goldstone v2

1 -A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS -

GOLDSTONE : A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS

Ayal Rosenberg

Friday, October 09, 2009

“I see a spectacle so rich in meaning and so wonderfully paradoxical to boot, that it would be

enough to make all the gods of Olympus rock with immortal laughter – Caesar Borgia as Pope.”

Nietzsche (The Twilight of Idols – The Anti Christ – chapter 61)

INTRODUCTION

Richard Goldstone published the findings of his UN Human Rights Commission investigation

into the belligerency between the parties during hostilities in the recent Gaza-Israel war

(December 2008 and January 2009) to a media fan-fare – sensationalism has always been one

of his characteristic calling cards. Time after time, Goldstone was introduced as an eminent

South African jurist, as a man who fought against apartheid, as a paragon of international law

and principle, a man of “high credibility” and “high integrity”1. Event the South African Zionist

Federation joined in the Pied Piper procession singing the same tune. When, within the very

cathedral of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, , Anne Bayefsky accused Goldstone of

humbuggery, he flanked by Navi Pillay, the head of the Human Rights Commission, replied that

he was used to abuse and that during apartheid whites had abused him for speaking out against

apartheid injustices. Navi Pillay, an Indian who grew up in apartheid South Africa, a lawyer who

had practices in South Africa during its darkest days, sat through this and kept a straight face

mimicking Goldstone’s feigned indignation.

1 According to Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1254861899900&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull


In 1980, when Goldstone was appointed an apartheid judge, I was about to enter the Wits law

school, where Goldstone himself had learned law. I was taught law by the likes Professor

Dugard, Justice Edwin Cameron, Professor Van der Vyfer and Professor David Dyzenhaus to

name a few. I had been taught exactly what apartheid was and who apartheid judges were. The

specter of Richard Goldstone preening to the world media as a man of principle, as man

demanding accountability, as a bulwark against apartheid is slap in the face to every victim of

apartheid, living or dead.

Goldstone claims, over and over (the scale and frequency of self adulation in itself should set

off alarm bells) that his report is all about accountability for crimes against humanity and the

integrity of international humanitarian law. This is a subterfuge coming from a subtle and

fraudulent apartheid judge. As far as Goldstone is concerned the report, as everything else in

his life, is about self: self-conceit; self-aggrandizement; self-praise; self-righteousness; self-

worth; self-adulation and, most importantly, self-promotion.

I would not have written this article if my sole purpose was to expose Goldstone. A man of his

ilk is not worth my time of day. On the other hand, without accountability from the

perpetrators of human right abuses there will never be respect for human rights. The UN

Human Rights Council is the appropriate institution to demand such accountability. But if

apartheid taught me anything – and I lived through it when Goldstone lived off it - it was that

respected institutions can be infiltrated by ideologues. Justice is then defined and applied from

the very pulpit of such institutions by the unscrupulous, the ambitious, the racist and even the

psychopathic. Under apartheid the rule of law was hijacked by brutality, the courts dispensed


discrimination in the name of justice and the judge’s who applied this law, who, especially in

the Appellate Division, were the spear tip in the heart of apartheid’s victims, masqueraded as

paragons of virtue.

When viewed from this perspective it became clear to me that it was not so much the

culpability of either the Palestinians or the Israelis which was worrying but rather the obscenity

of man like Richard Goldstone presiding over enquiries into crimes against humanity and at the

same time demanding accountability.

By shifting the focus I do not want to exonerate either the Israelis or the Palestinians for

possible crimes against humanity. Indeed, such culpability should be investigated and

vigorously prosecuted if there is evidence of such crimes, not only in the Israeli Palestinian

conflict but in all conflicts. Human right violations should not be subject to super-power vetoes

or Human Right Council majorities or political agendas. Most importantly, the investigators of

such violations should at the very least be moral men and women and not moralists. Under no

circumstances should an investigation into possible human rights abuses be conducted by a

man who is himself guilty of the very crimes he is investigating.

If a man like Goldstone can head a Human Rights Commission, if he can become a prosecutor of

war crimes at the behest of the International Criminal Court, then human rights becomes a

weapon in the hands of its worst abusers.

I am making a few fundamental assumptions. Apartheid was a crime against humanity; like

Nazism and Stalinism, it polluted language and law lending an aura of respectability to the

despicable thereby facilitating willing and unwilling obedience to the criminal. The enablers of


atrocity are the banal, the ordinary, the uninspiring – drab and dull men. Alain Finkelkraut has

observed:

“But the true executors of the holocaust, making it possible despite its enormity, were

the farthest things from perverts: they were model functionaries. Think of Eichmann or

Rudolph Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz: while the Jews new barbarism only by its

beastly face and still expected violent rage, these bureaucrats dispatched their victims

with a ferocity that was neutral, administrative, dispassionate and routine…It was the

banalization of the crime that was inconceivable: the dull, methodical and continuous

terror that the Nazis were about to make them endure…In fact the most pitiless acts of

inhumanity were committed by the most utterly ordinary men.”2

Lastly, the crime of apartheid would not have been possible without a willing and compliant

bureaucracy; the higher up the servant of the apartheid state bureaucracy, the greater his or

her contribution to perpetuating the crime. At the pinnacle of the apartheid bureaucracy, giving

it the aura of legitimacy it required for its very life breath, were the judges and especially the

Appellate Court judge.

Time, gullibility, ignorance, sensation, political, religious and personal agenda, and, most tragic

of all, abuse of Nelson Mandela’s magnanimous gesture of forgiveness, has allowed for the

revision of history, indeed for its reversal. I will therefore spell out the historical evidence and

the legal precedent. Given the gullibility, maybe ignorance, of no less than the like of the

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt the facts need repeating.

2 The Imaginary Jew – pg 48-9


Before proceeding to the evidence and the law I must dispose of a seeming anomaly: the notion

that a perceived champion of human rights, a man who was a prosecutor for the International

Criminal Court, a man who sits on the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, cannot in

reality be a systematic abuser of human rights and a perpetrator of crimes against humanity.

Major General Iona Timofeevich Nikitchenko presided over Stalin’s show trials during the Terror

of 1936-1938. According to estimates made by Robert Conquest3 (which were subsequently

vindicated by the opening of the Soviet Union archives), Nikitchenko adjudicated a process in

which there were 7 million arrests, 1 million executions, 8 million banishments to camps and 2

million deaths in pensal camps. This same Nikitchenko was one of the drafters of the London

Charter that set up the Nuremberg process. Moreover, Nikitchenko was an “eminent”,

“respected”, “illustrious” Judge at Nuremberg with “high integrity” and “high respectability”.

Tzvetan Todorov has commented: “It is true that at the Nuremberg trials Stalin’s

representatives sat in judgment over Hitler’s colleagues: a particular obscene situation, since the

judges were guilty of crimes as horrible as those of the accused.”4

NUREMBERG

The criminal culpability for crimes against humanity of judges enforcing law within an

“organized system of injustice” was established in The Justice Case of the Nuremberg Trials:

3 The Great Terror – pg 485

4 Home and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century – pg 207


United State of America vs. Alsotter et al5. The movie Judgment At Nuremberg was based on

this trial.

The Justice Trial was against sixteen defendants, all judges or judicial officers who served at the

behest of the Third Reich. Ten of the defendants were convicted for crimes against humanity,

and four were acquitted, one died before the verdict was handed down and there was one

mistrial.

Relevant portions of the indictment read as follows:

“Between September 1939 and April 1945 all of the defendants herein unlawfully,

willfully and knowingly committed crimes against humanity as defined by Control

Council Law 10, in that they were principals in, accessories to, ordered, abetted, took a

consenting part in, and were connected with plans and enterprises involving the

commission of atrocities and offenses, including but not limited to murder,

extermination, enslavement, deportation, illegal imprisonment, torture, persecution on

political, racial and religious grounds, ill treatment of and other inhumane acts against

German civilians and nationals of occupied countries.”

5 3 TWC 1 (1948), 6 LRTWC 1 (1948), 14 Ann Dig. 278 (1948)). The entire court protocol and decision is available online at http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/03/NMT03-T0001.htm to http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/03/NMT03-T1236.htm

http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/03/NMT03-T0001.htm

http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/03/NMT03-T1236.htm


“The German criminal laws through a series of additions, expansions, and perversions by

the defendants became a powerful weapon for the subjugation of the German people

and for the extermination of certain nationls of the occupied territories.”

In his opening statement to the Court, the Prosecutor, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, said:

“This case is unusual in that the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the

name of the law. These men together with their deceased or fugitive colleagues were the

embodiment of what passed for justice in the Third Reich.”

“The defendants and their colleagues distorted, perverted and finally accomplished the

overthrow of justice and law in Germany…The ‘trials’ they conducted became horrible

farces, with vestigial remnants of legal procedure which only served to mock the hapless

victims.”

Most of the defendants raised the defense that they were only applying the law which at the

time was not only legal but actually the binding law of the land. The Court dismissed this

defense and held that for culpability all that was required was that each defendant

“…knew or should have known that in matters of international concern he was guilty of

participation in a nationally organized system of injustice and persecution shocking to

the moral sense of mankind. The charge in brief is that of conscious participation in a

nationwide government organized system of cruelty and injustice in violation of the

laws of war and of humanity, and perpetrated in the name of the law by the authority


of the ministry of Justice, and through the instrumentality of the courts. The dagger of

the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.” [Emphasis AR]

The Nuremberg court distinguished between two types of defendants. There were those who

“with fanatical zeal enforced the will of the Party with severity”. The guilt of these was clear and

obvious. Then there were the judges who desperately tried to “retain ideals of judicial

independence and who administered justice with a measure of impartiality and moderation.”

The guilt of this type of judge was painstakingly difficult to determine. Such a judge was the

defendant Franz Schlegelberger.

Schelgelberger was born on October 1875 in Koenigsberg and appointed a judge of the District

Court of Lyck in 1901, nearly 30 years before the advent of Nazism. During this period, not only

did he distinguish himself as an eminent jurist but wrote a dozen internationally acclaimed

books on jurisprudence. In October 1931 Shlegelberger was appointed Secretary of State in the

Reich Ministry of Justice and in January 1941 he was put in charge of the Reich Ministry of

Justice as Administrative Secretary of State. In August 1942 Schlegelberger resigned from the

Ministry and effectively ceased being a Nazi judge.

From the evidence it was clear that Schlegelberger was a reluctant Nazi. He only joined the Nazi

Party in 1938 because Hitler forced him to do so but he never went to any party meetings and

he discouraged his family from becoming Nazis; indeed none of them ever joined the Nazi

Party. In his defense Schlegelberger claimed that he “could never have either favoured or

permitted principles of violent thinking” and that, on the contrary “all of his activities were

aimed at preventing or at least modifying the course set by Hitler’s dictatorship.” (This is the


exact claim that Goldstone would make when surveying his own sorry legacy.) The Court found

that Schelgelberger’s factual assertions about himself were true including the claim that he

resigned of his own accord because he could no longer support a system that was manifestly

unjust.

The Court described one of Schlegelberger’s defenses in this way:

“Schlegelberger presents an interesting defense, which is also claimed in some measure

by most of the defendants. He asserts that the administration of justice was under

persistent assault by Himmler and other advocates of the police state. This is true. He

contends that if the functions of the administration of justice were usurped by the

lawless forces under Hitler and Himmler, the last state of the nation would be worse

than the first. He feared that if he were to resign, a worse man would take his place. As

events proved, there is much truth in this also.

There seemed nothing to contradict Schlegelberger’s that he was fundamentally a decent,

honest man who, through no choice of his own, found himself serving an unjust system. The

Schlgelberger case was an extremely difficult one and the Court agonized in its deliberations

concerning his culpability in law for crimes against humanity. In the end, the Court held:

“The prostitution of the judicial system for the accomplishment of criminal ends involves

an element of evil to the State which is not found in frank atrocities which do not sully

judicial robes”


“Schlegelberger resigned. The cruelties of the system which he helped to develop was

too much for him, but he resigned too late. The damage was done. If the judiciary could

slay their thousands, why couldn’t the police slay their tens of thousands? The

consequences which Schlegelberger feared were realized. The police, aided by Thierack,

prevailed. Schlegelberger had failed. His hesitant injustices no longer satisfied the

demands of the hour. He retired under fire”

“We are under no misapprehension. Schlegelberger is a tragic character. He loved the

life of the intellect, the work of the scholar. We believe he loathed the evil he did, but he

sold that intellect and that scholarship to Hitler for a mass of political pottage and for

the vain hope of personal security. He is guilty under counts two and three of the

indictment.”

The legal principles arising from the Nuremberg Justice Case were codified in the Rome Statute

which is the founding document of the International Criminal Court. The culpability of a willing

judge within an inherently unjust system is covered by the Statute’s declaration that

“individual criminal liability will be incurred in crimes against humanity and war crimes by a

person…who knowingly aids, abets and otherwise assists, directly and substantially in

commission of such a crime, including the means for its commission.”


APARTHEID

In his speech from the dock in 1962, Nelson Mandela said6:

“I would say that the whole life of any thinking African in this country is driven

continuously to conflict between his conscience on the one hand and the law on the

other…The law as it is applied, the law as it has been developed over a long period of

history, and especially the law as it is written by the Nationalist Government is a law

which in our view is immoral, unjust and intolerable. Our consciences dictate that we

must protest against it, that we must oppose it and that we must attempt to alter it.”

Apartheid as practiced in South Africa between 1960 to 1994 was a “nationally organized

system of injustice” as defined in the Nuremberg Justice Case. In fact, apartheid was definitively

classified as a “crime against humanity” in the International Convention on the Suppression and

Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid7 which was enforced on 18 July 1976. Article 1 of the

Convention declares that “apartheid is a crime against humanity and that inhuman acts

resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies of racial segregation

and discrimination…are crimes violating the principles of international law.” In language similar

to the Rome Statute Article 3 of the Convention imputes criminal responsibility “irrespective of

the motive involved, to individuals….and representatives of the State whenever they….directly

6 Most of the quotes come from the TRC Report on Legal Establishment which is part of the TRC Final Report

Volume 4 Chapter 4 (pg 93-108)which available on line at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/Volume%204.pdf TRC Justice Hearing Volume 4 Chapter 4 (pg 93-108) 7 UN General Assembly Resolution 3068(XXVIII) of 30 November 1973

http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/Volume%204.pdf


abet, encourage or cooperate in the commission of the crime of apartheid.” This very same

wording was used to convict the Nazi judges at Nuremberg.

What is the criminal liability for crimes against humanity of judges who willingly served under

the apartheid regime? Nelson Mandela was clear about it: “the law as it is applied” (and it was

applied by the apartheid judges) was “immoral, unjust and intolerable.” Given the Nuremberg

Justice Trial precedent and the clear and unambiguous designation of apartheid as a crime

against humanity, the culpability of apartheid judges in international law is obvious. The

culpability of Judges appointed after July 1976, when apartheid was designated a crime against

humanity, and all prospective apartheid judges had been put on notice, is even more

undeniable. All apartheid era judges voluntarily chose to become judges. None of these judges

were forced to assume their positions. Every one of them took an oath to apply the laws of the

land. This was not the case with a Schlegelberger, for example, who was appointed judge long

before the Nazi party had been established. Professor David Dyzenhaus in his oral submission

to the TRC intimated that the apartheid era judges are more culpable than the Nazi judges. The

apartheid judge had more of an opportunity to protest than their Nazi counterparts. A Nazi

judge who would have spoken out might have been killed or sent to a concentration camp. No

such fate awaited a courageous apartheid Judge. Unlike the convicted Schelgelberger no

apartheid judge ever resigned for reasons of conscience.

After the demise of apartheid the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up.

During October 27th to 29th 1997 the TRC held its Legal Enquiry which also investigated how the

apartheid judiciary buttressed, “aided” and “abetted” the crime of apartheid. The TRC


requested that the Judges, especially the apartheid era judges, appear before it in order to

account to the nation for their actions during apartheid. While a few judges made a joint

written submission no judge appeared before the TRC in person. The written submissions were

made by the judges of the new South Africa and not by any judge from the apartheid era.

Notably, the foghorn of accountability, Goldstone, did not account.

The Chairman of the Commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was appalled by the

contemptuous arrogance of the apartheid era Judges, which led him to remark that the judges

“have shown that they have not yet changed a mindset that properly belongs to the old

dispensation.”

Professor Dyzenhaus, drew the logical conclusion from the judge’s behavior:

“If those judges really think they have nothing to account for, that the appellate Division

has nothing to account for, that the Judges have nothing to account for, then one should

be worrying about the kind of judgment they are going to be delivering in the future.”

Professor Hinds of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers also appeared before

the TRC. To him the criminal culpability of the apartheid era judges was incontrovertible:

“Just dealing with the question …as to whether or not there can be any criminal liability

flowing from judicial acts. It is clear to me that in theory, just following from the

Nuremberg principals, there can certainly be liability as to whether or not they are

enforceable, that is the test being whether or not at the time these individuals were

carrying out what they knew or ought to have known that what they were doing was


clearly in violation of basic principles of the norms of law and fundamental principles of

human rights. I happen to think the case can be made. Whether or not there is any

jurisdiction where they may be tried, I think that is more problematic because I am not

sure that they would be able to be tried under domestic jurisdiction for what we would

call complicity with the crime of apartheid. But it is clear they carried out principles

where they know or ought to have known of the intrinsic race bias within the system.

One had to be just blind, deaf or simply an imbecile not to have known this. ... I would

argue that they either know or ought to have known and therefore they have culpability

with respect to crimes that were committed by the regime, to the extent that the

judiciary carried out the laws whose impact affected the victims of apartheid.”

After the TRC, Dyzenhaus laboriously documented the legal and moral case against the

apartheid era judges in respect of their behavior during apartheid and their subsequent brazen

squandering of the opportunity afforded them to reckon with their criminal past.

“Even the most liberal judge who took office under apartheid could not avoid

implementing its law. He had to accept that even those laws whose content he found

abhorrent and whose provenance he regarded as illegitimate had a legitimate claim on

his duty to administer the law. He therefore not only made himself complicit in an

injustice he recognized as such but gave the injustice an aura of legitimacy.”8

[Emphasis added AR]

8 Judging the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation and the Apartheid Legal Order (Hart 1998) – pg 164


The TRC found that the apartheid era judges contributed to extending the life and the

“legitimacy” of apartheid:

“Part of the reason for the longevity of apartheid was the superficial adherence to ‘rule

by law’ by the National Party (NP), whose leaders craved the aura of legitimacy that ‘the

law’ bestowed on their harsh injustice. Significantly, this state of affairs was not

achieved in the early stages of NP rule…It was manifestly abandoned when emergency

executive decree blame the chosen medium of government towards the end of formal

apartheid – from the mid 1980s – when a climate of ‘state-lawlessness’ prevailed and

the pretence of adherence to the rule of law was abandoned by the Botha regime.”

It was clear to the TRC that the judiciary, and especially the appellate division, actively and

zealously maintained the status quo and did what it could to entrench the injustices of

apartheid.

The finding on the behavior of the apartheid era judges was severe in the extreme. Their past

crimes were exacerbated by their contempt for public accountability.

“The Commission finds that appearance before the Commission in such special

circumstances would have demonstrated accountability and would not have

compromised the independence of the judiciary. History will judge the judiciary harshly.

Its response to the hearing has again placed the questions of what accountability and

independence mean in a constitutional democracy in the public domain for debate.”

APARTHEID, GOLDSTONE AND PW BOTHA


“Virtue is choked with foul ambition.” Shakespeare - II Henry VI, Act 3 SC 1

“Ambition destroys its possessor.” Talmud, Yoma, 86

In a recent book published in South Africa various South African personalities write a short

piece about their mothers. After the short piece there are a dozen or so lines constituting the

bio of the personality. Richard Goldstone writes about his mother emphasizing her

philanthropic activities and the fact that she made him aware to injustices of apartheid during

his formative years as a young man. Then Goldstone pens his own short bio. He mentions that

he was elected as head of NUSAS (National Union of South African Students) in 1959, that he

was nominated judge of the South African Constitutional Court in 1994 and subsequently

became a prosecutor on behalf of the International Criminal Court. The period of Goldstone’s

life between 1978 and 1994 is a convenient black hole; nearly thirty years have vanished from

the man’s life. Stalin had political rivals air brushed from photographs with him; Goldstone

airbrushed the incriminating years of his life.

The chronology of Goldstone’s illustrious career in the service of apartheid is irrefutably

chronicled. In 1978 Goldstone was appointed as a standing judge to the Transvaal Supreme

Court by the Minister Justice Jimmy Kruger. PW Botha was Prime Minister of the Country. In

1980 the temporary appointment was made permanent by Justice Minister Alwyn Schlebush.

The formative period of Goldstone’s judicial career and the most extensive period of his life as a

judge dovetailed the presidency (at first prime-ministership) of PW Botha. At the time of his

appointment Goldstone was one of the youngest judges on the bench and one of the very few

apartheid Jewish appointees to take silk. Goldstone career under apartheid was meteoric and in


only nine years he was appointed to the Appellate Division of the South African Supreme Court,

the pinnacle of apartheid injustice.

In the year 2000, nearly twenty five years after he assumed office as an apartheid judge,

Goldstone, from the safety of distance, in a bombastic and mind numbingly dull memoir

laughably and pretentiously entitled For Humanity, justified his decision to become an

apartheid judge:

“The moral problems of joining the South African judiciary were manifest. Its members

were obliged, by oath of their office, to enforce the laws of the land. This was of great

concern to me. I decided, however, that I could play a more active role in efforts to

ameliorate those laws by accepting the appointment rather than by continuing to pursue

a lucrative commercial career.”9

Elsewhere, Goldstone claims that he consulted prominent anti-apartheid activists (he

conveniently never mentions any of them by name) and they encouraged him to become an

apartheid era judge and fight the battle from within.

Leszek Kolakowski, recently deceased, lived through both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian

systems. He wrote: “The art of forgetting history is crucial: people must learn that the past can

be changed – from truth to truth – overnight.”10 Kolakowski analyzes the mendacity of people

who serve a totalitarian system. “The vast corruption of the language” he writes “eventually

produced people who were incapable of perceiving their own mendacity.”

9 For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator – Richard Goldstone - Yale University 200 pg 5

10 Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie - Kolakowski


History, evidence, context, common sense all conspire against Goldstone’s self righteous self

justification of his inexcusable decision to serve apartheid. Only people who did not live

through apartheid, who are dull to its manifest injustices and who are incapable of

comprehending the enormity of the evil that was apartheid could take Goldstone’s self-serving

self-praise at face value.

In one of the most magnanimous gestures in the history of humanity, the victims of apartheid,

led by Mandela, forgave their oppressors. But there is a price to forgiveness. Alain Besancon

observed: “Forgetting is the expected consequence of forgiveness.”11 Only the mendacious can

abuse forgetfulness arising from forgiveness in order to retouch the past and thereby confuse

and morally obfuscate. Goldstone’s version of his own self-righteousness is nothing short of

revisionism comparable in significant ways to Holocaust Denial.

The Soweto riots in 1976 triggered wide spread unrest in South Africa. The Vorster government

managed to suppress the popular uprising using the arsenal of brutality: mass arrests (mainly

of children); murder (of women and children); torture; intimidation and censorship. Jimmy

Kruger, the Himmler of apartheid, was Vorster’s Minister of Justice. The death of black

conscious leader Steve Biko in police custody became the symbolic embodiment of the crime of

apartheid during this dark period. Jimmy Kruger’s response to Biko’s death encapsulated in four

words the barbarity of the man and the system of “law” he represented: “Dit laat may koud!”

he said with chilling cynicism. (It *Biko’s murder+ left me cold.) Later in his career Goldstone

would couch such callous inhumanity into well reasoned, seemingly respectable legal form. It

11

A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism and the Uniqueness of Shoah – Alain Bescancon (2007) pg 73


was this same Jimmy Kruger who appointed, Goldstone, then in his 30s, to the bench, initially as

an acting judge.

PW Botha took over as Prime Minister of South Africa in 1978. This is a period in South African

history when all pretence of law and order was abandoned, and, in the words of the TRC “a

climate of state lawlessness prevailed.” The barbarism of Vorster and Kruger finally woke the

world up to the illegitimacy of apartheid. After Soweto the world designated apartheid as a

crime against humanity and promulgated the Convention for the Suppression of Apartheid,

putting on notice any prospective persons willing to serve apartheid as judges that they would,

by this very act, become accomplices in crimes against humanity. This is precisely the time,

when the majority of South Africans were reeling from the ferocity of Vorster’s onslaught,

when Goldstone put forward his candidacy to serve as an apartheid judge and was appointed as

such.

Goldstone’s judicial career dovetailed the PW Botha era of “lawlessness”. I should point out,

like Goldstone, PW Botha was one of the few perpetrators of apartheid who refused to appear

before the TRC and account.

In his written submission on behalf of some of the judges to the TRC, Judge Edwin Cameron

wrote that appointees to the bench under apartheid were known supporters of apartheid. This

was never refuted and has not been refuted to this day. The notion that the anti-Semitic Jimmy

Kruger would appoint a known dissenter, who was also a Jew to the bench, is laughable. The

idea beggars belief that PW Botha and his minions would not only confirm the appointment of a

known anti-apartheid activist and steward such a person’s meteoric career precisely when the


raison d’être of his regime was to seek judicial compliancy and complicity in his onslaught on

the last vestiges of the rule of law.

When Goldstone was permanently appointed to the bench I was 19 years old and about to

enter Wits University to study law. At the time, Goldstone’s father worked for my father.

Goldstone the father was a frequent guest at our home. I remember clearly the father boasting

of his son’s achievements and especially cooing that his son socialized with the likes of

President John Vorster, PW Botha, Alwyn Schlebusch and Jimmy Kruger.

Contrary to Goldstone’s decades later lie responsible and respectable members of the legal

fraternity were aghast when Goldstone actively promoted himself as a candidate to serve

apartheid on the judiciary, especially after the world had put people like him on notice that

fulfilling such a function would constitute a crime against humanity. Reliable and honorable

members of the legal fraternity who knew Goldstone up close at the time attributed his alacrity

for the morally inexcusable to his vaulting ambition, which had earned him their opprobrium

prior to his appointment as a judge

RW Johnson, a fearsome and brave opponent of apartheid, succinctly captured the

circumstances surrounding Goldstone’s appointment to the bench and the character of the

man and what motivated him:

“As an able lawyer, Goldstone attracted criticism within the legal profession on his way

up as advocate when he had socially entertained at his home attorney’s who might bring

him such cases. Such behavior, as seen as touting for custom, was greatly frowned upon.

Throughout his career he had been criticized for his sheer ambition; De Klerk noted how


‘some of his colleagues criticized him for being over ambitious’ and how it was rumored

that he saw himself succeeding Boutrous Boutrous Ghali one day as UN Secretary

General leading to his nickname ‘Richard Richard Goldstone’. Under apartheid – unlike

most other judges of the Constitutional Court [post apartheid court – AR] – he had been

careful to avoid anti-apartheid activism. Indeed, his decision to take silk in 1980 had

drawn criticism from liberal circles and from many anti-apartheid lawyers, who had

refused promotion to the judiciary where they would have to apply apartheid laws.”12

Under PW Botha South Africa nearly became a Fuehrer State. The process of centralizing power

was pursued relentlessly. Botha dismantled the Senate and created in its place the President’s

Council, a de facto extension of the prime minister’s office. Then the office of prime minister

was abolished and replaced with an unaccountable executive president who became the

“personification of the State”. In words of Christi Van der Westhuizen, Botha had removed “the

few constitutional obstacles that stood in the way of non-accountable white rule.” 13 The same

author quotes Professor Boulle who wrote in 1994 that NP rule had been marked by “successive

rampant executive casting aside the rule of law imperatives as they made their powers more

intrusive and more discretionary, less responsible and less accountable.” Botha took this to a

new level of executive lawlessness. To carry out the Fuehrerization of South Africa Botha

required loyal judges to give the unspeakable a veneer of respectability. Goldstone was one of

the first hand-picked to assist this Fuehrer wannabe.

12

South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid – RW Johnson (2009) pg 153-4 13

White Power and the Rise and Fall of the National Party – pg 123


The constitutional reforms implemented by Botha went hand in hand with repressive

legislation. In 1982 the Internal Security Act was amended to provide for indefinite detention

without trial. People could be held and were held for indeterminate periods while being

tortured. Detention orders could not be overturned by the courts and the courts confirmed

this. Countless people (women and children and elderly included) were subjected to torture

and died in detention. Goldstone was silent throughout.

PW Botha’s thrust to move South Africa to complete autocratic totalitarianism proved to be so

controversial that his insane policies led to a further breakdown of all semblance of legitimacy

and public order resulting in imposition of a state of emergency between 1985 and 1990.

During this dark period thousands were killed, detained without trial, maimed and tortured. An

especial favourite was the use of sexual torture. The TRC documented cases of “forcing

detainees (both male and female) to undress; the deliberate targeting of genitals or breasts

during torture; the threat of and, in some instances, actual rape of detainees (male and female);

the insertion of objects such as batons or pistols into bodily orifices and placing detainees in cells

with common law prisoners known to rape newcomers.”14 Scores were murdered in detention.

In a cynical ploy to show South Africans and the world that the detentions were under legal

supervision and therefore legitimate and benign, PW Botha appointed Goldstone to oversee

the welfare of the detainees. In effect Goldstone was supposed to legitimate and cover up the

cruelest, most criminal and brutal excesses of apartheid. Goldstone was in cahoots with PW

Botha and true to himself he gave PW Botha the cloak of deceptive legitimacy that allowed PW

Botha to detain more, torture more and murder more. Not once did Goldstone ever speak out

14

TRC Report – Volume 2 – paragraph 115


against any excesses when he was the guardian of the detainees welfare; not once did he ever

become a voice, not even a whisper, a murmur for the innocents languishing in the apartheid

cells. It is difficult to wear a mask of dissimulation all the time; the truth has a long memory and

sometimes, in spite of the dissembler, has a way of peeking out from behind the mask. In 1997,

three years after the demise of apartheid, this is how Goldstone described the “good” work he

carried out for PW Botha:

“When we had *we meaning the apartheid establishment amongst which Goldstone

included himself] tens of thousands of people in detention without trial during the three

states of emergency from ’85 to ’89, I was asked, in fact by the government, by the then

President Botha, to visit the detainees. That surprised everybody. But against it was his

way of reassuring the international community that these people in detention were not

getting beaten up and were not being ill-treated. And too I think it was a subtle way of

telling the police not to beat them up.”15

Goldstone here has condemned himself in his own words. It was clear to all at the time, and

subsequently it has been documented both at the TRC and elsewhere, that during the dark

days of the State of Emergency detainees were getting “beaten up” – Goldstone’s euphemism

for torture; that PW Botha knew about this and encouraged it; that Goldstone was used to

hide the horrific truth; that Goldstone never once revealed the truth. The TRC clearly

documented how PW Botha not only knew about the torture but actually ordered it creating a

15

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Goldstone/gold-con2.html Thursday 8 October 2009 9:41 pm GMT +2

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Goldstone/gold-con2.html


covert torture and death squad, the apartheid equivalent of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, who, in

Botha’s own words “must be willing to be unpopular and even feared.”16

Schelgelberger had sold his soul to Hitler for “a mass of political pottage”; Goldstone had sold

his to PW Botha. Now his career could really take off. Leap-frogging more elderly judges, who

were also more qualified jurists, Goldstone was earmarked for the Appellate division – the

ultimate payback of the apartheid overlords to their most slavish judicial lackeys.

In January 1989 PW Botha suffered a minor stroke, Goldstone was nominated to the Appellate

Court and FW De Klerk took over as President of South Africa.

APARTHEID, GOLDSTONE AND FW DE KLERK

The five year period between 1989 and 1994 were the De Klerk years. Much happened in this

tempestuous and volatile period. De Klerk initially thought he could palliate the inevitable. Then

Communism collapsed under the weight of its own anomalies. Once De Klerk decided to push

the tottering anachronism he and his regime were forced to deal with overwhelming

challenges. They had to dismantle the apartheid laws. They had to legitimate the erstwhile

illegitimate opposition, the most vociferous of whom would soon be leaders of the country.

They had to keep a lid on the violence wracking the country. Foremost in their minds, they had

to negotiate their own immunity. Put bluntly they had to save their own skins and, if in the

process, justice and truth had to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency and polity then so be

it.

16

TRC Report Volume 2 – para 52 pg. 178


De Klerk was desperate for a clean bill of health and Goldstone would be instrumental in

providing it. He had learned from being the obedient servant of PW Botha that if he served his

political master well then he could exact any reward of his chosing.

Notwithstanding De Klerk’s decision to expedite the demise of the already dying apartheid, the

old repressions and excesses were rampant. There were still detentions without trial and

torture but, thankfully, there had not been a Biko style death in detention since 1988. Then,

only 12 days before Nelson Mandela was scheduled to be released, in January 1990 Clayton

Sizwe Sithole was found hanging by a belt and shoelaces from a water pipe in the shower while

under police detention (without trial). The seriousness of the death of Sithole cannot be

underestimated.

Sithole was the partner of Zinzi Mandela and the father of Nelson Mandela’s grandson. It was

clear that Sithole had died as a result of an illegal, unjust detention and as a consequence of

cruel and sustained torture. Sithole might have hung himself (and – no thanks to Goldstone –

we might never know the truth) but there was no denying he was driven to it by torture. At a

time so close to Mandela’s release, De Klerk obsessed about securing his own immunity and

that of the entire apartheid gang. He desperately needed exoneration of the police and, by

extension, of himself.

The numerous previous deaths in detention under apartheid, beginning with Biko, had been

emblematic and symbolic of apartheid in all its barbarity. There was a wide spread hope that

apartheid in its death throes would at last demonstrate the sincerity of its claim to have

changed its ways and show moral fiber by exposing the truth and exacting accountability. A


judicial commission of enquiry to Sithole’s death was called for and De Klerk obliged. The

victims of apartheid, those in the vanguard of the struggle day in a day out, the relatives of all

those countless who had been murdered and tortured in detention in the past, all pinned high

hopes on Goldstone, whom De Klerk appointed to head up the enquiry into Sithole’s death

If justice, the evidence and common decency all pointed to the guilt of the apartheid machinery

in the death of Sizwe Sithole, this was nothing in comparison to the demands of De Klerk for

complete exoneration. Goldstone delivered the goods as De Klerk knew he would. To the shock

and consternation of all those involved (by and large the travesty of the matter was drowned in

maelstrom of the upheavals wracking the country at the time) Goldstone exonerated the

security forces completely and totally. He found that Sithole had hanged himself and that the

police had had no part in his death. Goldstone decided that Sithole gad hanged himself with a

belt and shoelaces even though the police had earlier testified that his belt and shoelaces had

been taken away from him when he was incarcerated. De Klerk wanted to shift the blame away

from himself and to the Mandela circle. Goldstone obliged. Accordingly he ignored the evidence

and relevance of torture and the glaring incongruencies of the police testimony and intimated

that Sithole probably committed suicide because he had implicated Winnie Mandela in criminal

conduct. Goldstone’s findings were a judicial imprimatur of the very man who had first

appointed Goldstone to the bench, Jimmy Kruger. Goldstone’s judicial finding to Sithole’s

torture and death was: “It leaves me cold!”

Goldstone’s betrayal of justice and his mocking dismissal of the agony of the victims guaranteed

his own personal future. De Klerk was well aware of Goldstone’s over-weaning ambition and


consequently felt secure in using Goldstone’s ambition to serve precarious political ends. De

Klerk has admitted this in no uncertain terms.17 But De Klerk was playing a dangerous game. If

Goldstone’s ambition could bastardize all semblance of integrity in order to curry favour with

the powers that be, De Klerk did not realize that when he, De Klerk, no longer wielded power,

Goldstone would then sell his services to the new man of power and turn on previous

benefactor.

The last significant act of the apartheid government was the setting up of a standing

commission to investigate the causes of violence. The commission, headed by Goldstone

appointed by a gullible De Klerk, became known as the Goldstone Commission and was extant

between 1992 and 1994. The Commission had to issue reports to the sitting President, De Klerk,

and to Mandela. During the first two years of the Goldstone Commission the real power in the

country was De Klerk; during the latter two years, power was slowly devolving to Mandela.

Both De Klerk and Mandela had vested political interests in the findings of the Goldstone

Commission. True to form, Goldstone meticulously tailored and timed his findings to the flavor

of whoever was wielding real power in the country. Thus, at first his findings were bent to De

Klerk’s requirements and then later, in complete volte face to his previous findings, to

Mandela’s requirements.

One of the destabilizing forces instigating the violence was rogue elements within the rusting

apartheid machinery. This force became known as the “third force”. The other power bloc

fomenting violence was the ANC itself and especially its armed wing the MK. De Klerk was

17

The Last Trek: A New Beginning (1998) pg 213


interested in denying the existence of the third force. Mandela was interested in refuting the

involvement of the MK in the violence. Both leaders had compelling political reasons to conceal

the truth. Their loyalties were to politics which always demands compromises; Goldstone’s

loyalty however had to be to the truth and the evidence. To all observers at the time, to anyone

who was watching the news networks, it was obvious and manifest that there was a “third

force” and that the MK was knee deep in the violence. For heaven’s sake, I myself saw the ANC

shooting IFP marchers in cold blood in the streets of Johannesburg. The subsequent TRC

hearings confirmed what was clear to all at the time.

Goldstone however played with the facts (and consequently with lives) in order to position

himself in a favorable light first with De Klerk and then with Mandela. During the initial period

of the Commission, when De Klerk was the power, Goldstone denied that there was a “third

force”. Then when it became clear that Nelson Mandela was going to become the new leader,

Goldstone all of a sudden changed his tune.

RW Johnson described the situation:

“Goldstone was adamant, however, that, contrary to the ANC’s repeated allegations,

there was no evidence for the existence of a ‘third force’ organizing violence against

them. Then, just weeks before the 1994 elections, Goldstone dramatically reversed

himself, pointing to a systematic and silent ware waged by the police on a farm called

Vlakplaas against the ANC and its allies.”18

18

Johnson pg 154


Vlakplaas was the horrific killing field of apartheid. Goldstone new about its existence for

months but the release of such devastating information would have decimated any credibility

De Klerk still had and would surely have resulted in the sacking of Goldstone. So Goldstone sat

on this evidence. Then, when it became clear to Goldstone that De Klerk was a spent force, all

of a sudden, in a blitz of publicity orchestrated to portray himself as a warrior in the cause of

truth, Goldstone released the Vlakplaas bombshell . Johnson writes: “…the timing was perfect

for the ANC’s election campaign. It thus came as no surprise when Goldstone was appointed to

the Constitutional Court.”

If anything endeared Goldstone more to the ruling elite in waiting was his obstinate refusal to

say a word about ANC violence in the face of overwhelming evidence.

“The most remarkable fact about the Goldstone Commission was that while it was

supposed to investigate all armed groups, it simply failed to investigate the MK or any

form of violence orchestrated by the ANC. This was Hamlet without the prince, for the

MK continued to be active recruiting, training, managing arms caches and carrying out

hundreds of attacks, murders and other armed actions. Both the IFP and the security

forces laid plentiful evidence before the Commission on these matters but Goldstone

concentrated on other groups involved in the violence, an attitude which naturally

endeared him to the ANC.” 19

As PW Botha had rewarded Goldstone for covering up the brutality to detainees during the

state of emergency by promoting him to the Appellate division, as De Klerk rewarded him for

19

Johnson - 154


whit-washing the Sizwe Sithole death in detention by appointing him to head the Goldstone

Commission, Mandela now rewarded him for twisting and the truth to suit political power by

nominating him to the newly formed Constitutional Court.

When Nelson Mandela puts the kosher stamp of approval on a pig anything is possible. The

road from apartheid era judge, Jimmy Kruger appointee, PW Botha accomplice, to special

prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and special investigator on behalf of the Human

Rights Council becomes a highway. The erstwhile perpetrator of crimes against humanity can

become the prosecutor of crimes against humanity.

FOR HUMANITY

During the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt made a painful observation. There were

prominent and respected post war Germans prospering in the fog of forgetfulness despite the

fact that such respect and prominence had been earned under the Hitler regime.

“It is one thing to ferret out criminals and murderers from their hiding places, and it is

another thing to find them prominent and flourishing in the public realm – to encounter

innumerable men in the federal and state administration and, generally, in public office

whose careers had bloomed under the Hitler regime.”20

In one of the few books analyzing the role of the judiciary under Hitler, Hitler’s Justice: The

Courts of the Third Reich, Ingo Muller documented how Nazi judges kept their jobs after the

war and even flourished. In his submission to the TRC, Dyzenhaus quotes Muller on this topic in

20

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil – Penguin 1977 originally 1963 – pg 17


respect of the apartheid judges. “The German judiciary, who mostly kept their jobs after the

war, despite having watched very high ranking members put on trial at Nuremberg, did exactly

what they had done during the Third Reich. Why? Because there was no process of

accountability.”

George Steiner who has reflected movingly on remembrance and forgiveness has written:

“Only those who actually passed through hell, who survived Auschwitz after seeing their

parents flogged to death, or gassed before their eyes (like Elie Wisel), or who found their

own kin amid the corpses from which they had to extract gold teeth, a daily encounter at

Treblinka, can have the right to forgive. We do not have that right.”21

The victims of apartheid have forgiven their oppressors. This is their right and we must respect

it. Not a single person has been nor likely will be prosecuted for the crime of apartheid. And

probably that is how it should be.

The culpability of Goldstone for crimes against humanity is manifest and well grounded in

international humanitarian law. If Goldstone was not the worst among the apartheid judges he

certainly was no better than a Schlegelberger. Careful and close study of Goldstone’s judicial

record during dark days of apartheid will reveal that Goldstone the apartheid judge might even

fall short of Schlegelberger the Nazi judge.

Because of an artificial cutoff date in the Rome Statute (2002), Goldstone cannot be indicted

before the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He perpetrated his crimes before 2002.

21

Postcript – George Steiner


Also, it seems that in countries where universal jurisdiction is permitted for crimes against

humanity Goldstone could not be indictable again because the cutoff date is also 2002. I might

be mistaken here and I am not an authority. On the other hand, it seems that Goldstone could

be indicted in countries that have ratified the Convention on Suppression of Apartheid - again I

would defer to an expert on this matter.

I am however calling for a concerted, sustained, well financed and vigorous international effort

to document Goldstone’s culpability for crimes against humanity. This effort should not be

motivated by narrow political, religious, ethnic or national concerns but rather as an effort to

cleanse the cathedrals of human rights of hypocrisy. Until this is done human rights will forever

be an illusion.

This is why Goldstone should be singled out and for no other reason. The TRC commented on a

particular ugly aspect of apartheid injustice:

“The judiciary, which unthinkingly allowed judicial policy to be influenced by executive

dictate or white male prejudice; which was intent on maintaining and protecting the

status quo; which willingly participated in producing the highest capital punishment rate

in the ‘Western’ world by the mid 1980s and an execution rate that impacted

overwhelmingly on poor black male accused.”

It was not that black murderers were not guilty of murder. They were. It was that white

murderers of blacks were hardly ever brought to trial and never executed. Such a system

captured the essence of apartheid injustice. The apartheid judges reasoned that the fact the

white murderer of a black human being was never indicted in no way derogated from guilt of


the black murderer of whites and hence justice was served. But selective justice is total

injustice. A just system demands that all murderers be brought to trial. Anything else is the

opposite of justice or to quote the Nuremberg judgment “institutionalized injustice”.

This brings me back to where I started this journey: the UN Human Rights Council Commission

of Enquiry headed by Goldstone into the Israeli Palestinian Gaza conflict. The council is

dominated by persistent human right abusers. The super powers and majority blocs guarantee

that the worst offenders – like the white murderers under apartheid - are never investigated or

indicted. Sri Lanka which has majority support can be commended on a war that killed over

20,000 civilians. Israel might be guilty of human rights abuses but when only Israel is

investigated and not Sri Lanka for example then it is not justice but apartheid injustice.

Goldstone’s posturing that the exclusion from prosecution of criminal acts in other parts of the

world committed by others does not derogate from the alleged guilt of Israelis. This is the logic

of an apartheid judge – which is precisely what Goldstone was most of his life. And who more

apt, more suited, more skilled and experienced in administering apartheid justice than Richard

Goldstone – the quintessential apartheid judge.

After apartheid, Goldstone should have been grateful for the forgiveness bestowed upon him

by the gracious virtue of those he had oppressed. He should have slipped away into silence like

the erstwhile Nazi judges that Dyzenhuas mentioned and whose presence discomfited Arendt.

But the moment Goldstone sought to capitalize on the beneficence he received and use it to re-

invent himself as a proponent of human rights, the moment he sought to pollute the supposed

sanctuaries of human rights with his presence, and rewrite history by denying the past and his


role in it, and repainting himself, the oppressor as the liberator, then anyone who knows the

truth is duty bound to speak out. Hence, despite my initial reluctance to write this article, if I

did not I would be no different form Goldstone, who chose ignominious silence throughout 25

years of apartheid.

Steiner again: “Everything forgets. But not a language. When it has been injected with

falsehood, only the dramatic truth can cleanse it.”22 When human rights are compromised then

they become a tool of oppression and not a guarantor of liberty. The language of human rights

has been infected and it must be cleansed, starting with Goldstone.

Goldstone, the apartheid era judge, a scheming, poisoning, ambitious Caesar Borgia, now sits as

the Pope of Human Rights. The ghosts of JB Vorster and PW Botha are rocking Olympus with

immortal laughter.

In this shallow world of pretence it takes a mad, blind Lear to see that the thief has become and

judge and the judge a thief:

“A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yond justice rails upon a simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places, and, handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief.”

Lear – Act IV Sc 6

22

The Hollow Miracle – George Steiner


A PERSONAL NOTE

“We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.”

- The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements – Eric Hoffer

Dear readers permit me to conclude on a purely selfish and personal note.

As part of his inexcusable mission to rewrite his past, Goldstone trumpeted to all and sundry

“collective white guilt”. This was a calculated and shrewd maneuver of an erst-while apartheid

apparatchik who, in spite of himself, could not slough off the vestiges of racism still clinging to

his judicial robes. The new, greedy black elite in post-apartheid South Africa sought to grab for

itself as much wealth as it could. The wealth was in the hands of the whites. The whites had to

be shamed into buying off moral reprieve by paying these new, ravenous elite, who wielded the

political power and therefore could of provide absolution for a tithe. The rich whites were not

going to give anything away easily and so they had to be shamed into coughing up by other

‘moral’ whites. The white who castigated his own the loudest became the most moral and was

allowed to participate in the bountiful spoils. Goldstone charged into this travesty. He got

himself appointed as trustee of the Development and Reconciliation Fund, this is the very same

man who refused to appear before the TRC, the forum for true and genuine reconciliation. He

signed a declaration acknowledging the “white community’s responsibility for apartheid” (not

his own of course) and “our debt to fellow South Africans” and accepting that it was whites (as a

race and not him in particular) “failure to accept responsibility for apartheid thereby inhibiting

reconciliation and transformation.” How easy it is for an apartheid judge to persist with racism


Johnson rightly points out that these statements and this posturing of Goldstone “betrayed a

considerable state of intellectual confusion” and “endorsed the latest variant of collective guilt

as if unaware that this doctrine had been repudiated by the church and had been the scourge of

Jews down the ages.”23

In Hope and Memory, Todorov wrote:

“It is now easier to grasp why we are reluctant to grant moral credit to someone who

systematically excoriates his own group and favours the other, because we know

instinctively that the role of moral conscience is actually quiet comforting to its holder.

He or she becomes the virtuous one, as the keeper of values, and a guide to the straight

and narrow. When said by a public figure, ‘We are all guilty’ actually means ‘I’m less

guilty than you are, because I am the one saying so.’ Such a person thus cannot be

accused of being egocentric or xenophobic – but he or she acquires a rewarding role in

the community as the guardian of its values.”24

Goldstone persisted in his “collective guilt” band-standing. As Chancellor of Wits University, he

told a graduation ceremony that white graduates must not expect the top jobs anymore

because “the ‘sins of the fathers’ would be counted against them.”25 Johnson writes that “when

it was pointed out that not only was he [Goldstone] encouraging young, skilled whites to

emigrate but he was endorsing the doctrine of collective guilt, he had hurriedly denied that he

accepted the doctrine. Yet here again he was clearly accepting it.”

23

Johnson – pg 302 24

Hope and Memory – Todorov (pg 141) 25

Johnson 302


And this is precisely where things get personal. Goldstone was pontificating to young children,

such as my children living in South Africa that they must pay for the ‘sins of the fathers’.

Goldstone is pre-eminent amongst those sinners. My child, and for that matter, his own grand-

children, had nothing to do with apartheid. Goldstone had been the faithful and longstanding

hand maiden of apartheid. Goldstone had been on the payroll of apartheid. He had applied

apartheid laws day in and day out for two decades. He had slavishly served the most brutal of

apartheid leaders and each one of them, PW Botha and De Klerk, had rewarded him for his

loyalty. Yet my children, who are blameless, must pay for his crimes! What conceit, what

humbuggery!

To add insult to injury, at the very moment Goldstone was telling these young white graduates

that in the new South Africa, no matter their skill, their effort, their ability, their achievement,

they as a race “must not expect top jobs” he himself was seeking to secure for himself a top job

at the UN.

Todorov again:

“What are the features of a moralizer? The term is meant to describe public persons who

pride themselves on having the ability to discern good and evil. Being a moralizer does

not mean you are moral. A moral person subjects his or her own life to the criteria of

good and evil, which transcend personal pleasures and satisfactions. A moralizer, on the


other hand, tries to subject the lives of others to these same criteria, and profits by doing

so – by putting himself on the right side of the fence.”26

The personal payoff in Goldstone’s new found racism was a sure ticket to the UN - a moralizer’s

paradise.

Goldstone has left South Africa, the scene of his crime. Good riddance – we do not need him

and my children who live here certainly do not need to hear the wind bag moralizing of this

most quintessential apartheid judge. If you really think about it, after all, Goldstone had to

leave. The new South Africa with a black majority is unbearable for a white man who sucked

and sucked at the ample but putrid tit of apartheid for 25 years of his life.

26

Todorov – pg 189

goldstone v2

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