14 February 2008

Which Side Are You On?

Pride of place today goes to the SACP’s excellent, concise statement on the dissolution of the Scorpions. Something very strange was happening within the mass media. A frenzy was building up. Supporters of the Scorpions were manically repeating that “there is no reason” for the dissolution, even though the reasons have appeared over and over again, even in the hostile mass media.

The SACP statement linked below deflates all this denial like a pin deflates a balloon. The result is that some of the deniers have gone crazy with anger. For example,
click here to go to the SACP statement as it appears on Politicsweb, and scroll down to the bottom to see the comments. One says: “Die commie scum!” Another says: “The devil is loose...and he is roaming free in SA.” This naked, raging “rooi gevaar” is horrible to behold, but it will not win because it comes from a tiny minority.

Next to the rational and well-written Party statement the ranting insults simply look unclean.

Professor Sipho Seepe has written a denunciation of a different order, urbane, relentless and exhaustive, stripping President Mbeki’s cloak of deception from him and leaving him with nothing but his shame, like Adam and Eve trying to cover themselves with leaves as they left the Garden of Eden. The worst shame of Thabo Mbeki was that he offered his own mother as a token of his truthfulness, and then proceeded to evade the truth in front of the nation. Read about it in Seepe’s article, linked below.

Sipho Seepe was one of the eight broadcasters blacklisted in 2006 (see cartoon), and who are still not appearing on SABC, even though a report was commissioned which found their exclusion unjustifiable.
See the blacklist here. John Perlman was obliged to leave the SABC when he exposed the blacklist on air in unforgettable style. It is high time these injustices were rectified.

The South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) has done a brilliant job of defending 107 suspended Cape Town Metro Police officers. Good, steady trade union work has frustrated Cape Town’s wicked queen Helen Zille, who had reportedly stamped her foot and petulantly sworn to dismiss the protesters, who had caused her royal car to be held up in a traffic jam. Long live the power of the working class! See the third item, below.

The working class struggle is international and our fundamental foe is capitalist Imperialism. Yet we are not alone in that struggle. There are bourgeois elements, even in the metropolitan countries, who are strongly opposed to the Imperialist policies that their governments pursue. Conversely, there are governing parties that pose as working class, but who are in fact liberal Imperialists of the warmongering kind. Read Simon Jenkins, a High Tory gentleman, denouncing the British Labour party government’s Foreign Secretary David Milliband, and ask yourself: Which side are you on?

Click on these links:

Dissolution of the DSO (Scorpions), SACP Media Release (583 words)

Epoch of incredulity and season of darkness, Sipho Seepe, B Day (698 words)

City of Cape Town interdicted against disciplining 107 Cops, SAMWU (334 words)

Zeal for intervention is imperialism, Simon Jenkins, Guardian (1072 words)

Coming Events

4 comments:

  1. I saw the "good work" of your unions firsthand when they trashed Cape Town in 2006. Security guards on the rampage! Awful stuff, and the communists were equally awful in standing behind the senseless destruction.

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  2. Good Morning Anonymous,

    Thanks for the post. I do hope you read SAMWU's media release, linked at the bottom of my post. The point about good, steady trade union work is that the SAMWU comrades argued on behalf of the 107 police, in terms of the law, that the City of Cape Town had broken agreements. The court upheld their arguments. By the way there is no suggestion that the 107 were involved in any kind of "rampage".

    How you equate that very conventional and successful passage of trade union business with an event so wholly different to it as the security guards' strike, and in particular the Cape Town march, in 2006 is a mystery to me.

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  3. Any way your try plug it, the dissolving of the Scorpions looks like a manufactured effort by the ANC leadership to wash away their own fraudulent skeletons. With such a large number of our comrades under investigation are you not surprised by the presses reaction?
    I read the article you linked at the bottom of the page, and I agree with many points. Ideal situation - yes let there be a special branch of the SAPS that handles these high profile cases. Everything under one roof. However the SAPS is hardly in pristine functioning order, surely we should concentrate on getting the SAPS up to scratch before merging the two? It’s a largely known fact that the SAPS is understaffed overworked underpaid. Policing remains a huge campaign point, because most South Africans know first hand of the menacing elements that violent crime and white color fraud have on their communities.
    Yes there has been an abuse of power from the Scorpions, but look at their success rate.
    It saddens me to see the communist party of south Africa supporting this by listing reasons
    ‘ liable to be abused and violate the rights of individuals as contained in our constitution ‘
    Even if these ‘individuals’ (read high profile politicians / businessmen) are involved in crime?
    ‘seriously impairing our capacity to fight crime’
    But tellingly the author lists no examples, because on the whole the Scorpions have anything but Impaired
    ‘All the above turned the Scorpions into a law unto themselves not accountable to any of our constitutionally and legally established oversight mechanisms’
    We are to believe that members of the Scorpions are not accountable for their actions, that they operate above the devoid of any constitutional restrains? But the President of the ANC is….

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  4. you are a not a communist, you are an oputunist.
    thanks for taking the time to answer me.

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