Over the past several weeks there has been much killing talk coming from the Zuma camp. This was triggered by the ANCYL President Julius Malema's statement at a Youth Day rally that "We are prepared to die for Zuma. We are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma." Instead of carpeting Malema the more senior figures in the Zuma camp have either identified themselves with his sentiments, or formulated various excuses for them.

This allowed Malema to follow up his remarks by stating: "We must also intensify the struggle to eliminate the remnants of counter-revolution, which include the DA and a loose coalition of those who want to use state power to block the ANC President's ascendancy to the highest office of the land."

Shortly after Malema made his original comment the COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi stated at a funeral that: "In defence, in defence of one another, because we love one another so dearly and so truly, we are prepared to kill and to lay our own lives for one another. So yes, because Jacob Zuma is one of us and he is one of our leaders, and for him, we are prepared to lay our own lives, and to shoot, and kill."

In his recent statement to the SAHRC Vavi stated "In any revolution taking up arms is always a possibility, either to advance the revolution when no other avenue is available or to defend it." He explained that "revolution is a process intended to bring about fundamental change and thoroughgoing process of radical transformation. Revolution is far more than just attainment of a right to vote. It goes way beyond that."

Vavi certainly has one of the two necessary qualities of political leadership: that of passionate devotion to a cause. It took not inconsiderable courage to take the stand he did over the past few years. In his statement to the SAHRC Vavi notes that on account of his political stance:

"On occasions I receive death threats on my cell phone and in my office. I have been followed by unmarked cars or cars with untraceable number plates. Dead dogs have been thrown in my house yard. People have come to my house in search of me, leaving behind threatening gestures. This has happened on occasions throughout out the democratic era. Yet I have not reported this once to formal structures of the police and intelligence services. I could not because I have come to know of political projects in the high offices of intelligence personnel assigned to spread untruths about me and to spy on my activities." [See article]

The problem with Vavi is that that other necessary quality of political leadership - a sense of responsibility - often seems to be completely absent from his words and deeds. The COSATU leadership has fallen into a pattern of aggressively promoting policies and then, when the predictable consequences become apparent, loudly denouncing and mobilising against them.

Vavi seems genuinely outraged by what is happening in Zimbabwe. This is in admirable contrast to the cynicism and indifference with which much of the ANC leadership has responded to the unfolding catastrophe in that country. And yet he then gives expression to the very same ideology which Zanu-PF has used to justify the dispossession of commercial farmers, the repression of the opposition, the suborning of the will of the people, and the killing of MDC activists. What else were Zanu-PF doing between 2000 and 2003 than pursuing a process of "radical transformation" and using force to defend those gains from "counter-revolutionary" elements?

Max Weber noted that a political actor who believes in an ethic of responsibility "does not feel in a position to burden others with the results of his own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say: these results are ascribed to my action." For Vavi though all that seems to matter is that his original intentions should be pure. Weber described this attitude as follows: "If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However, a man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people... he does not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection."

The consequences of the kind of killing talk indulged in by the Zuma camp recently are certainly foreseeable, especially when one takes into account the "average deficiencies" of the crowds to whom they are addressed.

A vivid example of how words pave the way towards later action is provided in Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the rise to power of the Nazi's.

Haffner, an exile from Germany, began working on the manuscript in England in early 1939, but put it aside at the outbreak of the war. It was published after his death in 1999 under the title Defying Hitler. In one passage Haffner describes how he and his then girlfriend Charlie had gone for a walk in the Grunewald, the woods to the West of Berlin. This was in March 1933 in the midst of the "education campaign" run by the Nazis against the Jews, which would culminate in the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1 1933. The campaign was led by one Julius Streicher and its slogan was ‘Juda verrecke' (Perish Judah.)

"It was beautiful," Haffner writes, "unusually warm spring weather, as it had been throughout that March. We sat on the grass among the fir trees inhaling the scent of resin, under an indescribably clear sky with little clouds, like a couple in a film. The world was full of peace of springtime. We sat there for about two hours and ever ten minutes or so a group of young people would go past. It seemed to be a day for school outings."

"They were all fresh-faced adolescents accompanied and supervised by their teachers, who often wore a little pince-nez or a little beard, as one expects of a teacher faithfully watching over his little flock. Every one of these classes, as they passed, shouted ‘Juda verrecke!' to us in their bright young voices, as though it was a sort of hiker's greeting."