ATTACKING THE AUTHOR AND NOT THE ARGUMENT
By: Gareth van Onselen
The ruling party used last Friday’s edition of ANC Today to respond to two recent articles by Helen Zille and, in turn, to launch a scathing attack on the DA leader.
The first article it refers to was a statement made by Zille on 4 February titled “Mbeki can salvage his legacy by repudiating the National Democratic Revolution”. It was made just prior to the President’s State of the Nation Address and, in it, she set out what she believed President Mbeki should say in his upcoming speech. The second is an edition of SA Today, published on 15 February and titled “A Public Challenge to Jacob Zuma: Pledge your allegiance to the Constitution”. In it, Zille challenged ANC President Jacob Zuma to commit to the South African Constitution as South Africa’s primary set of laws and ideals. (Zuma has, on several occasions, said the ANC is more important than the Constitution).
I would recommend reading all three pieces before proceeding further.
Quite clearly those two articles hit a chord within the ruling party; for the ANC’s dogmatic response - one driven more by emotion than rational consideration - is both mendacious and, in parts, illogical. It does not directly address or respond to what Helen Zille said, setting up straw men and relying on misdirection instead. It is riddled with prejudice and, I believe, deserving of a response.
It is a fair amount of work to disprove a logical fallacy, and a full and comprehensive breakdown of all the errors in this particular piece would run to some length. So, let me rather address what I consider to be some of the more significant mistakes.
The anonymous response titled “Our revolution shall not be halted” opens with a series of paragraphs which define the scope of the attack and, at the same time, the outer limits of its merit.
Zille’s original statement, on Mbeki’s State of the Nation Address, elaborated on this central point: “…the President must concede that there is nothing democratic about the ANC’s core doctrine, the so-called ‘national democratic revolution’ (NDR) which commits the party to controlling all levers of power…. Unless he takes his last chance to reverse it, his legacy will be defined by the way in which he helped the party to extend its tentacles into virtually every institution of state, in order to serve the ends of his shrinking ruling clique.”
As evidence of the NDR’s destructive consequences, the DA leader provided six examples: the ANC’s proposed media tribunal, its attack on Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, the interference with the NPA, the Speaker's appointment as ANC Chairperson and head of the ANC committee dealing with party strategy in Parliament, the ANC’s refusal to re-investigate the arms deal and the current electricity crisis.
Significantly, the statement is dispassionate and, while the argument is forceful, it plays the ball, not the man.
In contrast, the ANC’s response does exactly the opposite - attacking Zille’s motives and speaking around the facts. Among other things, it describes her as part of “an amalgam of those who have exercised power and enjoyed privilege in one form or another - political, economic, social, military - based on the exclusion, exploitation and oppression of the vast majority”. Indeed, much the first third of the ANC’s response is dedicated to an assault on her character.
This is called an ad hominem attack, which Wikipedia describes as “rep
| Posted on 25/2/2008
 |  | |