Wednesday 2 November 2016

The Cape of Good Hope

Goodbye and good riddance to Jacob Zuma.

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 since August's local election results 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 had been dealt could happen was a sign of South Africa's democratic maturity.

But that that defeat had been dealt, that the voters had been moved to deal it, was a situation entirely of the ANC's own making.

And now, the corruption report.

14 comments:

  1. WHY aren't you in Parliament? Who is there instead of you?

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  2. Goodbye and good riddance to Jacob Zuma.

    Which also means goodbye and good riddance to the entire legacy of Nelson Mandela.

    Since Mandela personally endorsed Jacob Zuma-in full knowledge of his corruption-who could only have led the ANC and the country with his blessing.

    Just like Mandela was deemed unworthy of the title 'prisoner of conscience' by Amnesty International as far back as 1964 because of he and the ANC's turn to violence never once condemned the tyrant Robert Mugabe, embraced dictators and first legalised the mass murder of abortion.

    There are many things that are not well known about Mandela.

    But Margaret Thatcher's view of the ANC has been entirely vindicated by subsequent events.

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    1. You are hopelessly out of your depth, and really very nasty in an only too obvious way.

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    2. Shhh, grown ups are talking.

      If you knew anything at all, you would know the people who are most critical of Zuma in Britain and elsewhere, but especially Britain which was always the centre of the international struggle against apartheid, are the people who were closest to Mandela, an Honorary Member of the NUM who endorsed its struggle against the Thatcher anti-trade union laws to his dying day.

      He was also a strong supporter of the Stop the War Coalition.

      But you have no desire to know that or anything else. You're just a bitter loser who can't get over the defeat of the regime that was worshipped by the man Mrs. Thatcher worshipped.

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    3. I think that I know who you are. Good to hear from you again. Be good to see again soon.

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  3. The vindication of Thatcher.

    Like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's discovery that the ANC carried out "extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary detention" vindicating everything the 1980's Right ever said about them.

    Jacob Zuma was very much 'Mandela's man', and could not have conceivably won popular support or the leadership of the ANC without Mandela's personal public endorsement.

    The pictures of Zuma and Mandela together waving at cheering crowds are something to behold.Especially when you realise Zuma already had 658 corruption charges to his name at the time.

    There are so many things about Mandela that are not as well known as they should be.

    But the fact that his protege and personal choice for leader, is a corrupt thug should at least cause people to wonder if Mandela the myth matches the reality.

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    1. Silly little boy. Anonymous 00:34 has the measure of you: "You're just a bitter loser who can't get over the defeat of the regime that was worshipped by the man Mrs. Thatcher worshipped."

      Even though it was before you were born. "Shhh, grown ups are talking."

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    2. It is amazing what still does the rounds, Mr. L. The publications of Tradition, Family and Property's Young South Africans for a Christian Civilisation are all out there if you know where to look, they might all be online by now, still claiming apartheid was Catholic Social Teaching.

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    3. It would be a novelty for TFP to pay much attention at all to CST. A very odd collection of the posher, more pseudo-intellectual type of Far Right male youths from central casting.

      A veil is drawn over the attitude to apartheid on the part of the large white minorities in the Catholic and what Americans would call the mainline Protestant churches in South Africa, as well as over the attitude of English-speaking whites in general. But it ought not to be, and it will not always be.

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    4. TFP is nothing to do with the real Church.

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    5. Not remotely. I mean, its members do also happen to be Catholics, but you could say that about a lot of things. I remember one of them trying to tell me that the dangerously liberal St John Paul II had been the worst Pope of the twentieth century.

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    6. The original Alt Right.

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    7. Quite. Or one of several forerunners, anyway.

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