Lobby and Movement

Today is the day of the pickets in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town. Click here for details. Come down and avail yourself of an opportunity to express yourself. The Pro-Israeli “Lobby” says: “You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level”. This quote is from the linked article below. It means that if you have infiltrated junior staff of an institution you can get a large part of what you want without even troubling to approach or sway its political masters. The State Department cleaners could procure a few targeted assassinations or “renditions”, say. The person in charge of the stationery cupboard might be able to organise a small bombing campaign. The PR department might “wag the dog” for a whole invasion. The article has caused a sensation in the USA, while the “Lobby” has gone into top gear to suppress it. It found no publisher in its own country and had to be printed in the London Review of Books. I am sorry for the length of it. It is a characteristic of US writing of all genres that it runs to a tedious length. But even if you just skim the article, by scrolling through it for a minute or two, you will get the idea. In ANC Today, on the ANC web site, there is an article about the Progressive Women’s Movement (PWM). It seems that some among us in the ANC see the PWM as a sort of females-only national-level ward committee. That is to say, not as a democracy, but as a representivity. Furthermore, as a representivity in which workers and their workers’ Party would have their leadership role diluted by bourgeois claims disguised under multiple headings. Workers would have one vote, or maybe two, while bourgeois interests would have an entrenched voting block of four or five times as many. But then, that’s the whole point of representivity. See linked article We shall see how much of this gerrymandering the South African masses will stomach. It is doubtful whether they will emulate the praise-singing flocks of dancing women who used to swear oaths of loyalty to the late Jomo Kenyatta. But stranger things have happened. For example, in the USA, Christians have become Zionists and women have become war criminals. Links: The Israel Lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt, LRB (12814) PWM voice for SA women, ANC Today (916 words)