Friends & Friction: Send our soldiers back to the barracks

There is a reason our ancestors built their homes with mud and grass.

Apart from the practicality, they also had a deep spiritual understanding that the end is an integral part of a complete life. It is neither to be fought nor feared.

So the idea that one will use military might to fight death is absurd.

“We don’t see things as they are,” French-Cuban writer Anaïs Nin observed, “but as we are.”

If this is true, it explains why so many people are defying the lockdown.

They do not believe in the Covid-19 coronavirus apocalypse, especially after the nation worked through the HIV/Aids epidemic and false prophets of doom.

So the people have reason to mock your hysteria about death.

Good messengers understand that it is not the cogency of their message that changes hearts and minds, but the readiness of the recipients to receive it.

This is what those who are in authority fail to understand.

The fact that the ears are open does not mean that the message is ready to be heard.

The virus has exposed the fragility of our freedoms and the vulnerability of democracy.

A dictator no longer needs to suspend the constitution, he can simply shout “disease” and that will give him the licence to trample on human rights.

His actions will find support from many death-fearing self-preservationists.

Sometimes darkness brings hope. As the lockdown has shown, the protection of our freedoms lies in the death-defying stubbornness of our people.

No dictator will ever threaten the people with the fear of death or disease – they will simply ignore him because many may be poor, but they are not too stingy to pay the ultimate price.

Read: Soldiers and police face the heat over lockdown brutality

The academic argument that Covid-19 will make the public health system collapse is a joke on you.

Good morning, it seems like you’ve been sleeping for years because the system collapsed a long time ago.

Our public hospitals have been broken for a long time now, and patients even bring their own unsterilised clothes and blankets to the hospital. It is common to see patients sleeping on the floor.

So what future are you really worried about? That the private healthcare system will undergo what most people are already experiencing?

Treasure your pleasures and privileges, for they are about to perish. It will no longer be business as usual for Milton Friedman’s brand of capitalism.

The idea of people and nations trading food, beads or any other commodity was not invented by Adam Smith. It is probably as old as humanity itself. The difference is that trade existed to feed and clothe people, not to turn them into slaves of economics.

For instance, our forebears strictly observed the tradition of ilima – when widows and orphans could not plough their fields, the communities gathered together to help them before working on their own fields.

The dangerous and heartless brand of capitalism that we experience today was introduced to the world only 50 years ago by Friedman.

His so-called Friedman Doctrine was incubated in the department of economics at the University of Chicago in the US, where he was a professor.

Like a deadly virus that transfers from animals to humans, Friedman’s deadly ideas “zoonosed” through a group of Chilean economists who were trained at his university.

The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet adopted them and enforced them by sending soldiers to the streets.

The soldiers acted predictably – they did what armed soldiers do when they are not confined to the barracks: they killed civilians and the police became legislators.

Our defence against a coronavirus is not in a militarily enforced lockdown, but in a culture of respect for human life and an unwavering protection of human rights.

The current leadership must take responsibility for sneezing the virus of dictatorship into South African society. It must not be incubated any further.

Soldiers must return to the barracks.

Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive,an advertising agency.

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