A "liberal racist"

A liberal is a person who upholds and seeks to protect two basic principles: individual freedom and equality. However liberal tradition mostly attaches property rights to give meaning to these principles. Liberals argue that these principles are a skeleton unless property rights are articulated, attached and protected by law. It therefore follows that these principles are useless outside a guaranteed private ownership of property.

However a genuine liberal will have to carefully consider and understand the original position. Philosophically, the original position is a hypothetical situation in which rational calculators, acting as agents or trustees for the interests of concrete individuals, are pictured as choosing those principles of social relations under which their principals would do best. However crudely in this position, the rational calculators do not know facts about their principals which would be morally irrelevant to the choice of principles of justice. This restriction on their reasoning occludes information, for instance, about principals’ age, sex, religious beliefs, etc. Once this information about principals is unavailable to their agents, the plurality of interests disappears, and the problem of choice is rendered determinate. Rawls calls this condition a veil of ignorance. John Rawls’s writtings are available online.

What we need to be clear about is that to be a liberal is not for every Dick, Tom and Harry. A true liberal can and will not defend South African apartheid or to a large extent Zimababwean colonial property rights. He/she can not argue that expropriation of land from whites in Zimbabwe is a violation of constitutional rights. A true liberal will argue that Mugabe is “intra” than “inter-wrong”. “Intra” in the sense that he is being accused for redistributing land to his party people and friends, that is an injustice to African Zimbabweans but to take from white is to sow a fertile ground for liberalism in that country. After redistribution of land they can then discuss a genuine transition to liberalism. What he is doing, in theory, is reversing the situation back to original position which will cater for a proper negotiated lasting settlement.

This then come to my conclusion: a liberal that argue for the protection of apartheid and colonial property rights is in fact a racist worst than Terreblanche and DeKock. I would like to add that in South Africa the only party that was liberal was Democratic Party and liberalism died with the party what we have today are just bunch of ………..