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The Attack on Ship to Gaza an Excuse to Increase Tension? |
By Benny Asman - 1 June 2010
I am not a supporter of conspiracy theories. In general I think that conspiracy “theoreticians” display that they do not understand how politics and society work. After the Israeli attack on Ship to Gaza, I can however not restrain myself from launching a conspiracy theory.
1) The attack on the Gaza aid flotilla was neither a failure nor an “accident at work”. The purpose was to kill, thereby increasing the tension in the whole region and polarise international opinion. No one can convince me that what took place in the early hours of 31st May happened because the Israeli soldiers were “surprised” by the “unexpected violence” from the activists. The high command of the army and the Minister of Defence Ehud Barak had given green light to shoot with live ammunition already when boarding the ship.
2) The reason for increasing the tension is that Israel is actively preparing a new war against Lebanon. Israeli media openly discuss the coming war: not if there is going to be a war, but when it will come. Just the other day, the Israeli daily, Haaretz, interviewed the commander of the 162th armoured tank division, nick named “The Steel Division”. The general in question openly told Haaretz of two years of military exercise, training the units for a swift mobile tank attack against Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon. The general carefully underlined that everything was being done to avoid a new 2006 fiasco with Lebanon. That Israel recently have situated three nuclear submarines outside the coast of Iran also points to that Israel is preparing for war.
If the attack on the aid flotilla was an introductory manoeuvre leading to a new war with Hezbollah it will not take long before the war starts, perhaps within months.
I hope that my own conspiracy theory is as wrong as all the others, but …
Benny Asman is a free lance journalist stationed in Brussels, writing for Amandla!
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“Greece is not far away from South Africa” |
5 May 2010
By Dick Forslund
As the rise in unemployment now shows, old style capitalist ‘recovery’ is far away. The new wave of chaotic crisis riding Europe can kill it off entirely. With its gigantic coal power plans and insufficient taxation of the rich and corporations, SA is building up of debt, just like Greece. Greece did not get any wind fall profits from the Olympic Games in 2004, it just added to its debt. In the same vain, the more than R15 billion World Cup cost will not save the SA economy.
“No reason to accept a second bail-out”
Close to half of SA’s export is to EU. The SA government hopes that a fast recovery will give new tax revenues so as not to end up in a debt crisis like Greece. Today, this hope in fact depends on one unacceptable assumption: That the people of Greece shall accept the draconic austerity package. Neither the Greeks nor other ordinary citizens in Europe have a sensible reason to do accept this deal. The EU package of over R1 trillion (Euro720Bn) is in effect a second bail-out of the banks. The French and German banks stand for 30% of the financial claims on Greece! A business-as-usual recovery thus has no moral basis. The financial industry and its rich stake holders should take the full blow whilst small savings are protected, just as the Greek unions demand in their 2 day general strike.
The hope for a recovery-as-always, leaving SA capitalism completely intact, lacks reason. If the Greeks are forced to swallow this deal, which I sincerely hope they will not, this will only postpone the crisis for one year or two. People’s wages and pensions will be cut in Greece and then in the whole of Europe, as well as the public sectors in the Euro zone, where almost all of the governments are heavily indebted to predatory finance. Private and public spending is squeezed while the bulk of the 1R trillion pump up luxury consumption or is reinvested in financial speculation. It will simply turn the fiscal crisis into a new international crisis of demand. Again, this will hit South Africa.
“Capitalism an outdated system”
This is how the first crisis came about. Wages in US and Europe was squeezed by the neoliberal pursue for higher profits. Buoyant mass demand was replaced with consumption on credit provided by high finance. Today the private credit road is closed. Taxation in accordance with ability to pay, so to keep up public sector demand, is blocked by the neoliberals. Vested interest instead goes for European service delivery, starting with Greece, where corporate and upper class tax avoidance has been most endemic.”
South Africans have the right, even in the constitution, to aspire for what the people of Greece are trying to protect today with their general strike. Social services, health care, pensions … these things have to be pushed through also in South Africa, but now in a period when the system is becoming deranged. Trade unions, the communities and civil society in SA must side with the Greeks, demand their social rights and question capitalism in doing so. Capitalism is an outdated system. Evidently, it cannot organize the economy any longer.
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Just as South Africans waited with baited breath to hear the outcome of the disciplinary action against one of South Africa’s notorious youth leaders, another Notorious B-I-G falls...Lolly Jackson.
For many months now Julius Malema has dominated the front pages of tabloids, Sunday papers and social media...but not today. Today, the murder of the famous strip club owner – Lolly Jackson – dominated the news in the country.
It is with a bit of sadness that I look upon his death, as this controversial, and what seems to be larger-than-life South African was gunned down in Johannesburg at his friend’s place. What is funny is that like Malema, Jackson was someone that often gave controversial statements to the media. Who could forget his larger than life billboard with a picture of a female exotic dancer – with the tagline “Teazers: No need for gender testing” after the disgusting gender testing done on Caster Semenye, a South African sports hero. Or his comments on the World Cup – that South Africa had to sort out transport and crime if the world cup was going to be any success.
These public commentators seems to dull the reader, but still providing some humour to the situation we find ourselves in as South Africans; high unemployment rates, inequality, lack of basic services etc.
Lolly Jackson sold sex and Malema made the youth league “sexy” again. Either way, today we mourn the demise of both these South Africans; one was murdered. And the other’s voice seems to have been killed as Malema’s camp remains silent ...at least for today.
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Corruption gives birth to a new social movement! |
5 April 2010
By Amandla Staff
Mainstream media, opposition parties and many of us in Main Road South Africa are labeling the corruption practices of government officials, party bosses, those connected to the ruling party and their WAGS (wives and girlfriends) as a moral epidemic sweeping like a virus. Many are infected. High profile faces of the ruling alliance are not immune.
Motlanthe’s son, Mandela’s grand-son, Zuma’s WAGs, sons, daughters and nephews, Harvard educated Attorney Seth Nthati, Juluis Malema and even Vavi’s wife are allegedly among the endless list of those suffering from tendernitis or have a touch of briberuis(bribery). We gasp in disbelief as millions of Rands disappear into the pockets of individuals, their shelf companies, their off shore accounts, their tender agreements. Time and again we witness how charges against them are dropped, in payment for who knows what.
It has come to a point when all these scandals begin to lose their shock value. Like TV violence, we become immune to the moral violence of these actions, as if we are watching entertainment. Indeed, the killing of individuals who stood in someone’s way used to be political. Today, killings have evidently turned economic in some parts of our country, even when politicians, leaders and officials are the target of hired hit men.
Why is all this happening? There is much to the saying: “behind every great fortune is a great crime” Corruption has become endemic because capital is still apartheid-era Capital enmeshed in whiteness. The apartheid ruling classes also once acquired their first wealth and economic power through plunder, bribery, theft and murder. Today they have the power to let a stream of money trickle down from the commanding heights of the economy to junior BEE partners. Ordinary business deals, illegal bribes, or contracts which blur the line between moral and immoral, between law and lawlessness, are mixed into a chaotic mess of old alliances and new loyalties. This is not enough for the platoons of wanna-BEEs. They try to break their way through the barriers of apartheid Capitalism but this fortress is too strong. The only way to accumulate productive wealth for these aspirants is through a parasitic, and generally corrupt relationship with the state, whose top structures are today controlled by the ANC.
What is the force which moves this avalanche of corruption? Let us suggest that we are witnessing the formation of a social movement − presently the most lucrative social movement in South Africa. Corruption in SA today is the surface expression of this social force. It is a social movement that is anti-social.
To stress the deep social underpinnings of what is happening is not to rule out the fact that membership to this new social movement is voluntary. There is a moral choice to make. And the aspirants choose to align themselves with politically positioned individuals to reap the benefits of membership to the movement. This social movement also demands that you defend its guiding principles of self-interest and wealth amassing with fervor and passion. Julius Malema admits this freely when in his M&G interview (26/3) he says he lives on ‘handouts’ and poses before the camera with his quarter million Rand watch. Whatever the political interventions of the ANCYL may be in the public arena, this watch has become Malema’s most important message to the youth, and a powerful political metaphor for this new social movement. Its meaning is well captured by political philospher Steve Biko:
‘This is white man’s integration – an integration based on exploitative values. It is an integration in which black will compete with black, using each other as rungs up a step ladder leading them to white values. It is an integration in which the black man will have to prove himself in terms of these values before meeting acceptance and ultimate assimilation, and in which the poor will grow poorer and the rich richer in a country where the poor have always been black.’
When Malema ‘doesn’t have food’ he calls upon powerful friends such as the premier of Limpopo to help him. ‘That’s how we have come to relate to each other’, said Malema, seemingly unconscious of how in this statement, he has pinpointed the economic nature of today’s relations in the ANC-family, which have turned comradeship into cabalism.
In this context the words of Franz Fanon in his book The Wretched of the Earth is prophetical.
"But since then [independence] this party has sadly disintegrated; nothing is left but the shell of a party, the name, the emblem and the motto. The living party, which ought to make possible the free exchange of ideas which have been elaborated according to the real needs of the mass of the people, has been transformed into a trade union of individual interests."
At the centre of this new social movement is the old and powerful idea of individual wealth embodied by apartheid capital. Today, this idea is propagated by the ruling alliance and top leaders in black South Africa. How ironic that success and wealth is still measured by an apartheid era benchmark which calls for dispossessing others to enrich yourself.
No moral preaching can stop this social force; no reading of the law to culprits. What can stop this is an attack from a counter social movement, which potentially counts millions of citizens as members. From Balfour in the North, to Butterworth in the East, Masiphumelela in the South, and the many sites of struggles across the country, the forces for a social movement from below is gathering.
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Terre’blanche – an economic murder! |
7 April 2010
By Helga Jansen
Before the events surrounding the murder of Eugene Terre’blanche become the stuff of legend, myth and spin, we must soberly look at his killing and shape an analysis of his death within the contexts of the dire conditions of rural farm workers, and the unequal social relations simmering in the countryside. For this reason it would be too simplistic to view Terreblanches’ murder as a purely racially motivated act. That does not mean that the singing of a song, which should be relegated to history, has not played its part in exacerbating an environment of racial tension fueled by the populism of Malema with the acquiescence of the ruling party. To view the Terre’blanche murder as a race murder is to look for an easy answer. Terre’blanche was not killed because he was white. The meaning of Terre'blanche's murder is a symptom of our unequal society.
The talk of race must move beyond white supremacy and black nationalism, and look at the environment in which he was murdered – an unequal society in which a growing under-class of urban and rural poor, mainly black, see their situation growing more dire, made more so through weak service delivery and extreme levels of unemployment. Their situation is juxtaposed against the historical wealth of white South Africans, and the nouveau wealth of black South Africans. So if we are to discuss this murder, as one of many murders taking place throughout the country, then it must be in the context of growing frustration with a state alienated from the plight of its people, the continued monopolization of resources by capital, and an economic status quo in which generally, white South Africans remain wealthy and land owning. Terre’blanche’s murder was an economic murder.
Terre’blanche’s murder in fact illuminates the feudal system of rule still prevalent in our countryside. There has been very little change in the social relations between white farmers and black farm labourers since the days of colonialism. Not since the slave Galant led the Koubokkeveld revolt in 1825 as the whispers of freedom came across the Atlantic; not since 2006 when farmer Piet Botes from the Leeu Gamka area in the Karoo assaulted two teenage girls, was found guilty in a court, while facing charges of abducting and murdering 13-year-old Elizabeth Martiens; nor recently in 2010 when Swartruggens farm worker, Zibilon Setlhodi was badly assaulted by farmer, a Mr. H Engelbrecht.
The list of black farm workers murdered or assaulted by white farmers is as endless as the 3000-odd farmers whom, Agriforum, and others in the Afrikaner community, say have been murdered. The manner of his death, viciously beaten to death, is a bitter-sweet irony for Terre’blanche, a man whose time in prison was not for political reasons, but rather for assaulting and maiming two black men; Paul Motshabi, who was in his employ in 1997, and petrol attendant, John Ndzima. How ironic that this ‘kragdadige’ lived by the sword, and died by it.
Stories are emerging of how Terre’blanche ill-treated his own farm workers. If true it sheds light on the many cases of farm owners (predominantly white) who continue to maltreat farm workers, exploit their labour, rape women and girls, and dispossess families of their homes. Despite the laws protecting security of tenure of farm workers, the labour laws legislating hours of work and minimum wage standards for farm workers, or just the framework of basic human rights underpinning the political and civil rights of citizens in the public arena, many rural farmers operate in a feudal time-warp of ownership and social relations. The political and physical isolation of rural towns provides an almost schizophrenic immunity from a South Africa that has moved on from apartheid, if only in legal terms. Civil, political and social rights are often ignored in the social relations between black farm workers and white farmers as can be attested to by the many cases of assault, battery and even murder brought by black
farm workers against white farmers.
So, given this sub-world of white Afrikaner feudalism still alive in South Africa’s rural hinterland, is it any wonder that the two farm workers accused of killing Terre’blanche, say he refused to pay them the paltry amount of R350 for a months’ work. While the circumstances surrounding his death remains to be confirmed in court, and murder itself cannot be condoned, given rural social and economic relations, is it any wonder that Terreblanche was murdered in the way that he was? The master/servant relations underpinning social structures is alive and well in rural South Africa and underscores the continued struggle to organize rural farm workers.
Helga Jansen is a member of the Amandla! editorial staff
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