The Left has been highly critical of the ANC for many years.
The election results in South Africa have come as no surprise to anyone who has been reading the Morning Star, or attending the events around the Durham Miners' Gala.
Or listening to Jeremy Corbyn.
But the fact that those results have been recorded, without apparent reprisal and without significant gains for the violent fringe, is a sign that the country that the ANC created does work politically.
To the extent that it even works against the ANC, when that is what the people want.
The hilarious thing about you strange people is that PW Botha was nothing like as evil as the Soviet Union that you and your kind (particularly the ANC) regret the collapse of.You talk about the economic condition of Eastern Europe after the end of the Soviet empire!
ReplyDeleteYet the economic conditions of black South Africans are far worse after the ANC replaced the National Party. Unemployment among black South Africans was 21% in 1991; it is over 40% now.
Crime is far worse; South Africa now averages an appalling 50 murders a day.
Xenophobia is so bad in the "Rainbow Nation" that Zimbabwean migrants were chopped up with machetes in a wave of racist attacks by other black South Africans just last year.
And the most corrupt President in South Africa's history spends £13 million he stole on a massive mansion.
And yet the Left goes on and on about apartheid; because every regime it has created in the 20th century has either turned into a catastrophe or a tyranny.
Usually both,
It's always good to hear from the old Eighties Hang Mandela crowd, or in your case from someone who wishes that he had been born early enough to be in it. It is an important reminder.
DeleteIt's always good to hear from the nostalgists for the Soviet Union who bizarrely focus on "apartheid", because it's the only way of not reminding themselves that all the worst regimes of the 20th century-from Peking to Havana to Moscow-were leftwing regimes.
ReplyDeleteAnd even South Africa has now turned out like every other leftwing utopian revolution in history, while everything Norman Tebbitt and Margaret Thatcher ever said about the ANC has now been proved right.
Unemployment among black South Africans twice what it was in 1991.
Crime higher than ever in its history.
A corrupt probable rapist President who spends £13 million in stolen cash on his own palace.
How's the Rainbow Nation working out?
Good to see that you have been reading the Morning Star. But he can lose an election. Think on that. And speed the day at national level, of course. The party either ditches him, or it prepares for defeat.
DeleteDavid Lindsay, in his post, has plainly failed to notice the irony that the people of South Africa now clearly take the same view of the ANC as the 1980's Right.
ReplyDeleteAnd for good reason. Look at their President, the best President the KGB could train.
We're always proved right in the end, Mr Lindsay.
It's always good to hear from the old Eighties Hang Mandela crowd, or in your case from someone who wishes that he had been born early enough to be in it. It is an important reminder.
DeleteYour own Leader elected unopposed now agrees with literally nothing about the Tory Party in the 80s and would be Soft Left if she was Labour. Left to the 80s Tories there would never have been any elections for most people in South Africa.
DeleteSouth Africa is a very sore point for the Eighties boys, it's their dirty little secret from before they started saying gay marriage was their proudest achievement.
ReplyDeleteJust as no one who supported, or even failed to oppose, the Iraq War could ever become Leader of the Labour Party, so no one who failed to support same-sex marriage can ever now become Leader of the Conservative Party. It created a new party, just as Jeremy Corbyn is doing. And there is no Third Way.
DeleteThat was basically what did for Leadsom. They leapt on a quote that illustrated why she wasn't sound on gay marriage, but they were always going to get rid her somehow because she wasn't sound on gay marriage. Like you say, it created a new party. No wonder it's the thing Cameron is proudest of.
DeleteThatcher used to pretend she'd helped secure Mandela's release, but when the papers came out under the 30 Year Rule it turned out she had left him to rot. She was totally dependent on her husband who was a pro-apartheid fanatic and called the old South Africa "God's own country". He also thought trade unions should be illegal.
ReplyDeleteThe release of her Thirty Year Rule papers has been astonishing, and yet not at all surprising, all round.
DeleteAs Dennis Skinner puts it in his memoirs, "We've lived long enough to be proved publicly right about the year-long miners' Strike for Jobs of 1984-5." That material would have brought down the Government if it had been made public at the time.
And there is more. So very much more. He role in the storming of the Golden Temple came as news even to those of us who have made it our business to know quite a lot about these things.
Whatever next? We shall know soon enough. And yet nowhere near as soon as we should have done.
The neocons celebrate the disintegration of Yugoslavia and, against the clearly expressed popular will, the disintegration of what had been the Soviet Union. Do they also think South Africa should have been split up? Independence for the Transvaal and all that? If not, why not?
ReplyDeletePew Research Centre (2009): ""Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, publics of former Iron Curtain countries generally look back approvingly at the collapse of communism. Majorities of people in most former Soviet republics and Eastern European countries endorse the emergence of multiparty systems and a free market economy.""
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pewglobal.org/2009/11/02/end-of-communism-cheered-but-now-with-more-reservations/
That is not the same thing at all. The dissolution of the Union itself was massively unpopular at the time. Most people there still revile the name of Gorbachev, and Russians revile that of Yeltsin, because of what they had to endure under them.
DeleteThree states that are now in the EU but at least one of them is still pretty nasty, and 12 that are so bad several of them employ Tony Blair. Some progress.
DeleteThe discrimination against the ethnic Russians and other minorities in the Baltic States, especially Latvia, is obscene. In Latvia, we are committed, even if only nominally, to the defence of an apartheid state.
DeleteAs for Central Asia and the Caucasus, so beloved of Blair's bank manager, well, quite.
Three states that are now in the EU but at least one of them is still pretty nasty, and 12 that are so bad several of them employ Tony Blair. Some progress.
ReplyDeleteSouth Africa is pretty nasty, in case you'd noticed. It's President is on 800 corruption charges and counting. Some progress indeed!
But none of them would go back to the tyrannical horrors of Soviet communism.
Their condition now is a legacy of Soviet rule, particularly its destruction of any independent civil society, Christianity and the 40-odd year absence of any true freedom democracy or rule of law.
These are all part of the evil legacy of communism.
"Destruction of Christianity?" That depends whom one asks. The people whose ecclesiology most resembled your own were integral to the whole system. It was those with a Pope who were not. And not even all of those, alas.
DeleteThus, the Byzantine Rite Catholics in Romania were strong opponents of the British and French-backed Ceauşescu regime, a stand for which they paid a terrible price while Ceauşescu was being created a Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.
But from 1962 onwards, although there were individual heroes and martyrs, the Romanian Orthodox Church, as a body, was certainly not of that mind, instead devising an entire ecclesiology of "Social Apostolate" in support of Ceauşescu's admittedly anti-Soviet foreign policy and in order to refrain from criticising his domestic policies even while numerous churches were being demolished. Two Metropolitans (Archbishops) were members of the Great National Assembly, Ceauşescu's puppet legislative body.
In pro-Soviet Bulgaria, meanwhile, the Orthodox Church and the Communist Party were practically symbiotic, with the regime even using the Church's historic jurisdiction over Macedonia, which was then in anti-Soviet Yugoslavia, over Western Thrace, which is in modern Greece, and over Eastern Thrace, which is the European part of modern Turkey, in order to press its own claims to those territories.
People are often vaguely aware of the Russian Orthodox Church's complicity in the crimes of the Soviet regime, although it is amazing how frequently one encounters perfect ignorance of that fact.
But the collusion and worse of churches throughout the old Eastern Bloc cries out for a television documentary, perhaps even a series, with attendant newspaper articles and so on.
The Polish priests and the East German pastors are still fairly well-remembered, although they could do with being revisited, not least because they must and do often wonder why they bothered. But the whole story needs to be told.
(Angela Merkel's father and his brethren were no neoliberal capitalists, and I reproach myself for not knowing more about their admirable, but very startling, departure from Lutheran Erastianism right there in Saxony and Prussia. Learning German has been on my To Do list for 25 years. The influence of the Confessing Church, I suppose. But what lay behind that? Most Lutherans had not joined it, to say the least.)
The same is true of the striking similarity to the Romanian "Social Apostolate" in the formal and informal theology of the English-speaking and sometimes even the African-initiated churches in apartheid South Africa.
People know about the theological justification provided by the Afrikaans churches. People know about the valiant stand made officially by most of the rest.
A few people, although nowhere near enough, know about the immense self-sacrifice of those who opposed apartheid within Afrikanerdom, including within its churches until they were very often driven out of them.
But taboo continues to surround the role of the English-speaking whites. And of those blacks who were persuaded that the ANC was purely, since no one doubts that it was in no small part, a viper's nest of Stalinism.
As well as those whose tribal backgrounds, often at once defining and defined by ecclesiastical affiliation, placed them in opposition to the ANC.
And as well as those who were simply bought off, sometimes with the best of intentions such as the desire to save a desperately needed pastoral ministry, but even so.
The churches are not the only way into examining all of that. But they are the most obvious one. From Bucharest to Bloemfontein, and on into the present day from Nolbert Kunonga to the Chinese Patriotic Association, it is time.
Of course some Churches colluded rather than face improsonment and torture of their congregations. The communist suppression of Christianity was brutal; you had to be an atheist to get a communist party membership card.
ReplyDeletePope John Paul II was instrumental in persuading cardinals to be brave enough to speak out and in turning the churches into places of refuge for intellectual life from Soviet persecution.
Artists, journalists and newspapers congregated there as the only place they could freely express themselves.
No, it wasn't that They believed in it. You simply know nothing about Eastern Orthodoxy in particular, although not exclusively so. That's national churches for you.
DeleteThey believed in communism? Utter rubbish. It's completely incompatible with Christianity which believes in individual liberty because people cannot choose God or choose good unless they are free.
ReplyDeleteEver since Marx's "opiate of the masses" Marxism has been an explicitly anti Christian doctrine.
You are hopelessly out of your depth. Hopelessly.
DeleteUnder the heroic Pope John Paul II in particular the churches were the last refuges of freedom from communism.
ReplyDeleteDepends which church, depends which country, depends exactly when.
Delete