Tony Leon traces a line from the Berlin Wall to Simon’s Town, arguing that South Africa’s choices now side with repression over freedom – risking trade, investment and diplomatic fallout.

My late parliamentary colleague Harry Schwarz had a gift for explaining complexity in understandable terms.

Many decades after his arrival in 1934 in South Africa as a child refugee from Nazi Germany, he once illustrated a key difference between freedom and dictatorship. He used the example of the division of Germany between its Communist Eastern half and its Western democratic section to drive home his point.

“How many people,” he asked, “have been shot attempting to flee from West Berlin to East Berlin?”

The answer was zero, whereas an estimated 140 Germans were shot or killed by East German border guards when trying to escape to the West during the Cold War.

People in most places choose freedom, choice and opportunity over their opposites, precisely what we are witnessing right now in Iran (more on that below).

Euphemism over accuracy

Historian Niall Ferguson explained this with reference to the great divide in the last century. In his book Civilisation (2011), he observed:

“The twentieth century ran a series of experiments imposing quite different institutions on two sets of Germans (East and West), two sets of Koreans (North and South) and two sets of Chinese (inside and outside the People’s Republic). The results were very striking and the lesson crystal clear…

“If you take the same people, with more or less the same culture, and impose communist institutions on one group and capitalist institutions on another, almost immediately there will be a divergence in the way they behave.”

Precisely the point that Schwarz illustrated some years before. Better institutions, more personal freedom and the protection of individual rights produced more prosperity, liberty, and were magnets for people living under oppressive regimes.

Back in the days of a divided Germany, the Soviet gift for euphemism rather than accuracy was on full display.

The Soviet backed East Germany styled itself the German Democratic Republic (GDR), though in truth it was a repressive one-party state, and no free elections were ever allowed in its 40 years of existence.

And the infamous wall that divided the two cities and countries was officially named by the GDR “the antifascist barrier”, though many Berliners on both sides of the divide referred to it as “the wall of shame”.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there was elation across Germany and, indeed, in much of the free world. Though in the rush to pass judgement on its meaning, some historians got the big calls wrong. For example, Francis Fukuyama’s view was that this was “the end of history as such… and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

Well, here we are in the second quarter of the 21st century, and matters did not pan out as predicted.

Old habits

President Donald Trump this week weaponised the US legal system against the independent chair of the US Fed, an audacious undermining of a key domestic institution that not even Jacob Zuma attempted at the height of state capture.

Last week, in his own hemisphere, he asserted US military dominance in the kidnapping of autocrat Nicolas Maduro without the normal pretexts about human rights and democratic restoration (leaving in place the thuggish Venezuelan regime on the basis that the US will “run” the country).

The evolution of Western liberal democracy has taken a different turn from the optimistic note struck at the end of the Cold War.

But on the euphemism side of things, old habits die hard.

For example, when Russia’s President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, he branded the largest land war in Europe since 1945 as a “special military operation”, and any Russian who termed it otherwise faced the prospect of imprisonment.

This week, Russian political scientist Abbas Gallyamov (a former Putin speech writer, but now in exile for the crime of “discrediting the Russian armed forces”) gave vent to the real meaning of this curious phrase.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on last week’s display of US hard power in South America, he noted:

“The Americans showed what a ‘special military operation’ looks like, further demoralising the inhabitants of Russia – both ordinary people and the elite. The contrast between the highest efficiency of the US military and intelligence services and the striking inefficiency of their Russian colleagues is simply too stark. That Maduro was a crucial ally of the Kremlin made it worse.”

Indeed, Putin’s “modest progress” – as one analyst dubbed his Ukraine war effort – is the contrast between the same length of time – 1 418 days – it took for Russian forces to reach Berlin from start to finish in World War 2, and the same time lapse since 2022 in Ukraine. Last year, Russian forces there “captured less than 1% of Ukraine territory”.

Still, SA right now is palling around in a naval exercise with Russian Navy, China’s and even Iran, though the status of the latter was hastily changed from participant to “observer”.

Here, too, the gift for pretence and circumlocution endures.

The joint naval exercise is titled “Will for Peace 2026”. Even George Orwell would raise an eyebrow.

Cape of storms in SA

Iran is busily slaughtering thousands of its citizens right now as its navy “observes” a SA-based military exercise. And the official SA explanation is that the manoeuvres off our coastline are an “essential response to rising military tensions” globally.

Quite what this means in plain and ordinary terms remains bewilderingly unclear. Will the BRICS+ navies rush to defend Russian ships from being interdicted with oil cargoes from Venezuela? Send Naledi Pandor again to offer moral support for Tehran as its regime shudders? Who knows.

But consorting with Russia and Iran is hardly a good look for our country, once dubbed by axed US ambassador Ebrahim Rasool as a “moral superpower”. And all the navies, bar the UAE, involved with SA this week are key US adversaries. And none is remotely democratic.

China, of course, is in a different league, in most respects, from the failing Russian forces and the militarily impaired Iranian regime of oppression. Though it is no slouch on the repression front, China’s mighty economic engine and military hardware make it second only to America in the world.

But here is the kicker: its terms of trade with South Africa are basically colonial. It extracts our minerals and floods this country with its subsidised exports – it decimated our textile industry in the 1990s and is poised to do the same to our auto industry this decade.

By contrast, our terms of trade with the US are termed in the argot post-colonial “fair trade”.

Last year, our trade surplus (or net value of our exports over cost of imports) with America was around R37 billion. By contrast, our trade deficit (the value of imports over exports) with China was a staggering R136 billion in the same period.

Little wonder that the SA government is so concerned with the fate of AGOA, which passed its first hurdle in the US House of Representatives this week, but faces a far more formidable obstacle for renewal and SA inclusion in the Senate.

A warning shot of more consequence than any fire drill around Simon’s Town this week came from the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, US Senator Jim Risch. He posted a stark warning on X:

“South Africa’s ANC-led government’s foreign policy hides behind claims of non-alignment, yet it hosts drills with America’s chief adversaries. Any promise or deal this government offers Washington is meaningless when its actions signal open hostility toward the United States. Trump is right to treat South Africa’s government for what it is: an adversary of America. That is why the US should take stronger action against the South African government.”

No euphemisms or polite terms or understatement here.

The famous coastline around our southern waters, where “Will for Peace 2026” is being held, was dubbed in the 1480s by Bartolomeu Dias “, the Cape of Storms”, due to its dangerous and sometimes treacherous seas.

The storm warning out of Washington this week suggests an update beyond meteorology.