Apartheid and South Africa

An excellent article by john Pilger, he shows real insight into "how it really is". Reprinted in full because it's that important, know your history!!

informationclearinghouse.info

September 21, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - The murder of 34 miners by the South African police, most of them shot in the back, puts paid to the illusion of post-apartheid democracy and illuminates the new worldwide apartheid of which South Africa is both an historic and contemporary model.

In 1894, long before the infamous Afrikaans word foretold "separate development" for the majority people of South Africa, an Englishman, Cecil John Rhodes, oversaw the Glen Grey Act in what was then the Cape Colony. This was designed to force blacks from agriculture into an army of cheap labour, principally for the mining of newly discovered gold and other precious minerals. As a result of this social Darwinism, Rhodes' own De Beers company quickly developed into a world monopoly, making him fabulously rich. In keeping with liberalism in Britain and the United States, he was celebrated as a philanthropist supporting high-minded causes.

Today, the Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University is prized among liberal elites. Successful Rhodes scholars must demonstrate "moral force of character" and "sympathy for and protection of the weak, and unselfishness, kindliness and fellowship". The former president Bill Clinton is one, General Wesley Clark, who led the Nato attack on Yugoslavia, is another. The wall known as apartheid was built for the benefit of the few, not least the most ambitious of the bourgeoisie.

This was something of a taboo during the years of racial apartheid. South Africans of British descent could indulge an apparent opposition to the Boers' obsession with race, and their contempt for the Boers themselves, while providing the facades behind which an inhumane system guaranteed privileges based on race and, more importantly, on class.

The new black elite in South Africa, whose numbers and influence had been growing steadily during the latter racial apartheid years, understood the part they would play following "liberation". Their "historic mission", wrote Frantz Fanon in his prescient classic The Wretched of the Earth, "has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism rampant though camouflaged".

This applied to leading figures in the African National Congress, such as Cyril Ramaphosa, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, now a corporate multi-millionaire, who negotiated a power-sharing "deal" with the regime of de F.W. Klerk, and Nelson Mandela himself, whose devotion to an "historic compromise" meant that freedom for the majority from poverty and inequity was a freedom too far. This became clear as early as 1985 when a group of South African industrialists led by Gavin Reilly, chairman of the Anglo-American mining company, met prominent ANC officials in Zambia and both sides agreed, in effect, that racial apartheid would be replaced by economic apartheid, known as the "free market".

Secret meetings subsequently took place in a stately home in England, Mells Park House, at which a future president of liberated South Africa, Tabo Mbeki, supped malt whisky with the heads of corporations that had shored up racial apartheid. The British giant Consolidated Goldfields supplied the venue and the whisky. The aim was to divide the "moderates" - the likes of Mbeki and Mandela - from an increasingly revolutionary multitude in the townships who evoked memories of uprisings following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and at Soweto in 1976 - without ANC help.

Once Mandela was released from prison in 1990, the ANC's "unbreakable promise" to take over monopoly capital was seldom heard again. On his triumphant tour of the US, Mandela said in New York: "The ANC will re-introduce the market to South Africa." When I interviewed Mandela in 1997 - he was then president - and reminded him of the unbreakable promise, I was told in no uncertain terms that "the policy of the ANC is privatisation".

Enveloped in the hot air of corporate-speak, the Mandela and Mbeki governments took their cues from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. While the gap between the majority living beneath tin roofs without running water and the newly wealthy black elite in their gated estates became a chasm, finance minister Trevor Manuel was lauded in Washington for his "macro-economic achievements". South Africa, noted George Soros in 2001, had been delivered into "the hands of international capital".

Shortly before the massacre of miners employed for a pittance in a dangerous, British-registered platinum mine, the erosion of South Africa's economic independence was demonstrated when the ANC government of Jacob Zuma stopped importing 42 per cent of its oil from Iran under intense pressure from Washington. The price of petrol has already risen sharply, further impoverishing people.

This economic apartheid is now replicated across the world as poor countries comply with the demands of western "interests" as opposed to their own. The arrival of China as a contender for the resources of Africa, though without the economic and military threats of America, has provided further excuse for American military expansion, and the possibility of world war, as demonstrated by President Barack Obama's recent arms and military budget of $737.5 billion, the biggest ever. The first African-American president of the land of slavery presides over a perpetual war economy, mass unemployment and abandoned civil liberties: a system that has no objection to black or brown people as long as they serve the right class. Those who do not comply are likely to be incarcerated.

This is the South African and American way, of which Obama, son of Africa, is the embodiment. Liberal hysteria that the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is more extreme than Obama is no more than a familiar promotion of "lesser evilism" and changes nothing. Ironically, the election of Romney to the White House is likely to reawaken mass dissent in the US, whose demise is Obama's singular achievement.

Although Mandela and Obama cannot be compared - one is a figure of personal strength and courage, the other a pseudo political creation -- the illusion that both beckoned a new world of social justice is similar. It belongs to a grand illusion that relegates all human endeavour to a material value, and confuses media with information and military conquest with humanitarian purpose. Only when we surrender these fantasies shall we begin to end apartheid across the world.

www.johnpilger.com

Memories

I want to try and live my life carrying all my memories. And if even if the memories are painful, even if they do nothing but hurt me, I want to keep them. Even those memories I sometimes I wish I could forget. As long as I carry them with me, as long as I can keep holding on, then some day, some day, I’ll be strong enough that those memories don’t hurt me anymore. I’ll be glad that I have them. That’s what I want. With all my heart. That’s why all my memories are precious to me. I don’t think it would be okay to forget a single one.

Natsuki TAKAYA

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This is the hardest thing for me.

Patterns and properties

All of the Universe is composed of systems and patterns. A system is a set of components that interact with each other. A pattern is a property that emerges from the interactions between the components of a system. Each pattern becomes a component of a system on a higher scale. This gives rise to the infinite fractal nature of the Cosmos.

This echoed some Pirsig in my mind, from Layla, where he theorises on the nature of humans and human interactions. Going from the molecular, to the biological, the the social, and the intellectual, each step representing a set of patterns and laws governing that pattern.
The most curious thing about that system is that each pattern is the inverse of the previous. Laws that govern molecular compounds focus on binding the elements together, in a static state. The biological level, becomes the opposite, where the goal is not static-ness, but movement. Freedom to move at will is completely and utterly against the laws of the molecular.
Going from one extreme to the other is how life has become more infinitely complex and interwoven. And it is not always one set of laws that operate ... each new level, while ushering in a new set of natural laws, still holds within it the previous laws, only attenuated, or seconded to the new primary goals.

Sometimes we can no longer follow the established laws, and patterns, but we have to break ABOVE the current, and go against the grain, to live on a higher plane. Of course, the errant branches are the first to be pruned.

Dagga couple home invaded

The DC were hit badly last night. Our home was hit at gunpoint by three robbers. All our notebooks, phones and backup drives have been stolen.
Two years of case notes gone. We're unharmed and have Myrtle's spare phone.
It's really cruel.
There will be a break in transmission while we deal with insurance and shlep etc.
Keep the posts coming. We'll be back.

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Sending good thoughts and love to them.

Very suspicious.

High feeling

Thank you gearheadsandmonkeywrenches.tumblr.com

Horror in high places

You have more rights because you're a majority; you have less rights because you're a minority. That's how democracy works,”

But you wouldn’t tell from Zuma’s demeanour and responses in Parliament on Thursday that he appreciated the extent of the country’s crisis, or that it bothered him in the least. He was his usual giggly self, manoeuvring around contentious issues and washing his hands of responsibility for any of the many things that went awry.

Zuma ignored Kganare’s question about whether the country was under a security threat and why its military had been placed on high alert.

She called on Zuma to apologise to those brutally affected by his decision.

Zuma refused, saying it was not written on people’s foreheads who would go out of prison and recommit crime. He said while he sympathised with those affected, he would not apologise for releasing the prisoners as he was legally and constitutionally allowed to do so.

dailymaverick.co.za

This is an accurate reflection of the state of the nation. Words cannot convey my horror.

Health warning labels

Brilliant!!!

Thank you Le Container.

NollieFaith

We are constantly in need of anything and everything skateboard related and will happily accept new or used gear (bearings, decks, grip tape, hardware, protective gear, skate tools, trucks, wheels, etc). T-shirts and skate shoes are also much appreciated. Other items we could put to use include balloons, coloring books, crayons, footballs, pencils, sidewalk chalk, and sketch pads. You can drop off to us during one of our sessions or contact us to arrange a pickup or drop off at another time.

nolliefaith.org

www.citypress.co.za

www.iol.co.za

Fracking stupid

Thank you Zapiro.

Welcome rain!

Not much else really, just so happy to feel the rain and smell the clean moist air ...

Owls

In the garden

Perfection