If a peasant in Mpumalanga were to stand up at a presidential imbizo and complain about crime, Mbeki would argue with him until he won. That’s how he talks to people.
The above is from the personal column of Peter Bruce, Editor of the Business Day, yesterday. It is easy to recognise the picture of a man who listens only long enough to gain time to compose an argument to defeat the person who is talking to him. And it is easy to believe that President Mbeki is just that kind of person. See the link below.
There was a crisis at the weekend ANC and alliance lekgotla. See the report from the Business Day, below. Hearing the COSATU conference resolution on the NDR and Socialism, the President and his Treasury sidekick, Jabu Moloketi, decided to try to turn the lekgotla into nothing more than a humiliation for the mass working class represented by COSATU and the working class vanguard party, the SACP. This was Peter Bruce’s imaginary scenario made reality. But it did not succeed. COSATU was supported not only by the other working-class elements of the ANC, but even by other senior figures who could not agree to turn such a gathering into an attack on a part of the very alliance that was gathered there.
Read the text of the COSATU Resolution on the NDR and socialism in the linked text, below. Other political resolutions of the COSATU 9th Congress can be found here.
When people write at a great and inappropriate length it is generally because they are unable to reach a satisfactory conclusion. Gilad Atzmon in Counterpunch does not write anything wrong. He just fails to make the necessary final step and hence he keeps going too long, even if it is all very readable. He says that the contradiction of which he writes is between Jerusalem and Athens, and this is true, but not only for the Jews and the Greeks. All must choose between these polar opposites. There is no escape from this choice, not for anyone. Africans must choose reason and humanism over identity, and so must Japanese, Indians, and North Americans.
The choice is an inevitable point at which all humans must arrive and have already arrived. It is a point which can only be passed by making the correct choice, and not the choice that leads back into darkness. The step that Gilad Atzmon fails to take is to say that in fact there are no exceptions and therefore in that sense there are no more Jews and there is no more Zionism. There is only the global fight against the irrational, against the so-called post-modernist, against so-called identity politics, against fascism, and in favour of humanism and class politics.
The sewer-like flow of raw lies about Somalia in the South African media is not over, but there is some fresh, clear water flowing through the channels as well now. The Hans Pienaar article in yesterday’s Star is an example (see below). During the worst period, as Pienaar points out:
…the United Islamic Courts (UIC) were described as extremists with links to al-Qaeda, with no proof being supplied, no withholding of such provocative descriptions before asking where they came from, no corrective statements even from UIC sources. Because the US said so, despite the US being so palpably wrong so often on Iraq, with close to a million deaths as the price.
Click on these links:The Thick End of the Wedge, Peter Bruce, Business Day (769 words)
COSATU walkout narrowly averted, Brown and Ensor, B Day (416 words)
The NDR and Socialism, COSATU 9th National Congress Resolution (812 words)
One Hundred Years of Jewish Solitude, Gilad Atzmon, Counterpunch (6215 words)
US cannot be trusted on Somalia, Hans Pienaar, The Star (1034 words)
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