We need Free Education now - or we are all screwed

The Issue of Free Education has swept like a blaze - both literally and figuratively - across our nation's campuses. Citing the high cost of education in South Africa, students have taken to the streets with placards to demand that universities be open and free - but these protests often spark riotous outburst, shocking violence, and massive damage to our tertiary institutes. Here, Guest Writer Johan Van Eksteen puts forward a powerful and unconventional argument in favour of delivering every single one of the protesters demands. We think you'll agree.

The past few months on South African campuses have been tumultuous indeed. From Wits and UKZN to Rhodes and UCT, students have flocked en masse to the streets and lecture halls, demanding one simple thing: Free Education.

And yet, many of you (my Dear Readers) are vehemently opposed to this! You flock to social media and huddle in your racist echo chambers muttering trite things about the economy and having meaningless discussions about things as trivial as “long-term sustainability”, “limited funding” and “where the hell is this massive amount of money going to come from?”

However, my dear friends, I believe that there is a very powerful case to be made for universal, free and open tertiary education. It’s not even a case of “can we even do it without destroying our economy”; it’s a case of we must do it ASAP.

Not to address the historical inequalities of our country or deliver on the vague promises of ’94, ’07, ’09 and ’13. Not to restore dignity and parity and to give the poorest an opportunity to improve their lives. And no, not even to create an educated, progressive society that will one day contribute heavily in graduation tax and higher personal taxes (à la Denmark et Germany et Sweden et al) to others who want to benefit from the same free education they did.

No. We need to give them free education because, if we don’t, we are all fucked.

Ask yourself, which is more important: not having to pay an extra 15% tax in your business and personal declarations, or bringing enlightenment and critical thinking to someone who has such a puerile, myopic understanding of the economy, budgetary limitations, and finances?

How can you look at campuses - at the burning Jammie buses, the torched buses at Wits, the charred husks of cars at UKZN – and not see that these people need to read a fucking book as quickly as possible? How can you stand there and watch works of art being piled up and incinerated at UCT, read reports of staff, admin and VCs being harassed and held hostage, and browse photos of law libraries, coffee shops, theatres, and IT buildings being burned to the ground, and not realise that we need to get some fucking knowledge into their brains as soon as is humanly feasible?

How do you – Dear Reader – sit there in your mansions of privilege and greed watching Youtube videos showing protestors expelling parents and stakeholders from meetings because of their race - and NOT recognise the need for free, great education for these screaming buffoons?

Time and time again, illegal, illogical or infeasible demands are made by protestors, asking for free food and accommodation, asking that we abandon Western scientific disciplines, or demanding university staff be forced to donate their salaries or that landlords be forced to rent out their properties at a controlled amount, and you want to remain totally blind to the desperate need this country has for education?

How can you sit there on social media, scrolling past the contempt for and silencing of student media on campuses, the pages and pages of cult-like misinformation, propaganda, fear-mongering and hateful paranoia, not once think “I should be there, on the frontline, fighting to get these kids into the best classroom in the world!”?

Of course, it’s so, so easy for you to retort, “But where will the money come from?” This just shows you all the propaganda you’ve been swallowing.

This protest is being led by some of the finest financial and economic minds of our time. There are hundreds of MA and PhD students in those masses, making informed, rational suggestions. Since day one, there has been a clear and reasonable plan to show where all the billions of rand a year will come from – you just haven’t read it because you’re a racist.

Firstly, we’ll increase taxes by 15%. You know, above the tax increments already outlined in the National Budget '17/'18. It’s not like businesses will respond to this by putting up their prices of basic goods and services, thus negating the increases.

We’ll double the National Budget spending on education, up all the way to 100%. The national budget only pays for stupid things anyway, like the military. It’s not as if our national coffers are put towards Public healthcare, grants and welfare, or social services.

Besides this, we’ve all seen the damning financial documents from Rhodes. Not only will providing free internet, free food, free transport, free accommodation, a team of hundreds of admin staff and lecturers, and access to international academic platforms and libraries cost absolutely nothing, but all universities have literally trillions of Rands just lying around.

In any case, you have to ask yourself this frightening thought: what happens if we don’t give them the education they want so badly?

With just a shitty Matric and no other meaningful qualifications (coupled with irrationality and anger) they could easily become a policeman, or a Member of Parliament, or hell, the next President of South Africa. If you think they’re dangerous and destructive now, just imagine them with powers of law, or control over the financial reserves, or responsibility for the running of the country!!!

Next time you’re about to criticise this student movement, just take a moment to look across that crowd and ask yourself: “Do I want one of these people to be the next Hlaudi, the next Motshekga, the next Bheki Cele, or – god forbid – another Jacob Zuma?!”.

We need free education now, or we are all screwed.

Johan is a guest columnist at Muse and Abuse. Widely renowned for his non-nonsense approach to controversial topics, Johan shines a blinding light of truth on subjects like the hideous scourge of immigration, why white people should vote ANC, why Blackface isn't the real racist problem in SA, and how Black Privilege is an ugly truth that no one wants to admit. He also thinks gay marriage should have been outlawed years ago.

I'm taking a stand against this racist, sexist, privileged, problematic page

The bullshittery has gone on long enough.

I’ve known about this website for a while. “Funny”, you might call it, if you think the racist, sexist oppression of minorities and disenfranchised groups - or expressing an opinion that I don't share - is funny. Too long have we let such privilege go unchecked. For years, this site has been allowed to offend. To trigger. Well, no more.

Finally, I decided I’d do something about it. But, halfway through calling the author a "homophobe" and a "racist" on Twitter, using a trendy, clever hashtag that would definitely have changed the world, I thought I’d actually do something.

So I put away my mug of male tears, crawled out of my offense-free safe space ball pit, said twelve "Hail 'Yonces" and hacked his account. I wasn’t even hard. It was the first password I tried: “Ih8womenKillAllMinoritiesKKKstrangleSmallKittens69”.

Who am I? I’m Angie Davison. I’m a diasexual, brynxagender, polymorphic, fairykin pan-amorous feminist whose preferred pronouns are “zyrdl”, “zyrdlre”, and “xzyv” (LEARN THEM OR I WILL BLOCK YOU) and who identifies as a pan-gendered demi-theist, myxa-romantic pluraphorialist (but I’m not sure about that last one so I’ll see how I feel next week). And I am so DONE with this problematic fuckery.

So why did I hack his blog, you ask? Well, all across the world, in colleges and universities from Britain to America to South Africa, Freedom of Speech is under attack. Every time we - feminists and protesters like myself - say or do something virtuous and pure, hordes of droning troglodytes are allowed to reply with their wrong, stupid opinions. Large rallies of Christians and Republicans, and all flavours of controversial speakers are allowed to poison the air with their vituperative agendas, veiled under a thin pretense of "the right to political association and freedom of expression". They're allowed to lampoon our sacred, holy, universal beliefs. It's sick.

For every paper or publication we ban on campus, another pops up. For every song we get blacklisted on campus, another one takes its place. For every problematic noun or word that gets added to a list of potential Disciplinary Offences, a new one is created. For every dissenting, evil voice whose career and life we destroy on social media through paranoia, virtue signaling, and mob hatred, another one pipes up from the gorgeous, progressive silence.

Universities should be a safe space, where all of us - whether you're a POC, a Critical Studies student or someone fighting for a cause I already support - should be allowed to discuss our ideas freely and safely, without criticism or dissent.

I am done with cis-gender white men thinking they can rule and oppress the world and everyone. These straight, white male scum stereotype and box everyone by their sexual orientation, gender identity, race and sex, and then try to make them feel bad about just being who they are. It’s bullshit. They're a bunch of man-spreading, mansplaining, micro-aggressing bigots who reduce everything around them to an oversimplified straw-man. Every day, they inflict mental and systemic violence on hundreds of people just by being there. Their violence is disgusting. If we want to create a more peaceful, tolerant society, we need to kill them all #YESALLMEN.

MICRO-AGRESSING SCUM.
pic: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:FriedC

They’re probably even worse than second wave, sorry WHITE feminists, who did even less for society. You’d think that fighting for the vote, reducing voting age, securing fair labour laws and working towards our social and sexual emancipation would have been high on the agenda, but no, Becky with the Bitch hair was too busy listening to hubby, wearing pink and making cute cupcakes to stop the OPPRESSIVE PATRIARCHAL SHITLORDS from continuing their shitty, oppressive, democratically elected campaigns of terror into 2016. Worse still, their practices were hugely islamophobic and Eurocentric. How can scum like Ayaan Hirsi Ali have the audacity to criticise other cultures, or tell them how to treat their women? EUGH YOUR FAVES ARE SO PROBLEMATIC.

They didn’t even think of the biggest issues of our time. Things like white guilt and white privilege. As a white female, it sickens me to think of how many white people there are that don’t make effusive, complicated internet confessions of their sins to seem more enlightened and morally superior than those around them. It makes me so angry I almost spilled cappuccino onto my Macbook Pro's keyboard.

Despite there still being a pay gap in some small areas of society when you don’t adjust for job experience, qualification, time off and maternity leave, do they focus their efforts on this? No. And how can they, because they DON’T UNDERSTAND THE WORLD like we – twenty-something unemployed bloggers with four year degrees in Media Studies and Gender studies – do.

How can you begin to lobby for better, more progressive legislation without a spicy FIRE hashtag? How do even consider studying for something like a law degree to ensure that existing legal frameworks that ensure equality between men and women of any race or creed are upheld and followed to the letter without getting to grips with the deep lattice of competing systems of bigotry and prejudice that make me a lot more oppressed than you? How can we work towards a better, more considerate society if we aren’t ostracising those who think differently from us and use words or ideas that offend me?

Let this be a lesson to all of you out there. We are woke. We are watching. The days of this kind of oppressive, unfunny, fuckery that masquerades that “satire” and makes fun of things that I don’t find funny are numbered.

Making fun of Donald Trump or insulting African and traditional leaders who hate gay people is okay. I don't mind if he writes highly charged, ironic posts about how female voices are underrepresented in traditional, academic and legal spheres. I can even support his parodying of Men's Rights Activists. But to make fun of things I don't find funny, or my personal beliefs is a level of privileged fuckery that I won't tolerate. Say one more goddamn word about bell hooks and I’ll give this blog the Blurred Lines treatment: it'll be gone faster than a tweet that disagrees with whatever I say or do.

The choice is yours, boy: Check your privilege and check your hate speech, or Muse and Abuse goes bye-bye.

Small changes make Sieg Heil salute okay – NWU Potch campus study

Researchers and Nazi experts at the North West University's Potchefstroom campus have stunned local students after they released a report showing how “minor aesthetic alterations” to the controversial facist Nationalist party’s ‘Sieg Heil’ salute could make it “actually okay to do in public”.

“We all know how much a lot of us love the salute,” said students we spoke to on the campus grounds. “We just don’t know how to do it without making ourselves look like a bunch of inbred, ignorant, facist, racist, white-supremacy-loving, Fatherland-worshipping, Fuhrur-idolising arseholes.”

The 486-page report is packed with detailed diagrams and instructions showing how right-wing serenaders at the university campus could in future avoid being branded as extremist bigots with an agenda of disseminating racial intolerance and a supremacist ideology.

“As Usain Bolt, Championship footballers and countless historic examples have shown us, if we just alter the salute a bit, we can take away the hateful Hitlerness of what is otherwise a lovely arm gesture,” said head researcher Sally Tations.

“Look at Bolt – take away his other arm and what do you see? A Nazi Salute. This simple fact immediately tells us that the first step to not being a eugenics-loving Arian hatemonger is altering not your attitude towards skin colour, but either one or both arms mid-salute,” she said.

Tations went on to add that bending the right arm at the elbow, waving your Heiling arm from side to side, closing your hand into a fist, adding gesticulations with your other hand and not yelling in German were all excellent alternatives. Improving diversity on the Potch campus, she said, could also help to hide their racist tendencies.

“We noticed in the pictures in the newspaper of that serenade how there were a few black students involved in performing the salute,” he said. “However, these darker students were still a minority. If there had been maybe all black students doing it, it might not have been so hectic. Hell, it might have even been some kind of socio-political commentary on contemporary discourses of identity formation or something.”

The report has since been met by whitespread, sorry, widespread approval.

“It’s blerrie lekker,” said NWU student and BA Fingerpainting major Royce Yste. “Now I can salute the Fatherland while pretending I’m just waving to my brandy-addled mates at the next sokkie-jol I go to to enjoy cultural homogeneity. I’m flippen’ pleased.”

Nationalist party leader Adolf Hitler could not be reached for comment.