What It Means to Fight Oppression.

There are vital lessons to be learned from the accomplishments and failings of Nelson Mandela. Yet the mainstream media prefer to portray this great man as a kindly and benign old codger who won his battle for freedom. The assumptions behind this can be easily detected and should be excavated with a critical eye. The emphasis is always on the efforts towards reconciliation between the 'races' and not looking for 'revenge' against his former oppressors. The presupposition of biological distinctions between Africans remains intact while Mandela is to be applauded for being a 'restraint' on the barbarous hordes. Behind this lies the white racial consciousness, e.g. 'us' versus 'them'. We should resist this troubling banalisation of such an important figure. What is most admirable about Mandela is not the compromises his side made once in negotiations to dismantle the Apartheid regime.

The much lauded multiracial democracy of South Africa is actually a balancing arrangement between a state monopolised by the black vote and economic power resting in largely white hands. The mines remain privately owned and the largely black workforce is still being squeezed dry. In some ways the South African class system is now even worse than it was under Apartheid, the aspects of racial oppression which were inherent to that system remain in place in economic form. Except now the black people to rise to the business class have a vested interest in maintaining the continued subjugation of the toiling masses (most of whom are not white). The Marikana massacre in September 2012 demonstrated the disgraceful extent to which the ANC has become embroiled in the exploitation and oppression of the working-classes. The sight of white and black cops shooting the miners should be taken as the metaphor for the New South Africa.

To find the true heroism of Nelson Mandela we must examine the reasons for hysterical right-wing accusations of 'terrorism' against him. The African National Congress was dedicated to non-violent resistance for decades by this point and had exhausted every alternative to violent direct action. This was the background to the important moment when Nelson Mandela and his compatriots decided to found the Spear of the Nation and initiate the armed struggle. The targets were to be primarily governmental and symbolical, other targets included industrial and agricultural sabotage. Mandela was always eager to prevent the campaign from getting out of hand. He consistently opposed attacks on civilians and car-bombing in particular for it would degrade the movement and its cause. But he recognised that the situation in South Africa demanded more than pacifism.

In the Rivonia trial Nelson Mandela gave a virtuous defence of the cause "During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." It was these words which were the reason Mandela was sent to prison for 27 years. It was these words which were the reason the US Congress refused to remove Nelson Mandela from their terrorist list until 2008. And it is precisely for these words which we should admire him in his indomitable resistance to tyranny. To call this 'terrorism' is to hold secret sympathy with the same kind of people we defeated in 1945.

If you want to know what the ANC were fighting against for decades you ought to examine the barbarism in which the Apartheid regime was by its nature embroiled. South Africa was a counter-revolutionary force in the face of national liberation movements in its neighbouring countries. In its occupation of Namibia and invasions of Angola and Mozambique, South Africa became the belligerent in a conflict which left more than 1.5 million dead. This was at the same time that the white supremacist state was carrying out assassinations, coups and atrocities which spanned the whole of Africa and beyond. The ultra-violence of the regime was completely supported by the American and British governments of the day, as well as most other European countries and Israel. The major ally of the ANC in its solidarity with the African rebels was the Castro regime of Cuba - who sent thousands of health workers, arms and troops to assist the Africans in their fight with the old colonial powers, as well as forces from South Africa and the CIA.

The reason why the mainstream media would prefer not to delve into the details of the struggle against Apartheid is that it leads to embarrassing questions about the Cold War. We might be tempted to ask why Western governments were so vehemently on the side of Afrikaner minority rule. We might also want to know why is it the Communists were intervening on the side of freedom and not the West. When it comes down to it we would have to examine the history of South Africa and ask some pointed questions. This is precisely what the compromises of the 1990s blacked out from the public discourse. In a way this isn't surprising. Common to all beginnings the traumas of the past are always to be suppressed to prevent troubling questions of the new order from being raised. If the Apartheid system was a means of managing the class antagonism built into any capitalist society (which was the case) then we should want to know if this multiracial democracy is really much different.

Through divide and conquer the Afrikaner minority could maintain its hold on wealth procured through the exploitation of South Africa's copious resources as well as its working-classes. In the end it was the international campaigns to boycott and impose sanctions against the South African economy which crippled the system of divide and conquer. The ANC fought alongside the MPLA, SWAPO and Cuban troops against the counter-revolutionary forces at Cuito Cuanavale in what Nelson Mandela called "a turning point for the liberation of our continent and my people." These events combined with the sight of burning townships from Table Top Mountain was no doubt enough to convince many it was over. In the late 80s the Afrikaner business class then began to meet secretly with Oliver Tambo and others in places like Zambia to establish ties and negotiate. It took the party-state a bit longer. In a couple of years Nelson Mandela would be brought to meet with FW de Klerk in the first steps to his release and the official negotiations.

No Clean Hands.

Q: How big a part did violence pay in moving ANC forward?

A: These things are always difficult to gauge, but it's worth noting that pretty much every means of non-violent struggle were exhausted over many years. In my view Nelson Mandela was justified in shifting gears in the early 60s and founding the Spear of the Nation to initiate a campaign of sabotage. That's not to say every single action was justified, and indeed Mandela didn't simply believe that the resistance was to be fought by all means available. He was an opponent of car-bombing for example, precisely because it would degrade the movement. It's also the case that Mandela was very careful to select government targets, as well as industrial and agricultural targets for sabotage. So this wasn't indiscriminate civilian bloodshed for the most part. Then we have to put the struggle in its regional context.

The decolonization of Africa was still underway when Mandela undertook the new approach, but the liberation of Spanish and Portuguese colonies was stalled until the Fascist regimes began to collapse in the late 60s and early 70s. The primary force of counter-revolution in the region was Apartheid South Africa and it quickly moved to try and prevent its neighbours from achieving independence. The CIA was heavily involved of course. South Africa occupied Namibia and intervened in Angola and Mozambique, as well as organising bombing raids, coups and death squads in a lot of other places. We're talking 1.5 million dead plus $60 billion in damage from 1980 to 1988. Cuba pledged a great deal of support for the rebels in Angola, Namibia as well as the ANC. In fact, the ANC along with the MPLA and SWAPO fought alongside one another at Cuito Cuanavale in what Nelson Mandela called "a turning point for the liberation of our continent and my people."

I don't claim expert knowledge on this. My South African friends will probably have a lot to add on this. I would stress the demands of historical conditions and how quickly those demands can change. Gandhi's approach worked because the British Empire was crippled. You couldn't say that about the South African state in 1961.

Afterthoughts: Eventually the South African state was effectively crippled through the boycott campaigns and the international sanctions imposed on the country as opposition gradually became the predominant position in the world. Once the US had given up on Apartheid the South African regime had no choice but to dismantle the system of white supremacy. The next best scenario for the Afrikaner elite in South Africa was a compromise where the black masses would be given suffrage, while overwhelming economic power would remain in the hands of the white minority. The business class realised this by the late 1980s and began meeting secretly with Oliver Tambo and others in places like Zambia. It took the political class a bit longer to reach the same conclusion. Once free Nelson Mandela and the ANC negotiated away the possibility of economic justice, possibly out of fear of what the white generals might do if the ANC opts for significant social and economic reform. In this way we might understand Nelson Mandela as a transitional figure in an unfinished revolution.

War All the Time.

The special place of British troops who fought in the Falklands in this funeral should surprise no one. It was the war that saved Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 General Election, without which the later battles over the mines, privatisation and the poll tax would've never been fought. Since the death of the 'Iron Lady' we have heard little of the truth of Thatcher's foreign policy. Only the snippets have made it through in a collage of sound bites cherry-picked and arranged by the media class as part of the Thatcher hagiography. We're reminded of the Falklands war, as it was her saviour in life, it is now her saviour in death. There has been little to no mention of the full range of Thatcherite foreign policy, only Ireland and South Africa are mentioned as negative examples of the decisions made by the Thatcher government. Little mention of Thatcher's subservience to American power, evident in her decisions to support Reagan's bombing of Libya and Bush's invasion of Panama to kidnap Noriega. No mention of Thatcher's support for violence around the world.

 

 

The Falklands was once adequately summarised by Jorge Luis Borges as a "fight between two bald men over a comb." It was hardly a noble stand for democracy against dictatorship, as the Thatcher government was supporting Pinochet at the same time. In fact the Chilean dictatorship was a major ally in the war with Argentina. It's plausible that the Thatcher government would've had little qualm with the Argentine Generals had the islands not been an issue of dispute. That can hardly be called 'principled' in any sense of the word. It was a convenient way to benefit from the nationalist fervour too often stirred by war. In his bid to displace anger over his economic policies Galtieri gave Thatcher the opportunity needed to distract from the economic crisis in Britain. The sons of the poor were sent to fight and die for even less than the islands themselves. For their victory the Thatcher government rewarded the country with a programme of privatisation and deregulation, the consequences of which we are still living with to this day.

 

A year before the Falklands war was to be waged Margaret Thatcher gave the nod to the KMS to start training and arming the Contras in Nicaragua. It was a part of Washington's policy of stamping out all opposition with death squads. The support for the Contras would later burst out into the open and expose the ugliness under the surface of America's wars for 'liberty' and 'democracy'. The only other foreign policy position that the press have praised has been Thatcher's stance on the invasion of Grenada. Supposedly the 'Iron Lady' was outraged by the operations conducted in a Commonwealth nation without consulting the British. Actually the outrage was rather timid and private, while the UK government stood in line and supported the invasion. It definitely isn't the case that the Thatcherites were making anything more than cold calculated decisions to keep in line with American foreign policy. As we will see, for the most part, Thatcher failed to differentiate herself from the American line on world affairs.

 

 

We are meant to look upon Margaret Thatcher as a strident anti-Communist who brought down the Berlin Wall with the Reaganites. Even the words the Communists tried to use against her were turned against them. The term 'Thatcherism' was originally deployed by the Communist Party of Great Britain, while 'Iron Lady' was a sobriquet of Soviet invention; it was Dennis Healey who dubbed her 'Attila the Hen'. Old Madge delighted in all of this. It was the only and best card to play of course. Unsurprisingly then 'Attila the Hen' was quick to attack the Soviet empire upon taking office in 1979. It was one of Thatcher's first acts to persuade the European Economic Community to put a stop to its shipments of food and powdered milk to the children of Vietnam. After that decision a third of all infants under five deteriorated and many were stunted. Perhaps the only journalist to document this in the West was John Pilger. He also kept an eye on Thatcher's support for the enemies of the enemy in a bid to support one dominion over another in the Cold War.

 

It was not enough that the US war in Indochina had killed maybe more than 3 million people. The children of Vietnam were guilty by virtue of being born into a Communist state that had dared to try and defy the American empire. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot it was the US - still bitter over its humiliation in Indochina - led the chorus of international condemnation. Quick to follow the Americans as ever the British were soon on the side of Pol Pot. It was a matter of supporting China's influence in the region over that of Russia. The Khmer Rouge claimed to be the legitimate government of Kampuchea, so the US and the UK supported their bid to hold onto their seat in the UN. The West withheld aid to Cambodia until the Vietnamese occupation came to an end. The argument was that the Vietnamese would not let the aid reach the Cambodian people. Meanwhile, Vietnam sent over 25,000 tonnes of food aid across the border to feed civilians.

Instead the US government piled on the pressure for the World Food Programme to send $12 million in food to the Khmer Rouge sitting across the Thai border under UN protection. As Pilger has noted, the US had been secretly funding Pol Pot in exile since January 1980. The extent of this support - $85m from 1980 to 1986 - was later revealed in correspondence to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Major government would admit in 1991 that the UK had provided the Khmer Rouge with SAS training from 1983. It was in a 1988 interview for Blue Peter of all settings that the 'Iron Lady' clarified her view of the Khmer Rouge "Pol Pot could not go back... but some of the Khmer Rouge of course are very different I think there are probably two parts to the Khmer Rouge there are those who supported Pol Pot and then there is a much much more reasonable grouping within that title 'Khmer Rouge'..." This should not shock the cold-eyed realists of the world.



In the bid to support China mattered more than justice - which was not on the balance sheet of priorities. The deaths of 1.2 million people under Pol Pot were a price worth paying for extending China's reach and rolling back Russian influence. In the surrounding region the Thatcherites were a force of continuity and pledged support for Suharto in Indonesia. This support went as far as arming Suharto's troops to butcher the people of East Timor. The deals were overseen by minister Alan Clark, who had no concern for the consequences of his actions. Again, the justification for America's support for Suharto was to hold-off Communism. Sukarno was too left-ish and had to go, the CIA made sure of that in 1965 with the coup that installed Suharto for the next 33 years. The deaths of 200,000 people in East Timor didn't matter, neither did the deaths of more than a million people in Indonesia itself. It mattered not to Mr Reagan as little as it did to Mrs Thatcher.

 

This was a policy not contained nor unique to East Asia. It was the Thatcher government which violated Britain's neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war and began to sell as many arms as possible to Saddam in 1981. The American government had yet to remove Iraq from the terrorist list at that time. Once Iraq had been taken off the list (and replaced with Cuba) the Reagan administration threw total support behind Saddam. Before the Reaganites could fully align themselves with Hussein in 1982, Thatcher was sending Christmas cards to not just Saddam Hussein but Colonel Gaddafi. Together the Reaganites and the Thatcherites won over Saddam to the American side of the Cold War. That was before the standing of both Saddam and Gaddafi changed. Over 20 years later, as Jonathan Schwarz noted, the Iron Lady penned this line for an article "Saddam must go... It is clear to anyone willing to face reality that the only reason Saddam took the risk of refusing to submit his activities to U.N. inspectors was that he is exerting every muscle to build WMD."

 

We're living with the legacy of Thatcherism abroad and not just at home, it is very much alive and kicking. It's not just that we live with privately owned electric companies and a crippled labour movement. It was Thatcher's foreign policy which stands as the extension of the prescription of austerity, privatisation and deregulation. Financialisation and wars of aggression are not as far from one another as it may appear. Both were just as short-sighted as one another. It was the Thatcher-Reagan support for Iraq in its development of weapons of mass-destruction in the 1980s the Iranians reacted by re-opening the nuclear facilities that had been closed with the era of the Shah. We know how this ended for Iraq and we should be alarmed by the ongoing aggression demonstrated by the US and the UK towards Iran. It could all too easily escalate into a full-blown war and we know whose side we shall be on. And for that we may thank the departed.

Apartheid, Analogy and Disanalogy.

 

"Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians." - Nelson Mandela
 

The analogy between Israel and South Africa is often drawn when it comes to the question of the occupied territories and the Palestinians. There are good reasons for making this analogy, as well as serious differences between the cases that would mean the analogy is dubious. The problem of a Palestinian state is innate to Israel in the same way that racial equality is a problem innate to South Africa. The creation of nation-states out of the processes of European colonialism comes with the brutality of expansionism and war. South Africa was a principle aggressor in Southern Africa in its role as a counter-revolutionary force it slaughtered over a million people in neighbouring states in the 1980s. By comparison, Israel has been at war almost constantly for most of its existence and it serves the US as a "cop on the beat" in the Middle East. This is well demonstrated by the worrying tensions between Israel and Iran. I don't think I will be able to settle this matter in just one article, so I'm only going to go over a few points about the comparison.

The network of roadblocks and checkpoints which regulate the daily lives of Palestinians has been compared to the Apartheid rule of South Africa. Though it is worthy of condemnation even if we dismiss the comparison as a disanalogy. After all it's a system which has left pregnant women to give birth in the street only for their newborn babies to die in the heat, all in the name of Israel's national security. There is even a segregated highway system, roads on which only Jews are allowed to travel. This highway system was established on the pretext of counter-terrorism.  Actually this has nothing to do with counter-terrorism. Instead it is a part of the maintenance of the occupation of the West Bank, where the Israeli government supports (directly and indirectly) the settlements which hold 60% of the land. To this end the Israeli government are busily constructed a wall of annexation in and around the West Bank to snatch the major concentrations of resources and water from the Palestinians. This wall is called a 'defensive barrier' in Israel, which is what the Berlin Wall was called in East Germany. But the West Bank wall is longer than the Berlin Wall.

It's clear that the Israeli government is not too comfortable with the prospect of a Palestinian state. The continued encroachment into and domination of Palestinian territory has the potential to reduce the possibility of a free Palestine to a Bantustan at best. This isn't an accident of history. As Noam Chomsky would remind us Moshe Dayan's recommendation to his colleagues shortly after the 1967 conquests was that we must tell the Palestinians in the territories "You shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads". This is not the last of the ugly words spewed over Palestinian territory. Almost 30 years later the Director of Communications and Policy Planning David Bar-Illan who said in 1996 that "the Palestinians can have a state if they want, or they can call it fried chicken". And that's when the Israeli establishment talks peace. The establishment is aware of the situation on the ground, the need for a two-state settlement. It's just that there is no reason for the Israeli government to seek out peace.

It would seem that the Israeli elite are for a peaceful solution, whereas the more economically deprived and zealous Israeli citizens - particularly Mizrahi Jews and refuseniks - are much more hawkish. The ruling-class have been busily eroding the civic institutions and welfare state of Israel in recent decades. The neoliberalisation that the Israeli economy has undergone is another point of fair comparison with South Africa. Israel was once a quasi-socialist state with a significantly slim gap between the rich and the poor. Today it is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This is what comes with expanding a state by force and creating a country out of thin air. The apparent abnormality of Israel by world's standards today is exactly what makes it normal in historical standards. The very same process of aggressive expansionism was carried out in North America to a much more genocidal degree. And the founding of the American Republic provoked a desperate resistance from the likes of Geronimo.

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq." - Benjamin Netanyahu

There are good reasons to suspect that the Israeli ruling class is well aware of the consequences of their actions. In an interview with Gideon Levi Prime Minister Ehud Barak said "If I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage." By the way, everyone should know that Nelson Mandela was officially listed as a 'terrorist' in the US until about 2009. This isn't to say that by analogy Hamas are the Palestinian version of the ANC. Sadly the picture is much more complicated than that. The concept of 'terrorism' really designates the use of violence to achieve goals of a political, religious or ideological nature. That would certainly include all of modern warfare. So it could be that the notion of 'terror' lacks any weight in terms of moral condemnation. When the US shoots down an Iranian civilian airliner, it's an accident and not an act of terror. So it might be better to talk about specific forms of violence. For instance, in his years as 'terrorist' leader Nelson Mandela argued against car-bombing as a tactic. This wasn't a rejection of violence, rather it was about scale.

Christopher Hitchens observed the similarity of the theological justifications of Apartheid in the dogma of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Church adhered to a variety of Calvinism that enshrined a strict separation of white and black in holy design. Its presupposition was racial inequality, for the white man shares the bodily form of Christ. The ravings at the pulpit spewed forth its own blood myth of a Boer Exodus and in what Hitchens describes as an "Afrikaner permutation of Zionism" awarded the whites exclusive rights in a promised land. It should be no surprise that the National Party had an appalling record for anti-Semitism and took the side of Hitlerism in the Second World War. The end result was a pariah state where the rights of non-whites were nonexistent, in fact the people were confined to open prisons with boundaries defined by pigmentation. The state exercised its monopoly on violence to maintain this system for as long as it could. But the justifications were not simply theological.

Apartheid justified itself further as a separation which protected African culture from being drowned in white civilisation. Earlier in the 20th Century Jan Smuts formulated a holistic philosophy to justify British colonialism. This holism took the world to be composed of wholes, each together constitute a grand system while each can sustain and stabilise themselves. The stability of the system was guaranteed by the arrangement of wholes, provided each whole remained in the right place the system could be maintained. Every whole is made up of small wholes which are evolving and will inevitably come together to form larger wholes until finally becoming part of a single unified whole. This was the beginning of what would become Apartheid. South Africa further justified its brutal methods of repression in its claim to be an outpost of freedom fighting against Communism. Although Israel does not have the same kind of racial mythology as South Africa, its government often claims that the country is an outpost against radical Islamism.

No wonder then Israel and South Africa entered into a pariah's pact in 1975 to trade in weapons of mass-destruction. The end of Apartheid might actually signal how the occupation might end and Palestine might actually be established as an independent state. It was almost inevitable that the Apartheid system would undermine the future possibility of survival of the state. So the Afrikaner business elite began meeting with the ANC in neighbouring countries in the late 1980s. By then a campaign of sanctions and boycotting had done its damage on South Africa's economy and body politic. Around this time the Priests had a 'revelation' regarding racial equality. The fate of the regime was settled before the National Party goons even knew it. South Africa had been significantly isolated in the international community by that point. It was when the US started to withdraw its support for Apartheid that the Botha government started to cave. But this came after decades of struggle in spite of extreme violence and rejectionism.