2 February 2007

None So Blind


The idea of sending flyers through the e-mail and printing them locally at the point of distribution is a good one. It becomes theoretically possible, without heavy expense and waste, to cover a town or a whole country in a matter of minutes. See the first item, which is a flyer for next Wednesday’s Communist University. The link will take you to a file download icon.

Further to the CU response to Christelle Terreblanche’s report in last Sunday’s Independent, in which we pointed out the absurdity of what ZicoTamela told her (and which he has not denied). COSATU has now dealt comprehensively with the main allegation if the report, which is that COSATU was “invisible” at the World Social Forum in Nairobi last week. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Check the linked item below.

It now appears that COSATU may well have had more representatives in Nairobi than the all the other South African social movements put together. Not only that, but COSATU’s historical and organisational involvement is far more substantial than that of any other SA social movement. All of these things are clear but they will not stop people repeating the same old lies in future, because the counterposition of the Trade Union movement against other popular forces in society is what they want to project. But newspapers should not be printing people’s wishful thoughts or taking the snide remarks of disappointed individuals at face value.

In the coverage of Somalia, the facts are not favourable to the Imperialists, and text sources have reflected this to a considerable extent. But the power of the US press-relations machine is so relentless, and the attraction of their message so seductive to those who would prefer to believe them, that these articles are almost invariably disfigured by paragraphs of unsubstantiated “boilerplate” about Al Qaeda and so forth.

In the case of the attached item, even the headline is affected. In what sense is the imposed gang tenuously placed in Mogadishu a “government”? This is a travesty of the truth. Yet in the article it is reported that this gang, which supposedly came from a “stronghold” in the town of Baidoa, has now had to impose a curfew in its very own stronghold. "Somalia is not a place where you will earn a salary - it is a place where you will die," said one man, addressing himself to the African Union. "The salary you are seeking will be used to transport your bodies."

"We will not be intimidated," said the US Deputy Secretary of State “for Africa”, Jendayi Fraser. Until a few months ago Fraser was the US Ambassador in leafy Pretoria, where she seems to have done a good job of annoying a lot of people. Her chances of making a name as “Fraser of Somalia” are exactly zero. It is a measure of the nature of the thing that in spite of all the spin-doctoring, boilerplate propaganda, and bluster from the representative of the supposed “superpower”, it is the gunman whose words are more believable, by far. History backs him up.

Frank Furedi is a philosopher living in England who has spent time working out why liberals think the way they do. His essay on “Denial” from Spiked is good but too long. He could have said as much in a page. Here it is, anyway, linked below.

One can usually be quite sure that whatever cause is being displayed in the most agonising way in the general bourgeois media is certainly not the one where the crisis of capitalism and Imperialism is manifesting itself in most critically. In Nepal there has been a real National Democratic Revolution, similar to ours in many ways, good and bad. Right now they are in a stage corresponding to our CODESA, and the Imperialists are contriving a replay “IFP”-type scenario where atrocious murders are arranged in a bid to promote “ethnic strife” or “black-on-black” violence and so to obscure the class nature of the revolution. The article linked below reports the press conference of the Communist (which the journalist changes to “Maoist guerrilla”) leader Prachanda.

Click on these links:

CU Flyer for 7 February 2007 (Notice)

COSATU and the WSF (1094 words)

Somalia government starts implementing martial law, Sapa (524 words)

Denial, Frank Furedi, Spiked, (4413 words)

Indian fundamentalists abetting Nepal riots, Prachanda, RxPG (304 words)

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