimate payback of the apartheid overlords to their most slavish judicial lackeys. In January 1989 PW Botha suffered a minor stroke, Goldstone was nominated to the Appellate Court and FW De Klerk took over as President of South Africa. APARTHEID, GOLDSTONE AND FW DE KLERK The five year period between 1989 and 1994 were the De Klerk years. Much happened in this tempestuous and volatile period. De Klerk initially thought he could palliate the inevitable. Then Communism collapsed under the weight of its own anomalies. Once De Klerk decided to push the tottering anachronism he and his regime were forced to deal with overwhelming challenges. They had to dismantle the apartheid laws. They had to legitimate the erstwhile illegitimate opposition, the most vociferous of whom would soon be leaders of the country. They had to keep a lid on the violence wracking the country. Foremost in their minds, they had to negotiate their own immunity. Put bluntly they had to save their own skins and, if in the process, justice and truth had to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency and polity then so be it.

16

TRC Report Volume 2 – para 52 pg. 178

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De Klerk was desperate for a clean bill of health and Goldstone would be instrumental in providing it. He had learned from being the obedient servant of PW Botha that if he served his political master well then he could exact any reward of his chosing. Notwithstanding De Klerk’s decision to expedite the demise of the already dying apartheid, the old repressions and excesses were rampant. There were still detentions without trial and torture but, thankfully, there had not been a Biko style death in detention since 1988. Then, only 12 days before Nelson Mandela was scheduled to be released, in January 1990 Clayton Sizwe Sithole was found hanging by a belt and shoelaces from a water pipe in the shower while under police detention (without trial). The seriousness of the death of Sithole cannot be underestimated. Sithole was the partner of Zinzi Mandela and the father of Nelson Mandela’s grandson. It was clear that Sithole had died as a result of an illegal, unjust detention and as a consequence of cruel and sustained torture. Sithole might have hung himself (and – no thanks to Goldstone – we might never know the truth) but there was no denying he was driven to it by torture. At a time so close to Mandela’s release, De Klerk obsessed about securing his own immunity and that of the entire apartheid gang. He desperately needed exoneration of the police and, by extension, of himself. The numerous previous deaths in detention under apartheid, beginning with Biko, had been emblematic and symbolic of apartheid in all its barbarity. There was a wide spread hope that apartheid in its death throes would at last demonstrate the sincerity of its claim to have changed its ways and show moral fiber by exposing the truth and exacting accountability. A 25 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

judicial commission of enquiry to Sithole’s death was called for and De Klerk obliged. The victims of apartheid, those in the vanguard of the struggle day in a day out, the relatives of all those countless who had been murdered and tortured in detention in the past, all pinned high hopes on Goldstone, whom De Klerk appointed to head up the enquiry into Sithole’s death If justice, the evidence and common decency all pointed to the guilt of the apartheid machinery in the death of Sizwe Sithole, this was nothing in comparison to the demands of De Klerk for complete exoneration. Goldstone delivered the goods as De Klerk knew he would. To the shock and consternation of all those involved (by and large the travesty of the matter was drowned in maelstrom of the upheavals wracking the country at the time) Goldstone exonerated the security forces completely and totally. He found that Sithole had hanged himself and that the police had had no part in his death. Goldstone decided that Sithole gad hanged himself with a belt and shoelaces even though the police had earlier testified that his belt and shoelaces had been taken away from him when he was incarcerated. De Klerk wanted to shift the blame away from himself and to the Mandela circle. Goldstone obliged. Accordingly he ignored the evidence and relevance of torture and the glaring incongruencies of the police testimony and intimated that Sithole probably committed suicide because he had implicated Winnie Mandela in criminal conduct. Goldstone’s findings were a judicial imprimatur of the very man who had first appointed Goldstone to the bench, Jimmy Kruger. Goldstone’s judicial finding to Sithole’s torture and death was: “It leaves me cold!” Goldstone’s betrayal of justice and his mocking dismissal of the agony of the victims guaranteed his own personal future. De Klerk was well aware of Goldstone’s over-weaning ambition and 26 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

consequently felt secure in using Goldstone’s ambition to serve precarious political ends. De Klerk has admitted this in no uncertain terms.17 But De Klerk was playing a dangerous game. If Goldstone’s ambition could bastardize all semblance of integrity in order to curry favour with the powers that be, De Klerk did not realize that when he, De Klerk, no longer wielded power, Goldstone would then sell his services to the new man of power and turn on previous benefactor. The last significant act of the apartheid government was the setting up of a standing commission to investigate the causes of violence. The commission, headed by Goldstone appointed by a gullible De Klerk, became known as the Goldstone Commission and was extant between 1992 and 1994. The Commission had to issue reports to the sitting President, De Klerk, and to Mandela. During the first two years of the Goldstone Commission the real power in the country was De Klerk; during the latter two years, power was slowly devolving to Mandela. Both De Klerk and Mandela had vested political interests in the findings of the Goldstone Commission. True to form, Goldstone meticulously tailored and timed his findings to the flavor of whoever was wielding real power in the country. Thus, at first his findings were bent to De Klerk’s requirements and then later, in complete volte face to his previous findings, to Mandela’s requirements. One of the destabilizing forces instigating the violence was rogue elements within the rusting apartheid machinery. This force became known as the “third force”. The other power bloc fomenting violence was the ANC itself and especially its armed wing the MK. De Klerk was

17

The Last Trek: A New Beginning (1998) pg 213

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interested in denying the existence of the third force. Mandela was interested in refuting the involvement of the MK in the violence. Both leaders had compelling political reasons to conceal the truth. Their loyalties were to politics which always demands compromises; Goldstone’s loyalty however had to be to the truth and the evidence. To all observers at the time, to anyone who was watching the news networks, it was obvious and manifest that there was a “third force” and that the MK was knee deep in the violence. For heaven’s sake, I myself saw the ANC shooting IFP marchers in cold blood in the streets of Johannesburg. The subsequent TRC hearings confirmed what was clear to all at the time. Goldstone however played with the facts (and consequently with lives) in order to position himself in a favorable light first with De Klerk and then with Mandela. During the initial period of the Commission, when De Klerk was the power, Goldstone denied that there was a “third force”. Then when it became clear that Nelson Mandela was going to become the new leader, Goldstone all of a sudden changed his tune. RW Johnson described the situation: “Goldstone was adamant, however, that, contrary to the ANC’s repeated allegations, there was no evidence for the existence of a ‘third force’ organizing violence against them. Then, just weeks before the 1994 elections, Goldstone dramatically reversed himself, pointing to a systematic and silent ware waged by the police on a farm called Vlakplaas against the ANC and its allies.”18

18

Johnson pg 154

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Vlakplaas was the horrific killing field of apartheid. Goldstone new about its existence for months but the release of such devastating information would have decimated any credibility De Klerk still had and would surely have resulted in the sacking of Goldstone. So Goldstone sat on this evidence. Then, when it became clear to Goldstone that De Klerk was a spent force, all of a sudden, in a blitz of publicity orchestrated to portray himself as a warrior in the cause of truth, Goldstone released the Vlakplaas bombshell . Johnson writes: “…the timing was perfect for the ANC’s election campaign. It thus came as no surprise when Goldstone was appointed to the Constitutional Court.” If anything endeared Goldstone more to the ruling elite in waiting was his obstinate refusal to say a word about ANC violence in the face of overwhelming evidence. “The most remarkable fact about the Goldstone Commission was that while it was supposed to investigate all armed groups, it simply failed to investigate the MK or any form of violence orchestrated by the ANC. This was Hamlet without the prince, for the MK continued to be active recruiting, training, managing arms caches and carrying out hundreds of attacks, murders and other armed actions. Both the IFP and the security forces laid plentiful evidence before the Commission on these matters but Goldstone concentrated on other groups involved in the violence, an attitude which naturally endeared him to the ANC.” 19 As PW Botha had rewarded Goldstone for covering up the brutality to detainees during the state of emergency by promoting him to the Appellate division, as De Klerk rewarded him for

19

Johnson - 154

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whit-washing the Sizwe Sithole death in detention by appointing him to head the Goldstone Commission, Mandela now rewarded him for twisting and the truth to suit political power by nominating him to the newly formed Constitutional Court. When Nelson Mandela puts the kosher stamp of approval on a pig anything is possible. The road from apartheid era judge, Jimmy Kruger appointee, PW Botha accomplice, to special prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and special investigator on behalf of the Human Rights Council becomes a highway. The erstwhile perpetrator of crimes against humanity can become the prosecutor of crimes against humanity. FOR HUMANITY During the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt made a painful observation. There were prominent and respected post war Germans prospering in the fog of forgetfulness despite the fact that such respect and prominence had been earned under the Hitler regime. “It is one thing to ferret out criminals and murderers from their hiding places, and it is another thing to find them prominent and flourishing in the public realm – to encounter innumerable men in the federal and state administration and, generally, in public office whose careers had bloomed under the Hitler regime.”20 In one of the few books analyzing the role of the judiciary under Hitler, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, Ingo Muller documented how Nazi judges kept their jobs after the war and even flourished. In his submission to the TRC, Dyzenhaus quotes Muller on this topic in

20

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil – Penguin 1977 originally 1963 – pg 17 30 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

respect of the apartheid judges. “The German judiciary, who mostly kept their jobs after the war, despite having watched very high ranking members put on trial at Nuremberg, did exactly what they had done during the Third Reich. Why? Because there was no process of accountability.” George Steiner who has reflected movingly on remembrance and forgiveness has written: “Only those who actually passed through hell, who survived Auschwitz after seeing their parents flogged to death, or gassed before their eyes (like Elie Wisel), or who found their own kin amid the corpses from which they had to extract gold teeth, a daily encounter at Treblinka, can have the right to forgive. We do not have that right.” 21 The victims of apartheid have forgiven their oppressors. This is their right and we must respect it. Not a single person has been nor likely will be prosecuted for the crime of apartheid. And probably that is how it should be. The culpability of Goldstone for crimes against humanity is manifest and well grounded in international humanitarian law. If Goldstone was not the worst among the apartheid judges he certainly was no better than a Schlegelberger. Careful and close study of Goldstone’s judicial record during dark days of apartheid will reveal that Goldstone the apartheid judge might even fall short of Schlegelberger the Nazi judge. Because of an artificial cutoff date in the Rome Statute (2002), Goldstone cannot be indicted before the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He perpetrated his crimes before 2002.

21

Postcript – George Steiner

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Also, it seems that in countries where universal jurisdiction is permitted for crimes against humanity Goldstone could not be indictable again because the cutoff date is also 2002. I might be mistaken here and I am not an authority. On the other hand, it seems that Goldstone could be indicted in countries that have ratified the Convention on Suppression of Apartheid - again I would defer to an expert on this matter. I am however calling for a concerted, sustained, well financed and vigorous international effort to document Goldstone’s culpability for crimes against humanity. This effort should not be motivated by narrow political, religious, ethnic or national concerns but rather as an effort to cleanse the cathedrals of human rights of hypocrisy. Until this is done human rights will forever be an illusion. This is why Goldstone should be singled out and for no other reason. The TRC commented on a particular ugly aspect of apartheid injustice: “The judiciary, which unthinkingly allowed judicial policy to be influenced by executive dictate or white male prejudice; which was intent on maintaining and protecting the status quo; which willingly participated in producing the highest capital punishment rate in the ‘Western’ world by the mid 1980s and an execution rate that impacted overwhelmingly on poor black male accused.” It was not that black murderers were not guilty of murder. They were. It was that white murderers of blacks were hardly ever brought to trial and never executed. Such a system captured the essence of apartheid injustice. The apartheid judges reasoned that the fact the white murderer of a black human being was never indicted in no way derogated from guilt of 32 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

the black murderer of whites and hence justice was served. But selective justice is total injustice. A just system demands that all murderers be brought to trial. Anything else is the opposite of justice or to quote the Nuremberg judgment “institutionalized injustice”. This brings me back to where I started this journey: the UN Human Rights Council Commission of Enquiry headed by Goldstone into the Israeli Palestinian Gaza conflict. The council is dominated by persistent human right abusers. The super powers and majority blocs guarantee that the worst offenders – like the white murderers under apartheid - are never investigated or indicted. Sri Lanka which has majority support can be commended on a war that killed over 20,000 civilians. Israel might be guilty of human rights abuses but when only Israel is investigated and not Sri Lanka for example then it is not justice but apartheid injustice. Goldstone’s posturing that the exclusion from prosecution of criminal acts in other parts of the world committed by others does not derogate from the alleged guilt of Israelis. This is the logic of an apartheid judge – which is precisely what Goldstone was most of his life. And who more apt, more suited, more skilled and experienced in administering apartheid justice than Richard Goldstone – the quintessential apartheid judge. After apartheid, Goldstone should have been grateful for the forgiveness bestowed upon him by the gracious virtue of those he had oppressed. He should have slipped away into silence like the erstwhile Nazi judges that Dyzenhuas mentioned and whose presence discomfited Arendt. But the moment Goldstone sought to capitalize on the beneficence he received and use it to reinvent himself as a proponent of human rights, the moment he sought to pollute the supposed sanctuaries of human rights with his presence, and rewrite history by denying the past and his 33 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

role in it, and repainting himself, the oppressor as the liberator, then anyone who knows the truth is duty bound to speak out. Hence, despite my initial reluctance to write this article, if I did not I would be no different form Goldstone, who chose ignominious silence throughout 25 years of apartheid. Steiner again: “Everything forgets. But not a language. When it has been injected with falsehood, only the dramatic truth can cleanse it.”22 When human rights are compromised then they become a tool of oppression and not a guarantor of liberty. The language of human rights has been infected and it must be cleansed, starting with Goldstone. Goldstone, the apartheid era judge, a scheming, poisoning, ambitious Caesar Borgia, now sits as the Pope of Human Rights. The ghosts of JB Vorster and PW Botha are rocking Olympus with immortal laughter. In this shallow world of pretence it takes a mad, blind Lear to see that the thief has become and judge and the judge a thief: “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yond justice rails upon a simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places, and, handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief.” Lear – Act IV Sc 6

22

The Hollow Miracle – George Steiner

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A PERSONAL NOTE “We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.” -

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements – Eric Hoffer

Dear readers permit me to conclude on a purely selfish and personal note. As part of his inexcusable mission to rewrite his past, Goldstone trumpeted to all and sundry “collective white guilt”. This was a calculated and shrewd maneuver of an erst-while apartheid apparatchik who, in spite of himself, could not slough off the vestiges of racism still clinging to his judicial robes. The new, greedy black elite in post-apartheid South Africa sought to grab for itself as much wealth as it could. The wealth was in the hands of the whites. The whites had to be shamed into buying off moral reprieve by paying these new, ravenous elite, who wielded the political power and therefore could of provide absolution for a tithe. The rich whites were not going to give anything away easily and so they had to be shamed into coughing up by other ‘moral’ whites. The white who castigated his own the loudest became the most moral and was allowed to participate in the bountiful spoils. Goldstone charged into this travesty. He got himself appointed as trustee of the Development and Reconciliation Fund, this is the very same man who refused to appear before the TRC, the forum for true and genuine reconciliation. He signed a declaration acknowledging the “white community’s responsibility for apartheid” (not his own of course) and “our debt to fellow South Africans” and accepting that it was whites (as a race and not him in particular) “failure to accept responsibility for apartheid thereby inhibiting reconciliation and transformation.” How easy it is for an apartheid judge to persist with racism

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Johnson rightly points out that these statements and this posturing of Goldstone “betrayed a considerable state of intellectual confusion” and “endorsed the latest variant of collective guilt as if unaware that this doctrine had been repudiated by the church and had been the scourge of Jews down the ages.”23 In Hope and Memory, Todorov wrote: “It is now easier to grasp why we are reluctant to grant moral credit to someone who systematically excoriates his own group and favours the other, because we know instinctively that the role of moral conscience is actually quiet comforting to its holder. He or she becomes the virtuous one, as the keeper of values, and a guide to the straight and narrow. When said by a public figure, ‘We are all guilty’ actually means ‘I’m less guilty than you are, because I am the one saying so.’ Such a person thus cannot be accused of being egocentric or xenophobic – but he or she acquires a rewarding role in the community as the guardian of its values.”24 Goldstone persisted in his “collective guilt” band-standing. As Chancellor of Wits University, he told a graduation ceremony that white graduates must not expect the top jobs anymore because “the ‘sins of the fathers’ would be counted against them.”25 Johnson writes that “when it was pointed out that not only was he [Goldstone] encouraging young, skilled whites to emigrate but he was endorsing the doctrine of collective guilt, he had hurriedly denied that he accepted the doctrine. Yet here again he was clearly accepting it.”

23

Johnson – pg 302 Hope and Memory – Todorov (pg 141) 25 Johnson 302 24

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And this is precisely where things get personal. Goldstone was pontificating to young children, such as my children living in South Africa that they must pay for the ‘sins of the fathers’. Goldstone is pre-eminent amongst those sinners. My child, and for that matter, his own grandchildren, had nothing to do with apartheid. Goldstone had been the faithful and longstanding hand maiden of apartheid. Goldstone had been on the payroll of apartheid. He had applied apartheid laws day in and day out for two decades. He had slavishly served the most brutal of apartheid leaders and each one of them, PW Botha and De Klerk, had rewarded him for his loyalty. Yet my children, who are blameless, must pay for his crimes! What conceit, what humbuggery! To add insult to injury, at the very moment Goldstone was telling these young white graduates that in the new South Africa, no matter their skill, their effort, their ability, their achievement, they as a race “must not expect top jobs” he himself was seeking to secure for himself a top job at the UN. Todorov again: “What are the features of a moralizer? The term is meant to describe public persons who pride themselves on having the ability to discern good and evil. Being a moralizer does not mean you are moral. A moral person subjects his or her own life to the criteria of good and evil, which transcend personal pleasures and satisfactions. A moralizer, on the

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other hand, tries to subject the lives of others to these same criteria, and profits by doing so – by putting himself on the right side of the fence.”26 The personal payoff in Goldstone’s new found racism was a sure ticket to the UN - a moralizer’s paradise. Goldstone has left South Africa, the scene of his crime. Good riddance – we do not need him and my children who live here certainly do not need to hear the wind bag moralizing of this most quintessential apartheid judge. If you really think about it, after all, Goldstone had to leave. The new South Africa with a black majority is unbearable for a white man who sucked and sucked at the ample but putrid tit of apartheid for 25 years of his life.

26

Todorov – pg 189

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