Tutu's white tax suggestion 'racist': FF+

[The Ripper]

Calls made by Archbishop Desmond Tutu for white South African's to be taxed is racist and thoughtless, the Freedom Front Plus says.

"It borders on the emotional statements of (ANC Youth League president) Julius Malema and does not contribute to the debate on how to address the country's economic problems properly," FF Plus spokesman Anton Alberts said.

Tutu, who spoke at a book launch at the University of Stellenbosch in Cape Town on Thursday evening, said the damage apartheid caused was impossible to escape.

He said white citizens needed to accept the obvious: "You all benefited from apartheid."

"Your children could go to good schools. You lived in smart neighbourhoods. Yet so many of my fellow white citizens become upset when you mention this. Why? Some are crippled by shame and guilt and respond with self-justification or indifference.

"Both attitudes make that we are less than we can be."

However Alberts said in a statement it was improper to single out white people as they have contributed disproportionately more to the fiscus than any other group for the past 17 years.

"The request for introspection and a greater moral contribution should instead be addressed to the ANC government itself."

Tutu's race argument was so much more immoral if taking into account the fact that there were already more than 600, 000 poor whites, he said.

"Taxes levied on white people will merely be damaging social cohesion and will not contribute anything toward a sustainable economy."

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2011/08/13/tutu-s-white-tax-suggestion-racist-ff

Earlier: Desmond Tutu calls for wealth tax for white S/Africans (http://www.africanoutlookonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2550:desmond-tutu-calls-for-wealth-tax-for-white-safricans&catid=102:african-news&Itemid=28)

[Aces High]

"Your children could go to good schools. You lived in smart neighbourhoods.


He fails to mention that the South Africans made the good schools and good neighbourhoods with backbreaking work and sacrifices....making a country out of nothing with their bare ahnds.....something that the kaffirs could and never will be able to do.

[AussieScott]

Perhaps the Bore should mention the Africans life expectancy was 30 years longer under white minority rule. Guess where the African average life expectancy is now under socialist African rule?

[ikki]

well africans admit that their poverty is all about colonialism.
It ended too soon!

[Logan]

'Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.'

Rudyard Kipling

[European blood]

http://media.nowpublic.net/images//ac/1/ac1ae84254ad4efe6b3558aab0da688a.jpg

Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu


JOHANNESBURG — A call by South Africa's Desmond Tutu to tax whites for benefitting from apartheid risked a return to racial classification, ex-president's FW de Klerk Foundation said Monday.

"However devastating apartheid might have been we cannot continue ad infinitum to ascribe everything that goes wrong in South Africa today to the past," it said in a statement.

"Nor can we accept the dangerous idea of racial guilt -- or the very unchristian notion that some South Africans are morally superior to others simply because of the race to which they belong."

Tutu said at a a book launch last week that whites must accept that they all benefited from white minority rule which denied blacks the vote until 1994.

"You all benefited from apartheid. Your children went to fancy schools, you lived in posh suburbs," he told the audience, stressing that not all whites had supported apartheid, the Cape Argus reported.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate told the newspaper that many whites had been ready for a wealth tax during the country's post-apartheid truth and reconciliation process which he chaired.

"It could be quite piffling, maybe one percent of their stock exchange holdings. It?s nothing. But it could have helped... maybe building new homes, and that would have been an extraordinary symbol of their readiness," he said.

When asked if he was calling for a wealth tax, Tutu said: "That?s what I?m saying."

South Africa has one of the most unequal societies in the world, 17 years after the fall of racial segregation.

But De Klerk's foundation expressed unhappiness at Tutu for blaming present day social ills on apartheid and whites, and said a wealth tax on one group would be unconstitutional.

"It would require the reintroduction of racial classification and of many of the other demeaning racial distinctions that were associated with apartheid."

FW de Klerk was South Africa's last apartheid leader until the historic vote in 1994 and shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela, who become the first democratic president.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5im-hBE7STpehd2S_LoJ22Liya32A?docId=CNG.1f469d987692ee dad6d66fb6bb381964.441

[Óttar]

Then maybe he should withdrawal from being a minister (an archbishop, no less!) in a church that has the British monarch as its head? :lightbul: