by davidrobertlewis -

Lushaba 2: That record needle skipping faux pas remains

READING some of the latest ‘academic’ defenses of Lushaba in the ‘petit press’, one could be forgiven for thinking that he had delivered an important speech at UCT pronouncing on the supremacy of politics over law, utilising dialectical materialism to thoroughly debunk so-called legal institutional analysis, in the process setting the Holocaust in its rightful place, a mere peccadillo involving white people?

Both Chris Roper and Steven Robins are at pains to point out the context of a general critique of various approaches to the teaching of political science. While Roper’s is anything but a systematic contextualisation (in effect denying that the comments were even made), Robins errs on the side of rewriting the lecture altogether, as if the specific context of revolt against democratic and constitutional norms is all good and fine if one also raises substantive issues of colonial violence.

A case of competing frames of reference?

Robins erroneously writes: “As Roper indicates, the wider context of the lecture, and the logic of Dr Lushaba’s overall argument, do not in any way support Holocaust denial, and he certainly does not seek to argue that Hitler and the Nazis committed no crime in their acts of genocidal violence.”

“Instead, the lecture is a critical reflection of the racial blind spots of his discipline of political science, and why it was only after the Holocaust that genocide came to be recognised by scholars and human rights lawyers as a crime against humanity.”

If this were the case, then why did Lushaba not come right out with it, and say so, why beat around the bush? Why slip into an obnoxious, bigoted statement denying Hitler’s culpability for crimes against genocide, or should that be humanity? To use an ignoramus like Roper as an authority, would be to ignore his earlier statements made concerning Negritude and Césaire, a man whose work he rejected in a public address made in 1996, in the process claiming that the term itself was ‘racist’.

As I wrote previously, the result is not simply a moral vacuum in which the only historical crimes of any import are those against black persons, (and vice versa) but worse, a descent into reductionism, racial categorization and the logic of the late BJ Vorster, whose grey shirts were allied to the Nazi Party.

That Lushaba’s approach to political science provides short thrift to his subject matter, may be seen by the equally false claim that there are only three approaches worth considering. Check this page.

Equally problematic is his approach to proven facts like the 13th Amendment to the US constitution. Sorry Sir, while the amendment may have had the effect of extending the category of human being, it tragically did not state so in its wording. The same error appears in Roper’s fatuous piece devoid of truth yet upbraiding the media for breaking the story.

This shoddy approach to evidence-based research in favour of polemic and opinion-making easily embraces racist bile.

While I agree with Robins: “the lecture raises substantive issues about the relationship between the Holocaust and black histories of colonial violence that are certainly worthy of academic and public debate”, I categorically disagree with its intention and true purpose.

The trouble with long-winded mitigation arguments, sans facts, is their obvious attempt to drown out objections. Thus it is not what Lushaba actually says, and what is recorded, but rather an intellectual interpretation of events, one which seeks to spin an obvious faux pas, mere apprehension which passes for a response. In exhalting Hitler’s purported innocence, and ignoring that the intended audience are not pHd candidates per se, but rather first year students, both gaslight instead of enlightening the public. His students deserve a lot better than blatant lies.

“One possible charitable interpretation of Dr Lushaba’s comment is that he understands the word “crime” quite literally to mean a legally proscribed, punishable offense and that he was claiming that under Nazi law it was not a crime to kill Jews” writes David Benatar.

To add fuel to fire, Lushaba proceeds to claim such objections are in the minority, blames the media, and ‘stands by his words’. One would at very least expect an apology, but that would mean climbing down from his seemingly ‘unassailable academic pedestal’, a pedestal from which he has seen fit to launch racist invective.

There are undoubtedly many valid criticisms of racism and colonialism, however, a critique of racism which concludes that in order to combat racism, one has to suppress women, or homosexuals for instance, would not be a valid critique.

Similarly, a criticism of traditional approaches to political science, a critique which starts by inferring all law is subordinate to politics, but then falsely concludes the findings of war crimes made under Nuremberg were wrong, is not an educated segue into modernist and post-modernist discourse, but rather, a moribund approach to dialectical materialism, one which invariably leads into antinomian and relativistic terrain.

It is the exact same terrain in which our own TRC findings have been subordinated and reduced to irrelevance by political cadres and apparatchiks of Lushaba’s ilk, all emanating from our nation’s academic institutions.

Time to call a spade a spade.

SEE: Commandante Lushaba and the Führer

SEE: Remarks over Hitler by UCT lecturer Lwazi Lushaba are offensive

 

by davidrobertlewis -

LUSHABA: SA academia churning out unprofessional kooks and crackpots

THE LATEST rant from within SA academia points to a growing problem with the award of doctorates at these institutions. In February I exposed a fraudulent narrative issued by Dr Mandisi Majavu a ‘senior lecturer in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University’. (see link below)

This month, yet another senior lecturer in Political Studies, Dr Lwazi Lushaba from the University of Cape Town, demonstrates that there is a dearth of evidence-based intellectual inquiry at these institutions. Data analysis and empirical research should underpin philosophical and theoretical considerations, not the other way around.

If our academic institutions appear to have fallen prey to opinion-based, bigoted flights of fancy, which do absolutely nothing to further freedom of speech nor academic discourse for that matter, and which border upon hate speech, if not outright contempt for our constitution, then it may not come as a surprise, there is a global trend towards downgrading the prestige of the humanities and social sciences.

If jettisoning secular humanism in favour of radicalism for the sake of radicalism, or spurning history in favour of reductionist, ahistorical class analysis doesn’t get your goat, then perhaps the words uttered by Lushaba during a recent address to his students will.

The doctoral fellow has previously been taken to task by a religious studies PhD candidate and blogger James Bishop for issuing racist bile (see here). And was reprimanded for conduct that was “unacceptable, inappropriate and disrespectful” in 2019.

In the video Lushaba claims “Hitler committed no crime. All Hitler did was to do to white people what white people had normally reserved for black people.”

A syllogistic fallacy if any. In other words a flawed reasoning in logic. (Hitler is innocent. He only did what was normal. Therefore genocide of Jews/Whites/Blacks is normal).

Now I am not going to entertain you with galling details regarding the Final Solution and comparisons with previous and subsequent genocides, suffice to add that Lushaba is just plain wrong when he comes to attributing race to Jews (nations are not ‘races’, there is no plural in race, race is the child of racism not the father) and his utterances are best placed in the realm of speculative fiction, the crackpot section.

While the German Army under Lothar von Trotha did participate in a well-documented genocide of the Herero and Namaqua in Namibia, and the Rwandan genocide has often been compared to the genocides following from these atrocities, it is the denial of culpability, the attribution of innocence to the chief protagonist of the Final Solution, Adolf Hitler, and hence an impersonal, ahistorical, anti-morality based upon overly broad, reductionist and need one say, racist generalisations, (as in ‘let’s stick it to the whites’ and while we at it, ‘let’s stick it to the Jews’,) which is most troubling and offensive.

To remind readers who may have read my postings on Mcebo Dlamini, a Wits SRC leader who made similar remarks in 2015, and was subsequently forced by the SAHRC to apologise. The system we know as apartheid was both informed by and had its antecedent in the Nuremberg laws classifying Germans and Jews according to blood quantum and preventing miscegenation between ‘races”.

One need look no further than several examples of the former National Party of South Africa’s membership card which carries both the infamous swastika associated with the Nazis, and also the words proudly promoting affiliation: “The South African National Party emanates from the S.A. gentile National-Socialist movement and incorporates the said movement as also the SA Grey Shirts”.

It was Hitler’s brown shirts who engaged in what became known as Kristallnacht, a pogrom against Jewish-owned businesses while back in South Africa, it was John Vorster’s grey shirts and the government of D F Malan who succeeded in formalising what were until then informal race policies of segregation, in the process shutting down black owned business, which were relegated to the ghettos, ‘locations’ and so-called townships.

The rediscovery of the so-named Fischer tools housed at the University of Stellenbosch, used by apartheid doctors in their offensive project of race classification, further demonstrates the clear links between apartheid and Nazidom.

As I wrote in 2015, ‘A flurry of academic papers followed the 2013 rediscovery of the so-called ‘Fischer Tools’, used for race-classification purposes at the University of Stellenbosch.’

“The artefacts, it was immediately clear,” writes Dan Newling, “had been used to measure and classify physical differences between human beings of different ethnic origins.”

“An inscription on the back of one of the [objects] revealed their origin: they were the tools of Eugen Fischer, a notorious German eugenicist and Nazi whose theories inspired Hitler.”

You can read more from my original post on the Nazis, Mcebo Dlamini and DF Malan here.

And my expose of Mandisi Majavu here.

There are undoubtedly many valid criticisms of racism, however, a critique of racism which concludes that in order to combat racism, one has to suppress women, or homosexuals for instance, would not be a valid critique.

The statements by UCT SRC chairperson Declan Dyer in support of Dr Lushaba’s bizarre utterances about Hitler, fall into this category. Dyer has come out in support of Lushaba, stating that the comments were part of a larger critique of political science, and one should add, a critique of the anti-apartheid movement which took a non-partisan stance on the subject.

UPDATE: Dr Lushaba stands by his offensive idiotic statements, claims inter alia, that lectures at a public institution are somehow private, that the views of the person who objected are in the minority and that it is his ‘love of the black body politic’ that drove him.

If you follow his reasoning, then BJ Vorster, the head of the grey shirts movement affiliated to the Nazis, was innocent? Its a regular shit show. And worse, he appears to claim that the only peers who should be entitled to review his work, should be black etc etc, an apartheid headspace if any. In fact I remember similar crap emanating from my history teacher back in the day, ‘The English treated the Germans badly at Versailles, resulting in Hitler, similarly they treated the Boers badly, who only engaged in apartheid because they were mad at the British.’