When the tick gets bigger than the dog

03 August 2011

The weekly diet of government corruption dished up by the Sunday newspapers and the Mail & Guardian nauseates. For instance, the story of Transnet's CE, Siyabonga Gama's receipt of R10m, despite having been found guilty of irregularly awarding an R18.9m tender to a security company linked to former Minister Siphiwe Nyanda, should propel South Africans into action.

The Arms Deal is growing like an octopus, while Julius Malema's alleged access to tenders for self-enrichment continues to astound. There just is no end to the stealing of taxpayers' money meanwhile our President is silent about the culture of graft that has come to characterise his presidency.

The municipal elections have come and gone and there is still no sign of President Jacob Zuma taking any action against Sicelo Shiceka, Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs. Shiceka is said to have used his influence to ensure that a R32m tarred road was routed past a house he was building for his mother in the Eastern Cape while thousands of residents in the area do not even have dirt roads to reach their homes.

He is also alleged to have stayed at a string of luxury hotels at taxpayers' expense, like his colleague, Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa. Shiceka, whose claims to have a Master's degree have proven to be untrue, might justifiably say that both accusations should long ago have been levelled against other politicians who like him are guilty of the same misdemeanours but who get off scot free. For instance, according to a court case in the Pietermaritzburg's High Court in January 2010, the current Minister of Transport, Sbu Ndebele, had a road to his country residence in Natal tarred at a cost of R5.5m (an amount recorded in the 2004/5 budget for the province).

If newspaper reports and court documents are to be believed, the five kilometres of tarred road stopped shortly after Ndebele's property, reverting again to dirt road. The local newspaper, the Natal Witness, reported that local residents and farmers had questioned why the nearby and far busier Tugela Ferry-Keate's Drift road had not been tarred or maintained given the dangerous potholes on the road.

Corruption has become so endemic that Shiceka's profligate lifestyle seems more akin to that of a Trappist monk if his record is compared to the former ANC speaker in the Western Cape Provincial Legislature, Shaun Byneveldt, who like his colleague Ebrahim Rasool, was rewarded with an ambassadorship for his sins.

In September 2008 the Cape Argus reported that Byneveldt had travelled to 51 countries since taking up the speaker's position four years earlier and that he had taken family members on some of those trips. According to a source at the Cape Argus, "...Byneveldt was ‘forever travelling' and seemed to spend more time out of the country than at work." The newspaper asked him what benefit had accrued to the taxpayer from his many gravy-plane excursions. Byneveldt's reply, after a week, was arrogant and devoid of respect for the citizens who funded his lavish lifestyle:

"The Western Cape provincial parliament and the office of the speaker in particular hereby reserve the right to respond fully to all and/or any matter raised in your aforesaid email when adequate opportunity avails itself, save to place on record, at this juncture, that the information you rely on, in a variety of material respects, is correct."

This contemptuous abrogation of the ANC's solemn commitment in 1994 to break with our apartheid past and to govern in a transparent and accountable way is a cynical response to our constitutional right to know how our taxes are spent. Shiceka could justifiably ask: "Why pick on me when the ANC has given carte blanche to its legions of deployed parasites in the looting of the public purse?" He would have a point.

From the Land Bank, to South African Airways, to the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and even Robben Island, billions of rand have gone down the drain. And with every stash of money misappropriated, some poor community is deprived of a school, a clinic, or a park.

No quote seems more apt than the comment made by Zimbabwean Economist, John Robertson: "We imagine corruption to be like a tick on a dog. There are some places in Africa where the tick is bigger than the dog."

When that happens, the dog in all probability will die!

http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=249104&sn=Detail&pid=71619

WE CANT BUT THEY CAN?

Wed 17 Aug 2011

 

By Shane

 

Why is it that the ANC government has a different set of rules for blacks and whites?

I have a large back garden, so why is that I cant go and collect all these destitute whites and let them build some sort of shelters in my back yard? I will happily share my water and electricity with them? At least if they are squatting in my back yard I can make sure they are warm and fed and safe from the criminals that would prey on them? Make sure that their children remain healthy?? Because that would be illegal and in very short order I would get a demand from the government to brake down said shacks or find myself being arrested? And if I don't break them down fast enough they will come and do it for me! If I were to question these actions I would be informed of zoning laws and all sorts of municipal by laws that prevent me from doing this sort of thing!

So where are all these zoning laws and municipal by laws when the destitute black people decide to put up shacks in the same area and just live where they please?? Do the laws not apply to them because they are black? It seems that way does it not? If I collect all the white people who are having a hard time keeping up with the petrol price in my combi and take them to work - will I be allowed to pay less at the toll gates or will I still have to pay full price unlike the black owned mini bus taxi's? If I bring you a young man who needs work will you take into consideration that he grew up in the new South Africa and never benefited from apartheid in any way at all and should therefore be exempt from affirmative action, will you employ him or will you punish him simply because he is white?

Do you even realize that the older white generation is rapidly heading for retirement age and those are the people who's tax money supports this country, and the younger white generation are packing up and leaving because they are tired of their hard earned education being taken for granted! And the world at large are only to happy to offer them good money and careers because they know these are hard working tax paying people.

If you take the rate of decline in this country into consideration in fields like health care and education then it is plain to see what is going to happen to this country when the white taxes start to get less and less? Banana republic springs to mind? Can you imagine if we started a union for white people and decided to strike because of the unfair conditions we are working under? There wont be rubbish in the streets, we wont damage other people's property? The economy will however collapse! But then that is not how we were raised - we believe in hard work and that nothing in life is free. Yet another reason why we are so attractive to other countries.

So nobody is asking you to hand the country over to the whites, all we ask is that you govern it fairly, because the future at this point looks bleak - just ask your friend Mugabe how well his people are doing without the whites?

 

http://letterdash.com/shaneworld/we-cant-but-they-can-wtf

So what exactly is your problem with Communism?

By Mike Smith
15th of August 2011

At the heart of our claim to exist are what scholars of philosophy or ethics call “The right to life”.

This right constitutes the basis of just about every government constitution of just about every nation on earth. It is the basis of all law systems whether it be Roman Dutch, African tribal law or the the law between two men stranded on an island. Everyone claims himself this right to life as the most basic right of which all other rights are corollaries.

But who or what gave us this right? Was it our mothers who gave birth to us? Was it the doctors or midwives who smacked us on our bottoms to allow us to draw our first breath of air? Or was it God or Mother Nature…who gave us this “right to life”?

Wherever this right to life comes from, it causes a cognitive dissonance, because the same entity that granted this life also takes it away, which means the right to life did not exist in the first place.

Let me use an example. The same entity (God, Mother Nature, evolution, etc) that gives a lion the right to live, takes the right to life of the impala, his prey away. Does the Impala not have any right to life?

You cannot give one being the right to life, without denying another that same right. The moment you give the fish in the sea a right to life you take away the right to life away from the dolphin or the shark. The moment you give the impala the right to life, you take away the right to life from the lion.

Besides, when you give a human being the right to life and he goes and swims in the sea where sharks are, the shark will not care or not even be aware of the human’s right to life, let alone honour it.

Therefore I have to conclude that the “right to life” is a myth. It does not exist. Man and all beings, plant or animal has only one right and that is “The right to fight”.

Whoever one believes is in control, God, nature, evolution, doesn’t matter, one only has the right to fight…Fight for your own existence, fight for your right to life.

In nature the antelope has the right to resist the lion through running speed. The plants have thorns or secrete poison to resist, but so every being has developed his own right to fight for life.

Human beings do not automatically have any right to life. Nobody or nothing has given us any rights to life, least of all a piece of paper with ink on it called a constitution.

Compared to other animals, we are weak and slow. Our hearing, sight and sense of smell are pathetic compared to animals. Our weapons, our thorns, our poison, our speed, lies in our minds. Man survives by reason only. By using his brain.

When one speaks to Communists and one is weak of mind, weak of reason, one can easily be convinced about the goodness of Communism.

I recently had an interesting discussion with a former high ranking officer from a former Communist country. It came down to “What exactly is your gripe with Socialism/Communism?”…as he asked me.

On the surface Socialism/Communism sounds wonderful. All living in peace and sharing all property. All working towards the common good of society, etc.

When one points out the fruits of Socialism that more than a 100 million people have died in the last century due to it, then the Communist will tell you that, “Yes, there were despotic, sick leaders, that did evil things, but with the teachings of communism there is nothing wrong. You cannot say Communism is wrong just because a few leaders or people lost the way and now use it to prove that the teachings of Communism are wrong. Communism cares about humanity. It cares about about the downtrodden and exploited workers; It stands for the equal treatment of all and the sharing of wealth, etc”.

My answer to my communist friend was, “Communism takes away the right to own property”.

Immediately he was on his hind legs, his answer was, “Look,…in the end, the dear Lord gave us one earth and we all live on this one piece of land. What gives you or any person the right to claim one section of land for yourself. God gave it to all of us. Ultimately it belongs to Him. We should share it.”

Notice how he (an atheist) uses “God” to soften up his opponent.

So I said to him, “OK…let us leave God out for a moment, because many people are atheists or have other Gods with other values and belief systems, let us concentrate on reason.”

What exactly does this saying mean, “The right to own property?”, and why is it so important in our struggle for survival or this “Right to life” that most people subscribe to?

When you are born, you have nothing except your body. But almost immediately the body starts to fight parasites that want to kill it. Life is a struggle between parasites and hosts.

The body is essentially only a life support system for your brain. So to narrow it down, you basically own nothing, but your mind. Your mind is your ability to reason. Your mind is your weapon in your fight for survival.

Your mind and body is yours. You can do with it what you want in order to ensure your life and your survival and your pursuit of happiness. Nobody else owns it or can claim ownership of your body or mind.

When a primitive man takes some mud or sticks and builds himself a shelter, he takes up his “right to fight”. He uses his reason and his labour to fight the elements and to ensure his survival. It is then his property. If you take that modest abode away from him, you endanger his life or his “Right to life”.

When that same primitive man takes a stick and makes himself a spear to hunt with and takes a rock to make an axe with, it is his property and his tools to fight for his survival and his “right to life”. If you take away those tools, his property, you take away his right to life.

But he is still left with his mind and his ability to reason. So he takes a piece of land and through using his reason and his sweat he cultivates it, grows maize, domesticate animals and builds furrows to irrigate his land and provide the animals with water. This becomes his property and if you take that away from him, you endanger his right to life.

Not only do you endanger his right to life, but also that of his family and his pursuit of happiness. You then take away his right to produce offspring and survive.

If that man uses his reason to become an artisan, a spear maker, a bowyer and fletcher a shoemaker or a tailor and you take his little business away, you take away his right to life.

If you take away a person’s horse or carriage or car you take away his ability to go to work and in so doing threaten his life.

If a person is small of stature, old or female, he/she easily becomes prey to those who want to take his life or his pursuit of happiness away from him/her. Such a person will then again use his mind, his ability to reason to fight for his /her survival.

Such a person will invent a multiplier of force such as a sword or a firearm or whatever he thinks is appropriate to defend himself. Self defence is not a right in itself, the same way as the right to life is no right in itself. The only right an individual has is “The right to fight”.

If you take away his right to own a multiplier if he thinks it is what will ensure his survival, you take away his ability to reason and his right to life or his right to fight for his life.

But it goes deeper than that and it becomes worse…

Socialism aims to take away the rights to all those properties and make it the property of “The People” or society as if society is some anthropomorphic entity with its own reason and character called culture.

Communism aims to take away those same rights and make it the property of the State.

In both cases the individual is left with his body and mind that he owns, but he is not free to use it. Society or the state owns it and decides about his survival and what makes him happy, so he can use neither body nor mind to decide over his own destiny.

Both systems through taking his property away and letting others decide about his right to life and his pursuit of happiness then take away his ability to reason. This is called enslavement…not only of body , but also of mind.

When a person looses the right to reason, to think, to use his mind to fight for his survival, he becomes a slave to others and he ultimately loses his soul.

Such a person then has no incentive to use his mind or reason to exist. He has no incentive to produce. The only way to get him then to produce is through terror and threats to his life. The results are predictable…starvation, poverty and the slaughter of millions.

That is why Socialism and or Communism are evil. At the heart of it lies “The right to fight”, whether it be against the elements, parasites or an oppressive government.

Man can only ensure his right to life if he can use his reason and has the right to own property. If man is refused the right to own a spear, a bow or a piece of land, he will perish.

The only prevention of his death is for the individual to rebel against the ones who wants to take his right to own property away from him. The only way he can ensure his survival is to exercise his God given, “Right to fight”.

That fight might take many forms. It might be by the pen, the internet, the sword, politics or whatever…at the end it comes down to the right to reason, the right to think freely and express one freely. That is also why freedom of speech is so important in our fight for survival.

Freedom of speech does no physical harm to anybody. If freedom of speech and expression through art and music is taken away, then one’s freedom to express oneself through reason is taken away, and it leaves no other alternative than to express oneself through physical force.

In the end, if you take the right to property away, you take the right to everything else away. You take away the right to ownership of the mind of the individual…ultimately you take the right to fight for life away.

My friend listened and looked at me in astonishment without blinking an eye. I waited for his answer after an uncomfortable moment of silence.

Then he said: “Well I did not mean property as in owning spears and mud huts. I was talking about those big capitalist owning banks and big business exploiting the poor workers like us…”

http://mspoliticalcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/so-what-exactly-is-your-problem-with.html

Mandela's Secret History

Rian Malan

16 August 2011

Rian Malan on the significance of the great statesman's covert Communist party membership

This is a story about Nelson Mandela, the world-famous "freedom fighter" and "democrat." You'll have to pardon those slightly sardonic quotes, because I'm afraid this is that kind of story: a bit iconoclastic, and likely to provoke howls of outrage from Western liberals who see Mandela as a benign black moderate who led an army of hymn-singing Uncle Toms to the promised land.

The technical term for those liberals is "useful idiot," but even I must concede that their intervention was actually quite intelligent, back in the 1950s, when this all started. In those days, good men were weak, and their apartheid adversaries invincible on all but one score: propaganda. The war of perceptions thus became the most critical of all battlefields, with the African National Congress constantly seeking to exaggerate apartheid's evils while portraying itself as "good" in a way that was universally appealing.

In the early sixties, Special Branch detectives came upon a piece of evidence that made this a bit tricky in Mandela's case - a handwritten essay titled, "How To Be A Good Communist," in which the leader of the ANC's newly-formed military wing opined that South Africa would become "a land of milk and honey" under Communist rule. We were told that Mandela was innocently toying with Marxist ideas, trying to understand their appeal, but this made little sense. Almost all his co-conspirators were Communists, wedded to a Sovietist doctrine that envisaged a two-phase ending to the SA struggle - a "national democratic revolution," followed by second revolution in which the Marxist-Leninist vanguard took power.

If Mandela wasn't in on this plot, it would have been exceptionally stupid of him to participate in it, and Mandela was not stupid. On the other hand, he had to be very careful what he said on this score. The ANC needed the support of Western liberals, and by l964, those folks had come to realize that Communist revolutions inevitably led to the outcome satirized in George Orwell's Animal Farm - a dictatorship of pigs who hogged the best things for themselves, impoverished the proletariat and murdered or imprisoned dissenters by the million.

In such a climate, one didn't want to focus attention on that hand-written "milk and honey" essay. On the contrary: one wanted the world to see Mandela as a democrat, willing to die for values that Westerners held sacred. Toward this end, Mandela and his lawyers (with a bit of help from British journalist Anthony Sampson) crafted a masterful speech for Mandela to deliver from the dock during the Rivonia trial.

"The ideological creed of the ANC is, and always has been, the creed of African nationalism," he said. "It is true that there has been close cooperation between the ANC and the Communist Party. But cooperation in this case is merely proof of a common goal - the removal of white supremacy."

Mandela went to describe himself as a democrat in the classic Western sense, and a fervent admirer of the British and American systems of governance. "Africans just want a share in the whole of South Africa," he said. "Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent...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."

These words rang out around the world, and still echo today. Type Mandela's name into Google, and you come upon millions of essays, articles and book-length hagiographies depicting Madiba in exactly the way he presented himself in that speech: a black liberal, driven to take up arms by a white supremacist state that seemed utterly impermeable to calls for dialogue.

The Rivonia statement has become the foundational text of a semi-religious movement that seeks to canonize Mandela as the 20^th century's greatest proponent of freedom and democracy. Or perhaps I should say, "bourgeois democracy," in order to distinguish between democracy of the sort practiced in Britain and America and the diseased parody encountered in Marxist-Leninist police states. Nelson Mandela never stood for that sort of democracy.

Or did he?

It takes a brave man to address that question, and lo, one such has emerged. Professor Stephen Ellis heads the African Studies Centre at the University of Leiden, and holds the Desmond Tutu chair of social sciences at the Vrije University of Amsterdam. He is also one of the great authorities on the ANC, author of Comrades Against Apartheid and a former editor of Africa Confidential, a magazine valued for its authoritative gossip about what was really going inside the anti-apartheid movement in the l980s.

Now Ellis has published a study that sheds startling new light on Mandela's early political career and the circumstances under which he launched his armed struggle against apartheid. The study contains at least one revelation that can only be described as a bombshell -- Mandela was, at least for a time, secretly a member of South Africa's Communist Party.

The strange thing about Ellis's bombshell is that South Africans appear to be deaf to its detonation. I know this because I started hyping it to fellow journalists the instant it appeared in print. To a man (or woman) they all shrugged and said, "So what? It's not really a story." This tells us something interesting about South Africans: we are at once riven with ideological obsessions and hopelessly ideologically naïve.

The blame for this rests largely on our charming and literate Communists, who go to great pains in their memoirs to disguise the true nature of their beliefs. They tell us that they stood for fairness, justice, and racial equality, and against all forms of exploitation and oppression. They'd also like us to believe that their party was outlawed in l950 because they treated blacks as friends and wanted them to enjoy the franchise. Well, yes. I suppose this was a factor, but the overriding consideration that led to the SACP's banning was something else entirely.

At the Yalta Conference of l945, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin assured the Western powers that all the countries his forces occupied at the end of World War 2 would be allowed to determine their own destinies via free elections. With his international image in mind, Stalin instructed commissars in the occupied territories to observe the outward forms of "bourgeois democracy." Towards this end, liberals and social democrats were lured into broad fronts in which all key decisions were secretly made by tiny Communist minorities, with the backing of the Soviet's secret police apparatus.

These Communist conspirators then staged spurious elections that brought Soviet puppet regimes to power throughout Eastern Europe, usually with majorities implausibly close to 100 percent. Historians concede that Tito of Yugoslavia was genuinely popular, but elsewhere, the rule of Soviet proxies was imposed by deceit and enforced by tyranny. Tens of thousands of class enemies were executed, millions imprisoned, all vestiges of freedom eradicated.

The problem with Communist parties, including the South African one, is that they blindly supported this Soviet outrage, and seemed intent on pulling similar moves everywhere. If Joe Slovo and Rusty Bernstein were still alive, they'd stoutly deny such charges, but they'd be lying. We know this because Rusty's wife Hilda lived long enough to acquire a shrewd understanding of herself and the Communist movement of which she was a life-long part. "Joe and Rusty were hardline Stalinists," she said in a 2004 interview. "Anything the Soviets did was right. They were very, very pro-Soviet."

It is important to note that Mrs. Bernstein was by no means suggesting that her husband or Joe were evil men. On the contrary: they were religious zealots who genuinely believed that the Soviets had discovered the cure for all human misery.

"I've often thought about this," she said. "They wanted something bigger than themselves, something to believe in. People are always seeking for the meaning of life and if you're not religious, what is it? To us, working together in a movement that had rules and attitudes and comradeship gave important meaning to our lives."

In short, being a Communist was much like being a Christian. One studied the sacred texts of Marx and Engels, engaged in polemics as a form of prayer and ruthlessly suppressed all doubts, including one's own. Mrs. Bernstein says she was adept at this until l956, when Kruschev revealed the appalling extent of his predecessor Stalin's atrocities (he murdered around 16 million people, either by having them shot for thought crimes or starving them to death with mad policies). Her husband dismissed these reports as "lies and capitalist propaganda," but Hilda's bones told her it was all true.

"We had a fight," she said, "a battle that went on into the small hours of the morning. I wanted to leave, but we had three dependent children, and there wasn't any possible way in which we could have separated economically and so on. So we stayed together, and I accommodated myself by refusing to talk about it any more."

And so it came to pass that Hilda Bernstein, the secret doubter, had a ringside seat for the epochal events of the late fifties and early sixties, a time when her husband Rusty was one of South Africa's most senior Communists, and one of Mandela's closest allies moreover.

It was in this capacity that she learned of Madiba's secret membership in the Communist sect. "Mandela denies that he was ever a member of the party," she said, "but I can tell you that he was a member of the party for a period."

When this interview appeared on the website of the O'Malley archive, it caused a brief frisson among old Cold Warriors, especially when former SACP central committee member Brian Bunting verified Hilda's account. The interview also caught the eye of the aforementioned Professor Ellis, a lifelong student of the byzantine inner workings of SACP. He notes that the SACP of the early sixties was of necessity a pathologically secretive organization, a network of cells with little or no knowledge of each other and no official membership records.

"SACP members were formally required to keep their membership secret," says Ellis. "In principle, only the members of each four or five-person cell knew each other. One person reported to the next higher level, and so on. But there was also a special category of ultra-secret members who were not required to join a cell and whom even very senior party members might not know about." With this in mind, Ellis proceeded very cautiously before publishing anything about Mandela's apparent role in the Communist conspiracy.

One item in his files was an old police report claiming that two arrested Communists had identified Mandela as an SACP member. A similar admission appeared in the minutes of a 1982 SACP meeting. The final breakthrough came when Russian researcher Irina Filitova interviewed veteran conspirator Joe Matthews, who confirmed that Mandela served on the party's innermost central committee alongside him. "In the light of this evidence," Ellis concludes, "it seems most likely that Nelson Mandela joined the party in the late l950s or in 1960, and that he was co-opted onto the Central Committee in the latter year, the same year as Joe Matthews."

Even as I write this I sense that I am losing the average South African. I can almost see you shrugging and saying, "So? This still isn't a story." But it is a story, and here's why: if Ellis's evidence is correct, the fatal decision to launch a war against apartheid had nothing to do with the ANC. It was a decision taken unilaterally by the Communist Party, and then imposed on ANC president Albert Luthuli by a prominent African nationalist who was secretly a member of the Communist underground. His name: Nelson Mandela.

It seems fair to say that black South Africans have entertained thoughts of armed revolt since the day Jan van Riebeeck landed in Table Bay. It is therefore clear, as Ellis stresses in his landmark paper, that no political party held a patent on the term armed struggle. The Pan-Africanist Congress was dead keen on it, and elements in the ANC thought it was inevitable from the early fifties onwards.

The difference between those organizations and the Communist Party is that peaceful change via the ballot box was never really on the Communist agenda, because that sort of change invariably left the capitalist edifice standing. "Classes do not commit suicide," said Joe Slovo, a dutiful acolyte of Vladimir Lenin. Enemies of the working class had to be undermined, subverted, and conclusively defeated before the socialist millennium could begin.

There was a time when this socialist millennium did not seem particularly attractive to South Africa's so-called "bourgeois nationalists," Marxist code for Africans who would have been perfectly happy to defeat the Boers in a bourgeois democratic election and then help themselves to a fairer share of the nation's riches. Communists did not approve of "bourgeois nationalists," and vice versa, which is one reason why Nelson Mandela spent the l940s breaking up Communist rallies with his fists.

In the early fifties, however, the SACP realized that cooperating with the nationalists was likely to hasten the fall of the Boers, thus creating conditions conducive to a more rapid advance towards true socialism. At more or less the same time, nationalists like Mandela realized that the Communists could bring several desirables to the party. Around half of them were white. They had cars, houses, telephones, organizational skills and access to funding. Soon, Communists were supporting the ANC's legal campaigns and recruiting ANC members into their own underground party.

As Ellis observes, this strategy did not enjoy the approval of the high priests of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science, who were located in Moscow. It was a home-grown initiative, devised as a means of amplifying the influence of a tiny body of true believers. (At the time, the SACP had barely 500 members.) The SACP was thus delighted to discover, at a 1960 conference in Moscow, that these high priests were now thinking along similar lines. The imperial powers were pulling out of Africa, and alliances with previously detestable nationalists provided a way for tiny bands of Communist intellectuals to stay in the game, and perhaps wind up in control of a few key ex-colonies.

Out of this emerged the SACP's new revolutionary doctrine, which has always reminded me of the hoary old fable in which a scorpion convinces a frog to carry it across a river. The frog (or bourgeois nationalist) does all the work, staging a "democratic national revolution" that topples the imperial or colonial power. The scorpion (representing the Communist cause) goes along for the ride, only to sting the frog to death just as it reaches the far bank. The punchline of the original remains entirely apposite: scorpions do such things because that is their nature.

Something else happened in l960, something very important. The catalyst was the PAC, a movement of hardline African nationalists who'd broken away from the ANC the previous year on the grounds that it was "dominated by white Communists" whose ultimate loyalties were open to question (see above). In April, l960, the PAC staged a nationwide protest against the hated pass laws. In Sharpeville, police opened fire on a crowd of PAC supporters, killing an estimated 69. The resulting outburst of rage shook the apartheid government to its core, and led to the outright banning of both the PAC and ANC.

From afar, it seemed that the mood in South Africa had at last turned revolutionary, which is presumably why Joe Matthews and Michael Harmel of the SACP were given a stellar reception when they turned up in Beijing a few months later to canvass support for armed struggle.

According to Ellis, the Chinese had previously been sceptical of such plans, but now, the SACP delegates were considered so important that Chairman Mao himself took time to meet them. They were accorded a similar honour in Moscow, where they apparently stayed in Stalin's former dacha while conducting top-secret talks with senior Soviet officials.

The precise outcome of these discussions remains uncertain, but Ellis presumes that Matthews and Harmel came away with pledges of support, because the SACP now moved swiftly forward, adopting a policy of armed struggle at a conference in Johannesburg "towards the end of 1960."

It now became necessary for the SACP to convince the ANC to join its initiative. White Communists couldn't act in this regard, because they weren't allowed to join the racially exclusive ANC or take part in its deliberations. The task thus fell to black ANC leaders who wore two hats - which is to say, were members of both the ANC and the SACP. In some cases, this joint ANC-SACP affiliation was open and well-known, at least to those in the underground. In others, it was secret. The most important of these secret members was the charismatic Nelson Mandela.

On the day the SACP took its fateful decision, Mandela was a defendant in the Treason Trial, a marathon affair that had been dragging on since l956. The rest of South Africa was extremely tense, but inside Judge Rumpff's courtroom, the atmosphere was oddly congenial, considering that Mandela and his co-accused were on trial for high treason, and that the three judges were officials of a white supremacist regime that Mandela frequently characterized as "Nazi."

In theory, the gap between the white judges and the mostly black accused was unbridgeable, but these men had been staring at one another across the courtroom for years, sparring, joking, taking each other's measure and acquiring a measure of mutual respect.

All the accused were out on bail, but when they were re-detained during the post-Sharpeville State of Emergency, Judge Bekker's wife came to their aid, running errands on their behalf and carrying messages to their families. Judge Kennedy was so impressed by the pro-ANC testimony of Professor ZK Matthews that he came down from the bench and shook Matthews' hand, saying, "I hope we meet again under better circumstances." Judge Rumpff was a grumpy old Afrikaner and a reputed Broederbonder, but even he seemed to be softening.

On March 23, l961, Rumpff took the unprecedented step of interrupting the defence's closing argument, saying, in effect, we don't really need to hear this. Some of the accused took this to mean that the judges had decided to disregard the evidence and hang them - the predictable totalitarian outcome. They were wrong. A week later, Rumpff asked the accused to rise, and pronounced every one of them innocent.

This was a dumbfounding outcome, given the enormous resources the apartheid state had devoted to the treason case. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was in the habit of telling the world that most blacks supported the principle of separate development, and that only a handful of misguided troublemakers opposed it. Rumpff's judgement annihilated that argument. In rejecting the state's case, he had in effect ruled that the ANC's cause was just, its grievances legitimate, and its strategy of non-violent defiance acceptable in the eyes of reasonable men.

This outcome hugely strengthened the hand of ANC president Albert Luthuli, a devout Christian who continued to believe that peaceful change was possible in South Africa. After the Sharpeville shootings, his stance was bitterly criticized by ANC radicals, who thought the time for talking was over. Rumpff's verdict suggested otherwise. It showed that South Africa was still a land of law, with judges willing to hand down decisions that infuriated the ruling party.

South Africa also had a relatively free press, a vigorous democracy (albeit for whites only) and, as Mandela acknowledges in Long Walk To Freedom, a police force that still conformed to British norms, with due process respected and torture at this stage unheard-of. Some observers saw Rumpff's verdict as a watershed of sorts, a development that could easily have led to further liberalization.

Nelson Mandela was totally disinterested. In Long Walk To Freedom, he writes that he went underground within hours of Rumpff's verdict. Officially, his mission was to organize popular support for a national convention, but Ellis thinks this unlikely. "A close analysis of the campaign for a national convention concludes that this initiative was primarily intended to provide proponents of armed struggle with a paper trail that would justify their forthcoming change of policy," he writes.

In other words, the SACP was angling to regain the moral high ground. It knew that the verdict had come as a surprise to international observers, who were left wondering if Verwoerd's regime was indeed as evil as it was held to be. But the SACP also knew that Verwoerd could be relied on to reject any call for a national convention, thus restoring his reputation as an intransigent racist. As Ellis notes, this would allow the party to present the coming declaration of war "in the best possible light for public and international consumption."

The second leg of Mandela's underground mission was of course to convince ANC president Albert Luthuli to follow the lead the Communists had taken. Luthuli was not a pacifist per se, but he believed that non-violent options remained viable. Like many others in the ANC and even the SACP, he also believed it would be folly of the highest order to take up arms at a point when the ANC was still struggling to organize effective protests.

Luthuli and Mandela had it out in June l961, at a tumultuous meeting of the ANC's national executive in Tongaat, Natal. The debate raged through the night, but when the sun rose, Mandela was triumphant; the ANC had authorized him to launch Umkhonto we Sizwe, and to start making preparations for war against the apartheid state.

This is Mandela's version - or more accurately, one of his versions. In Long Walk, he acknowledges that the outcome of his clash with Luthuli was actually very messy. "The policy of the ANC would still be that of non-violence," he writes, and the new military organization was required to be "entirely separate from the ANC." Luthuli himself remained committed to non-violence until his death six years later.

Reading between the lines, Mandela seems to be suggesting that Luthuli was willing to turn a blind eye to his military adventure, provided it did not damage the mother organization. Durban Communist Rowley Arenstein rejected this out hand. "Luthuli was simply brushed aside," he said. "Adoption of armed struggle by the ANC was the act of a Johannesburg SACP clique, a hijacking."

Arenstein was subsequently purged from the party. Mandela returned to Johannesburg to plan his sabotage campaign, heedless of the counsel of men with clearer heads. "If you throw a stone into the window of a man's house," said SACP general secretary Moses Kotane, "you must be prepared for him to come out and chase you. The backlash will be fantastic. The police will go mad."

The first MK bombs went off on December 16, 1961. The rest is history.

http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page72308?oid=251075&sn=Marketingweb+detail&pid=90389

Convicted drug dealer Sheryl Cwele fired

2011-08-16

Convicted drug dealer Sheryl Cwele, wife of State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele, has been fired by the Hibiscus Coast Municipality, the SABC reported on Tuesday.

A disciplinary hearing found her guilty on all charges. She has ten days to appeal, the broadcaster reported.

Cwele was the head of health services in the municipality.

The disciplinary hearing against her began in June this year and the committee ruled against her last month.

It was convened to determine if she should keep her post after she was convicted of drug dealing by the KwaZulu-Natal High Court on May 06.

Cwele was sentenced to 12 years in jail.

She is appealing her drug dealing conviction and is out on R100 000 bail.

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Convicted-drug-dealer-Sheryl-Cwele-fired-20110816

Blacks should compensate Whites for giving them South Africa

Monday, August 15, 2011

By Mike Smith


Emeritus Arch Bishop of Cape Town is at it again and in the news for asking whites to pay a reparation tax or wealth tax because they all apparently benefitted from Apartheid.

Along came his cheerleading constitutional expert and praise singer Piere de Vos from UCT and said, “The problem is, of course, that some white people – out of shame or ignorance or maybe a bit of both – do not want to admit that white South Africans almost all benefited from apartheid vis-à-vis black South Africans.”

Almost All? Who were the ones that did not benefit? Again facts sucked out of each other’s thumbs.

As I have proved in Opening Pandora’s Apartheid Box…everyone in South Africa benefitted form Apartheid, Black and White. Blacks had the highest literary standards and the highest life standard of all the blacks in Africa.

Self hating liberal idiot, De Vos reckons, “If I had been born black and poor, I almost certainly would not have gone to University and I would almost certainly never have been a Law Professor at UCT (University of Cape Town), earning quite a nice salary, thank you.”

I love the way he chooses his words. “Almost All”…”Almost Certainly”…As always both De Vos and The Arch fails to explain how it was at all possible for Tutu to study and become a teacher just like his father was.
They also fail to explain how Nelson Mandela and countless other blacks managed to become lawyers during Apartheid South Africa a lawyer just like De Vos.

They further failed to explain how the Apartheid government built ten Universities for blacks including Medunsa which is a unique medical university that turned out 200 highly qualified black doctors every year all at state costs, paid for by the white taxpayers. It also trained paramedics and nurses.

Since 1970 the budget for black education was raised by about 30% per year every year. More than any other government department.

In the period 1955 -1984 the amount of black school students increased 31 times from 35,000 to 1,096 000.

65% of black South African children were at school compared to Egypt 64%, Nigeria 57%, Ghana52%, Tanzania50% and Ethiopia 29%.

Amongst the adults of South Africa, 71% could read and write (80% between the ages 12 and 22). Compare this to Kenya 47%, Egypt 38%, Nigeria 34% and Mozambique at 26%.

In South Africa, the whites built 15 new classrooms for blacks every working day, every year. At 40 children per class it meant space for an additional 600 black students every day!!!

In 1985 there were 42,000 Blacks at 5 universities in South Africa, about the same amount at the universities of the homelands.

In an article called “Die Afrikaner” 11 Feb 1987, the quarterly magazine called “Vox Africana Nr 29 4/87 stated that,

South Africa had 4,8 million whites and 18,2 million blacks in 1987. The whites paid 77% of the taxes and the blacks only 15%...despite this...56% of the government budget was spent on blacks.
During the time of Dr. Verwoerd. the living standards of Blacks were rising at 5,4% per year against that of the whites at 3,9% per year. In 1965 the economic growth of South Africa was the second highest in the world at 7,9%. The rate of inflation was a mere 2% per annum and the prime interest rate only 3% per annum. Domestic savings were so great that South Africa needed no foreign loans for normal economic expansion.

Even Lord Deedes admitted, “White South Africa grew to become the economic giant of the continent, the other members of the Commonwealth virtually sank into poverty.”

At the hight of Apartheid in 1978 Soweto had 115 football fields, 3 Rugby fields, 4 athletic tracks, 11 Cricket fields, 2 Golf courses, 47 Tennis courts, 7 swimming pools built to Olympic standards, 5 Bowling alleys, 81 Netball fields, 39 children play parks, and countless civic halls, movie houses and clubhouses.
In addition to this, Soweto had 300 churches, 365 schools, 2 Technical Colleges, 8 clinics, 63 child day care centres, 11 Post Offices, and its own fruit and vegetable market.
There were 2300 registered companies that belonged to black businessmen, about 1000 private taxi companies. 3% of the 50,000 vehicle owners in 1978 were Mercedes Benz owners. Soweto alone had more cars, taxis, schools, churches and sport facilities than most independent countries in Africa. The Blacks of South Africa had more private vehicles than the entire white population of the USSR at the time.
Today Soweto has modern shopping malls like, Dobsonville Shopping Centre. In 2005 the Protea Gardens Mall opened. This was followed by the Baramall Shopping Centre and the Jabulani Shopping complex and the Maponya Mall. Experts say that Soweto has as much as 25% oversupply of retail space.

The Canadian Medical Doctor, Dr Kenneth Walker wrote about Soweto, (I freely translate from “Verrat an Südafrika”, Klaus Vaque, 1987,pg 41)
“In Soweto I saw many homes that costs about $100,000 (1978) and that had a BMW in the driveway. All houses are single storey. Many are recently painted. Many had flowerpots in the windows and lawn in the front. Only 2% were shacks. If I had the choice to live in Soweto or in the apartment dwellings or “Projects” of New York, Chicago, or Detroit where there is so much crime, then I would not hesitate for one moment and choose Soweto.”The biggest hospital in the world, Baragwanath with 3200 beds and at its peak almost 8000 staff had 23 operation theatres fitted out with the most modern medical equipment that existed in the world. Blacks were treated here, operated on...at full state costs to the white-taxpayers for unlimited periods. The budget of this hospital was and is higher than the yearly budget of most small member states of the United Nations.

Next door to Baragwanath is the St. John’s Eye Clinic. The clinic is world famous for the treatment of Glaucoma, Cataracts, traumatic eye injuries and rare tropical diseases. All built and maintained by white taxpayer’s money for blacks.

Baragwanath in 1978 employed 450 medical doctors in full-time service. It treated 112 000 in-patients and 1.62 million out-patients per year. The children and infant death rate with 34.8 per 1000 was lower than Harlem in New York.

In 1982 alone, this hospital performed 898 heart operations of world quality.

Ironically...90% of the blood donors for this hospital were whites, who donated blood free of charge, totally voluntarily...to save black lives. (Quoted from The Citizen, 2 April 1987).

Whites have already given blacks their blood. What more do they want?
De Vos calls for a “ones off reconstruction tax”….did he forget that 20,000 “Victims of Apartheid” were compensated R30,000 each back in the days of the TRC?

Personally I think that Prof Pierre De Vos and Bishop Tutu should go get an education about the truth about Apartheid. Theyy can start by reading my Pandora Series.

Whites have given blacks the entire country for free. In tact. There is nothing more to give. Today blacks are destroying all the infrastructure that we paid for and built. Then still has the audacity to tell whites they should leave.

What I want to know is who are going to compensate whites for all the schools, hospitals, dams, airports, harbours, railroads, etc that they have built? It is high time for blacks to start paying whites. Nothing is for free.

Bishop Tutu and De Vos can start by selling their mansions and BMW’s and give it to the poor white fund of Solidarity “Helpende Hand”.

http://mspoliticalcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/blacks-should-compensate-whites-for.html

What our Cop's Get up To On Duty

The Sowetan newspaper's Monday front page - which features a picture of two uniformed police officers caught on tape having sex - has been met with a strong reaction from the public.

 

Working together we can.....

Sex on the Job

President Jacob Zuma is a Misunderstood President

President Jacob Zuma is a misunderstood president, his spokesperson Mac Maharaj told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Monday.

"He hasn't been through a formal education so his power is as a self-educated man. His cultural roots are different. And to understand him in the context of SA is a bit of a problem, Maharaj added.

He went on to say that there was "an issue in SA" around understanding the president.

"He doesn't fit the normal mould of a president of a country... It's very important for the public to understand how he thinks, where he comes from, to understand the positions he takes and the way he manages issues."

Maharaj added that Zuma was "a tremendous communicator at grass-root levels and informally, but he's not that powerful at formal occasions".

It was a "challenge" that Zuma had taken over at a time when SA's transition to the building of democracy was at its most complex stage.

Asked why the president appeared to be silent on corruption, Maharaj said: "Corruption in SA is a major problem and it has to be tackled, not just issue by issue but systemically."
He added that there was a danger if corruption became embedded in a state.

"There's corruption all over, in Britain, in the US, but when it becomes systemic then that is a problem.

Asked what Zuma planned to do about the ANCYL's treatment of Botswana, Maharaj denied that the president was procrastinating.
"You'll be surprised how it [the ANCYL] needs to be attended to - it doesn't just require a rap on the knuckles."
Maharaj said the treatment of the ANCYL required that the ANC discipline the league and "educate" its members.

He added that financial probity was necessary for anyone wanting to be a leader as that person would be "a servant of the people".

On the weekend, Zuma - in an interview with City Press - criticised ANCYL president Julius Malema for making statements calling for a change of government in neighbouring Botswana.

At almost the same time, the ANCYL issued an apology and withdrew the statement of its national executive committee, which committed to the establishment of a Botswana Command Team to bring about regime change.

"We withdraw the statement and apologise because we note that the leadership of the ANC took serious exception on the statement and classified that statement as transgression of ANC constitution and policies."

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/Politics/Zuma-hasnt-had-a-formal-education-Maharaj-20110815

Striking municipal workers in Cape Town

2011-08-15

Striking municipal workers in Cape Town greeted Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson with anger and shouts of “18%” when he emerged from the city’s civic centre to accept their memorandum for higher wages on Monday.

Riot police officers stood guard outside the civic centre, with barbed wire surrounding much of the front part of the building.
About 3 300 South African Municipal Workers’ Union members went striking through Cape Town’s CBD as part of national strike action over wages.

The workers are demanding an 18% or R2 000 pay hike while the South African Local Government Association (Salga) is offering 6%.

In Cape Town, strikers turned out garbage bins, kicking litter across the street while shouting “phansi 6%, phansi”. Many were drinking beer while marijuana could also be smelled in the air.
The workers were hoping that Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille would come to speak to them and didn’t hold back their anger when her deputy greeted them.

Crowd shouts voetsek

Wearing a suit and tie, Neilson was heavily guarded by riot officers armed with shields and emerged from behind a police casper parked in front of the civic centre. He tried to put on a brave face when workers shouted “voetsek” and other expletives at him.

After listening to a list of demands read out by Samwu’s Andre Adams, Neilson responded by saying that “I will take your memorandum back to the mayor and mayoral committee”.

“The city appreciates the contributions workers make,” Neilson told the crowds.

“We accept your right to strike and ask that you honour the conditions of [the] strike.

“I don’t believe all the information [in the memorandum] is accurate.

“[We] must start with correct, accurate information.”

The deputy mayor ended his speech by telling workers to “enjoy the rest of your day”, to which they responded with “voetsek” and a reference to female genitalia.

Salaries too low

Many of the strikers say that their current salary is making it difficult for them to be granted loans from banks, and as a result thereof, can’t qualify to buy houses because their salary is simply too low.

Renier Martin from Fisantekraal says he has been employed permanently by the City of Cape Town since December 2009 and is earning a monthly salary of R4 350.

Martin says what he wants is a 100% increase, but he knows this will not happen so he is willing to settle for a R2 000 hike.

“Some of us who received permanent contracts from 2009 are still owed nine months worth of backpay,” said Martin, adding that he would not be surprised if they did not get the backpay owed to them.

He says that there is currently a court case underway, regarding the outstanding backpay.

Mzukiseni Mdodasi from Du Noon says he is currently earning R5 700 and he would be delighted by the R2 000 increase, because he has dreams of buying a house but does not qualify for a bank loan to do so.

He says that his transport alone costs him about R250 a week.

Adams said that the strike would continue on Tuesday. 


http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Strikers-blast-Cape-Towns-deputy-mayor-20110815

Tension in SA 'crazy'

The racial tension in this country of ours is driving me crazy. If it is not the idiot youth league leader hurling racial slurs it’s the Archbishop!

I have a message for these people.

Dear Archbishop Desmond Tutu,

It shocked me to see the racial statement you made. I always had respect for you but you disappointed and angered me by abusing your position as a religious leader to publicly promote racism in South Africa. Your true colours came out and you have lost the respect of many. You should rather be concerned with religion and leave politics to the politicians. You are a walking contradiction and I pity you!

Dear Julius Malema,

I have so much to say to you but will keep it short, simple and sweet so that you can understand it clearly.

You are a power hungry, uneducated, racist man. You are abusing your position as Youth League leader (at the expense of the youth) to enrich yourself and create racial polarisation in South Africa. How does it feel to be the most hated man in South Africa? One of these days all your bad deeds will catch up with you and I will personally hand you a jar of Vaseline on the day of your sentencing!

To the rest of you whitey haters,

If an African is born in America he becomes a legal citizen of the USA and is known as an African-American. Correct?

I was born in South Africa and so was 10 generations of my family. That makes me a legal citizen of South Africa - a European African!

I am a proud South African and love my country but the current political climate makes it hard for me not to imagine the worst.

Have you ever thought how the average white person feels about living in South Africa at this moment? They are bombarded with public racial statements against them from all sides, disadvantaged with BEE and Affirmative action and blamed for something that ended 17 years ago.

Not all whites supported the apartheid government and most of us are not and have never been racist!

Most whites (including myself) have nowhere else to go. It is extremely expensive to move to another country and most of us cannot afford it.

Even if I could I would never leave my home! Just like most of the other white South Africans I will have no choice but to stay and fight for my rights!


http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/YourStory/Tension-in-SA-crazy-20110815