A peculiar delusion exists among the old PW Botha Fan Club that until very recently occupied even 10 Downing Street, that the British Left has some especial attachment to the present government of South Africa.
Anyone who thinks that has obviously not been reading the Morning Star, or watching the television programmes of George Galloway.
Nor have they been attending the Durham Miners' Gala, which the late Davey Hopper used to great effect to spread awareness of the massacre at Marikana.
Not least in terms of its powerful parallels with Orgreave, parallels that I have heard movingly articulated by the survivors of both events.
The David Camerons of the world will wait in vain for any sort of apology for the Liberation Struggle. Even Norman Tebbit has long said that none was due. But it was a long time ago.
And even on the BBC, its surviving veterans have been speaking today as those of us who have been paying attention have known them to have been speaking for quite some time.
That a defeat such as the ANC has just been dealt can happen is a sign of South Africa's democratic maturity.
But that that defeat has been dealt, that the voters have been moved to deal it, is a situation entirely of the ANC's own making.
You would make a wonderful Foreign Secretary.
ReplyDeleteThose who suffered under the apartheid regime are allied to those who suffered under Thatcher? Surely not!
ReplyDeleteShe was more nuanced on the matter than she is sometimes given credit for. But her fan boys weren't. They still aren't.
DeleteThey are even using the fact that the ANC can lose local elections without all hell's breaking loose as some kind of evidence that they themselves were right all along. They were not.
Cameron got an incredibly free pass over South Africa. He was the apartheid regime's all expenses paid guest when he was marked out as a star of the future. Corbyn and Abbott get grief just because they once had some fairly comical motorcycling holiday through East Germany at their own expense.
ReplyDeleteI sometimes think of setting up a production company. Partly to film both of those stories.
DeleteAnd many a Far Right regime in South America, Indonesia, the Philippines and so on. Thatcher also loved a good Maoist, justly called the Peking Plotter by the USSR.
DeleteIndeed. She never saw a Maoist whom she did not like. She installed Mugabe, having refused any other settlement, and she even arranged a knighthood for him. Then there was Ceaușescu. Then there was Pol Pot.
DeleteWhen Nelson Mandela died, her flame-keepers could be heard criticising him and his for their criticism, in turn, of Steve Biko.
As for the Rightist regimes, people understandably emphasise the Pinochet connection, with its huge practical impact on her domestic economic policy. She really did want, and try, to turn Britain into Pinchet's Chile. That was, explicitly, her model.
But for sheer comedy, albeit of the very blackest kind, you cannot beat the fact that she had been about to flog at a knocked down rate to her mates in Argentina the very ships that she then found that she had to deploy against them when they took her at her word and invaded the Falkland Islands.
But Thatcher herself ended up paying court to Mandela in Westminster Hall. It was quite a sight.
DeleteA lot of people said that she was a hypocrite. But she just knew when she was beaten. It would have looked even worse if she had stayed away.
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