L'Ouverture

There will be tribute to the great John Perlman, the free minded broadcaster hounded from the SABC, printed as an advertisement in this coming Friday’s Mail and Guardian. If you would like your name to appear on it, please email your name to this address: fionagar@mweb.co.za or Robbiep@xsinet.co.za before 11h00 on Thursday, March 1st.

The Communist University, too, is under pressure right now. People are saying: if you don’t do so-and-so, it will turn out badly for you. Nothing is certain. Everything is relentlessly pushed towards the condition of absolute insecurity. Always, there is the diminishment of resources, the contempt for the question of resources, the denial of resources, the interception of resources, and even the outright destruction of resources.

The Communist University lives off “the smell of an oily rag”. Maybe there is no other way for revolutionaries. Let that not be John Perlman’s fate. Long live!

The USA is going to sit down with Iran and Syria. The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, will be held next month. Then Rice will sit down at the table with the foreign ministers from Damascus and Tehran at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.

Unless the USA is planning treachery, this must be good news. Very good news.

Next week on Wednesday, March 7 at 17h00 in the SACP boardroom the Communist University will meet to discuss “Cooking the rice inside the pot” by the late “Comrade Mzala” (Jabulani Nxumalo). Comrade Castro Ngobese, ace spin-doctor of the YCL, will open the discussion. See the link below.

There is a great blogger called As’ad AbuKhalil. He blogs under the banner of The Angry Arab. As’ad’s blog featured a link to an obituary for a US academic called Frank Snowden (see the second link below). Snowden was a historian of blacks in antiquity, and especially the classical antiquity of ancient Greece and Rome. “Whites in the ancient world rarely equated blackness with subordination, Dr. Snowden argued, because the black people they encountered were rarely slaves. (Most slaves in the Roman Empire, for instance, were white.) Instead, they met blacks who were warriors, statesmen and mercenaries.” See the link below.

It is two hundred years since the abolition of the slave trade in England, and a film has been made to interpret the event for the gratification and self-congratulation of British people. To read just how exceptionally bad and insulting this film is, please click the last link below. Let us hope that this travesty is never presented in South Africa, or if it is, that huge demonstrations cause it to close.

Click on these links:

1985, Mzala, Cooking the rice inside the pot, Sechaba (3517 words)

Frank Snowden, historian of blacks in antiquity, dies, N Y Times (751 words)

Whitewashing the Slave Trade, Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch (1589 words)