“To me, manners should be natural. The object is to put everybody at their ease, whatever their age or rank.” – Ian Moncreiffe of that Ilk, Preface to Debretts’ Etiquette and Modern Manners
Life is hard for privileged persons of all genders from southern Sweden or other assorted victims or members of one pigmentocracy. Despite my grammar program on the PC telling me that such a word does not exist, it does as a certain Tanya Farber lectured yours truly in the Sunday Times.
If honest discussions about such definitions are missing and deliberately kept absent from public, you are either ‘racist’ in your behaviour or, another serious crime for the progressive crowd, ‘patronizing.’
If you scream and shout obscene and crass words at a person of another ethnic group which happened to be previously disadvantaged (and I am not speaking about people who had in a real war lost nearly everything, had been victims of ethnic cleansing and had to build up their countries from scratch), you are racist. If you behave well and polite you are ‘patronizing’. No escape is possible.
Definitions first, as always:
Racism: “A general dislike or contempt or profound negative attitude towards a group or members of a group of human beings a such (without any objective reason or objective experience) defined by racial, ethnic, religious or social properties and/or a profound negative, contemptuous or unfriendly attitude or behaviour to a member or members of such a group just because he or she or they are a member of such a group without any apparent objective reason due to actual behaviour of such persons.”
Patronizing: “treat someone in a way that suggests they are inferior”. (Compact Oxford English Dictionary)
Manners: “Showing considerations to others.” (Debretts’ Etiquettes and Modern Manners)
Therefore, that accusation can only arise from someone who is ideologically blind and in addition does not have the slightest idea of what good manners and politeness are.
For every clear-thinking person without blinkers and a plank before his eyes, the difference is evident. But if we apply the progressive crowd’s logic on social behaviour in South Africa we may conclude as follows:
- saying ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ to one from another ethnic group: patronizing
- giving a tip in a restaurant: patronizing
- giving a tip to a car park warden assisting you: patronizing
- telling one that he works well: patronizing
- giving one a salary raise: patronizing and of course intensifying racist exploitation
- telling him or her that they are well dressed: patronizing
- smiling: patronizing
- offering a lift: patronizing
- recognizing them as valuable human beings: patronizing
- appreciating their culture: patronizing
- speaking with them at all: patronizing
- shaking their hands: patronizing, patronizing, patronizing.
The esteemed reader is invited to find more examples. The most absurd and far-fetched example will be honoured with a good bottle of wine. T&Cs apply.
As one’s behaviour is always ‘racist’ or ‘patronizing’ (which, of course, is only the first step towards racist behaviour), my legal advice is to avoid any contact with people of other ethnic groups than your own, but that would surely also qualified as ‘racist’.
It is a mad world.
Social segregation has been restored. H.F. Verwoerd has come back through the back door as a result of progressive thinking. Wonderful, great, inspiring, encouraging, motivating, full of sense, constructive, awesome, delirious nation-building. Do those nitwits really consider the consequences of their actions and ideas?
That cerebrally challenged and intellectually below-average equipped people like journalists or gutter politicians argue on this level is not surprising.
But with higher-educated people working in responsible positions, for example, as a judge in a Magistrate’s Court, it should be different.
And I am sure it is different and that on this level certain ways of arguing are absent, and rationality prevails. In a corrupt ‘kangaroo’ court of a 3rd class banana republic, yes, but not here in glorious South Africa. Never, never, ever. It cannot happen here.
