It's time to speak of the disappointing and indeed, demoralizing degeneracy of the
African National Congress. Enough time has passed with the ANC in
power to pass judgment. It is now clear that their rule is a terrible
betrayal of the impoverished black masses. The ANC is a gang of
thieves allying themselves with the established big business and
mining interests to line their own pockets.
For example, last month the police
murdered 34 striking miners, then indicted 270 of the survivors for
the murders of the 34 gunned down by the police! An outcry forced the
government to back down after a few days. The establishment trade
union, COSATU, is in bed with the government and miners. The
so-called “Communist” party, apparently connected at the hip to
the ANC, opposed the strikers. (Imagine that! “Communists”
against workers! Where have we seen that before? The Soviet Union?
“Red” China? Hmmmm.)
The miners were paid around $750 a
month. The mine owners kept playing hardball, insisting on no deal
until the strikers went back to work first. After the
massacre, they agreed to a 22% wage increase (the miners had been
demanding 100%). That ended that strike. Other strikes are ongoing at
other mines.
The ANC has done virtually nothing to
improve the lives of the black population. If anything, the masses of
blacks live in worse squalor than ever. In all their years in power,
the ANC has failed to provide even basic services to much of the
population they rule. Instead they've made themselves partners with
the preexisting upper class and shared in the spoils. If this was the
deal Nelson Mandela arranged with the white supremacists, shame on
him.
The ANC! Building a Bright Future for the People of South Africa!
Jacob Zulu, the current ANC boss (and
thus President) is a satyr and freak who thinks showering after sex
prevents AIDS. His crackpot predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, was an HIV
denier. These are the caliber of gentlemen who preside over this
kleptocracy. I guess outside of Mandela and some others, the
apartheid butchers and assassins managed to kill all the good leaders
in the ANC.
To his discredit, Nelson Mandela has
put loyalty to the ANC gang above principle, and as far as I've heard
in foreign (non-South African) media, has maintained silence about
the ANC's crimes against the people, malfeasance, and feckless,
negligent misrule. It's a terribly disheartening legacy for the years
of struggle and sacrifice, and turns the sacrifice of Mandela and so
many others (many of whom are dead or maimed) to mud.
Unfortunately, one of the truest things
ever said about revolutions is The Who song, “Won't Get Fooled
Again.” (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”) The
same in that a new gang of exploiters and oppressors takes over. And
any idealists who don't get with the program get purged, as
“counterrevolutionaries.” (How ironic that epithet!)
Another example: Zimbabwe (formerly
Rhodesia) and the execrable tyrant and head of another gang of
thieves, the stone-cold thug Robert Mugabe. (The first thing he did
after seizing power was to destroy the other black freedom fighting
group, ZAPU. That was a tip-off to his nature, and what was to come.
Like so many cynical “revolutionaries,” what he meant by
“liberation” was “power for me!”)
Of course, virtually every African
ex-colony is now ruled by tyrants and thieves. They despoil and
exploit their lands in partnership with foreign corporations
(including Chinese ones now) and brutalize their people for being in
the way of this self-enrichment.
The challenge for humans who want the
sorry state of civilization on this planet to evolve is to solve the
conundrum of how power can be used for good, when those who are best
at seizing power are the ruthless, selfish ones, the politicians,
thugs, and mercenaries. The best I can come up with is “more
democracy,” which means more political involvement by the masses of
people directly in decisions that affect their lives. How to get
people to fundamentally change their relationship to power in that
way is the real hard problem. Most people do not want to be bothered.
Plus they would have to create the structural mechanisms to exercise
real power themselves. This would almost certainly involve
overthrowing the existing power structures in most cases. And they
would have to overcome their own deep psychology of authoritarianism,
viewing the people in power as a child relates to parents, in a
submissive, obedient way, deferring to them, and expecting to be
taken care of. In that sense part of the problem is that many people
on a deep level never grow up.
Another big problem is that the kind of
humane people who want to make the world better for humans are at a
real disadvantage because violence is so powerful a weapon. Forget
all that gush about “the power of nonviolence.” It is almost
never a match for violence. This gives the criminal classes and the
thugs they employ a huge advantage, since normal humans have no
stomach for violence. The only times nonviolence has trumped violence
is when there were no longer a sufficient number of thugs willing to
be sufficiently violent to suppress the large number of people
willing to risk their safety and well-being by physically opposing a
regime. This happened in India after World War Two, when the British
could no longer muster an army large enough to suppress the Indian
masses, and when the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979. In the last
week of his rule, his army killed 10,000 Iranians, then couldn't do
it anymore. The Shah fled to the bosom of his benefactor, the U.S.,
precipitating the so-called “Hostage Crisis.” Someone challenges
U.S. Imperialism, and it's a “crisis.” Today in Indonesia 2
million people are simultaneously striking. That's what it takes,
massive numbers. But that is hard to organize, especially when
regimes systematically murder organizers, as in Colombia, where the
murder of labor organizers continues unabated with the tacit approval
of the Obama regime. The strategy of systematically exterminating
anyone with a normal, pro-human social consciousness, who are labeled
“communist” or “terrorist,” has occurred repeatedly in
U.S.-backed neofascist states since World War Two as a method of
preventing the possibility of social progress and economic change.
As long as the oppressors are willing
to be violent, unless there is some other force impinging on them,
they will continue to use it.
Some examples where other forces
impinged on the masters of violence: In the case of the Vietnam war,
the U.S. Army was virtually mutinying in the field, and there was a
massive anti-war movement in the homeland. (Nixon was bitter about
the fact that the anti-war movement inhibited him from using nuclear
weapons on the Vietnamese.) In the case of apartheid, external
economic sanctions made the white business elite say “uncle.” In
the case of the civil rights movement in the U.S., the cold war
ideological competition with the U.S.S.R. Put the U.S. In a
embarrassing position of bloviating about freedom and rights and how
oppressive “communism” is, while lurid brutality and atrocities
by Southern “sheriffs” and redneck mobs against people just
trying to ride buses, register to vote, go to school, or eat at lunch
counters, was on blatant display for the world to see. (And of course
not all American whites were committed to the extreme form of
anti-black racism practiced in the Confederacy.) This ultimately
forced yet another round of civil rights legislation to be passed.
(The set of laws and even Constitutional Amendments following the
Civil War being mostly moot points.) Yet, there has been real
progress. On the other hand, the CIA, with the aid of the FBI and
Memphis police, murdered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and the
complicit power structure and establishment media are complicit to
this day by their never-ending lies and coverup about that
assassination.
Finally, another factor that can
undermine oppressors is internal divisions among elites.
So in conclusion, The End.
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